Heidi Blake

What is this guy's deal?

You've heard the tape.

I mean, that's just not true.

And we actually can prove that.

Milbank's statement continued that he did remember getting a few texts from some woman asking about statements, but he said this woman did not identify herself as a journalist and that he'd never met her.

It was true that we'd never met in person, but we had spoken on the phone and I had clearly identified myself.

Hello, my name's Heidi Blake.

I'm a writer for a magazine in New York, The New Yorker, and I'm doing a longish piece.

Milbank and I went on to exchange dozens of texts about the 999 call and the statement he said he never gave.

And he also responded to a memo containing detailed questions from the New Yorker's fact-checkers.

The weirdest thing was that he knew I'd recorded our phone call.

I even told him by text that we planned to use the tape in this podcast, and he'd replied with two thumbs-up emojis.

So now, there was this new statement in Nick Melbank's name containing the demonstrably false assertion that he'd never spoken to me.

But that wasn't all.

Alongside it, Essex Police had now produced a different version of the earlier statement from 2002, the one he'd told me he never gave.

Unlike the version I'd seen in the files, which was typed and unsigned, this latest iteration was handwritten, with a signature that read N.R.

Milbank, the way he told me he always signs his name.

Then they produced a final statement from Milbank confirming that the signature on this handwritten document was his and therefore the 2002 statement must have been written by him all along.

As if this strange game of statements about statements about statements wasn't baffling enough, I could already see that there were discrepancies between the two handwritten documents, the statement from 2002 and the recent one, in which he'd apparently denied ever speaking to me.

If you scroll to 104, this is the handwritten statement that he's just produced in response to the article, which is not written by the same person.