come clean

Idioms  

1. Confess everything, as in If you come clean about what happened I will promise to keep it to myself. [Slang; early 1900s]

---

Example Sentences

An altercation with a nightclub bouncer in Wellington, a wasteful Ashes performance and a foolish attempt to hide the truth, for which he later had to come clean.

From BBC

The pressure built so much and the frequency of the hospital visits became so crazy that it was like, you’re either going to be viewed as this very lazy, sometime-y person, or you’re going to come clean about what you’re actually dealing with and just face it.

From Los Angeles Times

His decades of painstaking research helped lead to a push in the 1990s for the Air Force to come clean on what it had been doing: testing spy balloons and recovering crash dummies.

From The Wall Street Journal

By the time she received that guitar, she’d topped the Billboard 200 with her album “Metamorphosis,” which sold 4 million copies and spawned hit singles like “So Yesterday” and “Come Clean.”

From Los Angeles Times

The Congressman, who co-sponsored the law that compelled the justice department to release the Epstein files last year, also said the Royal Family should "come clean" and lay out what they knew and what "action they're going to take".

From BBC