Hadley Freeman on the Lucie Kon case (previously) – If you’re Jewish you’ll be an unperson at the BBC:
Until I met Lucie Kon last week, I assumed the cruellest thing the BBC did to her was its Stalinesque decision to remove her name from its original and rightful prominent place at the end of films she had worked on for the corporation. “They never even told me they were doing that, and I was still working at the BBC at this point, so it was just shocking when I found out,” Kon tells me. Yet worse was to come.
The award-winning and now former commissioning editor recently won a £400,000 payout from the broadcaster after alleging she suffered antisemitic harassment from colleagues. The BBC rejected those claims but agreed to pay up instead of facing an employment tribunal at which Kon would have alleged, among other things, discrimination, harassment and unfair dismissal.
Kon had worked for the BBC for 25 very happy years, but everything changed after October 7, 2023. As Kon watched footage of the attacks being streamed by Hamas, she WhatsApped a colleague, whom I’ll call X. “Have you seen what’s going on? Hamas are evil,” Kon wrote. “So are Zionists,” X replied, knowing that Kon is Jewish and has family in Israel. A few days later, when Rishi Sunak, then prime minister, visited the Jewish school Kon’s children had attended, X said, “I think it’s disgusting that he’s taking sides like that.”
The following month, Kon pitched a documentary about the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival. She was told that she would struggle to be impartial because she had “skin in the game”. “Why would I struggle to be impartial?” Kon asked. “Because you’re Jewish,” she was told.
It’s always intriguing to discover whose background gives them invaluable “lived experience” and whose makes them “unacceptably biased”. What happened to Kon at the BBC in 2023 reminds me so much of my experience at The Guardian in 2020-22, when I was told I couldn’t write about my objections to trans-identifying men in women’s spaces because women writing on this subject caused too much “kickback”. Trans activists could write their opinions, because they were seen as the voice of the oppressed, whereas women who objected — like me — were the oppressors. The oppressor-oppressed nexus is the crucial nub of the progressive belief system, and on October 7 the progressive focus switched from trans to Palestine. That it was in fact Hamas that attacked Israelis that day meant, ironically, that progressives doubled down on the notion that Palestinians are always the blameless victims, and Israelis unremittingly evil. Thus, Kon was told if she worked on the film about Nova, she would have to “contextualise” Hamas murdering the Israelis, ie justify it.
And that’s not even the worst of it. When Kon was much younger, she’d struggled with eating disorders. During lockdown she’d had treatment for breast cancer. In February 2024 Kon’s GP warned her employers that the way they were treating her during the grievance process — isolating her, restricting her ability to do her job — was exacerbating her anxiety and her historic anorexia. Not long after that, Kon was told not to come into the office because of X, isolating and restricting her further. In January last year she was told she was at risk of redundancy, and shortly afterwards she was, for the first time in her life, admitted to hospital because her anorexia had become so dangerous. She has spent much of the past year and a half in and out of hospital.
This is the woman the BBC has chosen to pay off….to avoid the sordid details coming out in court of the betrayal and persecution of an experienced Jewish reporter who was having to deal with the antisemitism of her colleagues while struggling with serious health issues. What a a disgrace.
Three years after October 7 and skyrocketing rates of antisemitism, Kon’s stories about BBC colleagues’ antisemitism — such as expressing scepticism that Israeli women were raped on October 7 — feel dismayingly predictable.
But to hear how the BBC, which trumpets initiatives like “mental health awareness season”, treated an employee while she was receiving care for severe anorexia nervosa is genuinely shocking. Never have the BBC’s claims to be “inclusive” looked more hollow, or its rainbow-coloured “mental health” nonsense felt more meaningless. But then, like Kon, I have been treated in hospital for anorexia. So no doubt the BBC would dismiss me as “biased”, and take my name off this column.
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