When Idi Amin expelled Uganda’s Asian population in 1972, Anjula Mutanda’s family left with the rest. She settled in Britain, trained as a psychologist, and became one of Britain’s most recognisable television psychologists. Her daughter turned down a Cambridge offer at 18, studied at Manchester, and in 2025 pitched a podcast to the BBC about the Sean Combs trial. It reached number one on Apple Podcasts in Ireland. Then the verdict came back partial.
Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty is a BBC journalist and podcast host based in the UK. She joined the BBC’s Long Form Audio unit in Salford in 2022 and became one of the most recognised voices in British podcasting through Diddy on Trial, the BBC Sounds series that followed every week of the federal criminal trial of Sean Combs in New York. She currently hosts Fame Under Fire, also on BBC Sounds, a weekly celebrity fact-checking podcast that launched in July 2025 and continues to run as of May 2026.
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Where She Comes From
Her mother is Anjula Mutanda, a prominent British psychologist and TV presenter who fronted programmes for Channel 4, BBC Radio 4, and BBC One, and served as the first Black president of the relationship counselling charity Relate. Anjula was born in Uganda to an Indian mother and a Ugandan father. Her family were among the Ugandan Asians forcibly expelled under Idi Amin’s decree in the early 1970s, part of one of the largest forced removals of an Asian population in modern African history.
Anoushka has spoken about this directly. In a 2019 essay published on the BBC’s front page, she described her mother’s experience as “largely overlooked,” with “little understanding” of what those families went through. Her father carries the surname Dougherty, of Irish-British origin. That combination, Indian-Ugandan on one side and British-Irish on the other, sits at the centre of how she understands identity and who gets to be heard.
The 2019 piece was not, at its core, about heritage. It centred on one question: whether to accept her place at Cambridge University.
She had received the offer a week earlier. She was 18, from a state school, and mixed-race. She noted in the essay that just three percent of students who started at Cambridge in 2017 were Black or mixed-race with Black heritage, and asked publicly whether a university with those numbers was the right environment for her. She enrolled at the University of Manchester instead.
Her BBC Career Before Diddy
At Manchester, and through her student years, Anoushka was already making programmes for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. These were not university radio projects. Every one was a self-pitched idea that the BBC commissioned and broadcast.
Degrees of Love was a BBC Radio 4 documentary on relationships and going to university. It became a finalist at the New York Radio Awards. Covid on Campus, produced in 2020 for BBC Sounds and Radio 4, covered student life and university responses during the pandemic. The accompanying BBC News article reached the top ten most-read on the site the day it published. She also produced Back to Uni in 2020 alongside BBC investigative journalist Sue Mitchell.
She presented No Satisfaction for the BBC World Service Documentary Podcast, a programme exploring research from the UK, the United States, and Japan on why younger generations are having less sex than previous ones. She was 21 at the time. She spoke directly to peers. The programme was produced by CTVC and broadcast on BBC World Service.
In 2022 she joined the BBC’s Long Form Audio unit in Salford. Alongside the work that became Diddy on Trial, she contributed to Witness History and The Global Story on BBC World Service.
Diddy on Trial
When the federal trial of Sean Combs was confirmed for May 2025, Anoushka pitched the BBC a podcast to cover it. They commissioned it.
The trial opened on 5 May 2025 at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Combs faced charges including racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and violations of the Mann Act. Diddy on Trial covered proceedings week by week from New York, with listeners submitting questions directly via WhatsApp throughout the case. It was, as Anoushka described it, audience-driven journalism built around continuous contact with the people listening.
“Diddy on Trial was unique because we were in conversation with our listeners throughout the case. This was audience-driven journalism from the start, but it was clear after week one at the trial that the Diddy case was just the beginning. We got thousands of messages and requests to look into other powerful figures.”
By the end of the trial, Diddy on Trial had reached 78,000 monthly listeners on Apple Podcasts. It charted at number one on Apple’s Entertainment News chart in Ireland, and number two in the UK, Australia, Italy, and the Netherlands.
On 13 May 2025, Cassie Ventura took the stand, seven months pregnant with her third child. Anoushka later described it as the most striking moment of the entire trial. She said she had known Ventura for years primarily as Combs’ girlfriend, and watching her stand up in court as a mother, an artist, and a person with her own history was something else entirely. Six weeks later the jury returned its verdict.
The Verdict
On 2 July 2025, after thirteen hours of deliberation, the jury found Combs guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution under the Mann Act, and not guilty on racketeering conspiracy and both sex trafficking charges.
On 3 October 2025, Judge Arun Subramanian sentenced him to 50 months in prison, a $500,000 fine, and five years of supervised release. With time already served in custody since September 2024 credited against the sentence, the effective prison term fell well short of the more than eleven years prosecutors had sought. The sex trafficking charges, which carried mandatory minimums of fifteen years each, did not result in conviction.
Fame Under Fire
Anoushka launched Fame Under Fire on BBC Sounds on 24 July 2025, a week after the sentencing proceedings concluded. The weekly podcast covers celebrity and public figure scandals, bringing expert guests in to separate what is verified from what is circulating unchecked on social media.
Recent episodes have covered the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni lawsuit settlement in May 2026, the D4vd murder case through April and May 2026, and Drake’s appeal against Universal Music Group over Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us in the same period. The podcast carries a 4.2 rating on Apple Podcasts from 134 reviews.
BBC Commissioner of Podcasts Rhian Roberts said Anoushka brings “insight and experience, but a genuine love and understanding of the chaotic, fascinating space where fame and controversy collide.”
She spent seven weeks in New York, built one of the most listened-to BBC audio productions of 2025 around direct conversations with her audience, and reported every development of a trial built on testimony about power and exploitation. The jury cleared the most serious charges. She launched a new show the following month and kept going.
Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty is in her mid-twenties. Her mother’s family fled Uganda under Idi Amin, she turned down Cambridge at 18, and she pitched the Diddy podcast to the BBC herself. For a journalist at this stage of her career, that is a more specific record than most people in British broadcasting put together in a decade.
