Woman’s measly payout reveals
SHE was a normal, happy eightyear-old girl until the day she was taken to meet Jimmy Savile.
For the next two years Leisha Brookes was systematically abused – on BBC premises.
Now aged 50, she is angry that on top of the injury of a stolen childhood, she has been dealt the insult of a paltry £3,250 in compensation from the Government.
The award was made by the CICA, Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, renowned for handing out fortunes to crooks.
Only last year it gave £110,000 to Guinean refugee Aliou Bah for being locked up for too long in the UK when his own country refused to take him back after he was convicted of sex attacks, including one on a 16-year-old girl.
And in a similar case, Moroccan drug addict Khalid Belfken, 27 – who has 21 convictions including theft, burglaries, assaults and weapons possession – was given £40,000 damages when he was held unlawfully during an attempt to deport him.
Meanwhile Leisha has waited almost five years for the CICA’S recognition of what she suffered at the hands of Savile and others – at least 100 assaults as a regular “guest” at the BBC’S Television Centre.
Leisha said: “It works out at just £730 each for all the men who abused me. Is my life worth so little? It’s disgusting, a joke.
Damaged
unusual. Her years of torture, which ended when she was around 11, led her to attempt suicide more than 20 times.
She says her ordeal meant every relationship she ever had was damaged. Her five children were taken away from her and she was so volatile and vulnerable she was unable to hold down a job.
Leisha even spent time in prison in the mid 1990s after attacking the home of someone she became convinced had abused one of her own children.
The set designer was convicted of child abuse when Leisha was 11. She finally plucked up the courage to go to police about her celebrity attacker when she was 19.
But Leisha claims nothing was done and no one believed her.
Then in 2012, when Savile was finally exposed as a predatory pervert, she approached cops working for Operation Yewtree, set up by the Metropolitan Police to investigate him and his fellow abusers. And at last she was believed. Her evidence was used as a central part of the Dame Janet Smith Review, set up by the BBC to investigate sex abuse claims against the corporation. In the review, Dame Janet stated of Leisha: “I accept she was taken to Television Centre on different occasions and was there abused by Jimmy Savile. “She may also have been abused there by other men.” Poverty-stricken Leisha later got £18,750 compensation from the BBC, which she had to use to pay off debts. She now lives as a recluse on just £155 a week in disability benefits in a tiny council