Theroux told bosses about abuse of girl, 15
LOUIS Theroux reported Savile to the BBC in 2001 after discovering he had slept with an underage girl, Dame Janet says.
The documentary maker told an executive producer about the ‘credible allegation’, but it was decided not to report the information to police.
It was ten years before Savile died, and a woman in her 40s came forward to say that when she was 15, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, she had been the DJ’s ‘girlfriend’ and had had sex with him.
She apparently approached Theroux because she wanted to correct the impression given by Savile in a documentary, When Louis Met Jimmy, that he had never had a girlfriend. Theroux met the woman and her friend, who was another ‘ex-girlfriend’, a year after the film was broadcast in 2000, and they told him that ‘contrary to what Savile had said in the documentary, Savile had had many girlfriends and they were two of them… and that several of Savile’s ex-girlfriends were friendly with each other’, said Dame Janet.
‘One of them had started a sexual relationship with Savile when she was only 15. Mr Theroux said that he therefore realised that Savile had committed a criminal offence by having sex with a girl of 15.
‘However, because it had happened over 30 years previously and because the woman in question was then in her 40s and capable of making a complaint to the police if she wanted to and was very concerned (like the other woman he met) that Savile did not know that they were meeting Mr Theroux, he did not consider that he should do anything about what he had been told.’ Theroux did speak to an executive producer at the BBC, David Mortimer, who told the inquiry he remembered ‘becoming aware of the serious nature of the information and discussing how the information should be dealt with’.
But as the meeting with the women had taken place in confidence, neither felt they could take it further without permission.
Dame Janet said neither could be criticised for that decision.