This is pretty wild that I have to post this on my professional website, but my partner of close to 25 years, Reesa Dube, is totally safe and healthy and living her life with me in Brooklyn.

If you are on my website because you googled me after seeing a “Missing persons of NYC” post on the horrendously irresponsible site that is Facebook, please read this post because you saw an extreme case of online misinformation.

Reesa has been estranged from her sister, Rachael, for years; Rachael is profoundly unwell and has concocted an insane true-crime-podcast narrative in her own head wherein I’ve apparently disappeared Reesa. Rachael’s inventions are incontrovertibly and dangerously false. (It’s insane that I even have to write that sentence and assert it: it gives the opposite some air, as if it even had some remote possibility.) Reesa simply does not want to be in contact with her sister anymore—that is literally it. It is a private business between them. Nevertheless, I did beg Reesa to talk to her sister live on May 16 to prove that she is fine; Reesa did this—and her sister dismissed this live call as “AI.” Rachael is genuinely not well. Literally get in touch with Reesa and me if you want to hear it straight from us. We’re in Brooklyn … like, come and ask us. This is easily verifiable.

This is incredibly, incredibly embarrassing to post on a professional website, at a time when I’m in between jobs and should be celebrating that I’m about to start a new one, but I apparently have no choice as there are now Facebook vigilantes who are posting that I’m wanted or some shit. (Anyone can just post on Facebook that I’m a “person of interest” and then repost repost repost—that’s how this world works.) This has to be the craziest thing I’ve ever lived through, and I’ve lived through a lot. I even went to my Brooklyn precinct today to explain the situation and ask for advice (What do you do when a deeply unstable relative sics a vigilante mob on you, and the person whom she thinks is “missing” is actually walking on the streets normally in the nice weather that we had this weekend?)—and the officer said that they can’t stop the Facebook harassment until it crosses some criminal threshold. The officer was actually a very sympathetic person, and I appreciated our talk. But wonderful—so I’ll just wait till something criminal happens to me.

Also feel free to confirm this with Reesa’s parents, Richard and Donna, if you know them, and even with Rachael’s three children. I believe Donna just posted a Facebook message, confirming that she and Reesa talked for literally hours today—but who knows whether that truth will spread faster than people’s weird-ass appetite for true-crime-podcast stories to emerge daily. Just champing at the bit for ghastly narratives. I don’t get it. My mind cannot comprehend the mass psychosis and the speed at which it spreads.

I’m so sorry to post private family situations like this, but one disturbed person’s mind, further amplified by the Facebook slop machine, is literally endangering me now. That combination is sadly a powerful pipeline (I should know—I work in this industry). So I am forced to put a public statement up, awkward as it is, to protect Reesa and myself. (I deactivated my Facebook account in 2006, two years after it was founded, because I hated that site; Reesa has a very dormant account that she never uses—again, because it’s a terrible place. We’re not gonna wade in the muck.) And if the immediate threat passes, I’m then gonna have to worry about the digital trail of these insanely false accusations affecting professional matters. What a world.

I have a giant network of people in New York who know me. My friends have met Reesa. She is a very private person and she has dealt with a lot in her life—as you can imagine from this small glimpse into her life that she never wanted people to know. Some people just want privacy. Eva Mendes wants privacy. Thomas Pynchon really, really wants privacy. Normalize wanting privacy—leave her alone. Not everything is a true-crime podcast that needs a deluded, self-appointed mob to crack the case. Also, you know, the “missing person” is not even missing? She’s right here? The person who’s “wanted” is very easy to contact? We’re both out here and existing? What is wrong with the world.

Reesa and I are gonna hit 25 years next year (I asked her out in February 2002, when we were sophomores in high school), and I will be overjoyed to celebrate that milestone with her.