It’s strange to think that not everything in a Bill O’Reilly book would stand up to scrutiny, but that appears to be where we are.

Bill O’Reilly‘s publisher, Henry Holt, has jumped in to defend the television personality and author against charges that a much repeated anecdote included in his book Killing Kennedy may not be completely true.

O’Reilly claimed in his books on Kennedy’s death and on Fox News that he was outside the residence where George de Mohrenschildt, a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, killed himself in Florida in 1977. At the time, O’Reilly was a reporter for Dallas’ WFAA-TV.

Over the past weeks, that story has unraveled. Several of O’Reilly’s former colleagues and other reporters who covered de Mohrenschildt have disputed the tale. CNN produced audio that included O’Reilly telling a congressional investigator “I’m coming to Florida” only after learning of de Mohrenschildt’s suicide. And the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office death investigation report makes no mention of O’Reilly, strongly refuting the notion that he was at the residence at the time of the suicide.

Deadline quotes a previous statement from publisher Holt, that “the company fully stand(s) behind Bill O’Reilly” and that “This one passage is immaterial to the story being told by this terrific book, and we have no plans to look into this matter.” Similarly, Mediaite received a short statement: “We fully stand behind Bill O’Reilly and his bestseller ‘Killing Kennedy’ and we’re very proud to count him as one of our most important authors.”

But the scandal is building and on Monday, investigative reporter (and Melville House author) Edward Jay Epstein published an essay in Newsweek, detailing his version of events, with a pretty unambiguous headline, O’Reilly’s JFK Reporting Was Impossible. I Know Because I Was There, and opening paragraph: “I was recently bemused to see that Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host, managed in 2012 to parachute himself back in time to March 29, 1977 so as to make himself a witness to the gunshot that killed George de Mohrenschildt.”

On Monday, Holt posted a statement from Bob Sirkin, the cameraman who accompanied O’Reilly to Florida, in which he appears to back up O’Reilly’s story. And as Erik Wemple at The Washington Post notes, O’Reilly pointed his own viewers to that statement on Monday night, while shrugging his shoulders at “far left attacks.” But while O’Reilly and Holt are hoping that Sirkin’s statement will be the last word, as Media Matters reports, the story is far from over.

But even Sirkin, O’Reilly’s defender, is unable to corroborate his claim that he heard the gunshot that killed de Mohrenschildt. He also offers no explanation for the existence of O’Reilly’s own recorded remarks that he’s not in Florida, and why the police report didn’t mention of O’Reilly.

In an interview with Media Matters last month, Sirkin likewise said that he was unable to confirm O’Reilly’s account of having heard the gunshot.