To Westminster magistrates’ court where Huw Edwards has this afternoon been handed a suspended jail sentence of six months imprisonment, suspended for two years after pleading guilty in July to making indecent images of children. The former TV star admitted to having 41 indecent images of children, which had been sent to him by another man on WhatsApp between 2020 and 2021. Edwards will also be put on the sex offenders’ register for seven years.
It transpires that the ex-Beeb man paid a student hundreds of pounds, and even gifted him a Christmas present, after he was sent indecent images of children. 25-year-old Alex Williams, also from Wales, was given a 12-month suspended jail sentence earlier this year after pleading guilty to seven offences related to possessing and distributing indecent images – some of which he sent to the News at Ten presenter. Today’s proceedings found that the former TV star paid Williams up to £1,500 while the younger Welshman provided pornographic material to Edwards – revealing too that when Edwards was asked by Williams if he wanted sexual images of a person whose ‘age could be discerned as being between 14 and 16’, the presenter responded: ‘Yes xxx.’ Good heavens…
The prosecution claimed:
It is clear from the face of the WhatsApp chat recovered [by police] that a deal of the chat between Alex Williams and Mr Edwards was sexual in nature. It is also clear that Mr Edwards was paying not insignificant sums of money, low hundreds of pounds on an occasional basis…which Mr Williams directly asked for on several occasions, as gifts or presents, apparently off the back of sending pornographic images to Mr Edwards, about which images they chatted. [Williams] has stated that the money was more generally to support him at university and amounted to around £1,000 to £1,500.
The case’s mitigation lawyer has insisted the money was ‘not paid for the purpose of receiving indecent images’, adding: ‘Mr Edwards positively told Mr Williams not to send images of people who were underage.’
The latest updates follow the summer’s revelations that despite not working for most of the last year, Edwards received a £40,000 pay bump between March 2023 and April 2024 – earning a whopping £480,000 and becoming the BBC’s third highest-earning presenter. The Beeb has since asked Edwards to return more than £200,000 of his salary – which he was paid after his arrest in November – with the BBC board stating: ‘Had he been up front when asked by the BBC about his arrest, we would never have continued to pay him money.’ Yet rather curiously, director general Tim Davie confirmed last month that the public service broadcaster had in fact been aware that one of their top stars had been arrested over the most serious category of indecent images of children. It seems there remain a rather lot of unanswered questions over the whole matter yet…
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