Report Depicts Horrific Pattern of Child Sexual Abuse by BBC Celebrity

By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL, Published: January 11, 2013, - Source

LONDON — Scotland Yard and Britain’s leading child welfare group drew a horrific picture of more than 200 cases of sexual abuse of victims as young as 8 by the BBC host Jimmy Savile in a report released on Friday, and prosecutors admitted for the first time that “shortcomings” in interviewing some of the victims allowed Mr. Savile to escape prosecution before his death at the age of 84 in 2011.

The 37-page report, jointly written by the police and the welfare group, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, depicted a pattern of abuse in broadcast studios, hospitals, homes for the mentally disabled and other places of care for the vulnerable. It documented 23 offenses committed at the BBC’s television center in London during Mr. Savile’s 40 years there, including one assault during the taping of the last episode of his “Top of the Pops” show in 2006 — when the performer was nearing 80.

Only one location, Stoke Mandeville Hospital, about 40 miles northwest of London, with 24 attacks, was the site of more offenses than the BBC was. Mr. Savile maintained living quarters and an office at the hospital and was free to roam it as an honorary porter after raising millions of pounds with a charitable appeal for its spinal injuries unit.

The report, which referred to the entertainer in criminal fashion as James Wilson Vincent Savile, said the police had received more than 450 individual complaints, ranging from groping to forced oral sex and rape, with many of the allegations still awaiting police investigation. It gave a breakdown showing that the preponderance of the victims, 73 percent, were younger than 18, with the largest group 13 to 16 years old. Over all, the report said, 82 percent of the victims were female.

It also offered tentative answers to the persistent question of why nothing was done to stop Mr. Savile, particularly when his activities were an open secret to many who worked with him and were the subject of several formal complaints to the police.

The offenses spanned a period from 1955 to 2009, the report said, with the peak from 1966 to 1976, when Mr. Savile was 40 to 50 years old and at the pinnacle of his popularity, drawing millions to his prime time shows. In the 2009 assault, Mr. Savile, then in his 80s, put his hand up the skirt of a 43-year-old woman on a train between Leeds, the northern industrial city that was his home, and London, the report said.

The depiction of what Cmdr. Peter Spindler, the Scotland Yard officer who has led the police inquiry, called a “vast, predatory and opportunistic” record of misconduct offered the latest gruesome indictment in a scandal that has plunged the British Broadcasting Corporation into turmoil. The crisis has prompted the resignation of its director general, George Entwistle; a shake-up in its news division; and an inquiry that reported last month that lax leadership and “rigid management chains” had left the corporation “completely incapable” of dealing with Mr. Savile’s behavior.  

The scandal has also tainted the National Health Service, another of Britain’s iconic institutions, which operates more than a dozen hospitals and several other medical institutions that have been tarnished by the scandal, particularly the Leeds General Infirmary, in Mr. Savile’s hometown.

Mr. Savile was long celebrated as a zany national treasure, with a near-saintly commitment to charitable work with children, who was knighted by Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth II, and one of the report’s central conclusions is that he matched the huge following he built across Britain, especially among children, with a chilling ability to work his way into the confidence of his victims.

He then managed to escape the consequences of his abuse on the strength of his soaring popularity and the victims’ reluctance to pit their accusations against his seemingly impregnable renown, the report said.

“It could be said that he groomed a nation,” Mr. Spindler, the Scotland Yard commander, said in a BBC interview after the report was published. “He was hiding in plain sight, and none of us was able to do anything about it.”

He added, “This whole sordid affair has demonstrated the true consequences of what happens when vulnerability collides with power.”

Another police commander, Detective Superintendent David Gray, head of Scotland Yard’s pedophile unit and an author of the report, pointed to Mr. Savile’s apparent relentlessness in pursuing his victims and his choice of the most vulnerable victims to minimize any risk of their reporting him. “He’s spent every minute of every waking day thinking about it, and whenever an opportunity came along, he’s taken that,” he said.

The report said the offenses ranged from “opportunistic touching over or under clothing,” including groping young fans during breaks in the filming of his prime time shows, “Top of the Pops” and “Jim’ll Fix It,” at BBC studios in London, to dozens of cases of “coercion, violence and rape.” The most serious offenses, described in the report as involving rape or penetration, involved 26 females and 8 males.

“The formal recording of allegations of crime on this scale is, to the best of our knowledge, unprecedented in the U.K.,” the report said.

The report’s chronicle of the locations of the attacks reads like a gazetteer, ranging across 28 regions in England, Scotland and Wales.

A sampler of assaults in the report offered further insight into the pitiless nature of Mr. Savile’s activities: “1960. A 10-year-old boy saw Savile outside a hotel and asked for his autograph. They went into the hotel reception where he was seriously sexually assaulted.” “1965. A 14-year-old girl met Savile in a nightclub. She later visited his home and was raped.” “1974. Savile took a 14-year-old schoolgirl for a drive in his car and seriously sexually assaulted her.”

In the welter of apologies prompted from organizations named in the report as having failed to stop Mr. Savile, one that stood out was from the Crown Prosecution Service, which issued a statement acknowledging that three victims who accused Mr. Savile of abuse in 2009 were not taken seriously enough.

Keir Starmer, the service’s director, said that an “unjustified” degree of caution by the police and prosecutors has “often resulted in sexual offenses being subjected to a different, and, in reality, more rigorous test than that applied to other crimes.” New rules would require prosecutors to make greater efforts to build a case around the accusations of abuse victims, Mr. Starmer said.

But the report suggested that prosecutors were not alone in their inaction. “Why did it happen and why was it not noticed and stopped by police, health, education or social services professionals, people at the BBC or other media, parents or carers, politicians, or even ‘society in general?’ ” the report asked, before offering its own answer.

“For a variety of reasons, the vast majority of his victims did not feel they could speak out, and it’s apparent that some of the small number who did had their accounts dismissed by those in authority, including parents and carers,” it said.