For almost two years, the BBC stood behind a documentary about the people who run the UK’s biggest LGBTQ+ news site. On Thursday, October 8, it stood up in the High Court in London and took it all back.

The BBC accepted that the allegations it made about PinkNews founder and CEO Benjamin Cohen and his husband Anthony James, the company’s COO, were false. It retracted them, apologised, and agreed to pay the couple compensation. The settlement ends the defamation case they brought against the broadcaster.

What happened in court

The apology came as a Statement in Open Court, the formal way a defamation case is settled in public in England and Wales. According to PinkNews’ report from the hearing, the BBC’s counsel, Jane Phillips, told the court:

“The BBC retracts and apologises unreservedly for the defamatory allegations made in the programme and the article.”

The BBC accepted the allegations were “false and extremely harmful to the married couple’s reputations,” PinkNews reported. The Guardian described the compensation as “substantial” and reported that the documentary and the accompanying BBC article have been removed. The case will no longer go to trial.

The BBC itself isn’t saying more. A spokesperson told PinkNews: “The BBC has reached a settlement with Ben Cohen and Anthony James. We will not be issuing any further comment.”

Cohen and James brought the case personally, not on behalf of PinkNews. They say they’ll donate the compensation to the Multiple Sclerosis Society and Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Charity.

What the BBC broadcast in 2024

The documentary, PinkNews: Behind Closed Doors, and related BBC News coverage went out on 10 December 2024, according to the couple’s statement. Among the claims: that the couple “enabled and tolerated” sexual misconduct towards junior PinkNews staff, and, in the BBC’s online coverage, that they put inappropriate pressure on young female employees to act as surrogates.

The BBC now accepts those claims were false.

The cost to a young family

The part of this story that lands hardest is the timing. Cohen and James had become parents through surrogacy. Their son was six months old when this began, the couple say.

According to the Statement in Open Court, as reported by PinkNews, the coverage led to additional investigations by Cafcass, the family court advisory service, causing “considerable anxiety and distress during a time when they ought to have been able to focus on their newborn son.” The couple’s statement says those extra social-worker investigations came ahead of a Family Court hearing on the parental order for their son, the legal step that makes intended parents in a UK surrogacy the child’s legal parents.

There were professional costs too. Cohen resigned as a trustee of the charity Humanity & Inclusion, and James resigned as an associate non-executive director at Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, PinkNews reported.

”One of the most damaging homophobic tropes”

Cohen and James have been blunt about why they think this matters beyond their own family. In their statement, they say the BBC’s claims “reinforced one of the most damaging homophobic tropes: that gay men are sexual predators who pose a threat to others.”

That trope has a long, ugly history, and it’s the same one used today to justify “LGBT propaganda” laws and website blocks from Minsk to Ankara. When a public broadcaster with the BBC’s reach puts a gay couple’s name next to claims like these, the couple argue, the damage doesn’t stay with them.

“These were allegations that should never have been broadcast,” they said. “The BBC’s authority makes mistakes like this more dangerous, not less.”

They also said “the BBC ignored warnings about the veracity of these allegations and chose to broadcast false claims to millions of people,” and called on the corporation’s new leadership to look at how it happened. “The BBC, though, needs to carefully consider and learn from the impact that its reckless journalism has had.”

Why it matters now

The timing is awkward for the BBC. PinkNews notes the settlement lands during the review of the BBC’s Royal Charter, the document that sets out what the broadcaster is for and how it’s run, and shortly after a House of Commons committee said the BBC had made errors in its news and current affairs output.

For LGBTQ+ readers, there’s a simpler takeaway. Queer media is small, often underfunded, and easy to dismiss. Its founders are public figures and fair subjects for scrutiny, like anyone who runs a newsroom. But scrutiny has to be accurate, and in this case the BBC has now said, in open court, that it wasn’t.

“The allegations were false,” Cohen and James wrote. “The BBC has retracted them in full and apologised unreservedly.”

Disclosure: PinkNews is a fellow LGBTQ+ news outlet. TrueQueer has no business relationship with PinkNews, Benjamin Cohen or Anthony James.

Sources: PinkNews, “BBC apologises unreservedly…” (Oct 8, 2026); Benjamin Cohen and Anthony James, statement via PinkNews (Oct 8, 2026); The Guardian via AOL (Oct 8, 2026). Photo: Gary Bembridge, London Pride 2011 outside BBC Broadcasting House, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.