Investigation of BBC Host Examines Dropped Cases

By Alan Cowell
The New York Times
October 26, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/world/europe/jimmy-savile-denied-sex-abuse-in-2006-interview.html?_r=2&

LONDON — As sexual abuse accusations multiplied against Jimmy Savile, one of Britain's best-known television hosts before his death last year, attention turned on Friday to clues of any misconduct that had been ignored, overlooked or brushed aside while he was alive.

One of the most recent episodes to come to light, the police said, involved a retired officer who revealed that he investigated an accusation that Mr. Savile had attacked a woman in his trailer at the British Broadcasting Corporation studios in the 1980s.

The case could not be pursued for lack of evidence, the officer is reported to have said, and the police said they were looking for the case file. But it joined others in a tally of seven complaints against Mr. Savile that the police had investigated and then dropped.

The complaints are bound to deepen questions about why senior managers at the BBC, Mr. Savile's employer for decades, failed to take such indications into account when, last December, they prepared Christmas season tributes to him two months after he died at 84.

The seeds to the BBC's role in the scandal were sown late last year when the editor of the current affairs program "Newsnight" canceled an investigation into Mr. Savile. The program had conducted an on-camera interview with Karin Ward, who said she had been abused by Mr. Savile in the 1970s while she was a 14-year-old inmate at the now-closed Duncroft School, a state institution for emotionally disturbed teenage girls.

Some British newspapers focused their reports on Friday on the number of occasions when police officers and prosecutors began investigations of Mr. Savile but did not proceed. The cases included four accusations of abuse, some in hospitals, dating from the 1970s that were investigated and abandoned in 2009. Prosecutors have now promised to review those cases. Other cases were investigated in 2003 and 2008, news reports said.

Police officials said the number of people who claimed that Mr. Savile had assaulted them had grown to 300 from 200 in just the last week as more potential victims came forward. All but two of the complaints involved women, the police said.

The police also said they were "preparing an arrest strategy," but it was not clear when they planned to detain suspects.

Mr. Savile's own attitude about the suspicions against him — and suggestions that he had abused children — emerged on Thursday when UTV, a television station in Northern Ireland, unearthed video of an 2006 interview in which he denied that he participated in "underage sex."

In the interview on UTV, an affiliate of ITV, a BBC competitor, Mr. Savile was asked about rumors concerning children that "had long been tabloid fodder."

Mr. Savile interrupted the interviewer, Gerry Kelly, when he suggested that, in Mr. Savile's long-running television show "Jim'll Fix It," in which he helped children realize their dreams, "you loved those children."

"I never loved them at all. I respected them and they respected me," Mr. Savile said. "They knew that I wasn't some yucky adult that'd say: 'My, my, don't you look smart today?' I don't talk like that to kids."

Mr. Savile was asked later in the interview about rumors in tabloid newspapers and he replied: "Any tabloid journalist will tell you two things. One: I'm very boring. Two: I don't do drugs; I don't do underage sex or any of them things that you read in the papers today."

Speaking on Thursday about the impression Mr. Savile made, Mr. Kelly offered a clue into some of the elements that have shielded Mr. Savile from his accusers.

"We took him at his word as everybody was at the time, we had no reason other than what was written on the Internet to disbelieve him," Mr. Kelly said in a new interview with UTV.

"I was sitting to him, as close as I am to you, face to face, and he was saying he didn't do these things," he said. "I could hardly call him a liar, could I?"



John F. Burns contributed reporting.