The BBC was told on Thursday it was guilty of serious failings in its handling of Jimmy Savile, the celebrated TV and radio host who was revealed after death to have been one of Britain’s most prolific sex-offenders.
Warnings about Savile’s conduct went unheeded for decades, a damning report by a former judge said on Thursday. However, it found no evidence of a cover-up by the BBC as an institution.
The report said there had been and still was a prevailing, macho culture at the publicly funded broadcaster, in which staff were fearful of making complaints, especially about its top stars known internally as “the Talent”.
That meant senior managers were kept in the dark, concluded the report’s author, former appeal court judge Janet Smith. But a lawyer for Savile’s victims called the findings a “whitewash” and implausible.
The Savile scandal burst into public view in 2012 when British police said Savile, one of Britain’s best-known celebrities, had abused hundreds of victims, mainly youngsters, over six decades until his death aged 84 in 2011.
The revelations plunged the BBC into crisis and prompted allegations the broadcaster had covered up his crimes.
“It seems to me that the BBC could have known,” the broadcaster’s director-general, Tony Hall, told a media conference. “Just as powerful as the accusation ‘you knew’, is the legitimate question: ‘How could you not have known?’”
The Smith report concluded that Savile had abused 72 victims in relation to his BBC work over nearly 50 years.
The judge said there had been five missed opportunities to uncover his misconduct and that of fellow BBC personality Stuart Hall, who was jailed in 2013 for child sex crimes.
The report came as veteran DJ Tony Blackburn accused the BBC of making him a “scapegoat” after sacking him on the eve of its publication.
Mr Blackburn (73) said “all relationships” he had with the BBC were “terminated with immediate effect” this week because the evidence he gave to Smith’s review concerning an investigation in 1971 contradicted the BBC’s own version of events.
He has pledged to take legal action against the corporation, which he claims is making him a “scapegoat” for the “cover-up” of abuse. – (Reuters/PA)