By VennerRoad, 5th Oct 2016
Louis Theroux once regarded Jimmy Savile as a friend. Now he realises that maintaining that friendship posthumously would come with too heavy a price.
Louis Theroux
When Jimmy Savile died five years ago, he was given a funeral fit for a king. Today his name is so reviled that no calumny is too vile to heap on his corpse. You can read some of the background here, but the current focus is on documentary maker Louis Theroux. Sixteen years ago he made a film about Savile in which he asked him about some of the allegations that had been made about him. Let’s be clear about this, today with the rise of social media you can go on virtually any website but particularly YouTube where you will find scurrilous stories including some professionally produced videos about the rich and powerful including politicians, business people and celebrities.
This includes women, who unlike men tend not to be accused of rape, but to take just one example, Hillary Clinton is currently in the news for all the wrong reasons, but whatever crimes she may have committed with regard to her private e-mail server, and whatever the state of her health, she is not the Devil Incarnate. If she had really been complicit in the murders of her and her husband’s political opponents, she would not be running for President now.
Just because the pre-Internet world did not offer cranks, fantasists and mischief-makers a global audience does not mean their ravings were not broadcast. They were generally confined to rumours, the odd scurrilous leaflet or pamphlet, and on occasion the tabloid press, though even the tabloids had to tread carefully because on occasion not only celebrities but the infamous would resort to the law of defamation, including Colin Jordan.
Now in practice there is absolutely no way to shut up these people, and indeed any attempt to do so is likely to be interpreted as a cover-up, as in the ludicrous Hampstead Satanic abuse hoax. In addition to this, once a man is dead, he is fair game. So why has Savile been so targeted? It is of course possible that some of the allegations are true, but one doesn’t have to study his character in any depth to appreciate why there is such a mythology about him. When he shot to fame he was older than his broadcasting contemporaries, he wore his hair bleached blond, and was noticeably eccentric, something that was not entirely an act.
He also revelled in rumour and speculation about his private life; he was believed to be homosexual, a belief he did nothing to discourage, although the people closest to him deny that emphatically. Savile was also an outsider, a plain-speaking Northerner from humble stock who mixed with the genuinely powerful, the rich, the famous, who on occasion rubbed shoulders with royals, and although he did a lot of good, the public was never left in any doubt about who had done it.
In his recent documentary, Louis Theroux was of course unable to re-interview Savile, but he did speak to not only some of the women who claim to have been abused by him but to three women who knew him. One of these was Sylvia Nicol, the one honest woman who shamed a thousand liars. She worked with Savile at Stoke Mandeville and said she saw him do nothing but good. Janet Cope was his personal assistant for thirty years until she was dumped unceremoniously, so one might have expected her to jump on the sexual abuse bandwagon. She did not.
One of the women Theroux interviewed gave an insight into the mentality of many women who falsely accuse men of sexual abuse up to and including rape. She said when she delivered Savile a new pair of glasses he groped her breasts and exposed himself to her. According to Theroux, it took her forty years to convince herself that what happened to her was sexual assault, in reality it took her forty years to confabulate a likely non-consequential meeting with a celebrity into something sinister.
She was the mirror image of one of the women who claimed to have been indecently assaulted by the DJ Dave Lee Travis. At his trial she said that when he opened a hospital radio station in 1973, Travis had groped her so badly that she had suffered “40 years of hell”. Her late husband hadn’t realised how this one, brief incident had affected their love life. Powerful testimony for the gullible, but someone who had been following the trial contacted the DJ’s legal team. Travis had turned up for the opening with his wife on his arm and an entourage in tow. And there was video footage to prove it. In short, this demented woman had latched onto Travis during the Operation Yewtree witch-hunt and blamed him for everything that had gone wrong in her obviously pathetic life.
This is clearly what many of the alleged victims of Jimmy Savile have been doing, and claiming compensation for it, them and a certain, grasping, ambulance-chasing law firm.
Throughout his documentary, Theroux lets the viewer know that he was well and truly conned, but still can’t fathom how. Was he though? Let’s take a look at just three allegations from one of the numerous official documents: the Stoke Mandeville report.
Victim 24 was said to have been abused by Savile over a five year period from the age of 11, and in the chapel of all places:
He would stand in the presbytery and watch the service from behind a curtain and this is where the abuse took place. He systematically abused Victim 24 for a period of five years. He was often accompanied by another man, described as wearing a suit, who watched. The abuse took the form of rubbing her body and putting his fingers in her vagina.
It remains to be seen who the other man was, but is this story remotely credible? She was said not to have reported the incidents at the time. One would imagine she would have screamed so loud the first time he inserted a finger into her vagina that there would not have been a second time.
Victim 36 said that in 1981 when he was 8 years old, Savile sat by his bed and:
immediately placed his hand beneath the bed sheet and touched Victim 36 on his penis, over his pyjamas. Savile continued to touch Victim 36’s penis as it became erect and exposed through his pyjamas. Victim 36 was distressed at what had happened and reported the matter to his mother when she visited shortly after. Victim 36’s mother did not believe him.
What would any mother worthy of the name do under such circumstances?
Unusually, Victim 38 has a name. Elaine Jones was visiting someone on the Burns Unit in the 1980s when she claims she was indecently assaulted by Savile as two of his entourage stood guard. She claims to have told her boyfriend about it, but no one else.
All or almost all of the allegations against Savile are like this, not only from Stoke Mandeville but elsewhere. He has even been accused of interfering with corpses. It remains to be seen if he actually started that absurd rumour, but Paul Gambaccini brought it into the public domain proper. His reward was to be accused of indecently assaulting an underage boy in the 1970s, before he became homosexual. Thankfully, that lie came to nothing. We should mention the BBC because in February this year, several tabloids claimed Savile had raped a ten year old boy at the Beeb while dressed as a womble and indecently assaulted a twelve year old girl. And this information comes from...the girl who witnessed the attack.
Anyone who knows anything about the BBC will realise how absurd these claims are, yet this rubbish goes unchallenged. Kids of that age or any age can’t just walk in and wander about, and never have been able to. Children don’t only visit studios to watch programmes, there is a long tradition of child actors, and legislation covering how many hours they can work, what they can and cannot do, and how they are to be chaperoned. What we are witnessing here is not corroboration of Savile’s evil by volume but one absurd tale after another by deranged, mendacious or simply attention-seeking women and not a few men.
Do these people even consider the logistics of the fantasies they postulate? A womble suit, for real, even sex with a consenting adult woman would be a strain in that, much less a struggling child.
Does this mean the young cannot be sexually abused, even raped? Of course not! Sadly it happens too often, but in what context? For a paedophile to rape a 12 year old there are basically two options, one is to snatch her - or in this case him - off the street, then to murder the victim or release her and take his chances. A child violated under those circumstances will almost certainly report the rape, and even if she did not, it would be detected. The other option is for the sexual predator to groom the child, to use a fashionable word, but this is a process that takes time, it cannot be done opportunistically. In 1994, the BBC broadcast an excellent exposé of such paedophile activity. Peter Righton (1926-2007) was a bona fide child sexual abuser who had insinuated himself into the British establishment; the programme included actual footage of Righton’s fellow paedophile Charles Napier grooming boys in Sweden. There are different ways of doing this, one was shown in the 1961 public information film Boys Beware; therein, the technique of befriending an isolated child was played out using actors. Napier used alcohol.
So many lies and fantasies have now been spun about Jimmy Savile that it may be impossible to tell where the truth lies; the only thing that can be said for certain is that the bulk of the allegations made against him are either unprovable one way or the other, or simply sick fantasies that have been incited by this obscene media feeding frenzy.
For those interested in taking a deeper look, first and foremost read the official documentation, but do so with a critical eye, then check out the Jim Cannot Fix This and Anna Raccoon blogs. The latter has completely destroyed the lies about Savile abusing girls at Duncroft School; the former has been examining documentation from a variety of sources and exposing Savile’s accuser for the liars, charlatans and fools they are. Louis Theroux is no liar, nor is he a charlatan, but he is a fool if he believes any of this rubbish, though not fool enough to open his mouth if he does not.
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