January 24 2026, 08:15 
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has issued a formal apology to a former radio host for the anti-gay harassment he endured while employed by the broadcaster.
As the BBC itself reports, Jack Murley worked for BBC Radio Cornwall from 2019 to 2024, when he was fired for social media posts that violated the broadcaster’s guidelines on impartiality. Following his dismissal, Murley alleged that he had been discriminated against because he is gay and union representative for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).
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Two employment tribunals in February 2025 and October 2025 dismissed Murley’s allegations, finding that the BBC’s decision had not been related to his sexuality or his position with the NUJ.
But in a December 18 social media post, Murley claimed that after an internal investigation into his allegations of harassment, he’d met with BBC management and received an in-person, “unconditional” apology “for the repeated instances of homophobic and discriminatory abuse” he had experienced while working for the corporation.
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“That abuse was catalogued and confirmed in a high-level internal report compiled by the BBC’s Corporate Investigations Team last summer, and followed a months-long whistleblowing investigation started at my instigation,” Murley’s statement read.
According to U.K. LGBTQ+ outlet PinkNews, the BBC initially refused to acknowledge the in-person meeting or its apology to Murley, with a spokesperson noting only that the corporation “welcomed the tribunal judgement, which was widely reported on in October.”
But on Friday, the BBC reported that its chief operating officer across nations, Jason Horton, had sent a letter to Murley apologizing for “the behaviors and comments” to which he’d been subjected.
According to the outlet, a leaked report from the BBC’s whistleblowing team detailed several instances of harassment that it found the corporation must answer for. These included an encounter in which Murley was called a “fairy boy” by a colleague, another in which a colleague used the homophobic slur “poof,” and one in which a colleague told Murley he understood why gay men had been banned from donating blood.
“Statistically, your lot are a lot more likely to die of AIDS, that’s just a numerical fact,” the colleague allegedly said.
The report also found that Murley had provided direct evidence that a senior manager had refused to address homophobic emails, texts, and phone calls Murley had received from listeners, advising him instead to be “less gay” on air.
In his letter, which Murley posted to Instagram on January 18, Horton said that the BBC has “worked hard to change the culture for the better across management and the wider team.”
“It is unacceptable for anyone to experience homophobic behavior in the workplace,” Horton wrote, adding that he’d been “deeply concerned” by the finding of the BBC’s internal investigation.
Murley told the BBC that he was grateful to former colleagues who had provided evidence and eye-witness accounts to the corporation’s whistleblowing team.
“At a time when I was producing an award-winning LGBTQ+ show for the BBC, I was being subjected to the kind of homophobic and bigoted behaviours from BBC staff members that would have been unacceptable decades ago – let alone in a modern workplace,” Murley said. “I am glad that the BBC has finally admitted that people in positions of power created and sustained an environment in which my abuse was explicitly and implicitly tolerated by those who should have been expected to stop it.”
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