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British Report on Savile Scandal Details 214 Cases of Sexual Abuse Report Depicts Horrific Pattern of Child Sexual Abuse by BBC Celebrity
(about 9 hours later)
LONDON — The British police and the country’s leading child welfare group drew a horrific picture of more than 200 cases of sexual abuse of children as young as 8 by the television host Jimmy Savile in a report released on Friday, and prosecutors admitted for the first time that they could have brought Mr. Savile to trial before his death in 2011 but failed to do so. LONDON — Scotland Yard and Britain’s leading child welfare group drew a horrific picture of more than 200 cases of sexual abuse of victims as young as 8 by the BBC host Jimmy Savile in a report released on Friday, and prosecutors admitted for the first time that “shortcomings” in interviewing some of the victims allowed Mr. Savile to escape prosecution before his death at the age of 84 in 2011.
The preponderance of the victims, 73 percent, were under the age of 18, and 82 percent were female, the report said. The 37-page report, jointly written by the police and the welfare group, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, depicted a pattern of abuse in broadcast studios, hospitals, homes for the mentally disabled and other places of care for the vulnerable. It documented 23 offenses committed at the BBC’s television center in London during Mr. Savile’s 40 years there, including one assault during the taping of the last episode of his “Top of the Pops” show in 2006 — when the performer was nearing 80.
The depiction of what Peter Spindler, a police commander, called a “vast, predatory and opportunistic” record of misconduct offered the latest gruesome indictment in a scandal that has plunged the British Broadcasting Corporation, Mr. Savile’s longtime employer, into crisis; drawn in a mounting tally of suspects and victims; and raised questions about the protection of children from predators in supposedly safe institutions. Only one location, Stoke Mandeville Hospital, about 40 miles northwest of London, with 24 attacks, was the site of more offenses than the BBC was. Mr. Savile maintained living quarters and an office at the hospital and was free to roam it as an honorary porter after raising millions of pounds with a charitable appeal for its spinal injuries unit.
In the process, Mr. Savile’s public image has been transformed. Once seen as a zany national treasure with a near-saintly commitment to charitable work with children — knighted by Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth II — he is now blamed for one of Britain’s most extensive catalogs of abuse. The report, which referred to the entertainer in criminal fashion as James Wilson Vincent Savile, said the police had received more than 450 individual complaints, ranging from groping to forced oral sex and rape, with many of the allegations still awaiting police investigation. It gave a breakdown showing that the preponderance of the victims, 73 percent, were younger than 18, with the largest group 13 to 16 years old. Over all, the report said, 82 percent of the victims were female.
“It is clear that Savile cunningly built his entire life into gaining access to vulnerable children,” said Peter Watt, a senior official of the children’s advocacy group, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, speaking at a joint news conference with police officials. It also offered tentative answers to the persistent question of why nothing was done to stop Mr. Savile, particularly when his activities were an open secret to many who worked with him and were the subject of several formal complaints to the police.
The report said Mr. Savile used his status as a celebrity to “hide in plain sight” as he committed criminal offenses in 28 police jurisdictions over nearly six decades. The offenses spanned a period from 1955 to 2009, the report said, with the peak from 1966 to 1976, when Mr. Savile was 40 to 50 years old and at the pinnacle of his popularity, drawing millions to his prime time shows. In the 2009 assault, Mr. Savile, then in his 80s, put his hand up the skirt of a 43-year-old woman on a train between Leeds, the northern industrial city that was his home, and London, the report said.
The locations included the premises of the BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster; a home for disturbed adolescent girls; and 14 medical facilities, like hospitals, mental health units and a hospice. The cases covered the years 1955 to 2009. The youngest victim was an 8-year-old boy, the report said, and the oldest was 47. One victim was visiting a dying child in the hospital. The depiction of what Cmdr. Peter Spindler, the Scotland Yard officer who has led the police inquiry, called a “vast, predatory and opportunistic” record of misconduct offered the latest gruesome indictment in a scandal that has plunged the British Broadcasting Corporation into turmoil. The crisis has prompted the resignation of its director general, George Entwistle; a shake-up in its news division; and an inquiry that reported last month that lax leadership and “rigid management chains” had left the corporation “completely incapable” of dealing with Mr. Savile’s behavior.  
Separately, the Crown Prosecution Service acknowledged that three victims who accused Mr. Savile of abuse in 2009 were not taken seriously enough. “I would like to take the opportunity to apologize for the shortcomings in the part played by the Crown Prosecution Service in these cases,” Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, said in a statement. The scandal has also tainted the National Health Service, another of Britain’s iconic institutions, which operates more than a dozen hospitals and several other medical institutions that have been tarnished by the scandal, particularly the Leeds General Infirmary, in Mr. Savile’s hometown.
A total of 450 people came forward to accuse Mr. Savile after the scandal exploded in October, and the police concluded that the number of crimes he is accused of committing totals 214, 34 of them rapes, with most of the victims 13 to 16 years old. Twenty-three of the offenses were committed at the BBC Television Centre in London. Mr. Savile was long celebrated as a zany national treasure, with a near-saintly commitment to charitable work with children, who was knighted by Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth II, and one of the report’s central conclusions is that he matched the huge following he built across Britain, especially among children, with a chilling ability to work his way into the confidence of his victims.
The offenses peaked between 1966 and 1976, the report said. “His peak offending came with the peak of his success,” said Detective Superintendent David Gray, who works in a Scotland Yard unit investigating sexual crimes against children. He then managed to escape the consequences of his abuse on the strength of his soaring popularity and the victims’ reluctance to pit their accusations against his seemingly impregnable renown, the report said.
During his time at the BBC, Mr. Savile played a central role in two shows — “Top of the Pops,” featuring rock bands playing their latest hits, and “Jim’ll Fix It,” in which Mr. Savile responded to requests from viewers. Both shows gave him direct access to audiences of young people, some seeking his advice and help on “Jim’ll Fix it.” His charitable work also took him to hospitals and other health facilities in his hometown, Leeds, in the north, to Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire, near London. “It could be said that he groomed a nation,” Mr. Spindler, the Scotland Yard commander, said in a BBC interview after the report was published. “He was hiding in plain sight, and none of us was able to do anything about it.”
Detective Gray said Mr. Savile must have thought about abuse “every minute of every working day.” He added, “This whole sordid affair has demonstrated the true consequences of what happens when vulnerability collides with power.”
The bald statistics gave a clearer insight into the scope of the accusations against Mr. Savile, which the prosecutor, Mr. Starmer, depicted as a “watershed moment” in Britain’s handling of abuse cases. Another police commander, Detective Superintendent David Gray, head of Scotland Yard’s pedophile unit and an author of the report, pointed to Mr. Savile’s apparent relentlessness in pursuing his victims and his choice of the most vulnerable victims to minimize any risk of their reporting him. “He’s spent every minute of every waking day thinking about it, and whenever an opportunity came along, he’s taken that,” he said.
Commander Spindler said Mr. Savile “cannot face justice today, but we hope this report gives some comfort to his hundreds of victims.” The report said the offenses ranged from “opportunistic touching over or under clothing,” including groping young fans during breaks in the filming of his prime time shows, “Top of the Pops” and “Jim’ll Fix It,” at BBC studios in London, to dozens of cases of “coercion, violence and rape.” The most serious offenses, described in the report as involving rape or penetration, involved 26 females and 8 males.
The report raised some questions about the culture of the era in which Mr. Savile rose to prominence as television audiences grew, feeding in part on a revolution in pop music. “It was an age of different social attitudes, and the workings of the criminal justice system at the time would have reflected this,” the report said. “The formal recording of allegations of crime on this scale is, to the best of our knowledge, unprecedented in the U.K.,” the report said.
There have also been questions about the motives of some of his accusers. The report’s chronicle of the locations of the attacks reads like a gazetteer, ranging across 28 regions in England, Scotland and Wales.
In an introductory passage of the 37-page report, the authors addressed an issue that has caused concern among legal experts, Savile family members and others who have argued for caution in face of the avalanche of allegations: Mr. Savile, who died in October 2011, cannot defend himself, nor can the accounts of his accusers be tested in criminal proceedings. A sampler of assaults in the report offered further insight into the pitiless nature of Mr. Savile’s activities: “1960. A 10-year-old boy saw Savile outside a hotel and asked for his autograph. They went into the hotel reception where he was seriously sexually assaulted.” “1965. A 14-year-old girl met Savile in a nightclub. She later visited his home and was raped.” “1974. Savile took a 14-year-old schoolgirl for a drive in his car and seriously sexually assaulted her.”
“An issue that has understandably been raised is that as Jimmy Savile is dead there can be no criminal prosecutions against him and the testimony of his victims cannot be challenged in the courts,” the report said. In the welter of apologies prompted from organizations named in the report as having failed to stop Mr. Savile, one that stood out was from the Crown Prosecution Service, which issued a statement acknowledging that three victims who accused Mr. Savile of abuse in 2009 were not taken seriously enough.
But the authors, in effect, turned this argument on its head, saying that the “lack of criminal proceedings — and justice for victims” persuaded them that the information gathered in their three-month investigation “should be put into the public domain.” Keir Starmer, the service’s director, said that an “unjustified” degree of caution by the police and prosecutors has “often resulted in sexual offenses being subjected to a different, and, in reality, more rigorous test than that applied to other crimes.” New rules would require prosecutors to make greater efforts to build a case around the accusations of abuse victims, Mr. Starmer said.
The report acknowledged that not all the victims who have come forward have been interviewed by the police. Nonetheless, it said, “the patterns and similarities of the offenses and behaviors” that have come to light so far have convinced investigators that most victims are speaking the truth. But the report suggested that prosecutors were not alone in their inaction. “Why did it happen and why was it not noticed and stopped by police, health, education or social services professionals, people at the BBC or other media, parents or carers, politicians, or even ‘society in general?’ ” the report asked, before offering its own answer.
“On the whole, victims are not known to each other, and taken together their accounts paint a compelling picture of widespread sexual abuse by a predatory sex offender,” the report said. “We are therefore referring to them as ‘victims’ rather than as ‘complainants,’ and are not presenting the evidence they have provided as unproven allegations.” “For a variety of reasons, the vast majority of his victims did not feel they could speak out, and it’s apparent that some of the small number who did had their accounts dismissed by those in authority, including parents and carers,” it said.
 The scandal began to emerge when “Newsnight,”a flagship current affairs program on the BBC, canceled an investigation into accusations of sexual abuse by Mr. Savile in late 2011, shortly after his death and just before the network broadcast lavish Christmas tributes to him.
As the scandal grew, it forced the resignation of the former director general of the BBC, George Entwistle. Police officials said last month that 589 people leveled accusations, mostly against Mr. Savile but also against other high-profile figures. Police detectives have questioned 10 men about sexual accusations that they all deny. Six more men, who have not been identified by name, are under investigation.
A report commissioned by the BBC concluded last month that lax leadership hampered by “rigid management chains” left the network “completely incapable” of dealing with the crisis over Mr. Savile’s behavior.
A 200-page report by Nick Pollard, a veteran British broadcast executive, censured editorial and management decisions relating to the cancellation of the “Newsnight” broadcast in 2011. But Mr. Pollard absolved top management of applying “undue pressure” in the decision to stop the broadcast.
The report also did not challenge the assertions of Mark Thompson, the head of the BBC at the time, that he had no role in killing the Savile investigation and was unaware of the sexual abuse accusations until he left the BBC last September. Mr. Thompson is now president and chief executive of The New York Times Company.