Two months ago I was at home asleep in bed and the radio flicked on to the Today programme. David Jordan, the BBC's head of editorial policy, was being interviewed about the Newsnight Savile investigation.
"They investigated a particular aspect of what was going on with Jimmy Savile … what they were looking at specifically was allegations that had been made to Surrey police in 2007 …"
My eyes opened instantly – that wasn't true. I knew because there were four people on that investigating team: Meirion Jones, Liz MacKean, Mark Williams-Thomas and me. We investigated whether Jimmy Savile was a paedophile and found the police had investigated him in that process.
The Pollard report has now gone some way to explaining how the public line on the investigation strayed so far from what actually happened. Statements have been corrected and blogs amended. But at the time it felt as if the most powerful news organisation in the world, one that I respect, was trying to rewrite history and who was I to stop it?
In news, some stories run and some stories don't. You have to learn to accept it. But this story stuck with me – these women had suffered years of injustice. I'd asked them open questions about what happened in a Surrey school for girls 40 years ago and received what I thought were credible answers detailing allegations of sexual abuse. I'd written up notes, cross-checked facts and found footage of some of the Duncroft girls on a Savile TV set.
But the piece didn't run. It took until last week for a former head of Sky News to step onto a BBC stage and say "the Newsnight investigators got the story right". I doubt that provides much comfort to Savile's victims.
I'm 25, and I've been a journalist in some form for five years now. I joined the BBC through the news trainee scheme in 2011 full of ideas and ideals. Most people I met there were fiercely capable, intelligent and supportive. But for a short period at least, I saw the fuzzy face of the auntie we all know morph into the incomprehensible hardened one of a broadcasting corporation.
At one point in late October, I found out that national newsrooms were being called by anonymous sources claiming to work for BBC News. One rang the Times saying the investigation had been "chaotic" and "marred" by a decision to have me, a young journalist on placement, work with the team. At the time that article was published I had just finished assistant producing a Dispatches and was working on two Channel 4 News investigations. The team was not chaotic, and I don't think I'll ever know who really made those anonymous phone calls.
There were two parts of the Pollard report that I found the most shocking: the first was that evidence was not looked at by the Newsnight editor, making judgments about the value of mine or anyone else's work on that story based on presumption rather than fact. The second was an email in which the BBC's head of communications said he could "drip poison" on another BBC employee.
This is the first time I have written anything publicly about what happened. I wasn't interviewed by the inquiry. Any attempts they made to communicate with me didn't get through. My name doesn't go alongside most of the stories I work on: journalism to me is about getting the story and the truth. "The best obtainable truth" as Carl Bernstein said. We had that truth more than a year ago now. For me, that's what the Pollard report has proved.
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