The BBC’s former top news anchor Huw Edwards resigned from Britain’s publicly-funded broadcaster on “medical advice” after being off air since last year following claims that he paid a teenager for sexually explicit pictures.
In a statement released on Monday, the BBC said that “on the basis of medical advice from his doctors” former BBC News at Ten presenter Huw Edwards has resigned from the corporation.
“The BBC has accepted his resignation which it believes will allow all parties to move forward. We don’t believe it appropriate to comment further,” the broadcaster added.
Edwards, 62, has been off the airwaves since last July after a report from The Sun newspaper alleged that an unnamed “BBC star” — later named as Edwards — had paid a drug-addicted 17-year-old around £35,000 in exchange for sexually explicit images.
The newspaper later amended its accusations to say that “it is understood contact between the two started when the youngster was 17,” suggesting that the requests for illicit images may have occurred after the teen turned 18.
While the legal age of consent in the UK is 16, it is still a crime to proposition anyone under the age of 18 to produce sexually explicit pictures of themselves. London’s Metropolitan Police and South Wales Police said last year that they did not find any evidence of a crime after investigating the allegations.
The BBC still faced accusations of an attempted cover-up, with the broadcaster reportedly only contacting police after the allegations were made public.
Although The Sun did not report the gender of the alleged victim, BBC interim chairwoman Dame Elan Closs Stephens told a parliamentary committee last year that the individual in question was a “young man”, The Guardian reported.
Before his departure, Edwards was the fourth-highest-paid presenter at the BBC, earning around £430,000 annually. The longtime news reader was often tapped to cover major events for the public broadcaster, including the official announcement of the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
After revealing that Edwards was the BBC presenter from the reports, his wife, Vicky Flind said that Edwards was hospitalised for “serious mental health issues” saying that her husband had “been treated for severe depression in recent years.”
The mother of the alleged victim said last year that as a result of receiving vast sums of money in exchange for sexual pictures, her child had transformed from a “happy-go-lucky youngster to a ghost-like crack addict.”
“When I see him on telly, I feel sick. I blame this BBC man for destroying my child’s life. Taking my child’s innocence and handing over the money for crack cocaine that could kill my child,” she said.
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