October 22 – It was reported over the weekend that BBC icon Jimmy Savile had sexually assaulted his own niece. Worse, her grandmother knew it all along but kept her mouth shut: grandma’s brother, Jimmy, made sure she had a comfortable lifestyle.
Savile’s exploits were no secret. Here are a few examples. In 1976, a 9-year-old boy was molested by Savile in his dressing room, and was caught in the act by a man who simply said, “Oops,” and shut the door. At about the same time, a teenage girl, whose father was a pedophile friend of Savile’s, was abused by Savile. In 1985, Savile recorded a BBC song where he bragged about becoming a dancehall boss so he could meet girls. And no one thought this odd? In 1992, after a 7-year-old boy was asked by Savile to take off his clothes in a performance with male strippers, a complaint was filed with the authorities, but nothing came of it. Indeed, the BBC called the episode “a lighthearted item.”
In 2000, Savile was finally accused of pedophilia in a TV documentary but got away with it. Astonishingly, he actually admitted he lied about not liking kids because it was a convenient decoy: “It’s easier for me as a single man to say I don’t like children because it puts a lot of salacious tabloid people off the hunt.”
George Entwistle, the director-general of the BBC who succeeded Mark Thompson, wants us to believe that he was clueless about Savile’s predatory behavior. “Jimmy Savile was regarded by a great many people as odd, a bit peculiar and that was something I was aware some people believed,” he recently said. Just peculiar?
