Bobby Madley, a former Premier League referee who was sacked by PGMOL last year, has shared a very personal end of decade message on Twitter.
In it, he admits to sending a private message to a friend on Snapchat in which he made a joke about a disabled person, and reveals the regret about the 'dark humoured joke' which cost him his job.
He also says he was 'threatened' by his friend over the video after an argument, and also firmly denies rumours that circulated at the time that he had had sex with a dog on camera.
Madley, whose father is disabled, and who claims to have done work for disabled children's charities, goes into the reasons why he made the joke.
He says he had been joking with fellow parents about not taking part in a parents race at his daughter's sports day, and a few months prior to this he had been 'fat-shamed' in a newspaper by former referee Mark Halsey, who said he was making mistakes in games because of his weight.
When he saw a person walking past with a walking impairment, he took a short video and wrote the caption 'f**k me I have a chance of winning the parents race this year.'
Madley says he sent the video to just one person who knew the context of the joke, but a few weeks later had a dispute with that person who then said 'what would your boss say if it ended up on his desk?'
That's exactly what happened a few days later, and he admitted the offence immediately, expecting to get a warning and have to attend discrimination training.
Instead, he was fired with immediate effect, and he feels particularly bitter about it as it happened in the same week as Boris Johnson made some controversial comments.
'Whilst I absolutely understand the importance of an employer taking discrimination seriously as they did, the decision to this day still stuns me,' he writes. 'The same week that a politician referred to Muslim women as letterboxes and made no apology.'
At the time of his sacking, rumours flew as to the reasons behind it, as they were not immediately revealed.
'Rumours began to appear on Twitter that the reason I left is because I had been filmed having sex with a dog,' Madley writes. 'I have to say I found this hilarious to begin with that people would somehow arrive at that conclusion.
'The fact was somebody posted that I’m a ‘dog botherer’ in relation to me being a Huddersfield Town fan (the Terriers) and so the rumour began. The more the day went on the less funny it became.'
Madley also revealed the 'mental torture' of the past 18 months, and says he was reading threats against him that got so bad he had to have police protection for an evening.
After leaving the Premier League, Madley went to referee in Norway, where he lives with his new girlfriend after splitting from his wife a couple of years ago.
'Hopefully 2020 will be the start of the new me,' he concludes. 'I am not proud of that video and as I said I have to live with that for the rest of my life.
'Please don’t think bad of me. I’m a human being who made one mistake, one that many many people have done themselves and not lost everything for. Again, I have to pick those pieces up.'