I was the one who broke the controversial Liam Neeson story. Since then, I've learnt something important about 'cancel culture'

On 4 February this year, I published a story about Liam Neeson. (It was, you might recall, based on an interview in which Neeson had told me he once roamed the streets with a cosh, looking to kill a “black bastard” to avenge the rape of a friend.)

In the days after the story ran, plenty of people accused me of trying to sabotage Neeson’s career for no reason and/or "going after him" unprompted. Most of this so-called feedback came through Twitter, though one man did send me a three-page handwritten letter in which he called me "less than a human being" for doing my work.

“Thank you so much for killing the career of Liam Neeson and destroying the movie four days before it comes into the cinemas [which] so many people worked so hard for,” one person wrote sarcastically in my Twitter mentions. “Great journalism. Hope you get awarded @PulitzerPrizes.”

Another person told me I had “effectively ended [Neeson's] career” and “hurt his loved ones” by telling the story, adding: “He trusted you. His mistake.”

Just last month, a man in a bar (who was busy telling my husband everything he thought I had done wrong with this story, while I stood next to him) also claimed that Neeson's career was over because of me.

I did wonder, for a while, what the repercussions would be for Neeson. I was asked about this when the story first ran and I said that I didn’t know, which was true – I couldn’t predict how Hollywood studios would react, nor could I predict how Neeson’s fellow actors would feel.

In case you are genuinely curious about how this plays out from a journalism ethics point of view, here goes: as much as people love to picture journalists as bloodthirsty hounds looking to sink their teeth in the tender flesh of well-meaning actors, the truth of the matter is that once someone has told something on the record, in the context of an interview during which you were clearly identified as a journalist, it’s practically an obligation to report it. Your first duty is to your reader, and very rarely will you find a valid reason to keep something to yourself. There are of course exceptions to this, which journalists manage on a daily basis. But in this case, when it comes to the overall story, it would have been absolutely unthinkable to sweep it under the rug.

So let's talk about "cancel culture", to which Liam Neeson was subject after my story became international news. This weekend, on Sunday 5 May – so three months after the story ran, almost to the day – as I was sitting in a cinema waiting for Avengers: Endgame to begin, the trailer for Men in Black: International came on.

Sure enough, there was Liam Neeson, cinema-screen-size, his distinctive voice booming across the room. (Neeson plays High T, the head of the MIB UK branch, in the film. There were some calls for him to be digitally removed from it after the interview ran, but that has clearly not come to pass.) A couple of days later, this headline appeared on the entertainment industry news website Deadline: “Lionsgate takes UK rights to Liam Neeson starrer Made In Italy." Neeson is set to play the main role in Made in Italy, actor James D'Arcy's directorial debut, as a father who returns to Italy to sell his house – and mends his relationship with his son in the process.

In the days after we went to press, the general consensus seemed to be that “time would tell” how my story would affect Neeson’s career and his popularity, both with studios and moviegoers. Three months have passed. Time has told. And it has told us one thing: that story didn't destroy Liam Neeson's career. It didn't "cancel" Liam Neeson. He's in films. He's scheduled to be in more films. He's still championing Central Park's horse-drawn carriages, a cause that has been close to his heart for a long time.

Liam Neeson is still working. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing. What I am saying is: if this whole story teaches us one thing, it’s that cancel culture isn't real, and if you fear it, you're afraid of the wrong things.

Do people get held accountable for what they say or do, and does this happen often by way of the media? Yes. But the idea that there is some kind of faceless PC authority that sits in its woke tower and decides who gets to work and who doesn't is baseless. So is the idea that a single reporter has the ability to take down a well-liked powerful man. (You might be thinking: "But what about Harvey Weinstein? Ronan Farrow took him down," to which I will say: it wasn’t just Ronan Farrow, it was Ronan Farrow for the New Yorker and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey for The New York Times, as their shared Pulitzer Prize suggests, and they didn't take down Weinstein on their own; they did so with the help of the many women who came forward with allegations.)

A lot of the belief in "cancel culture" comes from the fact that people often think they have to decide how they feel about someone right away, and that this opinion will have to be valid forever. But it should be OK not to know precisely how you feel about someone, especially when shocking new information comes to light. And it should be OK to allow your opinion to change over time as your brain gets more comfortable with the facts.

But this fear that if someone famous says “the wrong thing” in front of a reporter at a given time, then they are finished? This fear is unfounded. It's not how Hollywood works. Yes, we do live in a social media-happy culture now where people can catch a lot of flak, fast, because of what they say and do. But that's not "PC cancel culture madness". That's just a real-time reaction. And as the fall-out from my Liam Neeson interview has proven, it rarely has long-term consequences.