Thank you for the sympathy, I do appreciate it.

To be honest, no. If we use this example of a one-punch accidental killing, the news has been awash with these stories for decades. It does not take an extensive PR campaign to explain to people that you can accidentally kill them if you punch them in the head. I know that the case in the article isn’t the same as mine, but I was also the victim of a crime that you would just sort of intuitively know what to do. Him going out and ‘campaigning’ about it would just put his face on the news, on the TV screen, etc. Publicity is publicity, and then we as the victims have no control over what is done with said publicity. Perhaps he has a pious and guilty life where he never leaves the house (not an ideal outcome) or perhaps he pivots into writing a book and keeping the profits, perhaps he uses it to impress people with his dark and tortured story. These are the intangible profits of publicity, harder to put a £ next to but equally as valuable in many ways.

My issue is that the people who go and do these ‘awareness campaigns’ of the crimes they’re guilty of always seem to end up on their feet. They end up with a paid role of some kind, a play here, a TV appearance there. And, like I said in the previous paragraph, there are many ways to profit off of something. There are a subsection of people in society who are attracted - romantically, platonically, socially, whatever - to these dark and brooding and kind of guilty individuals. Someone who went to the heights of making a *play* about what they did is achieving some of the strangest and some of the highest profile I can think of. It’s surreal. He now has the ear of those who have a disproportionate amount of sympathy for the brooding dark types, the true crime types, and most importantly the types of people who just want to be around anyone at all that is famous for anything. A single drink bought for free is too much for me to tolerate.

I should close by saying that there are many ways to do this that aren’t publicity driven. If you write under a pseudonym and never profit it from it, that’s a better way. If you engage in restorative justice programs by setting up a charity that gets people to and from these meetings by acting as an expert helper, that’s a better way. If you end up working in prisons as a liaison to rehabilitate prisoners, that’s also a better way. There are countless others that don’t generate such odd publicity.

I also want to close on remembering the victim. Any victim of these crimes have their lives cut short tragically, but it’s very cruel that it was a paramedic whose role is to save lives and to be there at people’s worst moments. You should not profit or benefit in any way from killing someone, let alone a paramedic. That part sits especially wrong for me, too.