"I am at last in a position to apologise - which I gladly do publicly - to Laura Deming for my email to her in 2012, about which I had forgotten until the investigator reminded me of it. As STAT reported three weeks ago, I consider that that email would have been a mistake even if she had been five years older, because we were in a mentor-mentee relationship. I catgorically deny Laura's current (though, as she made clear on August 10th, not contemporaneous) view, shared by the investigator, that I sent that email with improper intent - but my email does not become OK just because improper intent is now being misread into it."