 |
| SAVILE |
Allegations that flamboyant Savile, who died last year, operated unhindered as a paedophile for years have rocked the publicly-funded broadcaster and have opened the floodgates to accusations against other celebrities.
Cigar-chomping Savile, knighted as a “Sir” by Queen Elizabeth, was one of the BBC’s biggest names, and questions have been raised about whether the broadcaster turned a blind eye to his activities.
Rival channel ITV shattered Savile’s reputation as a dedicated charity fundraiser when it broadcast interviews with women who said he abused them when they were as young as 12, sometimes on BBC premises.
The Metropolitan Police, had previously said they would conduct only a review into the allegations, as Savile was dead and so that alleged victims could be officially acknowledged. But the force said yesterday the review had been broadened into a criminal investigation because it had established in the last two weeks that there “are lines of inquiry involving living people that require formal investigation”.
Those people were not named, and the force did not elaborate further. Police commander Peter Spindler said a “staggering number” of potential victims had come forward to report sexual exploitation during their childhood, with more than 400 lines of enquiry being pursued. “We are dealing with alleged abuse on an unprecedented scale,” he said.
The scandal is an early crisis for the BBC’s new director general George Entwistle, who took charge only last month. He faces having to explain how the alleged abuse went on unchecked for so long in the organisation, and whether it had later tried to cover up Savile’s activities.
The scandal has also followed his predecessor across the Atlantic. Mark Thompson, the New York Times Company’s incoming chief executive, ran the BBC when it dropped an investigation by its own Newsnight programme into Savile last year.
Newsnight’s editor, Peter Rippon, has said the programme had been looking for evidence of institutional failings by police or prosecutors over the allegations against Savile, rather than the exposure of a dead celebrity, and had not found any. However, a leaked internal e-mail published in The Times yesterday cast doubt on that explanation, saying that the Newsnight programme was indeed “focusing on allegations of abuse”.
The broadcaster has launched two independent reviews of the allegations; one looking into unlawful conduct by Savile when he was working for the BBC and another to investigate why the Newsnight report was shelved.
It has emerged that Savile confessed to a reporter that his reputation would collapse after his death, and he would be seen as “crooked”. The Jewish Chronicle reported that in an unpublished interview, two months before he died, Savile admitted he was “not a straight punter”. Reuters