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Dave Lee Travis used fame to target vulnerable young women, court told | Dave Lee Travis used fame to target vulnerable young women, court told |
(about 9 hours later) | |
The former Radio 1 DJ Dave Lee Travis is an "opportunist" who used his fame to target and molest vulnerable young women in attacks spread over three decades, a jury has heard. | |
The 68-year-old broadcaster groped a 19-year-old girl live on Top of the Pops, the court was told, in one of a series of assaults that began at the height of his fame in the mid-1970s. | |
In another incident, the jury was told how a 15-year-old girl feared she was going to be raped when Travis forced himself on her in his VIP trailer at a Showaddywaddy concert in 1978. | |
Travis denies 13 counts of indecent assault and one count of sexual assault, relating to 11 young women, between January 1976 and November 2008. | |
Opening the prosecution case at Southwark crown court in London on Tuesday, Miranda Moore QC described Travis as an "opportunist" who has a record of targeting "young women who are vulnerable" at his place of work. | |
The veteran DJ sat in the dock of the court, listening to proceedings through a hearing loop and at times shaking his head as the barrister told jurors how he indecently assaulted young women while acting in pantomimes, working as a DJ, and at the opening of a hospital radio station. | |
The jury was shown BBC footage of Travis introducing a performance by the Smurfs on the Top of the Pops in June 1978 when he allegedly put his hand up a 19-year-old girl's skirt and inside her knickers, grabbing her bottom. "She was assaulted effectively live on Top of the Pops," said Moore. | |
Days before that incident on Top of the Pops, Travis invited a 15-year-old girl into his Winnebago at a Showaddywaddy concert on a farm in Gloucestershire, the court heard. After complimenting the teenager on her breasts, Travis began flicking her nipples before removing her top and pinning her down to the banquette to stop her from leaving. "She began to scream," the jury heard. "She was shouting and in her own words she thought he was going to rape her." | |
Showaddywaddy's lead singer, Dave Bartram, is due to give evidence for the prosecution later in the trial, the court heard. | |
Another incident took place in Travis's dressing room when he was playing the evil wizard Abanazar in the pantomime Aladdin in 1991, the court heard. The broadcaster pressed himself against a woman and shoved his hand down her trousers before being interrupted by one of the Chuckle Brothers walking past his dressing room. | |
The victim reported the incident to the stage manager of the theatre, and was told that female workers "should not be left alone with him and should not be in his dressing room at any time", the court heard. | |
The jury of eight women and four men were told about another incident that happened in the busy office of a local radio station between 2000 and 2003. Travis was a DJ at the station, Chiltern Radio, and was "sexually assaulting" one woman and her colleagues on a "regular basis", the jury heard. | |
Jurors were told how Travis was confronted after slipping his thumb up the skirt and into the knickers of one woman at the station, who screamed at him: "Don't touch me, you're a pervert." | |
"It appears this is the straw that broke the camel's back," Moore said. "She went ballistic. She made a fuss there and then." | |
Travis left the radio station shortly after, the court heard, although the broadcaster denies he left because of this incident, despite reports that he had "stormed into the newsroom shouting about false complaints" against him. | |
Another young woman, who is not included in the indictment against Travis, said the broadcaster had grabbed her breasts when she was deputy carnival princess at the opening of a hospital radio station. "She thought he was a big name and what Dave wanted was what Dave got," Moore told the jury. | |
Journalists were also targeted by Travis, the court heard. One journalist said she felt "infringed upon and violated" when Travis grabbed her breasts and tried to persuade her to pose for photographs while she was in his kitchen, interviewing him for a newspaper feature. Another journalist complained about him groping her bottom during a tour of his six-bedroomed property, the court heard, which featured an "amateur bikini shot" of the singer Jo O'Meara from S Club 7 on the wall of his recording studio. | |
In a separate incident in 1992, a British Airways worker told police she was made to feel "embarrassed and powerless" by Travis at a work party, where she won a dancing competition and danced the lambada with the broadcaster as her prize. The jury heard that Travis pressed his body into hers so she could feel his erect penis, before grasping her bottom with both hands and lifting her off the floor. | |
Travis, who is on trial under his real name, David Patrick Griffin, shook his head at times as the crown described the allegations against him. | |
The jury heard that Travis described the claims in interviews with police as "absolute crap" and "made-up rubbish" and the victims as fame-hungry women who could "smell money". In one interrogation by officers, Travis said if he had touched a woman's breast in 1971 "he would admit it because it was seen as flirtatious at the time". | |
"If you live in a sweet shop you don't eat sweets," Travis told detectives in one interview. He said it would have been "insane" to grope anyone in a radio studio, when asked by police about allegations that he touched the breasts of a BBC trainee, aged 24 at the time, as she introduced Woman's Hour live on Radio 4. | "If you live in a sweet shop you don't eat sweets," Travis told detectives in one interview. He said it would have been "insane" to grope anyone in a radio studio, when asked by police about allegations that he touched the breasts of a BBC trainee, aged 24 at the time, as she introduced Woman's Hour live on Radio 4. |
The trial, which is due to last up to six weeks, was adjourned until Wednesday. | |
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