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Melissa Gilbert believes her husband Timothy Busfield will be exonerated of the child sex abuse allegations he is facing.

The actor and director has been charged with four counts of criminal sexual contact with a child on the set and is awaiting trial. He’s been accused of sexually abusing two boys on the set of the former Fox/Warner Bros. Television series The Cleaning Lady.

“[This has been] hell. This has been the most traumatizing experience of our lives,” Gilbert said on Monday’s Good Morning America, in her first sit-down interview with co-anchor George Stephanopoulos, alongside Busfield’s civil attorney Larry Stein. “Our life as we knew it is done. We are grieving what we had. All of our plans, all of our dreams, all of our ideas, all of our projects. For Tim, it’s done. He’s canceled. Even if he’s exonerated, he will always be that guy. The last person in the world who would hurt a child.”

She added, “And believe me, if I thought for a second that Tim Busfield hurt a child, he’d have a lot more to worry about than prison.”

She said she has no doubts of his innocence, but hopes for an apology and an exoneration. “I know this man in my bones. No one knows him better than I do,” she said. “Our marriage has… we’ve had a lot of ups and downs. We’ve been through struggles. We’ve had our own issues to deal with, and we’ve worked through everything. He is nothing if not completely honest with me. I trust him with my children’s lives, with my grandchildren’s lives, my nieces and nephews. He is an honorable, caring, generous human being.”

Gilbert said she chose to speak out now to address the “untruths” they have been reading about and hearing. “I am 100 percent he will be exonerated,” she said, “but I will tell you that there is a practical side to this and we have to be prepared for all scenarios.”

Busfield has denied allegations. The charges against Busfield relate to alleged touching on two separate occasions, once in October 2022 and again in September 2023. Each count carries a minimum sentence of three years, which can’t be suspended or deferred. Busfield was released from jail after his arrest.

Busfield’s defense has revolved around arguments that the parents of the twin boys were looking for vengeance against Busfield for recasting them in the fourth season of the Fox series after they aged out of their roles. “When they were fired, they assumed Tim was responsible for it. The truth is he was not,” said Stein on GMA. Stein was asked about a claim in the criminal complaint that Busfield and Gilbert bought the twin child actors Christmas gifts, and Stein said gifts were given to multiple children at a Christmas party. “Tim did not give the boys gifts. Melissa gave them gifts,” he said. “Every child at the Christmas party, not treating them special or different than anyone.”

Gilbert and Busfield married in 2013. Also in her interview, Gilbert said she was, however, aware of separate allegations against her husband that were included in the child sex abuse criminal complaint to allege a pattern. The Thirtysomething and West Wing star was accused of sexual assault by two women in 1994 and 2012; charges were not brought in either case. “These allegations have been out in the ether for a very long time,” she said. “I am neither naive nor am I complicit. I talked to him about it. I asked him questions about it. I heard his side of the story, which no one has ever heard, which is the truth. And when the time is right, and that is not now, Tim will tell the truth of all of these past allegations when he needs to.”

Busfield’s trial is tentatively set for May 2027 in New Mexico.

ABC News reached out to the parents of the children. In a statement to ABC News, the district attorney’s office said its focus “remains on the victims.”

The vibes couldn’t be more different from 2023.

In the wake of a surprise deal struck by the Writers Guild of America with studios and streamers and announced on Saturday, arriving earlier than many expected, WGA members expressed gratitude they weren’t about to face another down-to-the-wire negotiation or strike like they did just three years prior.

The 2023 writers’ strike, widely supported within the union three years ago, has cast a long shadow and many writers weren’t eager to face a repeat of the labor action. “I think everyone’s very relieved,” showrunner David H. Steinberg (No Good Nick) said in an interview. “It sort of came out of the blue that all of a sudden a tentative agreement had been reached and all the writers that I talked to on social media were like, ‘thank God.’”

“We’re obviously still waiting on the details but anything that calms the industry down is the most important thing in my book,” wrote member Geoff Roth in a message. “The whole business needs to walk back from this existential cliff we’re constantly being told about, as it’s becoming self-fulfilling.”

The union hasn’t yet released any detailed materials describing the proposed contract language, so opinions could change once members see the fine print. So far, the WGA has only disclosed to members that the provisional agreement will span four years rather than the union’s typical three. The agreement “protects our health plan” with higher contributions and contribution caps and “builds on gains from 2023 and helps address free work challenges,” the union said.

But what the WGA has said has been enough to get writers talking. The expansion of the contract term from three to four years represents a potentially risky move for the labor group given the rapid changes — consolidation, cost-cutting and the use of generative AI among them — currently roiling Hollywood. An extended deal means that the WGA may have to wait longer to make significant contractual changes if issues crop up in the next few years.

Most writers who spoke with The Hollywood Reporter weren’t disturbed by the paradigm shift. “The extra year on the term is a bit of a bitter pill given the rapid pace of AI evolution but it was a necessary — and quite predictable — trade-off to save the health fund,” wrote Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim in a text. “This is kinda where I assumed we’d end up.” Overall, he’s pleased with what he knows about the deal so far.

There’s also the issue of the WGA potentially having just dislodged itself from its typical negotiating schedule. The union usually bargains in the same year as performers’ union SAG-AFTRA and directors’ union the Directors Guild of America. It’s not clear whether those two unions will change their customary three-year contract lengths in their own negotiations, which could upset the usual schedule. Bargaining in the same year, the thinking goes, can boost all three unions by allowing them to align pressure campaigns and/or work stoppages.

That concern doesn’t bother Steinberg. “I’m aware of what the issue is, that you want to be aligned with the other deals to bring pressure if you need to,” says Steinberg. But, he notes, the AMPTP had at the very least been considering asking for a five-year contract term, as THR has previously reported. Paired with the WGA’s usual three-year term, four years “seems like a great compromise,” he adds.

The relative speed with which Saturday’s deal was struck represented another pivot for the WGA in 2026. The union is known for deploying aggressive tactics like negotiating down to the last minute of a contract’s term and/or taking a strike authorization vote to increase leverage.  

But the WGA did not, in the end, deploy this longtime playbook. The union and the studios tidily wrapped up their tentative deal within the three weeks that constituted the WGA’s first scheduled bargaining period. (Otherwise the two sides certainly could have penciled in additional time before May 1, when the WGA’s 2023 contract officially expires.) The union never took a strike authorization vote, even to apply pressure.

The speed of negotiations has prompted some misgivings and nerves in at least one writers’ group chat, said a source. Another source noted that their peers seemed relieved but largely cynical and checked out in this negotiation, compared with the high levels of engagement in 2023.

Still, many members who spoke with THR argued that industry conditions in 2026 may have required a fresh approach. Writer employment has declined compared with the high-flying era of “Peak TV,” when streamers were more focused on attracting subscribers than earning a profit. And WGA leaders made no secret about the dire state of their health fund, which lost a cumulative $122 million in the fiscal years of 2023 and 2024.

The WGA was led by chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman as well as co-chairs of the negotiating committee John August and Danielle Sanchez-Witzel and union president Michele Mulroney in talks with the studios, which were repped by the Gregory Hessinger-led Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

The contraction in work “put a lot of stress on our fund because fewer writers working means decreased contributions coming into the plan,” Mulroney previously told THR.

In 2026, in other words, the WGA was in a very different position that it was three years prior, when its leaders felt emboldened to sustain a 148-day strike in order to reshape payment in the streaming era and establish inaugural protections against generative AI. Its members, many still fatigued from the 2023 strike, don’t seem poised — at least for now — to nitpick their deal or criticize their union for not pushing hard enough.

“The Writers Guild made it clear that the priority going into the negotiations was to shore up the pension and health funds,” says Steinberg. “So mission accomplished, I guess.”