BBC’s Savile probe waited 3 years to talk to key witness
AN ‘independent’ inquiry into sex abuse at the BBC has been branded a farce after it failed to interview the key whistleblower until more than three years of investigations had taken place.
The BBC commissioned retired judge Dame Janet Smith to conduct a ‘thorough’ review in 2012 but she had no contact with Karin Ward until January – just weeks before its publication next Thursday.
Miss Ward, 57, was one of the first to publicly unmask Jimmy Savile as a serial paedophile and rapist – a scandal which sparked the biggest crisis in the BBC’s history.
The mother of seven has told how she was forced to perform sex acts on the Jim’ll Fix It star in the back of his Rolls-Royce, and saw Gary Glitter having sex with an underage girl in Savile’s BBC dressing room, during the filming of his show Clunk Click.
She also said she was ‘groped’ by Freddie Starr when she was just 15. Mr Starr was cleared after an 18-month investigation but lost a libel case against Miss Ward last year.
Dame Janet finally interviewed Miss Ward on January 18 – less than a month before the completed report was handed to the BBC and days after a leaked version showed that the review was already on track to exonerate the BBC for the decades of abuse on its premises.
The review had spoken to 107 witnesses who suspected Savile of molesting young girls but the leaked draft report said it was accepted that managers did nothing to stop him as they had no ‘hard evidence’.
Victims of his decades-long abuse have dismissed the inquiry as a £10million ‘whitewash’. The revelation that it has only just questioned Miss Ward is likely to confirm their fears it had reached its conclusions before all the evidence was heard.
It is not clear why the review took so long to interview her. A spokesman said: ‘It is the review’s policy not to provide comments to individual members of the press.’