FREUD ABUSE SCANDAL DEEPENS

More victims speak out as it emerges police failed to investigate Maddie link

THE Clement Freud scandal deepened last night as new victims came forward, including one who reported him to police two years ago over Madeleine McCann.

Detectives investigating Madeleine’s disappearance were alerted to the paedophile BBC star’s connection to the case, but nothing was done.

The Mail revealed yesterday how Freud, who died in 2009 aged 84, had a villa in the Algarve resort where Madeleine was snatched – and befriended the McCanns there.

Now Vicky Hayes, who was groomed by Freud for years before he raped her as a teenager, has come forward to say she told police about the coincidence two years ago.

Mrs Hayes, 64, is one of several new victims to emerge yesterday after Freud was unmasked as a child abuser. She revealed she twice reported him to police, after his death, and last night called for the late broadcaster and MP’s knighthood to be ‘revoked’. Among yesterday’s developments: Another woman said her 14-year-old sister was plied with alcohol and molested at his marital home;

Police are compiling a dossier on sex allegations against Freud for the Goddard Inquiry into historic abuse.

Scotland Yard will consider whether any potential accomplices are still alive who could face charges.

Freud’s PR executive son Matthew, 52, cancelled his annual star-studded summer party – due to be held last night as a TV documentary exposing his father was being broadcast.

The celebrated raconteur was revealed as a paedophile by two women who gave compelling accounts to the ITV Exposure documentary.

Sylvia Woosley was just ten when Freud, 24, began abusing her, and he later brought her up as a daughter, inviting her into his marital bed with his actress wife Jill.

A second girl was violently raped as a teenager when Freud was a Liberal MP – sharing a House of Commons office with fellow paedophile MP Cyril Smith.

Lady Freud, 89, has said she is ‘profoundly sorry’ at what her husband of 58 years did to them.

The five women so far to have told their horrific stories about Freud have revealed the married father of five to be a serial child predator.

Mrs Hayes gave her horrific account to ITV News last night and recalled being ‘paralysed with fear’ when the manipulative abuser raped her after plying her with champagne when she was 17, then callously advised her to ‘ring me’ if she was pregnant.

Years later, when she was pregnant by her husband with her first child, he tried to molest her again. She reported Freud to police after he died, but then contacted police again when she realised his connection to the Madeleine case when she read in Kate McCann’s book that he had cooked for the McCanns at his holiday villa in Praia da Luz.

Mrs Hayes told ITV News: ‘It really jarred with me, left me feeling very uneasy. He had a home in Praia da Luz, but why invite them and cook for them? Nobody else would have thought Freud capable of abuse and rape but he did it to me. He was capable of anything.’

She reported her concerns to her local police force in Suffolk, and her son wrote to the Metropolitan Police to pass on his mother’s account and concerns over Freud’s connection to the McCanns. They received no response.

Ms Hayes said: ‘I’m angry the police were dismissive of my information. I have a six-year-old granddaughter, a young girl like Madeline. If you have a something you feel needs to be looked at you have to tell someone. That’s why I contacted the police.’

Freud’s family says that the former MP was in the UK at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance in May 2007.

Yesterday detectives were said to be looking into the possibility Freud associated with other alleged abusers at the time of the claims that stretch from the Forties to the Seventies. Freud, the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and brother of painter Lucian Freud, went to the same school in the 1940s as the late Lord Janner, accused of sexually abusing a string of boys.

Freud was hailed as a ‘national treasure’ by Gordon Brown at his funeral, which was also attended by luminaries including Bono, Stephen Fry, Uri Geller, Paul Merton and George Osborne – but yesterday the great and the good deserted him.

Mr Osborne ‘never met him’, veteran comedian Barry Cryer only ‘knew him a bit’, Lord Bragg ‘was not in any way associated’ with him, said his wife – despite him going to Freud’s 70th birthday party – and Uri Geller said: ‘Don’t call me a close friend.’

Specialist detectives at the Metropolitan Police are examining a statement from Sylvia Woosley, now in her late 70s, who claims Freud preyed on her for a decade.

Although officers will not open a criminal investigation, they will consider whether any potential accomplices are still alive, and will compile a dossier for the Goddard Inquiry into historic sexual abuse.

‘He was capable of anything’