For those who haven't yet listened to Serial, look away now. 

For the rest of you who joined in on what became an international sensation, then you're probably familiar with the ups and downs of it, and the role that Asia McClain played in the whole thing. Just in case, the whole 12-part series dealt with an investigation in to the murder of Hae Min Lee, a crime which Adnan Syed was convicted of. Host Sarah Koenig did her best to look back over the facts and found that there was less concrete evidence than many thought that raised questions as to whether or not Syed got a fair trial, or if he was even guilty in the first place. 

Syed's former classmate, Asia McClain, originally stated that she was with him at the time that the police believe the murder took place, but withdrew it later on. State prosecutor Kevin Urick told the court that he had spoken with McClain and the she had said that she was under intense pressure from Syed's family to write the affidavit, and that she no longer stood over it.

The podcast made much of the fact that Syed's lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez, didn't chase this up properly and when Koenig did, McClain was reluctant to delve back in to the past and drag it all up again. However, it seems that she has decided to come forward and issue a new affidavit, which was obtained by The Blaze, in which she confirms that she was with Adnan at 2:36pm on January 13 1999; the time of the murder. 

"My only goal has always been to provide the truth about what I remembered"

The affidavit states that she "never told Urick that I recanted my story or affidavit about January 13, 1999. In addition, I did not write the March 1999 letters or the affidavit because of pressure from Syed’s family. I did not write them to please Syed’s family or to get them off my back. What actually happened is that I wrote the affidavit because I wanted to provide the truth about what I remembered. My only goal has always been to provide the truth about what I remembered".

The new affidavit from McClain will more than likely be filed by Syed’s defense team on Tuesday. Her attorney, Gary Proctor had been in contact with Syed’s lawyer, C. Justin Brown, to tell him that she wanted to write a new affidavit regarding that day back in 1999, and clarifying that she had not spoken to Urick at all. Proctor told The Blaze that "the last paragraph of the affidavit says we have provided this to Adnan’s lawyer. Where he chooses to go with that, what he wants to allege [against Urick] is his business. All we can tell you is what happened, if it doesn’t square with what [Urick] said — we’re not changing our story". 

Pic via Critics at Large

As for where the case will go now, Syed and his team lost an appeal for post-conviction relief in January of last year, and have decided to appeal that decision to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. That argued that he had ineffective counsel as McClain was never pursued to testify and that he was never given the chance to take a plea deal, but the Court of Special Appeals has instructed them to "focus only on the plea aspect" of his appeal, meaning that they either don't consider Gutierrez's failure to follow up with McClain as evidence that she was ineffective counsel, or that they have already decided to include it as evidence and don't need further information on it. 

McClain says that she's willing to testify if it should come to it, saying "if the state is arguing that he was somewhere murdering her when I know he was somewhere talking to me, logic says that’s impossible."

Via The Blaze