The BBC are reported to have received a complaint about disgraced news anchor Huw Edwards over a decade before his sentencing, it has been claimed
A dossier of emails sent to the BBC has reportedly revealed that a complaint was made against shamed newsreader Huw Edwards all the way back in 2012.
Last September, the Welsh broadcaster was given a six-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, after he admitted charges of making indecent images of children.
It came months after the news broke that Huw was alleged to have paid a young person for sexually explicit photos.
Now, according to The Sunday Times, an email was sent to BBC director-general Tim Davie an hour before Huw was sentenced in September, which claimed that a complaint was made about Huw all the way back in 2012, in the aftermath of the Jimmy Savile scandal.
The email, which was obtained by the Times under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, was from a former BBC employee. They are said to have detailed how a complaint had been made against the newsreader a decade before his suspension.
It reportedly read: “The reason for my email to you is just to flag that there is a high probability that this complaint was documented somewhere but was (by recollection) to have been deemed non-actionable.’
They added that the complaint was “Not necessarily a criminal allegation” and said “I have no real specifics I can offer you – other than it exists”.
Tim allegedly responded three minutes later with an email thanking the ex-employee and explaining he would share it with the team.
The Times requested all of the email correspondence between the BBC’s senior executives, dated from Huw’s arrest to the day after he was sentenced. Six months later, they were granted the information and given access to nearly 200 pages of emails.
The emails are also said to have uncovered that Huw offered to pay back some of his salary from the BBC between the time of his arrest and his resignation from the broadcaster.
However, Huw is yet to repay any of the money back, with a BBC spokesperson confirming to Mirror, “The BBC believes that Huw Edwards should return the money paid to him by the BBC, covering the period between his arrest and his resignation.”
Huw, who was the presenter of the BBC News At Ten for two decades, was known as the corporation’s highest-paid newsreader but later found himself at the centre of a scandal when The Sun claimed that a presenter had given payments to a young person for sexually explicit images.
Not naming Huw at first, many presenters such as Rylan Clark and Jeremy Vine were quick to clear up that the reports were not aimed at them.
Over a month after the news broke, Huw’s wife, TV producer Vicky Flind, named him as the person behind the reports and issued a statement claiming that he was “suffering from serious mental health issues”.
Describing it as “difficult days” for their family, Vicky explained how Huw had been “treated for severe depression” in recent years.
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