The scramble begins for Jimmy Savile’s money

Today it was announced that the estate of the late Jimmy Savile has been frozen in anticipation of a plethora of civil actions by his alleged victims.

Although investigations are ongoing and no definite conclusions will be drawn for some time, it is fair to say that there is now substantial evidence that Jimmy Savile did quite a few things that he shouldn’t have done, including some, perhaps many, that would have seen him in court or even behind bars.

The real issues to be dealt with here do not concern Savile, or only Savile, they relate to such common sense things as child protection. For example, it has not yet been established if Savile was given unchaperoned access to teenage girls, in particular at Duncroft School.

It is clear though that the majority, perhaps the vast majority of claims made against the late TV presenter have either been greatly exaggerated or have no basis in fact, unless we are prepared to believe that he was also a necrophiliac, that he groped young boys as well as underage girls, and that he was caught in flagrante delicto with a 12 year old on separate occasions by both a journalist and a fellow BBC employee, who both did and said nothing about it, making them accomplices to the deed, morally if not legally.

Gary Glitter arrested by police
investigating the Jimmy Savile scandal.

The most recent development in the case is the arrest of Gary Glitter. One of Savile’s alleged victims claims to have seen him having sex with a 13 year old in Savile’s dressing room. No details of this act have been given, presumably it did not involve force as in for example the Imiela case, but in Britain, a man who has sex with a girl of 13 is committing rape, whatever the circumstances; even if she initiates the encounter, the issue of consent does not arise.

How much credibility are we to give this claim? Gary Glitter is a convicted paedophile, moreover, every informed person in the English speaking world and much of the Orient knows he is a convicted paeophile, his face has been splashed all over the media from his glam rock days, and from his trial 13 years ago.

In November 1999, Glitter pleaded guilty to 54 counts of downloading indecent photographs of children. But, he was cleared of four counts of indecently assaulting an underage girl, an allegation that dated to the 1980s. Whether or not he should have been convicted, that trial was tainted by money changing hands. His alleged victim had originally sold her story for £10,000, but was promised a further £25,000 on his conviction.

Any future proceedings, either against the estate of Jimmy Savile or against alleged living predators, are likewise likely to be tained by money. The woman who claims she saw Glitter having sex with an underage girl cannot have been unaware of his previous troubles; Glitter was arrested on the child porn charges in 1997, yet she said nothing then or during or after his trial. She said nothing years later when Glitter was arrested in the Far East on far more serious charges. She said nothing on his return to Britain. She said nothing when he was hanged in effigy in the TV dramatisation The Execution Of Gary Glitter. Now, only after Savile is dead and the proverbial has hit the fan does she come forward with this claim. What credibility either is to be given to the claim that comedian Freddie Starr was doing similar things way back in the 1970s?

A solicitor acting for an unspecified number of alleged victims said her clients were not interested in money; whether or not that is true for some of them, she won’t be acting for free!

It remains to be seen how much actual damage Savile caused many of his alleged victims. One girl claims he put his hand up her skirt. How much is that worth in hard cash? If this sort of comment sounds cynical, it should be borne in mind that at this very moment there are two areas of the country where the contraceptive pill is being sold over the counter to girls as young as thirteen. What sort of nation have we become where on the one hand a man who gropes underage girls has the headstone of his grave dismantled, yet where child protection “experts”, schools, police officers, the government itself and worst of all parents turn a blind eye to or even condone girls who are barely old enough to wear a bra having sex with classmates, or even with men old enough to be their fathers?

[The above op-ed was first published November 1, 2012. This article was republished here on June 5, 2023. In the more than ten years since it was first published, I have done a lot of research on the Savile accusations; a few people have done a great deal more. My conclusion and theirs is that all these allegations are bunk. Every single one of them.]