Paperback: 384pp
Published: Eye (August 2025)
ISBN: 9781785634222
A true story based on a false story
‘A cautionary tale, told with incredible grace and restraint’
Irvine Welsh
Late one night in February 2018, the award-winning Irish journalist Olaf Tyaransen returned home to find his name trending on Twitter.
To his horror, he discovered that Brooke Magnanti – controversial author of the Belle de Jour books – had published an article accusing him of physically and sexually assaulting another woman a few years earlier.
Tyaransen had never met Magnanti, and the woman in question had recently died in tragic circumstances. While he was certain the allegation was completely untrue, it was already going viral. Hundreds of people were rushing to judgement and sharing Magnanti’s article.
In a painfully honest and compelling memoir, Tyaransen details the emotional, social and professional impact of that false accusation.
His lacerating, unflinching account highlights the importance of due process, the mindless cruelty of crowds and the potentially fatal consequences of online vigilantism.
OUT AUGUST 2025. AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW
The walls of my life start crashing down around me on a cold starry Galway night in the early hours of Friday February 23rd, 2018.
It’s 2am. I’ve just returned home following an evening barhopping with friends in Salthill. Unusually for the west of Ireland at this time of year, it hasn’t been raining and the moonlit stroll back has somewhat cleared my head. Too wired for sleep and not in the mood for Netflix, I decide to attempt some work before hitting the sack.
‘#MeToo was the delightful payback where many scumbags got what was way past coming to them. However, internet shaming and pile-ons are the bluntest instruments of justice and can catch innocent souls in the crossfire. This cautionary tale of one such instance is a story which needs to be told. Olaf Tyaransen has done so with incredible grace and restraint’
Irvine Welsh
‘We often say books are “honest” when they tell us what we want to hear or when they confirm the righteousness of the side already chosen. This book will not do that for many of us; all the more reason to read, therefore, and once you start, you won’t be able to look away. A book for anyone who has wielded an online pitchfork, had one pointed at them, or looked away in horror or fear’
Niamh Mulvey
‘So addictive it kept me up till the small hours. Brutally honest, forthright and frequently witty – Tyaransen tells the story of a miscarriage of justice in the first exposé of the dark side of #MeToo’
Larissa Nolan
‘This searingly honest, often entertaining memoir powerfully reminds us of the inconvenient truth that, despite the huge net positive of the long overdue #MeToo movement, guilt by accusation is never a road we should take – especially in a post-truth world when keyboard warriors in their echo chambers demand it’
Sarah Harte