This morning, we received the rarest of gifts: a genuinely candid interview with a celebrity. Noah Galvin, the 22-year-old star of the ABC sitcom The Real O’Neals, spoke with E. Alex Jung of New York’s entertainment vertical Vulture about being a young, out gay actor in Hollywood. The story was headlined “Noah Galvin Has Nothing to Hide,” which turned out to be very much untrue.

At one point during the interview—as Jung and Galvin talked about the phenomenon of quasi-out industry types in Los Angeles—the discussion turned to Bryan Singer, the X-Men director who has long been rumored to be a major player in Hollywood’s clandestine gay scene. In 2014, Singer and several others were sued by a man who claimed he was raped by the director when he was a teenager. The suit was eventually dropped, but it sparked an examination into Singer’s relationships with younger men and the old dudes they seemed to hang around.

Of Singer, Galvin said:

“Yeah. Bryan Singer likes to invite little boys over to his pool and diddle them in the f—ing dark of night. [Laughs.] I want nothing to do with that. I think there are enough boys in L.A. that are questionably homosexual who are willing to do things with the right person who can get them in the door. In New York there is a healthy gay community, and that doesn’t exist in L.A.”

To read that quote now, though, one has to go to another website—like, say, The Hollywood Reporter. If you scroll to the bottom of the Vulture interview you’ll see this note:

Editor’s note: This article originally contained a reference to Bryan Singer. In an interview format, we generally let the subject speak his mind. But this is a contentious issue, and after consideration, we decided to delete the reference. Noah Galvin has issued a statement.

That statement links to one released by Galvin tonight, in which he addresses his Singer-related gabbing:

I sincerely apologize to Bryan Singer for the horrible statement I made about him in the interview I gave to New York Magazine. My comments were false and unwarranted. It was irresponsible and stupid of me to make those allegations against Bryan, and I deeply regret doing so. I have never been to Bryan’s house, and I admit there is no basis for any of the things I said or implied about Bryan in that interview. I understand now that my statements were not at all funny and have serious implications. I am very sorry and I hope that Bryan and everyone else who read that interview can forgive me for my serious lapse in judgment. I have contacted New York Magazine and the other publications that republished my statements and asked them all to print this retraction and apology.

Galvin also apologized for things he said about the actor Colton Haynes—who coyly came out in an Entertainment Weekly article published last month—and Eric Stonestreet, the straight actor who plays the gay character Cam on (ABC’s) Modern Family. Yet those portions of the interview remain untouched. It’s unclear why exactly Vulture decided to take the rather extraordinary measure of deleting a celebrity’s already-published on-the-record answer to an interview question, but there are plenty of forces at play.

There is the possibility that Vulture considered what access it might lose by running such an allegation against a director who helms a billion-dollar film franchise. Or maybe Vulture retroactively decided that printing Galvin’s answer was simply in poor taste. A New York spokesperson said the magazine had nothing to say beyond its editor’s note. Marty Singer, Bryan Singer’s high-powered attorney, did not return a request for comment.

Whatever the case may be, all parties involved learned important lessons. The aggregation machine will extract and amplify any quote with a hint of controversy, regardless of the context. As for Galvin, being candid doesn’t pay in Hollywood, which, weirdly, was the point he was trying to make in the first place.