BBC caught covering up false rape allegations once again

At HEqual we’ve previously written extensively on the BBC’s refusal to report on false rape accusations that result in the suicide of the victim. The BBC has still never directly reported on a single such case, only finally reporting the suicide of Jay Cheshire indirectly after his own mother took her own life a year later.

Thursday 6th July showed this pattern of contempt for victims of false rape allegations continuing at the BBC, with their “reporting” on the case of Jemma Beale, a serial false accuser, found guilty of falsely accusing no less than fifteen different men of rape or sexual assault, almost certainly some sort of record total for this heinous crime.

Fifteen false accusations are incredibly notable in themselves, though the seriousness of case is magnified ten-fold given that one of her victims was jailed for seven years. Furthermore, her lies only came to light after his sentence was over, so she intentionally deprived an innocent man of years of his freedom.

The case is clearly of huge significance and most of the media has given the guilty verdict the prominence is so clearly deserves. It’s the top post on Reddit’s news subreddit, the main story on the front page of the Metro Newspaper, and covered extensively by most others and The Sun already has two post-verdict articles in place. International coverage comes from across the globe including 9news and Yahoo in Australia, Fox News (where it’s currently the top world story) and the Washington Times in the US, and The Journal and Sunday World in Ireland.

In contrast to front page coverage elsewhere the BBC relegated its coverage of the story to the local London section of its website. So, to find the story on the BBC website ones has to click on news, then the UK section, then the England section, then on the local section and finally on London. The article is then found hidden towards the bottom of the page, and it is displayed without an image to click on.

Normally we’d examine the history of the BBC article via the News Sniffer service, which monitors “key feeds from the BBC News website”. However, it hasn’t picked up this story, thus suggesting BBC excluded it from all its main feeds. From the BBC London Twitter feed we can establish that the article was live by 6:43pm, yet there’s no sign of it on an archive of the BBC UK page from that time.

So, we’ve established that the BBC did its best to hide this article away on its site and newsfeeds, but what about the content itself? In contrast to every other outlet who reported the details of the case thoroughly, the BBC’s article is succinct to say the least! Their reluctance to report on false rape accusers is such that the article is a mere seven sentences long, Excluding the headline and image caption, it total 135 words.

Missing information from the BBC article includes:

• The dates of the offences
• The number of counts of perjury she was convicted of
• The number of counts of perverting the course she was convicted of
• Acknowledgement that the victim she jailed served his sentence
• The fact that she’d received “compensation” and the amount
• Beale inflicting injuries upon herself as “evidence”
• The drain on police resources resulting from her crimes
• The impact of her crimes on the NHS
• A victim fleeing the country after being falsely accused
• The impact on her other victims
• The fact that Beale was in a relationship with a man at the time
• How video evidence disproved her claims
• Explicitly acknowledging the accused were innocent

The BBC’s appalling coverage isn’t limited to the content itself, for example its headline is shorter than that used by any other outlet, and it is almost unique in failing to acknowledge the gender and of course the quantity of victims, simply reading: “Liar” convicted of false rape claims (other BBC versions add the term “Serial” to the beginning of the headline). Other headlines acknowledge the innocence of Beale’s victims yet this term is not only missing from the BBC’s headline, but from the entire article too!

Readers may well be thinking that the BBC has simply made a mistake here and at least given proper coverage to the trial at an earlier stage. The case first hit the headlines around the 13th and 14th of June, with The Daily Mail, The Sun, Times, covering the trial, some multiple times. However, this one pathetic report is the sole mention of the case anywhere on the BBC website. Beale’s name is nowhere to be found anywhere else.

In fairness to thee BBC, their reporting is marginally better than that of the Guardian, who refuse to mention the case anywhere on its site. However, the Guardian doesn’t put people in prison for refusing to give it money and unlike the BBC it has no legal duty to be impartial, so it’s the BBC who are guilty of the greater level of misconduct.

In conclusion, it’s blatantly obvious what has happened here. The BBC has been faced with a story about serious false rape allegations, types of crimes it hates reporting on more than almost any other. The fact that there were so many false accusations, that they were motivated by receiving “compensation” from the state and there was a victim wrongfully imprisoned makes the case all the more notable, and of course all the more unpalatable for the feminist BBC.

We can see that the BBC tried to ignore this case until the last possible moment, yet the guilty verdict has forced its hand and meant it had to cover Beale’s crimes in some way to avoid breaching its charter. However, instead of reporting the facts properly and giving appropriate coverage and prominence, it has simply done the absolute minimum possible, writing a pathetic headline, barely describing any of what occurred and then hiding the article away as deep as possible on its site to stop people reading it. The article couldn’t be any shorter if they’d tried.

This is of course typical BBC behaviour and a huge insult to all Beale’s many victims, particularly the gentleman wrongly imprisoned, not to mention the taxpayer. It’s also an insult to anyone who pays the licence fee and funds such pathetic “journalism”. We will of course be writing to the BBC to complain and encourage others to do likewise.

In addition to the standard BBC complaints form, readers can also try sending feedback to the following email address: londonnews@bbc.co.uk