contacted anonymously by the bbc presenter via a dating app and claims the presenter then sent menacing messages. our special correspondent lucy manning has the story and she s with me now. to be clear, this is a different young person to the one the sun has reported about. this individual was first contacted by the mail presenter on a dating app and after the two had connected on the app, the two had connected on the app, the conversation moved to private messaging and the young person has told bbc news they were surprised to find out who the presenter was when he revealed his identity and a presenter told the young person not to tell anyone. but the young person has told us that they felt they were put under repeated requests and pressure to meet up. they did in fact never meet up. later, the young person alluded online to the fact that they were having contact with the bbc presenter and they implied that online, they might name him at some point. the presenter reacted by
team decided to push forward and investigate the case. it s very important that the team saw them as serious allegations. which seems weird that the presenter was only spoken to onjuly the 6th. let s talk about that for a minute because i think that is a really important point. if you ve got an allegation coming into a corporate investigations team, i think you need to balance the concerns of duty of care, privacy, all those things i ve talked about, i don t think you take that complaint directly to a presenter. if you just work that through, if anything that comes through or anything that hasn t been verified just gets brought in front of someone, i would say it s important at that point to validate that, to have notjust the audience services team, but the specialists
let s take a closer look at the timeline released by the bbc today. on may 18th, the complainant went to a bbc building to make the initial allegation. the following day, the complaint was assessed by the bbc s corporate investigations team. that team decided that the complaint did not include an allegation of criminality, but nonetheless merited further investigation. also on may 19th, the bbc says it emailed the complainant but received no response. then there was a delay of almost three weeks untiljune 6th when the bbc says it made a phone call to the complainant which didn t connect. no further attempts to contact the complainant were made for a month. that takes us tojuly 6th, when the sun informed the bbc of the allegations it was intending to publish. also on that day, the director general tim davie says he was made aware of the matter