California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been largely out of public eyesight after canceling his trip to an international climate conference last month with little explanation, citing “family obligations.” On Tuesday, he explained his decision to miss the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, saying his four kids staged an “intervention” for Halloween. “Mom and dad missing Halloween for them is worse than missing Christmas,” said Newsom. “And I woke up that next morning with something that’s probably familiar to a lot of parents, that knot in your stomach, that I had no damn choice, I had to cancel that trip.” He and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, were about to leave for Scotland when he changed his mind.

Conspiracies ran wild after Newsom’s abrupt withdrawal, like theories that he had a bad reaction to his COVID booster shot. “It’s funny how certain folks can’t handle [the] truth,” Siebel Newsom wrote in a tweet that she then deleted. “When someone cancels something, maybe they’re just in the office working; maybe in their free time they’re at home with their family, at their kids’ sports matches, or dining out with their wife.”