DLT: 3 female stars groped me

DAVE Lee Travis told a court yesterday he had been groped by three famous women – but refused to divulge their names.

The former BBC Radio 1 DJ said they ‘ put their hands down my legs and squeezed me’.

Travis told Southwark Crown Court it was a ‘different world’ back in the 1970s, when some of his alleged sex offences are said to have taken place. He said ‘things that happened ... was just flirtatious behaviour’.

The 68-year-old also claimed that half of the country would be in jail by now ‘if patting somebody’s bottom in the 1970s was a crime’.

Back then, ‘ you could put your arm around someone’s waist and it wasn’t misread as an attack’ and ‘you could touch someone on their shoulder and you wouldn’t get arrested for it’.

The DJ told the court: ‘Put any person on the stand and ask them about those days and they will say it was flirtatious. I could give you names of four women, three of whom are very famous, who have groped me – and I mean groped me.

‘I don’t mean touch my back or bottom, but they have put their hands down my legs and squeezed me.

‘Do you want their names? I’m not going to give them to you. But it happened.’

During heated cross-examination on his third day in the witness box, he said the allegations against him were simply part of a ‘witch hunt’ which made him ‘as mad as hell’.

Prosecutor Miranda Moore QC asked: ‘ Were you mad as hell because you were doing this sort of thing for years and years, thinking that it was perfectly all right, when it fact it wasn’t?’

Travis replied: ‘No, that is absolutely 100 per cent wrong.’ In a rare light-hearted moment, the DJ said he was insulted not to be considered a sex symbol in his heyday, claiming he was ‘fair to middling’. But he conceded: ‘I never said I was a sex symbol. I’m a big cuddly hairy bear.’

Video footage of him attending the launch of a hospital radio station with his wife Marianne in Hertfordshire in 1973 was played to the court.

Travis is accused of molesting a 17-year- old carnival princess as he walked around the hospital wards.

The footage shows him posing for pictures with his arms around two carnival princesses. He then holds the one he is accused of molesting in his arms and appears to say ‘I’ve pulled’. Travis claimed he said ‘mad fool’. Asked if he had indecently assaulted her, the DJ said the allegation was ‘complete nonsense’.

Travis, of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, denies 13 counts of indecent assault and one of sexual assault. The trial continues.