‘The BBC broke me because I am a Jew’

Lucie Kon loved working for the BBC. She is full of stories about the wonderful times she had at Panorama, Blue Peter, Today, BBC Breakfast, and in Westminster over three spells spanning 25 years. She talks about working with a then unknown BBC reporter called Michael Gove as they covered the latest dramas in Parliament. She remembers fondly her friendship with Dame Deborah James , with whom she made a documentary before the bowel-cancer campaigner died in 2022. The walls of her flat in north London are adorned with memories of her life in television, and on her sideboard is one of her most prized possessions, the Emmy for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary she won last year. For almost all of her BBC career her Jewish faith had little bearing on her work, other than when colleagues might pick her brains for her knowledge of Judaism or Israel. That all changed overnight on Oct 7, 2023, when she became a lightning rod for anti-Israeli sentiment at the BBC in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks . Rather than expressing concern for Ms Kon’s family members in Israel, a colleague lectured her on the “evil” of Zionism , she says, and told her to empathise with the Hamas terrorists who indiscriminately raped, murdered and mutilated Israeli civilians that day. “I went from a BBC journalist who happened to be Jewish to a Jewish journalist at the BBC,” she says. “It was like having Jew stamped on my forehead.” Over the next three years, Ms Kon fought a losing battle with the BBC to acknowledge and tackle the anti-Semitism within its ranks. The cost has been devastating. Rather than being believed and supported, she says she has been victimised, sidelined and forced out. She has spent months in hospital suffering from health conditions triggered by her ordeal. “The BBC dumped me, isolated me and sent me round the twist,” she says. “They broke me.” In April this year, only 19 days after attending the Oscars , where a documentary she helped produce won an Academy Award, the BBC made her redundant. Last month the broadcaster agreed to pay her more than £400,000 in compensation rather than fight an employment tribunal at which she planned to allege racial and religious discrimination, victimisation, harassment and unfair dismissal. She would much rather have had her £118,000-a-year job back, as well as an apology from the BBC for the way she had been treated, but both have been refused. She also has a message for Matt Brittin , the director-general who has promised he will not tolerate anti-Semitism in the BBC: that abuse of Jewish staff is still widespread. “The BBC isn’t full of anti-Semites, but it does have a problem with anti-Semitism,” she says. “I never for one minute imagined that there would come a day where, if I said to someone I was a Zionist, that would be used against me, or that it would mean anyone would think I was part of a death cult.” The BBC has long been dogged by stories of anti-Semitism in its ranks. In 2025, Tim Davie resigned as director-general over a series of revelations from The Telegraph that included anti-Israel bias in its news coverage. Last year the BBC apologised for an “error of judgment” in broadcasting a performance by the punk duo Bob Vylan at Glastonbury during which they chanted “death, death to the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces]”. Ms Kon’s experience suggests few lessons have been learnt from such damaging episodes, given that some of her story post-dates Mr Davie’s resignation. When the Oct 7 terrorist attacks happened in 2023, she was working as a commissioning editor in a documentary unit that sources its films worldwide. “I felt incredibly privileged to do a job that took me all over the world,” she says. “It was a tremendously proud time for me.” It was obviously a job she was good at. As well as the Emmy, she has photographs of herself clutching an Oscar and a Bafta after a film she commissioned and executive-produced won both awards earlier this year. But on the Saturday morning when the attacks happened, something changed within her workplace. She was WhatsApping a colleague when news reports of murders and hostage-taking in Israel began to appear. She says: “Hamas were livestreaming what they were doing because they were really proud of themselves. And they wanted the world to know what they were doing. “We could see that they were taking old people and babies hostage. And we knew a little bit about how they were murdering people. I said to my colleague, have you seen what’s going on in Israel? “I said Hamas were evil and the reply I got was: ‘So are Zionists.’ I was really shocked.” When she went to the office the following Monday she found other Jewish colleagues were experiencing similar comments from BBC staff. It became so bad that Ms Kon says she would go and hide in the disabled toilet “to take myself away from the situation because I don’t want to argue with my colleagues”. It had not always been this way. Ms Kon talks about the four years she spent on Radio 4’s Today programme , where her knowledge of Judaism and Israel, a country in which she had spent a year studying, were treated as an asset. “My knowledge of my community, and my experience of studying in Israel was treated as something to be embraced,” she says. But, equally importantly, “we had resources that meant we could look things up. Just facts, not opinions”. Nine days after Oct 7, Rishi Sunak, then prime minister, visited a Jewish school to show solidarity with the Jewish community, as he put it. TV screens in the BBC offices were showing the visit on the news, and Ms Kon said to no one in particular that she was reassured Mr Sunak was visiting the school, which Ms Kon’s two children happened to have attended. “A colleague said: ‘I think it’s disgusting that he’s taking sides.’ I was like: ‘What are you talking about? He’s not taking sides, he’s just saying he’s going to protect citizens of this country.’” On another occasion a co-worker told Ms Kon she should “think about what drove Hamas to do what they did”. Ms Kon says: “I saw footage of a kibbutz defender being shot in the head by a Hamas terrorist, then he got a knife out of his back pocket, cut his head off and held it up in his hand. And I’m being asked to think about what drives someone to do that?” As Jewish colleagues swapped stories of being called “Zios” and subjected to a stream of anti-Semitic comments, Ms Kon set up a support group for Jewish people at the BBC that led to a meeting with Mr Davie. He was presented with comments that had been made to Jewish staff, including Ms Kon, and a request for the BBC to refer to Oct 7 as a terrorist attack, which it had refused to do . When one of her colleagues heard about the request, Ms Kon claims they told her: “If you want to call Hamas terrorists, you have to say that Israel is a terrorist state.” Mr Davie said the BBC needed to be proactive in tackling anti-Semitic comments, but matters did not improve. The BBC had been swift to email staff to support black colleagues after the murder of George Floyd in the US, and when Islamophobia was in the news, but there had been nothing about Oct 7. Ms Kon says: “A colleague of mine said that if you say you’re a Zionist at the BBC, you might as well say that you were the person who had that knee on the neck of George Floyd. You’re a murderer. You’re an evil colonialist. You’re a racist.” Ms Kon decided her team should commission a documentary about the events of Oct 7, but was told “we’ve done enough films from Israel”. Nevertheless, Ms Kon pressed on, and was sent a “mind-blowing” taster tape of a film being made by an Israeli documentary-maker who pieced together the attack on the Nova Music Festival using Hamas videos and footage shot by their Israeli targets on mobile phones. It was a dispassionate, factual reconstruction of the terrorist attack, Ms Kon says. Ms Kon spoke to senior managers, who agreed that the BBC should acquire and produce the film. However, one executive decided Ms Kon should not be in charge because she was “too partial” and had “skin in the game”. Another staff member stressed the need to “contextualise” what Hamas had done. Eventually the decision about the Nova Music Festival film was reversed and Ms Kon was allowed to supervise the documentary, but only if she had someone working alongside her to ensure impartiality. During the following weeks Ms Kon discussed her experiences with several senior managers who suggested she was being oversensitive, and offered her therapy, she says. In January 2024 Ms Kon sought advice from a senior manager, who told her to raise a formal grievance complaint. Ms Kon decided to follow the advice. “I knew I was taking a risk at that moment,” she says. “And everything changed, my life, my career, from then on.” The BBC decided that Ms Kon – the alleged victim – should avoid coming in to the office in case she came into contact with the people she had complained about. She mostly worked from home, but would sometimes go to the BBC and find a desk in another part of the building where she could “hide”. Ms Kon began struggling with anxiety, and the stress she was under eventually triggered a recurrence of the anorexia she had last suffered in her youth. After a five-month internal investigation, she was told her grievance had not been upheld. She lodged an appeal but, in December 2024, was told that it too had been unsuccessful. By January 2025, with the grievance process finished, Ms Kon was looking forward to getting back to the office and carrying on as normal, but her doctor told her that she needed to take some time off. “I didn’t really want work to know how bad I was feeling,” she says, “although anyone who looked at me would have been able to tell”. A day after telling the HR department she would be taking sick leave, she was called to a meeting where she was told about a restructuring that meant her job was at risk. She says that, as the meeting went on: “I thought, this is what people told me would happen when they warned me not to put in a grievance. “They warned me that it might be career-defining, and I didn’t want to believe that because I worked for the BBC, which I trusted, and I was dealing with people who, on the face of it, were really nice and seemed honest and transparent. “But they weren’t.” During 2025 Ms Kon spent months in hospital being treated for anorexia, while the redundancy process dragged on. Ms Kon’s role was replaced but the headcount stayed the same. Ms Kon, who says the new role was her old job with a different name, was turned down when she applied for it. In the middle of all that, the Oct 7 documentary We Will Dance Again won the Emmy in New York. Ms Kon had to pay for her own flight, sleep on a relative’s floor in Manhattan, and pay for the Emmy that has her name inscribed on it. She was even robbed of the chance to celebrate her success because she had been told she was not allowed to speak on behalf of the BBC, and when she went on stage with her team to collect the Emmy, she was “worried, because the director thanked me and it was being livestreamed”. When the BBC produced its annual report this year, it