SAVILE: BBC’S £1 0M WHITEWASH Depraved
Report ‘clears’ TV chiefs who were warned about years of sick abuse
JIMMY Savile’s victims accused the BBC of a £10million whitewash last night after a leaked official investigation cleared executives of any wrongdoing despite revealing they were warned of his abuse.
Although 107 people suspected Savile of molesting young girls, managers did nothing to stop him because they had no ‘hard evidence’, a draft of the broadcaster’s review into the scandal found.
Celebrities who reported hearing stories about the star’s predilections included Esther Rantzen and Terry Wogan, Dame Janet Smith’s review says.
It says there is ‘some’ evidence Savile was involved in a paedophile ring at BBC and, chillingly, warns that another Savile ‘could be lurking undiscovered in the BBC even today’. But a culture of secrecy means whistleblowers are even more afraid now than 40 years ago.
The report reveals that Savile – who died in 2011 aged 84 – behaved inappropriately on at least 61 different occasions, including 45 counts of physical sexual abuse.
Four of the victims were raped, including two girls under 16. Three of his victims were as young as nine.
One of those little girls was taken to the BBC on several occasions, and ‘ taken round to various men who would abuse her’, the report said.
Yesterday some of the victims said they were furious that they had to relive their ordeals to an inquiry which turned out to be an expensive ‘sham’ designed to get the BBC off the hook.
Katrina Rose, 54, who was abused by Savile at his Belgravia flat as a 14-year-old, said she was ‘devastated’ by the findings. ‘I didn’t really expect to be upset because part of me was expecting it to be a whitewash but I feel really let down by this,’ she said.
Miss Rose decided to waive her anonymity and tell her story to the Daily Mail before later recounting it to the BBC inquiry.
‘Asking us to give evidence and then finding that no one at the BBC was at fault nullifies what we all went through,’ she said.
‘Saying that the BBC bosses can’t be blamed in any way is absolutely awful. They [told us]: “We’re listening to you, we’re taking notes”, but for what purpose?
‘To say that that was the climate at the time is no excuse.’ Victims’ lawyer Liz Dux denounced the report as ‘not credible’. The review, which was leaked to the website Exaro, was pieced together from interviews with 260 witnesses, including senior TV executives such as Lord Grade and Alan Yentob.
It found that senior bosses were warned about Savile’s behaviour, but when they looked into it, it seems that their primary concern was that a public scandal that could damage the BBC’s reputation. TV producers who worked closely with Savile saw him behaving inappropriately with young teenagers but insist they did not know he was having sex with them.
The review blames the broadcaster for a deferential culture where ‘untouchable’ stars were treated with kid gloves. Yesterday, Savile’s nephew Guy Marsden said the star regarded his bosses as ‘insignificant nothings’ and claimed that the BBC ‘quaked in front of him’. ‘It was impossible for the high-ups not to know what was going [on],’ he said. ‘They all knew at the BBC what was going on. They were just hoping it would not
come out.’ However, Dame Janet said: ‘I do not think that the BBC can be criticised for failing to uncover Savile’s sexual deviancy. Nobody in a senior position at the BBC was ever aware of information that could have led to or assisted in the prosecution of Savile.’
Last night, Meirion Jones, the former BBC journalist whose Newsnight investigation into Savile was suppressed in 2012, said he was perplexed by her findings. ‘There is very useful information here about just how high it went, but the conclusion is a whitewash,’ he said. A spokesman for Dame Janet Smith stressed that the leaked document was an ‘early’ draft, and that people should not rely on it.
BBC director general Tony Hall described Savile as a ‘dark chapter in the history of the BBC’ but declined to comment fully until the final report is published.