Believe it or not, it’s been eight years since Mel Gibson was pulled over for drunk-driving and shouted a bunch of anti-Semitic slurs at the arresting officer, and since then his career never fully recovered.

But now a journalist who interviewed Gibson is saying all of that should end and people should give him a second chance.

Allison Hope Weiner, a freelance journalist who posted an article about Gibson on the site Deadline, said he’s been ostracized long enough and people should forgive him at this point.

Of course a lot of people will be surprised that Weiner feels so much sympathy for Gibson, considering he was accused of beating his wife Oksana Grigorieva. And who can forget those strange phone messages he left her? Once those got out, the media had a field day with them and it really looked like the 58 year old actor was done for good.

But Weiner says all of those bad decisions were attached to a very dark time period in Gibson’s life, so he should be forgiven and let back into the Hollywood in-crowd.

“During his breakup with Grigorieva, he’d gone through a terrible emotional breakdown and struggled to get healthy, gain joint custody of his infant daughter and deal with the fallout from the publication of those awful tapes,” she wrote.

“He was in a very bad place and we talked for some time about how difficult it was for him to deal with the pain he’d inflicted on his family.”

Not too long ago, Weiner interviewed Gibson over the phone, and during that conversation she felt some sort of connection to him, and by the end of the interview she said she understood him much better and believed he should be given a second chance. Weiner even said the two became friends after the interview.

“He got so upset talking about that period in his life that he ended our call abruptly,” she wrote. “He shared some very deep, personal feelings with me and was in so much pain, that I was honestly worried about him. It wasn’t the type of conversation that one has with an interview subject. I decided we were friends now and that I could no longer write objectively about him.”

Images via YouTube