But surely many or all of these things / the views on here can be simultaneously true….
I expect he is having a genuine mental health crisis. He has a history of severe depression and this frenzy would probably trigger a crisis in any of us if we were in his shoes.
Surely we all also accept that even if all of this is legal (as the police have confirmed), it’s all gross, an ugly pattern of behaviour, and contrary to the weekly churchgoing family man news anchor persona that has been presented until now. I think any of us with kids would take the view that if our 18/19/20 year old child was in this position with a prominent and wealthy 61 year old, we’d feel like that was “abusive” and wrong even if not illegal. There’s no point saying there’s no proof. The BBC have seen some of the nasty texts etc and they will have taken real care to verify before saying they’d seen them and confirmed they were from his number. We can I think trust some reporting, surely?!
It’s also true I think that the media frenzy is totally blown out of proportion and likely a living nightmare for every single person involved. It’s doing real damage. Let’s hope no one suffers more harm…
It’s also probably the case that if the Sun went ahead and implied criminal behaviour with no proof of that particular aspect, there’ll be trouble for them. Arguably that was the really shocking bit.
But it might also be true that if his salary is paid via our license fee and part of his position / role is his upstanding persona, there’s an element of public interest in exposing this, even if they way it was all done by the awful, awful Sun was appalling.
Finally, we all know it’s true that in general rich white men get away with and are forgiven by society for horrible things. We shouldn’t pander to that and start saying the much younger people involved in this are somehow to blame….