United Kingdom

And in the course of going public they'd be outing a middle aged man who is clearly not ready to be publicly out the closet.

At this point it's either because: a) the presenter's identity is pretty well known (some parts of the foreign press are running with it) or b) a number of people are contacting the BBC about shady behaviour from presenters and this just happens to be the same presenter so it is getting rolled up into the ongoing investigation.

The article says they do not know each other. BBC news likely knows the rumoured identity of the presenter so perhaps they made the link? It does seem weird to ‘confirm’ it’s the same presenter, now anyone who knows either person likely knows the name, only a matter of time before it’s leaked whether or not anything has wrong has been done.

Like it or loathe it, the BBC is the UK's most important broadcaster by a country mile.

If the BBC's internal procedures are shown to be reasonable and to have been followed, which it appears so far to have been the case, then I don't see anyone jumping ship about this.

People do dumb stuff all the time, some of which may or may not be illegal. It isn't an employer's responsibility until the employer finds out about it. What matters is the response and, so far at least, it appears the BBC has done fairly well this time, although perhaps more effort could have been made after the initial followups made by the BBC to the original complaint were ignored.