Jimmy Savile accused in ITV documentary

Abuse Claims: Savile Had Keys To Broadmoor
Sky News – 38 minutes ago

More allegations of sexual abuse have been made against Jimmy Savile amid claims he preyed on children at hospitals.
Several police forces have received complaints from members of the public - and it has emerged the late TV presenter had keys to high-security hospital Broadmoor, where he worked as a volunteer, and would have been able to access patients' rooms.
One woman said she had been assaulted by him at the age of 13 while being treated for spinal injuries at Stoke Mandeville hospital in 1971.
Caroline Moore, now 53, told Sky News Savile had quietly approached her while she was sitting in a wheelchair in a corridor at the hospital in Buckinghamshire.
"He came over and didn't speak to me, he just bent down and rammed his tongue down my throat," she said.
"After he'd done it he just got up and walked away. It was all very matter-of-fact.
"I was horrified. I didn't really know what had happened to me but it's stayed with me all these years."
She said she had been too frightened to report it to hospital staff at the time - and that he was seen as a "powerful character" who was not challenged about his behaviour.
Ms Moore said she had also seen him groping a bed-bound woman at the hospital.
"I want him to be seen for what he is, not for what he tried to portray," Ms Moore said.
Savile was a high-profile volunteer at Stoke Mandeville, where nurses are said to have dreaded his visits because of his behaviour and would tell children to stay in bed and pretend they were asleep when he was around.
He also volunteered at Broadmoor, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, from the 1960s.
One victim said the Jim'll Fix It star shoved his hand up her nightdress after walking in on a group of girls watching TV at Broadmoor.
Alison Pink, who has since had a sex change, told The Sun: "I felt absolutely disgusting afterwards - like I had been used as a piece of meat for his sexual gratification."
West London Mental Health NHS Trust, which now runs Broadmoor, said the allegations related to a time when it was run as a separate organisation and that its security arrangements have changed significantly in the last decade.
Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs Stoke Mandeville, said: "We are shocked to hear of the serious allegations about Jimmy Savile.
"We are unaware of any record or reports of inappropriate behaviour of this nature during Jimmy's work with the trust."
North Yorkshire Police said it had forwarded a claim of abuse from the 1980s in Scarborough to the Metropolitan Police, while Tayside Police reported another claim about an historical incident in Liverpool.
Lancashire Police said it had received two allegations. One concerned a girl then aged 14 in the 1960s in West Yorkshire. The other was about a 15-year-old girl in the 1980s in Bedfordshire.
Allegations have also been made about abuse at Leeds General Infirmary in the 1970s.
June Thornton, a patient at the hospital in 1972, has said she saw Savile abuse someone she thought was a brain-damaged girl.
A spokesman for Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust said: "We are shocked at the nature and extent of the very serious allegations made against Jimmy Savile which were revealed by the Metropolitan Police on Wednesday.
"At this stage we are not aware to what degree their investigation relates to incidents in Leeds."
Scotland Yard have said the allegations spanning 40 years point to the former DJ, who died last year aged 84, as a "predatory sex offender". They have formally recorded a number of criminal allegations including rape and indecent assault.
A radio interview recorded in 2007 emerged this week in which Savile vehemently denied suggestions of abuse.

bb1 wrote:Comment on one of the message boards:

Verox • 9 minutes ago Report Abuse
Some of these people are remembering they met Savile; reading accounts of what he is alleged to have done and creating within themselves the belief that the same must have happened to them. The Witches of Salem and the Devils of Loudain are illustrative cases of such contagious delusions.

During the sixteenth century whole districts in some parts of Lancashire seemed contaminated with the presence of witches; men and beasts were supposed to languish under their charm, and the delusion which preyed alike on the learned and the vulgar did not allow any family to suppose that they were beyond the reach of the witch's power.

Was the family visited by sickness? It was believed to be the work of an invisible agency, which in secret wasted an image made in clay before the fire, or crumbled its various parts into dust.

Did the cattle sicken and die? The witch and the wizard were the authors of the calamity.

Did the yeast refuse to ferment, either in the bread or the beer? It was the consequence of a 'bad wish'.

Did the butter refuse to come? The 'familiar' was in the churn.

Did the ship founder at sea? The gale or hurricane was blown by the lungless hag who had scarcely sufficient breath to cool her own pottage.

Did the river Ribble overflow its banks? The floods descended from the congregated sisterhood at Malkin Tower.

The blight of the season, which consigned the crops of the farmer to destruction, was the saliva of the enchantress, or distillations from the blear-eyed dame who flew by night over the field on mischief bent.

From History of Lancashire, 1867
Thomas Baines.

12 OCTOBER 2012

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4310096.html
Savile-savaging reveals Britain's medieval mindset

BRENDAN O'NEILL

The anti-Savile campaign reveals that huge swathes of respectable Britain, from the media to the political class, like nothing better than to get a kick through pursuing a paedophile panic, writes Brendan O'Neill.

The posthumous pummelling of Jimmy Savile, the late BBC DJ and Top of the Pops presenter who now stands accused of molesting young girls, is becoming creepily medieval.

First, directly after the ITV documentary that made allegations about him was broadcast on October 3, the commemorative plaque on his former home in Scarborough in the north of England was defaced, graffitied with the words "paedophile" and "rapist".

Then a statue of him in Glasgow was taken down, in a weird, modern-day replay of the pulling-down of those Lenin statues in post-1989 Eastern Europe.

Then "a group of enthusiastic feminists" tried to get a gang together to go to the graveyard in Yorkshire where he is buried in order to desecrate his headstone.

Then his grave site was actually attacked, pelted with glass bottles and strewn with torn-up and battered flowers, though it's not clear who did this.

Then his gravestone was physically taken down, out of "respect for public opinion", and, in the words of one overexcited newspaper, was "broken up, placed in a skip and used as landfill".

And now there is a loud, rowdy newspaper-led campaign to have him stripped of his knighthood, which UK prime minister David Cameron is said to be seriously considering. Which is a bit weird considering there is no legal mechanism in Britain for de-Sirring a dead person.

We face the possibility that our PM will create a brand new law just so that dead Jimmy Savile - already lying in an unmarked grave and having his likenesses fastidiously scrubbed from public view across the UK - can be humiliated some more.

What next? Will we dig up his body and pelt it with rotten tomatoes? Or maybe we should put his cadaver on trial, as the Catholic Church did with the dead body of Pope Formosus in the year 897, and do to his corpse what was never done to this BBC bigwig when he was alive: find it guilty of committing a sex crime.

In the midst of this increasingly unhinged Savile-savaging, two things tend to be forgotten:

none of the claims being made about him were ever the subject of a court case when he was alive, which means they can never now be proven beyond a reasonable doubt;
even if it could be shown to be a cast-iron fact that Savile molested girls, still a civilised society ought not to respond by launching a medieval-style campaign of defacement against his former home, his statutes, his grave.
The anti-Savile campaign reveals something rotten about modern Britain. It shows that huge swathes of respectable Britain, from the media to the child-protection sector to the political class, like nothing better than to get a kick through pursuing a paedophile panic - and they don't give a damn about the consequences such suspicion-fuelling panics might have on levels of public trust and public decorum and on rational thought itself.

In essence, the Savile-bashing madness, which is being spearheaded by liberal commentators and even by BBC people, is a more upmarket version of what the News of the World (RIP) used to do.

One of the things that most riled the chattering classes about that late Sunday tabloid was its obsession with paedophiles.

In the early 2000s, the NoTW ran "name and shame" campaigns, publishing photos of alleged child abusers and even vague info about where they lived. Infamously, this gave rise to instances of anti-paedo vigilantism.

In 2000, in Portsmouth in the south of England, hundreds of people protested outside the homes of suspected paedophiles, forcing the families inside those homes to flee. In the same year, in Gwent in Wales, some obviously confused youths daubed the word "Paedo" on the front door of a paediatrician's home.

The blame for this bad behaviour was laid at the door of the News of the World and its weekly fear mongering feature articles about the perverts allegedly stalking unsuspecting communities across the UK.

The paper was vociferously criticised by respectable commentators, who accused it of stirring up the prejudices and passions of uncouth people (the tabloid-reading hordes), and making them go out and do mad things - sometimes to people who had only been questioned, rather than convicted, over alleged sex crimes.

Yet now, in the Savile hunt, we have respectable commentators doing the exact same thing. The liberal broadsheet columnists and former BBC staff wringing their hands over Savile's alleged crimes are using the same language the News of the World used a decade ago. They're talking about "sex rings" at the BBC (making the opportunistic behaviour of a handful of weirdos sound like organised and structured evil) and about Savile and his alleged sect's "grooming" of children.

They're fretting over a "culture of abuse" at the heart of the BBC's light entertainment department, just as the News of the World once fretted over a "child abuse culture".

They're also calling for the naming and shaming of alleged paedophiles at the Beeb - not only Savile, but also other DJs and TV presenters who are rumoured to have done untoward things in the '70s and '80s.

And their campaign, just like the News of the World's, has unleashed some pretty debauched public antics, from graffiti to grave desecration.

It seems that, in modern Britain, it is bad for a lowly tabloid to stir up public panic about paedos, but it is okay for activists, serious columnists and politicians to do so.

What the Savile scare ultimately represents is the return of the paedophile panic to its rightful owners and original creators - that is, feminists and so-called liberals.

The respectable set's claim that the News of the World singlehandedly spawned modern Britain's warped obsession with paedos always disguised the reality - which is that, in truth, our Middle Ages-style, disproportionate fear of evil child-snatchers sprung from arguments put forward by feminists and left-wingers in the 1970s and '80s, not from the sabre-rattling of tabloids.

It was these activists' demented campaigning around issues such as "Satanic Ritual Abuse" - the crazy and utterly unfounded notion that parents across Britain were putting on black cloaks and sacrificing children to the devil - which fanned the flames of the modern paedophile hysteria, nurturing the idea that there were "rings" of supremely evil men waiting to rob our children of their innocence and maybe even their lives. This mad panic was only latterly embraced by the tabloids, which of course were instantly denounced as stupid and vulgar for spreading fear about sinister child abusers.

Now, with the feminist-led, broadsheet-fuelled handwringing over an alleged Savile "sex ring", the paedo panic has returned to its respectable roots. But the impact of this erudite Savile panic on public life is likely to be as rotten as the impact of the News of the World's more lowbrow paedophile panicking was - it, too, looks set to intensify people's suspicion of "other adults" and to cultivate a misguided belief that weirdos and pervs lurk in every institution in the land.

BBC Looks Into Dropped Savile Documentary
Sky News – 1 hour 4 minutes ago

The BBC was under increasing pressure today as it emerged it will scrutinise an 11th hour decision to drop a film about the Jimmy Savile sex abuse claims.
Ken MacQuarrie, a corporation veteran, has been asked to speak to BBC journalists who want to know why the Newsnight documentary was dropped days before broadcast.
Several Newsnight journalists wrote to BBC director-general George Entwistle to ask why the film was not aired, a BBC spokesman has confirmed.
Mr MacQuarrie, who has overall responsibility for BBC Scotland, will report to Mr Entwistle and information will be shared with the BBC Trust chairman, Lord Patten.
One question is likely to be whether the programme was dropped because it interfered with a BBC tribute programme to the recently deceased entertainer.
The BBC's reputation is increasingly under fire after an avalanche of allegations that the corporation was aware of the sex abuse claims, but did nothing about them.
Grant Shapps, chairman of the Conservative Party, told BBC1's Question Time last night that it "seems unimaginable" that people at the BBC were unaware.
He said: "What happened now appears to be outrageous.
"It's particularly disturbing that a programme paying tribute, a three-parter, went out just last Christmas after it was already known at senior levels within the BBC that something was wrong, enough to have had a serious Newsnight programme made about it and enough to raise serious concerns.
"I do think there are definitely questions that do need answering."
Mr Shapps backed calls for Savile to be stripped of his knighthood, saying "it can't be right" that he remains a Sir in name following the allegations.
He said: "I would be in favour of the Forfeiture Committee taking a close look at this because it can't be right that somebody apparently keeps the Sir in front of their name when this is the reality of their life."
Fresh claims of sexual abuse have been made against the late TV presenter, following allegations that he preyed on children during hospital visits.
A string of police forces have received complaints and referred them to Scotland Yard, which is leading the investigation.
Greater Manchester, Lancashire, North Yorkshire and Tayside are the latest forces to say allegations have been made.
A woman told Greater Manchester Police of a sexual relationship she had with Savile from the age of 15.
A second said she was groped by him in Salford when she was under 16.
Another woman told Tayside Police she was targeted in the Liverpool area and another in Scarborough in the 1980s.
Two more women complained to Lancashire Police about incidents when one was 14, in the 1960s, and the other 15, in the 1980s.
Claims have also emerged that Savile groped young patients at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, where he worked as a volunteer fundraiser.
One woman alleged that she saw him molest a brain-damaged hospital patient at Leeds General Hospital.
Nurses at Stoke Mandeville are understood to have dreaded Savile's visits because of his behaviour.
They apparently told children to stay in bed and pretend to be asleep when he came round.
June Thornton, a patient at Leeds General Infirmary in 1972, said she saw Savile abuse someone she thought was a brain-damaged girl.
Ms Thornton said that when she told a nurse about the abuse, she was ignored.
Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs Stoke Mandeville, and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust said they were helping police with their investigations.
Police believe Savile could have abused as many as 25 victims over a period of 40 years.
They have so far formally recorded a number of criminal allegations including rape and indecent assault.
The raft of allegations against Savile has been branded a "cesspit" by BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten.
He has pledged to hold an independent inquiry as swiftly as possible after the police investigation.

Sabot wrote:
Don't worry. They almost certainly don't know where Savile Row is. But that street sign will have to come down.

Lamplighter wrote:

Sabot wrote:
Don't worry. They almost certainly don't know where Savile Row is. But that street sign will have to come down.

My favorite suit shop is in Savile Row .... LL