A BBC presenter has been sentenced to ten years in prison by a court in Australia for raping, torturing, and killing dozens of dogs. Zoologist Adam Britton pleaded guilty to 56 charges of bestiality and animal cruelty last September, as well as child pornography offenses.
Britton was a senior researcher at Charles Darwin University and featured in several productions for the BBC and National Geographic. He even starred in a BBC series alongside legendary nature documentarian Sir David Attenborough.
Courts heard that Britton tortured 42 dogs and killed 39 of them in a shipping container, filming many of his crimes. Britton had a “sadistic sexual interest” in the animals and abused his own dogs and those of others who had been entrusted to his care.
“Your conduct on each of those occasions involved a degree of depravity and reprehensibility which falls entirely outside any ordinary human conception and comprehension,” the judge in the case told Britton.
THE BBC SEX CRIMES LEGACY.
The sentencing comes just after the BBC’s top-paid news anchor Huw Edwards pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children.
Edwards was part of a depraved WhatsApp group in which images were shared from December 2020 to April 2022.
The BBC has plagued by sexual abuse scandals for decades, most infamously that of former presenter Jimmy Savile. The DJ abused children for decades while working at the broadcaster, which has been accused of covering up the abuse or at minimum turning a blind eye to it.
The BBC is funded largely by British television owners through the TV license, a de facto tax which anyone who watches live programming—even if none of it is BBC content—must pay, or else face criminal fines backed by the threat of imprisonment.
Reform Party leader Nigel Farage has called for the TV license to be scrapped and for the BBC to switch to a subscription-based funding model.
