The BBC is guilty of a “miscarriage of justice” over its “unacceptable” and total lack of support for female employees who were harassed for 10 years by the jailed stalker Alex Belfield, an MP has said.
Barry Sheerman, the Labour MP for Huddersfield, said the BBC’s treatment of the women – who include his constituent the BBC Radio Leeds veteran Liz Green – revealed an “incompetent and remote” organisation that failed to understand or care what was happening to its employees.
Green, the former head of news at BBC 5 Live Rozina Breen, and the outgoing director of BBC England, Helen Thomas, all want the BBC to commission an internal investigation into why their complaints about Belfield’s harassment were “ignored” for the best part of a decade.
Thomas told Belfield’s jury at Nottingham crown court that she was told to “man up” when she complained. All of the women claim they were told to ignore the abuse and delete the thousands of emails Belfield sent to, and about, them.
Sheerman stood up in parliament on Thursday and asked the culture secretary to intervene to help the women. “[Green] and other women were trolled unmercifully. Their lives were absolutely ruined and disrupted and the BBC gave no support, no help at all. Is it time we got the department of culture, media and sport secretary here? I am a great, passionate supporter of public broadcasting but what these women have suffered from the BBC is unacceptable,” he said.
Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, responded to say it was an “incredibly serious matter”.
Sheerman, who is the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on miscarriages of justice, told the Guardian: “In an interesting way this is a miscarriage of justice. I’m horrified that a progressive employer like the BBC can be so incompetent and remote, to allow people who I know to be strong women to fester like that.”
He said he was building cross-party support for the women and vowed to carry out a “relentless” campaign to get answers for them, via an independent inquiry. “We won’t stop until the BBC explains to them all what they were thinking.”
Belfield was jailed for five and a half years last month for stalking the presenter Jeremy Vine and three other men, but found not guilty of stalking Green, Breen, Thomas and the former BBC radio presenter Stephanie Hirst.
Despite the acquittals, a judge imposed an indefinite restraining order preventing Belfield from contacting the women, ruling that, applying the civil standard, Belfield had committed “statutory harassment causing distress and alarm” to them.
He praised the women for acting “with substantial courage and real fortitude in coming to court to give evidence in a public forum about matters which had very substantial negative mental health impacts upon them, over several years”.
On Thursday, Vine, who has supported the women and said it is “very, very important that the BBC learn lessons” from their treatment, published the victim impact statement he gave to Nottingham crown court after Belfield was convicted of stalking him and three other men.
In it, he said: “Broadcasters like me know about trolls. We get plenty of abrasive messages and in 99.9% of cases we let them go. But ordinary trolls don’t compare to this Olympic-level stalker. He turned criminal harassment into a cottage industry.”
He added: “There is no doubt in my mind that if this court had not stopped Belfield, someone would have died. It is quite possible that a Belfield follower would have physically attacked one of the eight victims in the case. I am convinced Belfield wanted that – it’s why he broadcast my home address to 500,000 people on YouTube, having falsely claimed on more than a hundred occasions that I stole £1,000 from a friend’s memorial service.
“His lies made his followers hate me and I am sure this odious, devious criminal would have quietly celebrated if one of them had come to my home and thrown acid in the face of my teenage daughter.”
A BBC spokesperson said: “We know this has been very difficult for those involved and we continue to provide support to current and former staff. We also want to learn from this to ensure we offer the best possible support to all colleagues, who may sadly experience the threat and risks of online stalking in the future.”
