Part Four: Jimmy Savile: Britain's Unending Nightmare

Robert concludes the harrowing tale of Jimmy Saville by explaining the horrific reach his relationship with Margaret Thatcher gave him into the NHS, and how he lived out his days as BBC royalty.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Well, come to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about the very worst people in all of history that
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Sometimes you just want to change up how you introduce
your show, you know, just the same way every time.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
This guy this is the biggest bastard.

Speaker 4 (00:23):
Yeah, guy, this guy's in the running, is to say, right, yeah,
he's way up there.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
He's a bigger bastard than all the pollen in the
fucking air right now is turning.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
Out of control, I know.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Oh my god, terrible. Another twelve months of winter. Come on, guys,
the real winter. This time.

Speaker 4 (00:42):
I have the opposite, you know when people are like,
oh my gosh, I get seasonal depression in the winter.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
It's like, no winter, rock.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yep, winter is so much better. You know what's even
better than winter? Learning about a Well, Courtney's gonna start
anyway with our guest Courtney Kosa. Hello, Courtney, how are
you feeling? Hello as we talk about this monster?

Speaker 5 (01:07):
Glad to be back for another horrific episode?

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Oh good, well, we're glad to have you back. We
love having you on the show. We love tormenting you
with horrible things. That's what you do with your friends,
you know, you gather together, spend time talking about Jimmy Saville.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
That's what you do with your friend.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah, that's why I don't have that many of them.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
That's what Jimmy Savile does with his friends, is.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
What Jimmy Saville did with his friends. Yeah, yeah, talking
about a lot of these same crimes. I presume with
his cop friends at least.

Speaker 4 (01:39):
Oh my goodness.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
So we left off last episode with me mentioning that
we're going to talk more about the Duncroft approved school
for girls and like approved schools or government approved schools
where you like send kids who were having trouble. Right.
One of the things happening at the time is that
in this period of like mental health history in the UK,

(02:08):
there's this kind of belief that you have a girls
or kids in general, who are having specific kinds of
problems that are like troubled mentally to a significant extent.
In some cases, it's best if the state treats them
rather than their family. Right, And Duncroft is an experimental
facility which sought to use psychotherapy too, as Davi's rights

(02:30):
for in his book In Plain Sight correct the behavioral
defects of the girls placed in its Care. Duncroft was
specifically a school for troubled girls who were seen as intelligent.
Right now, what that really means is that these are
the children of prominent and wealthy families primarily, not like exclusively,
but a lot of Duncroft girls come from quote unquote

(02:52):
good families right per the book In Plain Sight, girls
were sent to Duncroft for a variety of misdemeanors. One
girl who arrived at the school as a fourteen year
old in nineteen seventy two insisted years later that half
the girls were there as punishment for being the victims
of sexual abuse, the crime of having sex underage, as
we thought it. Others were put in Margaret Jones's care,

(03:12):
that's the woman running the facility, for dabbling with drugs
and arexia, attempting suicide, or for running away from children's
homes or abusive parents. So some of these kids are
just kids who you know, got have been shuffled through
the system, but were noted as being like intelligence, and
so maybe you know it's worth trying to reform them.
But a lot of these girls are like rich girls

(03:32):
who have embarrassed their parents.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
And it's a really good way to say it.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, yeah, and often embarrassed them by getting molested, sometimes
by their parents or by an uncle or something one
of these rich creeps. Yeah, so that's kind of what's
going on here now. As I noted, the headmistress of
the school for much of its existence was Margaret Jones,
and she absolutely loved Jimmy Savile. Because Duncroft was a

(03:58):
school for the daughters of prominent people, attracted a lot
of celebrity attention when fundraising was needed. Savell very quickly
became the most prominent and reliable, famous friend of the school.
For an obvious reason. It gave him access to teenaged girls.
Because Saville was seen as a good volunteer, he was
allowed to sleep overnight at Duncroft with some regularity. He

(04:19):
was even allowed to take Yeah. Yeah, they let him
crash there.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Yea, that is crazy.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, it's wild. How many hospitals and facilities just do that. Yeah,
he stays overnight a bunch of times. Uh huh, happens constantly.
He was even allowed to take girls off campus in
his car for day trips. Many of these patients were
eager for the opportunity to escape because this is a
it's not a fun place to be, right. Margaret's theory

(04:43):
is that one of the ways you fix these kids
who have behavioral problems you give them like shitloads of chores,
so like constant chores or seems like a therapeutic aid.
So it's a boring place where you're being kept away
from like your friends and your music and like parties
and the things that like a normal age girl would like,
and you're just doing chores all the time. And then
this famous guy shows up and is like, Hey, anybody

(05:05):
want to ride? You want to leave school for a day? Right,
you can see why this is appealing to a lot
of these young ladies.

Speaker 4 (05:13):
Yeah, starting at nineteen six running these places that are.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
Allowing Margaret Jones, qualified people, Sophie, qualified people who love
this man Jimmy, who's just good at raising money. He's
a saint. He's the next best thing to a saint
pretty much. You know, all he does is raise money
for good costs and volunteer. Is time these other celebrities
are out partying and living it up. Jimmy's volunteering as

(05:36):
an orderly you know, at a bunch of hospitals, like
a surprising suspicious number of hospitals and he sleeps there
a lot. What a great guy. Now starting. One of
the weird things about this is that Margaret's nephew is
a guy named Myron Jones, and it's spelled weird in
the British way. Myron Jones becomes like a journalist, like
a BBC journalist, and actually he is one of the

(05:57):
guys who will report on Jimmy later, but as like
a kid, he just is seeing Jimmy at Duncroft regularly
when he's visiting his aunt, and like I think his
parents both work there at least part time, so he's
around Duncroft all the time, and he just notes like
weird guys around a lot. He would later say he
was full of banter, though had no real conversation as such.

(06:18):
I had a feeling that he was somebody with whom
you didn't really know what was going on. One time,
Myron saw Saville leave the school with three girls in
the back of his convertible. He recalls his parents getting
angry about this and confronting his aunt about it, and
her response was just he's a friend of the school.
Why are you worried? He's a friend of the school.

(06:39):
It's okay, it's fine, don't look into it. Good so convenient,
it's really convenient. We don't know how many Duncroft girls
were abused by Saville, but after the coming of the Internet,
increasing numbers of former patients began discussing abuse that they
had endured while at Duncroft on the Internet. In two
thousand and eight, and at that point, fifty year old
woman named Carrie wrote a biography as part of a

(07:01):
therapeutic exercise to deal with a lifetime of trauma and
abuse which had started in care homes and approved schools,
including Duncroft, where she'd been sent in nineteen seventy two
at age fourteen. So she writes, this autobiography is like
a therapeutic exercise, and she publishes it online. And in
this online autobiography she writes about the people who molested her,

(07:22):
one of whom was a celebrity, and she doesn't want
to give his name because again the UK has really
strict libel laws, so she just calls him JS. Who
do we think that is?

Speaker 3 (07:36):
I got one guess?

Speaker 2 (07:41):
Could it be Dame Judy Dench. I don't know, you know,
it's impossible to say she's wrapped it in such a
cipher we'll never know likely. Yeah, So she writes about
this celebrity JS who visits Duncroft regularly and whenever he
shows up, he brings cartons of cigarettes for the girls
and records which he hands out his gifts. That tells
you a lot about the time. That like the number

(08:02):
one gift for fourteen year old girls cigarettes, cigarettes and records.
And it's so normal, Like the facility is like, of
course the girls can have cigarettes. Obviously, we got to
keep them away from their friends and from like going
to shows and hang it out, but they can smoke.
Of course, we're not demons here. Obviously they need their
three packs a day. Jesus, I was reading something. We're

(08:26):
like in the sixties, the average American smoked like four
thousand cigarettes a year. What a time we need to
go back now that we know they're harmless. I think
we need to go back to smoking all the time. Guys,
you know.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
Enough.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
This is an episode sponsored by the Health Cigarette. The
health cigarette. It's a cigarette. It's good for you. We
haven't figured it out yet, but if you give us
enough money, we'll invent one.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
It's the one funny part.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
It's the one funny part is that all these kids
are chain smoking. Oh man, just cartons. Yes, this man
came to the girls school with cartons of cigarettes and
records and then stayed overnight. No way to have known
he was doing something bad. How could we have guessed
he was hurting these kids.

Speaker 4 (09:13):
The least he should have done to these kids is
give them cancer.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
So Carrie came to cherish Savile's visits because it meant
an escape from her boring, ordinary day to day life,
and it meant that she got attention. Right, Kids like attention.
Kids need attention. It is good for them to some extent,
like it's necessary for children to have attention from adults.
And when you're in a place, your fucking family's basically
been like, yeah, ship her off to the fucking kid

(09:40):
jail where you're just doing chores all the fuck. You're
desperate for attention. And here is a famous charismatic guy
beloved by the whole country, including the royals and the
Prime Minister, and he's paying attention to you. You can
see why that's appealing to a fucking fourteen year old,
fifteen year old girl, right, So she likes the visits

(10:03):
like she cherishes them, but she also writes quote it
it being hanging out and going on a day trip
with Jimmy also meant one had to put up with
being mauled and groped when he pulled into a lay
by some five miles along the road. I wasn't the
only girl JS favored with this either. In fact, he
often tried to press me to go further than simply
fondling him and allowing him to grope inside my knickers

(10:25):
at my partly formed breasts. He promised me all manner
of good things if I would give him oral sex,
and eventually she agrees and does it. And the bargain
is that Savile will take her to see him record
one of his TV shows at the BBC. And he
does follow through with this promise as far as I
can tell, I think he pretty much always does. Like

(10:47):
when he promises to take a girl he's molesting to
go see an episode of whatever show be recorded at
the BBC, or to meet the Beatles or whatever, to
get into a concert. He pretty much always, as far
as I can tell, follow through that it's easy, like
it's easier like if you're if you're actually like not
following through. Some people are gonna tell right, like you'll

(11:10):
deal with more problems. You know, this isn't a good
thing about him, It's just that's how it works better, right.
And this is a big part of why the BBC
is implicated because over the years Jimmy takes will never
know how many at least dozens, probably hundreds of girls
that he is abusing onto BBC property for a period

(11:30):
of nearly half a century. For decades he is taking
teenage girls, maybe taking teenage boys he's abusing too, I
don't I don't recall coming across those accounts, but he's
definitely for decades taking underage girls that he is molesting
and raping onto BBC property in order as part of
the abuse. That's part of the quote unquote transaction that

(11:53):
he's arranged with these kids. And so the BBC, like
his abuse of hundreds and hundreds of children and adults
would not have been possible without the eager and ready
assistance of the British Broadcasting Corporation. There is simply no
other way to say it. The BBC was a rigid
organization with a strict hierarchy, where talent set up top
and a culture of fear, as identified by the Dame

(12:16):
Janet Smith Review, ensured lower level employees new reporting abuse
by a star would be the end of their careers. Right,
So it's just known, you don't talk shit about the performers.
They're the ones making money for everybody, so they get
to do what they want. And if you're trying to
ruin the party, you're not going to have a career

(12:37):
at the only place really to have a career in
television in Britain at this time. That's good.

Speaker 5 (12:43):
It's the career and the libel laws like make this
terrible combination.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
That's exactly right. It's this mix of these two things
that I think is most of why this happens, right,
and the complicity of the British ruling class who needs
Jimmy to make austerity seem more palatable. As the nineteen
eighties wore on, Savill grew only grew more and more
skilled at finding victims and discouraging them from talking to anyone.

(13:11):
This was not hard, since the man had become a
regular guest, not just in Margaret Thatcher's household. She like
invites him over for holidays sometimes like he comes over
and has dinner with some regularity, and he is also
a somewhat regular guest of the royal family. In nineteen
eighty five, Savill convinced Prince Charles and Princess Die to
guest host a two hour anti drug special called Drugs

(13:33):
Watch with him. That's good again. We know he's drugging
some of the girls and boys that he's raping, right,
we have reports of that, sometimes just giving them alcohol.
But like, anyway, thanks for the anti drug PSA, Jimmy,
I'm sure it helped. That same year, yeah, I must have.
Thank god Princess Die and Prince Charles were there too,

(13:54):
you know, really to lend an air of responsibility to
the proceedings. I'm sure that got a lot of kids
at a bad place.

Speaker 4 (14:01):
Now.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
That same year, during an event for healthcare officials, Prince
Charles jokingly referred to Savill as my health advisor. He
talks about him constantly. Saville was also known to Pope
John Paul the Second who met so Pope John Paul
like visits England during this period for like the first
time a Pope had visited London in some period of time.

(14:23):
I don't know, maybe I don't know, but it was
a big deal obviously, given like the history of the
Church of England, right, how the Church of England starts
as this breakaway from the Catholic Church, and there's generations
for which the Catholic Church is suppressed violently in in
England and in Ireland. Obviously, so the fact that a
pope is visiting England is like a big deal, right.
And John Paul the second he'd been shot over in

(14:45):
the USSR. He's like a big deal pope and one
of the first people the Pope meets when he lands
in London. This is on TV. This is a major event.
Is he walks right up to and shakes hands with
Jimmy Saville. This is this is like a major part.
Like he's one of the first people the Pope meets
in England because Saffle's like a famous Catholic.

Speaker 5 (15:05):
Is the Pope ironically like the only non pedophile in
this story.

Speaker 2 (15:09):
Well, I wouldn't say, I don't. I don't. I don't
want to go to bat for JP the second that
hard Okay, we know he definitely I am certain Again,
I'm not a I'm not an expert on John Paul.
The second specific involvement in the Catholic churches covering up
of sex crimes. But I don't believe he was uninvolved.
Uh so I'm certainly not gonna say that he was

(15:30):
the pope while the Catholic Church was hiding like yeah,
I doubt he was completely in the clear. I don't know.
I'm not an expert on his involvement there. Sure, sure
he's right, he's in charge and it's happening in his organization.
So in the rare but not that rare instances where
people did try to report on Saffle's behavior. As I noted,
he is an expert on the UK's libel laws and

(15:53):
these are to make a long story, shirt, your laws
suck UK, and I know I'm in the United States.
We've got a lot of shitty laws and a lot
of stuff. UK libel laws are fucking bullshit and it's
a massive problem. This is a part of the problem
with like Rowling right where people are getting in legal
trouble for saying accurate things about JK. Rowling being a
fucking bigot like Jimmy Savill is very good and a

(16:13):
lot of bad people are very good at using the
UK's libel laws as a weapon in order to make
sure people don't report on the bad things that they're doing.
And basically, if you're trying to talk about some of
these rumors or even reports, and you can't prove outright
that Savile's a child predator, reporting even reporting on individual

(16:34):
allegations could get you in massive trouble. You have to
be extremely careful. Now, I think people are even more
cowardly in the media than the real level of legal
risk justifies. I think there is added cowardice on top
of that. But the cowardice starts with the chilling effect
that's created when you have laws like this. So any

(16:57):
journalist or paper that wanted to write about jim is
going to be beset with legal effects, which I mean
the end result of this is that in most publications
throughout most of the period of time where Jimmy Savill
is abusing people, they're just automatically spiking any story about
his private life quote unquote private life. Right, anytime anyone
wants to talk about is Jimmy Savile raping people, those

(17:19):
stories just get spiked automatically because legal is not going
to let it through. Right, Why even try, right, Who's
gonna who would want to risk your newspapers survival to
report on some he said, she said thing about a
beloved humanitarian like Jimmy Saffle. That's the argument being made
by most of the major editors and most of the
major publications in the United Kingdom for decades.

Speaker 5 (17:42):
I do get it, though, because you're publica, it's your
publication on this.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Line, and you don't know, you know, if you're not
plugged into this whole world, you don't know the truth.
And maybe all you're hearing is, oh, he's dating a
lot of like eighteen or seventeen year olds. That's legal.
I may think it's gross, but I'm not gonna destroy
my newspaper to report on a guy having legal sex
with someone who's young. That's how a lot of people
think about it right now. That said, a lot of

(18:07):
people go much further than they need to and clamping
down on this even based on the fear because of
just like cowardice, and it's easier and in some cases,
Jimmy's writing columns for their fucking papers. As we talked
about in the last episodes or last week. So as
Jimmy ghost from his thirties to his forties, rumors continue
to dog him about his outrageous lifestyle. But it's never

(18:28):
framed as pedophilia, right, It's always he's just this eternal bachelor.
He's really got an active social life. He's always surrounded
by girls, but in the way that they don't mean
literal children, even though that's actually what's happening. Like, that's
how people talk about this when he's interviewed and stuff,
because people ask him like, Hey, it's weird you're not married.

(18:49):
Do you have any like serious long term relationships? Are you,
like with anybody long term? He would justify the fact
that he never got married or had long term relationships
by explaining his belief that being in a relationship causes
brain damage, particularly in women, and he wants to avoid
the brain damage, right, And in fact he gets wealth. Yeah, yes,

(19:12):
you get brain damaged when you when you get married,
you know, and I just don't want any of that
brain damage in my life. And as he gets wealthier's
that good?

Speaker 6 (19:23):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (19:24):
Yea, the brain and damage, I.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Mean, I will say being in a relationship does do
a degree a kind of brain damage to you. But
it's a good one, I think on the whole. You know,
it's necessary. You're never you're not avoiding brain damage as
a person. You know, everyone everyone does gets something, But
Saville is so worried about this quote unquote brain damage

(19:48):
that even as he gets rich and he buys homes
and condos across the country, he makes sure that there
he has all of his houses refitted to take the
stoves out and to take the kitchen out, because he
thinks that having a proper kitchen is part of what
makes girls get brain damaged. This is like a thing
he'll talk about and interviews. What again, this is just

(20:10):
this is just cover, right, This is him coming I
don't think he actually even believes this necessarily. This is
him coming up with cover for why he's not with
anybody long term.

Speaker 5 (20:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
You know, everyone knows he's dating, is on dates all
the time. Everyone knows he's constant because he talks about
and his coworkers will be like, yeah, he talked about
his sex life. He said, oh, I was with a
bird this weekend, or a lovely bird went out to
the coast or whatever. But they never hear their names
and or their ages, and they just assume he's a
star who's sleeping with a different woman every night. That's

(20:41):
not what's happening. But that's the assumption people make, and
it's an assumption people are kind i think, often consciously
forcing themselves to make because they know something is bad,
but they don't want to stir the pot, right, so
they're like, yeah, he's just he's a real swinger. He's
a hip guy. You know, he's just got a large

(21:02):
appetites or whatever. People find ways to have it not
be their problem.

Speaker 5 (21:07):
I feel like the libel laws should cover the slander
against all grown up women.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
In a relationship. In relationship, yeah, shockingly, it doesn't that
you're clear on. Savell would also publicly in interviews he
would repeatedly insist that he hated children, right like, I
don't like kids. I don't like them at all. That's
why I'm not in a relationship. That's why I don't
have any. I just don't actually like them.

Speaker 4 (21:30):
Dog, were you not hosting a child show? What? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (21:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (21:35):
That people thought that was weird. It got people talking
right about the he hates kids, but he does this
child show. He's basically Santa Claus. That's odd. And in
the Twilight of Jimmy's career, documentarian Louis Thereaux asked him
like why do you say this, Like, why do you
say you hate kids, because, like I see you on TV,
it doesn't seem like you hate kids based on how
you perform with them on stage. And Saville was like, well, yeah,

(21:58):
that's a lie basically, and he his exact response was,
we live in a very funny world, and it's easier
for me as a single man to say I don't
like children because that puts a lot of salacious tabloid
people off the hunt. Hunt of what, Jimmy a hunt
of what? Well, yeah, and Louie kind of asks, this
is I love Louis as a general rule, he doesn't

(22:19):
go hard enough. He does do more than a lot
of journalists did at the time, but it's not nearly
enough in this interview because he does basically ask him,
are you a pedophile? And Jimmy's like, no, of course not.
But you know, I don't want anyone looking into my life,
and so it just lies like this or easier. It
stops you from looking into your life. But you're just
saying you're trying to throw people off the hunt. That's
not I want private hunt of what. Mostens did this show.

(22:44):
I've made references. I have a long term partner that
I've been with for a while. Like, I have a
personal life, I've a roman I don't talk about it
in detail because people on the internet are weird and
like if you go into detail, if you let people
know who you're seeing or whatever, like folks are fucking
like you don't want to. The internet is filled with

(23:04):
oddities and people. I've had people make very uncomfortable.

Speaker 4 (23:08):
Decision difference being private and secret, but this.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
Is a big difference. He's specifically saying, no, no, no, I
just lie about hating kids because it gets it that way.
People don't look into what I really do.

Speaker 6 (23:20):
Is this?

Speaker 2 (23:21):
You know he's saying that. He admits that, and that's
as an interview in like two thousand, but like he's
not completely hiding this shit.

Speaker 5 (23:29):
I am proud of Threau for asking are you a pedophile?

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah, we'll talk about Louis a little bit more. This
is there's a lot of This is probably, I mean,
I think definitely the most critiqueable moment of his career.
I say that as a guy who's a general fan
of the man's work. How he handles savile is not
He's not proud of it. I'll say that much. We'll
talk more, Okay, okay, But it's all this stuff, these

(23:55):
rumors about his outrageous lifestyle and like how promiscuous he is,
which he does talk about. It's interpreted again that like
this is just consensual sex with adult women. But the
fact that he's talking about this at all does nearly
derail Jimmy becoming Sir Jimmy. Right, this is something that
continually is a problem for him for like a decade.
Is well, we don't want to give a knighthood to

(24:16):
a guy who talks about this kind of stuff. But
old Maggie, she keeps pushing, you know, like she really
is dedicated to this cause. And for an idea of
how well known at the time people are really aware
that Thatcher is pushing for Jimmy to get a knighthood.
I want to quote again from that our article Ferrol
Kenney wrote for the UK Telegram. In a revealing nineteen

(24:38):
eighty two cartoon in the Sun, Savile is depicted as
a gangster complete with fedora and machine gun, with Margaret
Thatcher showing him pictures of Arthur Skargel as well as
labor politicians Michael Foot, Tony Benn and Dennis Healy with
a caption bump off these lot and I'll see that
you get a knighthood. So there's a recognition that Thatcher
is using saffle, he is an important and central wing

(25:00):
of her pr machine, and also that he's doing it
to get a knighthood. People are know this at the time.
It's not, you know, hidden from anyone paying attention. In
nineteen eighty six, Margaret had her private secretary Nigel Wicks
right to the Honors Committee, saying that she was most
disappointed that mister Saville's name has not been recommended. He added,

(25:21):
she Thatcher wonders how many more times his name is
to be pushed aside, especially in view of all the
great work he had done for Stoke Mandibal. Right, He's
why are we delaying this guy getting a knighthood? Did
you see he funded the spinal center that he hangs
out at an awful lot, like a weird amount.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
They're doing great sleepovers.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
It's important the we're in great sleep But we'll talk
about the sleepovers at Stoke Manibal. But first let's have
a sleepover with our sponsors and we're back. It turns
out that's illegal, so we didn't have a sleepover with
our sponsors. I apologize. So by this point, nineteen eighty

(26:06):
six or so, the age crisis is still too big
a deal, and Jimmy's sex scandals, as people talk about them,
are still too recent for him to get across the
finish line and become a night Another problem for Savile
comes when he's there's an interview about his days as
a club promoter, and he tells a lot of lurid
stories about having to beat people within an inch of
their live or I like the gang of thugs, that

(26:26):
he would sick on people and have them like savage folks, right,
And that interview temporarily hurts his shot at getting a knighthood.
But I've also read speculation and I think this is
a pretty good take on it, that this isn't just
like him being sloppy and like, oh, I shouldn't have
done that because it caused problems for me. This is
also part of the tactic that keeps him safe because

(26:48):
by admitting, oh, I did violent stuff in my past,
I had guys beaten up. I beat up guys, that
is basically copping to something illegal, But it's also something
that no one's going to care about because it was
like ten or fifteen years ago. And these guys are
like bad guys, as he always frames it, their hoodlums.
They're provoking him, they're causing problems. You know, they're not

(27:10):
victim victims, right, But it's something illicit that he can
admit to. That Again, it throws people off the scent. Right, Well,
if he's open about this, there's probably nothing else going on, right.
And it also he can be fairly sure that, like,
if anyone wants to look into the dark side of
Jimmy Savile, they can find some stuff, and it's stuff

(27:32):
that they can talk about it and be like, well,
you know, Jimmy did this or that, but it's not
that bad, right, it's something that's forgivable bad. And that's
interesting to me. In nineteen Yeah, you know what else?
Oh wait, we already did that.

Speaker 4 (27:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Sorry, I guess we're just gonna we're going on a
raw dog this next part. This is bad. This is
real bad. In nineteen eighty eight, the entire management board
of broad More Psychiatric Hospital, where Jimmy volunteered quite regularly,
was suspended by the Department of Health under appointee Ken Clark.
The board basically shits. The psychiatric hospital was not well run,

(28:06):
things were costing too much. It was like in debt.
The facilities there were bad, there were problems with it.
So the government is like, well, we need to shut down,
get rid of the people running it now. And the
board that had been running broad Moore is replaced by
a task force appointed by the Thatcher administration. And the
task force is run by Jimmy Savill. No, now he's

(28:29):
running a psychiatric hospital. Jimmy had started volunteering at Broadmore
in the nineteen sixties, and in nineteen eighty eight he
got total control over what happened at the facility, or
near total control. He's effectively running it, per the Tribune quote.
This This decision was rubber stamped by Junior Health Minister
Edwina Currie, who wrote at A Boy and Her Diaries

(28:50):
on hearing Savile's plans for reform at the hospital, which
included union busting, as Savill alleged that inflated overtime payments
were rife among the unionized workforce. Curry later conceded that
this was likely savele blackmailing staff who could blow the
whistle on his abuse. So Savill's like, now that I'm
running things, you know the real problem at this hospital,
these damn unions. It's made a way too expensive. All

(29:13):
these guys I got good, I'm gonna we need to
fire a bunch of these people because they're they're faking.

Speaker 4 (29:17):
They're Oh, I'm just so shocked that savel would be
a time union.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, but we had to get rid of these guys.
They're they're stealing basically from the country by faking this
overtime stuff. No, no, they weren't reporting me for raping
patients that had nothing to do with it. It was
overtime fraud. Right, So the Thatcher regime gets what it wants.
They get to cut costs, they get to busty union
fucking Maggie loves that shit and she's getting Saveles doing
He's literally like, I cannot overstate this is not a

(29:45):
side thing. She didn't happen to be friends with. This guy,
Jimmy Savell is a significant, meaningful part of Thatcherism, Like
he is a major and important part of her entire regime,
like that that has to be driven home to peace.
How key he is in this whole period of time
in British political history, and the fact that he's now

(30:06):
running this hospital, he's able to fire basically anyone he
wants to who who's going to speak up at anything?
That just makes him even more fucking bulletproof to the
people he's raping and molesting and abusing in other ways. Now,
the fact that there were employees at all these facilities
who saw Savile's behavior and tried to intervene. This doesn't
just happen at Broadmore. There are employees everywhere that he

(30:28):
volunteers who try to say something, but it never goes anywhere.
And it is important though that it is important emphasize
there are people trying to intervene, right, and that fact
often gets lost, in part because it doesn't work, but
in part because a lot of powerful people have a
vested interest in the fact that folks tried to stop

(30:50):
Jimmy being lost. Because by far the best way that
you can interpret this, that the public can interpret this,
that the British public specifically can interpret Jimmy Saville and
what happened in his crimes is oh, this was just
a monster who manipulated and a hidden planesight and he
tricked everybody. We all fell for no one knew anything
was going on.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
Nobody had any idea.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yeah, people knew Jimmy was allowed to rape and abuse people.
Thatcher and everyone in her, everyone that we talked about,
who was a part of fucking Curry. I will say
it right now, I'm not prone to those laws. I
think Curry and Thatcher and everyone else involved in the
decision to put him in that position in broad more,
if they didn't know he was outright raping kids, they
knew he was raping people. They knew he was having

(31:33):
they would probably affirm him as having sex with people
who were under age.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
The fuck he was.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
They knew what he was doing, and they knew they
were putting in a position where he could do it more,
and they did it because it benefited them politically. They
didn't know maybe all the specifics, but they knew enough.

Speaker 4 (31:47):
They knew it. They knew he wasn't a they knew
he was at minimum a sketchy creep.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, and they knew what they were doing. Yeah, Thatcher
knew what she was doing. Kenny writes, quote read the
NHS investigations into Savile, and there are numerous examples of
everyday people with little power standing up to Savile or
at least doing what they could reasonably do within their
small domain to protect those who are in their care.
There are no such stories within the Thatcher government, only

(32:15):
an elite who took him at face value time and
time again. I cannot exaggerate the degree of deference and
power that Jimmy was given over an entire psychiatric hospital.
This is gonna fucking blow your mind. Broadmoor gives him
a suite of rooms permanently that he is allowed to
occupy and live him and is a private apartment in

(32:39):
the women's wing of the hospital. They give him an
apartment in the women's wing, and he has their allegations
he would just have victims delivered to his rooms sometimes,
or if he's the one taking them in for intake,
he'll just bring him on up to his room and
do whatever fucking sex crime he's gonna do, and then
I'll put him wherever they need to go. Right He's

(33:02):
he's getting victims delivered to his apartment at the psychiatric
hospital in the women's wing.

Speaker 5 (33:08):
This is a psychotic Also, it's not charity anymore. It's
like he's nobody was wondering why he wants to run
this fucking place and.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
Like be there.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
He's just a good man. He really likes helping out
these people. You know, he cares about them. No one
else cares about these people.

Speaker 4 (33:27):
Just jimmy, what was the word we decided at the end,
loathsome loathsome Now.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
The website Investigative Psychiatry and analyzing several of these reports,
notes that clinic staff found the fact that he was
given an apartment in the facility bizarre and inappropriate, but
it was quote sanctioned from the top down as part
of his task force role.

Speaker 4 (33:49):
This physical top whose signature, whose signature is on that?

Speaker 2 (33:54):
On that, I mean Curry's is right?

Speaker 3 (33:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Uh yeah, yeah, I mean I'm sure that's documented. There's
there's a the article has like a footnote there. I could,
I could get more names for you. But this physical
autonomy was the ultimate evidence of his symbolic power. He
had colonized the hospital space to a point where he
was no longer a guest, but a semi permanent resident
with more freedom of movement than many senior clinicians.

Speaker 4 (34:17):
Now, what figures out here colonizing a fucking women's psychiatric ward.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, it's fucking nuts that they gave him a fucking
apartment is crazy. I mean, first of all, hospitals have
what yeah, yeah, I'm fucking insane cerate a big for
a cut?

Speaker 3 (34:36):
What the fuck?

Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah, it's crazy stuff. Yeah, hi mom. Now, Stoke Manibal
was not his first major volunteer effort, but it makes
him a fixture within the NHS, and he receives offers
to volunteer at and raise money for dozens of hospitals,
including Leeds General, great Ormond Street, and Wheatfield's Hospice. Modern
investigations have turned up evidence that Savill's sexually abused patients

(34:59):
had each of these facilities. For the UK Standard, his
youngest victim was an eight year old boy who suffered
a sexual assault at his hands, and again we know
there were younger victims that was you know, at one
point in time as he aged, Savil seems to have
preferred patients who were dying in hospice. The Standard recounts
one story of an eleven to twelve year old dying

(35:19):
boy at Great Ormond who admitted shortly before passing that
he had been touched inappropriately by Savile. That's part of
why we'll never know how many victims is he's specifically
going after people who are dying and thus won't be
around to complain or report as he gets like older.
That's a big thing he does.

Speaker 5 (35:40):
Also the psych hospital. It's like, oh, so you can
immediately call into question the credibility of these victims.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Crazy, he's crazy, you know.

Speaker 4 (35:50):
Yeah, yep, that might be one of the worst things
you've ever read on this.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's pretty Like I said, this
is like the one of the only research at bits
Binges I've been on a while that actually had me crying.

Speaker 4 (36:05):
Yeah, I understand.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
Yeah. In nineteen ninety, the last year of Thatcher's time
in office, she finally succeeded in getting Jimmy savill knighted
during that year's Queen's Birthday honors. He was knighted for
his charitable services, and from that moment on, Jimmy savill
Obe was now Sir Jimmy Savile. He received personal congratulations

(36:27):
from all of his friends in the royal family. Prince Andrew,
Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York,
sends him a handmade card. Savile, for his part, was
over the moon about his knighthood and he made no
great efforts to disguise why. He told journalist Lynn Barber
in an interview conducted just after the ceremony, I had

(36:48):
a lively couple of years with the tabloid sniffing about,
asking around the corner shops everything, thinking there must be
something the authorities knew that they didn't, where As an
actual fact, I've got to be the most boring geezer
in the world because I ain't got no past, and
so if nothing else, it was a ginormous relief when
I got the knighthood because it got me off the hook. Boy,
getting this knighthood is great. It's got to make it

(37:10):
a lot easier for me to commit sex crimes without
getting noticed. Thanks the Queen, off I go.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
He just says that, wow, the clothes are crazy.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
Yeah. Now, the same year, nineteen ninety, he gets knighted
by the Queen. Because that's not enough, Savill also receives
a papal knighthood. The Pope knights him too. I mean
apropos the Catholic Church and the British royal family just
no notes. Guys nailing it.

Speaker 4 (37:41):
Like Pulpe John Paul the second.

Speaker 2 (37:43):
Yeah yeah, JP two makes him a knight. Now it's
an interesting side note when all of this comes out
and it becomes incredibly obvious to the entire world that
Jimmy Savile's been a massive pedophile the entire time and
abused god knows how many people. There's like people who
are like, hey, should we like strip him of his
knighthood and his papal knighthood. Maybe we like that probably

(38:06):
should happen, right, And that can't happen. Actually, it's impossible
to do that because there's no permanent register of nights.

Speaker 6 (38:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
Once you die, you just drop off the list, you know,
no longer a night. That's just like how being a
night works. So by the when he died, he stopped
being a knight. There's no way to like retroactively go
back and strip the honors. I actually prefer it that way.
Like I've seen people complain about this, I have no
issue with this. I don't think either the Catholic Church

(38:35):
or the British Royal family should ever get to forget
that they united this guy. I think he should be
Sir Jimmy Saffle forever.

Speaker 3 (38:44):
I was like, why, but.

Speaker 2 (38:47):
I see your point.

Speaker 4 (38:48):
But also, term limits baby, termlaments.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Not the first pedophile night, not the last. Honestly, probably
more pedophile nights than non pedophile nights if you're going
his story.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
That's crazy.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
Good stuff. Yeah, and there's some Again. I don't think
either these institutions should ever get to or the BBC
should ever get to be free of the shame of
having been affiliated with Jimmy Savell. But there are some
very funny interviews with this representative of the Catholic Church.
The Vatican spokesman at the time was Federico Lombardi at

(39:25):
the time that Saville died, and like I found one
interview with him in the AP that includes this line.
He also said Savell would never have received the honor
had allegations about his behavior been known, and Lombardi stressed
the Vatican's firm condemnation of any type of sexual abuse
against children. Really, oh really, is that so?

Speaker 4 (39:45):
Feeri uah?

Speaker 2 (39:46):
Vaticans never supported sexual abuse of children.

Speaker 3 (39:49):
That's good.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
I was just reading about how two hundred thousand such
or so like French kids are known to have been
raped by Catholic priests. But good, good to know you
guys take a firm line on that stuff, Like I know,
because the Catholic Church and this current Pope have had
some pretty good takes on certain things happening politically recently,
and you know that's good. I'm glad the Catholic Church

(40:10):
is especially pushing back on our administrations like nightmarish genocidal
immigration policies, and hold every member of the church as
responsible for these the things that we're done. But we
shouldn't forget what the Catholic Church is historically and what
they did and what they enabled, and this is part
of that. It's a little part of that, given the

(40:31):
grand scheme of those crimes, but it's part of it. Right,
good stuff. It's probably time for an ad break.

Speaker 4 (40:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's take five and then just just
traumadup it on, buddy.

Speaker 7 (40:46):
Yeah, Okay, we're back and we're just going to power
through the rest of the horrible things.

Speaker 4 (40:57):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
In nineteen ninety, in the year years right before he
was knighted, Saville is known and people who are part
were around the royal family noted that he acted as
a fixer for Charles and Diana's marriage. When they start
having like marriage issues, He's brought in to be like
their their relationship coach. Basically the guy.

Speaker 4 (41:14):
Who's never been in a relationship.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
Never love that, and he's the great idea?

Speaker 1 (41:20):
Was that?

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah, Yeah, I think it was. It was Prince Charles,
although I think Princess Died was fine with it. Like
they both seem to have liked him, like genuinely liked
and admired.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
That's like the only thing they've ever agreed on is that.
Jimmy So yeah, a good guy guy. Now it seems
to me it's really fucking weird.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
Perfect Guardian quote. Saville is understood who visited Prince Charles's
official London residence several times in the late nineteen eighties
when he was acting as a kind of marriage counselor
between Charles and Princess Diana. And there's a lot of
there's been a lot of like the British equivalent of
like a public records request, both around Thatcher and around
the royal family and Savell, and we've gotten some stuff.

(42:00):
Some of what I've talked about came out through those
records requests. A lot of his conversations and his correspondence
with Thatcher is still basically like uh, censored or whatever.
It's like I guess sensitive or whatever. So we don't know,
Like there's actually a surprising amount that's been redacted of
his relationship with Thatcher, which I'm very curious to know.

(42:21):
And there's a similar things going on with the Royal family.
But what we do know, based on letters and documents
that have come out since his death, is that Stavel
is basically the volunteer pr specialist for the royal family.
He's one of the first people they call when there's
a scandal. Well, part of the thing is the fucking
Prince Charles really trusts him because, as I noted, Jimmy's

(42:43):
like a former coal miner from the north, so he's
like a down home country boy basically, but in you.

Speaker 4 (42:50):
Know, and was buddies with Lord man Batten, who was
like a father freaking Charles. Yeah, there's all that.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, so he was friends with Mount Batton. And also
he's a he Charles sees him as like a representative
of the common man, right, He's not gonna actually talk
to real poor people, but like he can talk to Jimmy,
and Jimmy can tell him how commoners think, right and
how commoners will react to things. So you trust Jimmy
more than you trust your fancy went to eaton or whatever.

(43:16):
You know, pr representatives who talk the right way. No, no, no,
Jimmy knows how the common man works, right, he can
tell us what we should say. Based on interviews with
Dicky Arbider, who was media relations liaison for the Prince
and Princess of Wales at the time, Savill cut an
upsetting figure even within the rarefied world of the royal household. Quote.

(43:37):
He would walk into the office and do the rounds
of the young ladies, taking their hands and rubbing his
lips all the way up their arms if they were
wearing short sleeves, if it was summer and their arms
were bare, his bottom lip would curl out and he
would run it up their arms. This was at Saint
James Place. The women were in their mid to late
twenties doing typing and secretarial work. No no, yeah, gross,

(43:59):
deeply bad. You'll hear about this a lot. This is
an important tactic of his. What he's doing the whole
when he's casually meeting women in the world. These are
adult women, but he'll do these like really exaggerated like
gomez atoms, you know style, like kissing all the way
up their arm gestures. Right, He does this a lot.

(44:19):
You'll also find people talking about this in like these
analyzes that different institutions like broad More and Stoke Mandible
published right about how Savil would do stuff like this
when he would meet women, and often like meet women
generally that he's not actually abusing or anything. And this
is an important point, as summarized on the website Investigative

(44:39):
Psychiatries right up quote. Savil also used bizarre and flamboyantly
inappropriate public behavior towards women, such as extravagant greetings and
kissing up their arms to their lips as a calculated
method to scope their reactions engage the level of resistance
he might face. If he does this and you don't
turn away or pull away at all, and you let
him get all the way to your lips, he knows okay,

(45:01):
if I want to. This is someone who's more vulnerable, right.
That's that's the interpretation that people have made of this behavior,
and I think it's probably accurate. It makes sense. There's
a lot of reports of this.

Speaker 3 (45:14):
I would have been out the door.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Yeah yeah, yeah. He should have gotten hit in the
face every time. But he's doing it again. This is
the weird behavior that's oh, Jimmy's like that with everybody.
He's just really like no, no, no, this isn't being
sexually inappropriate. He's like that with everyone. That's just how
he is.

Speaker 5 (45:31):
You know. Also, if your being sexually inappropriate with the
ladies that are of age, it's also like another strange
form of cover.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Yep, yep, exactly exactly, and it works very well for
that purpose. In nineteen ninety one, Savill sat down for
a BBC radio interview on the show In the Psychiatrist's
Share with doctor Anthony Clare. Savill made some statements that
would subsequently become quite famous. For one, he claimed to
have no emotions. Quote that would make me bad news

(46:00):
for a psychiatrist or a psychologist, because there's just nothing
to find. What you see is what there is. Now
that's not true one its face. Many of Jimmy's victims
have written about the rages that he would drop into
if he were denied or hindered in any way. This
is a guy who got violent and could get violent,
and who got very angry when he was angry. But
the fact that he says this, that he claims, so

(46:21):
I don't have emotions, I don't really feel things is
part of the mythic wall that he's building around himself
to protect himself. If Jimmy doesn't like kids, there's no
reason to explore his relationship with kids. If he has
no emotions, there's nothing to figure out about his inner life.
Stop looking, right, That's why he's doing this. And the
only thing that's really remarkable to me is how well
this all works. Part of why this is something I'm

(46:44):
not super well qualified to say to talk about, but
it's the thing I've seen written about is that British
culture had and still has for generations celebrated a specific
kind of what we're often called quote uniquely British eccentrics. Right,
there's a long, proud tradition of like weirdos in public
life in British history that is, up to a point, celebrated.

(47:08):
If you get famous enough for something, then the fact
that you're like a weirdo stops being a thing that
you'd get like mocked for and like something people celebrate. Right,
It's just kind of this aspect of Britain's not the
only place where this happens, but it's known as like
a very British thing, and in fact, in thatchers like
her announcement of his knighthood. She talks about him as
like he's one of the great British eccentrics. You know.

(47:30):
Sometimes our wonderful little island, it produces these splendid weirdos,
you know, and we like to celebrate our weirdos in England.
That's kind of the idea right now. It's been noted
by several of these analyzes that I've read and seen
summarize that like this whole persona, this thing is calculated

(47:50):
like he is. He understands that there's this attitude that like, well,
often a lot of like great public figures in British
history are these eccentrics. So if I'm just an eccentric,
then I'm not dangerous, right, and it discourages people from
looking into me. Right. It's a boundary testing mechanism. That's
how some of these reports will frame it.

Speaker 6 (48:11):
Right.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
He's seeing how much quote unquote calculated oddity is one
of the terms used an institution will tolerate, and that
helps him see, can I violate more rules?

Speaker 6 (48:22):
Right?

Speaker 2 (48:23):
Okay? I did this thing which is like harmless, but
you're not supposed to do it. Did they let me Okay,
that means I can do a little more. That means
I can do a little more, right, That's how he's working.
This is very methodical, right, and that's what we call
these people predators, you know. And there's a difference. There's
an important difference. And I don't want this to come

(48:44):
across as minimizing the other thing. But when you're talking
about like some like famous musician who statutory commits statutory
rape on like a thirteen or fourteen year old girl
because like she's around, and he doesn't give a fuck,
and he's being provided with with with girls. You know,
he shows up to do it and he's provided girls
and he doesn't care how old they are. And that

(49:05):
happens at a point in this musician's life. That's like
a bad thing. There should be accountability for that. It's
not okay. It's a real problem if that doesn't ever
occur outside, if that person is not continuing to go
after people of that age. There's a difference between that
and predatory behavior, where you're actively going out of your

(49:25):
way to find victims and to groom victims and to
groom institutions to provide you with victims. These are both
really bad things. But they're different levels, right. I think
it's important to see the difference between someone who does
not care morally about what they're doing as long as
they get to like satisfy their urges, and someone whose

(49:46):
brain works in such a way that they are constantly
looking for holes in organizations and institutions and people that
they can use in order to gain leverage so that
they can commit harm, you.

Speaker 5 (49:58):
Know, the point where they're doing charity so that they
can hurt people.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
Yes, that's a different breed.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
There's a real different breed. It's an escalation. So this
scoping behavior, which is mentioned in the broad More report
talking about his interactions with women, is a really important
thing to understand because like these are like the fact
that he's doing reconnaissance is noteworthy, and there's a there's
a good line and that investigative psychiatry right up that

(50:25):
that that reads quote he was constantly probing for the
point where Jimmy being Jimmy ended and Sir Jimmy Savill began.
I think that's it. That's an important thing to note.
The term grooming is usually deployed to refer to something
abusers do to their victims, but What I like about
that article is that it talks about institutional grooming, right,

(50:47):
the grooming of these different hospitals and organizations that allow
him to get access to his victims. Quote, he identified
the specific needs of an institution, such as fundraising in
the NHS or industrial mediation in broad more, and fulfilled
them to create a debt of gratitude. This symbolic power
then allowed him to operate in a clinical vacuum. So

(51:07):
this is a complex, multipart process. He's putting a lot
of thought into this and a lot of effort. Once
he's got an in.

Speaker 5 (51:14):
Sorry no, it mirrors the Epstein thing in a way too,
like whether the charity and also the fact that I
don't know if he was, but if people think he's
a spy or whatever, that's the point. That's the level
of institutional grooming he's doing. Yeah, that's super interesting.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
Yeah yeah. Yeah. So once he's got an in at
a facility that he wants to be in at, either
because his fundraising saves the hospital or whatever, or because
he's been appointed to a task force or you know, however,
he gets in, Sevil will start dressing. When he's working
at these hospitals, like a member of the clinical staff.
He wears a white coat, right. He helps in aspects

(51:57):
of patient care. He's helping during intake, and he's not
just grooming his victims. He's grooming the staff to accept
him as legitimate. And the fact that and off. Most
of the time he's not abusing the patient. Most of
the time when he's acting as an orderly he is
just doing orderly work, and that grooms the patients to
no one's on guard when Jimmy walks in their room.

(52:18):
He's supposed to be there. You know, there is some evidence,
not direct, but like you can tell it by inference
that during the nineties, Jimmy Savill continued to participate in
parties and events where teenagers were provided as basically sex
toys for the rich and powerful. Petronella Wyatt, a British
journalist who once had an affair with Boris Johnson, wrote
an article for The Spectator, which is a conservative magazine,

(52:42):
in which she relates some of the things she experienced
while socializing with this crowd in the years after Sir
Jimmy's knighthood. Back in the nineteen nineties, I used to
see teenage girls with eyes the color of Vervin at
some of the extravagant parties I was invited to. Looking back,
I have a fair idea of why they were there,
but it never occurred to me to ask their age
or protest their presence. Was I complicit and like, yeah, yeah,

(53:04):
you were? Like definitely, That's what that means. She doesn't
allege that Jimmy was providing the girls at these parties.
In fact, she doesn't interrogate how that's happening at all.
But we know he was aware or he was at
many of these events right, And we know he was
in a position to his access to psychiatric hospitals and

(53:26):
his access to like the Duncroft Approved School for Girls,
could have allowed him to provide girls to such events.
We know he took girls out of facilities like Duncroft
and took them too, like the BBC to see film
and know so we know he's taking girls that he
is raping and taking them to secondary and tertiary locations

(53:47):
from hospitals and from like the approved school. Is it
so crazy to think that maybe he used his access
to provide girls to parties for his rich and famous friends.
I can't prove that. Is that such a crazy thing
to think might have happened.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
I don't want a crazy leave.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
I think it's pretty likely that something like that went on.
I might even say that at this point the burden
of proof would be on the attendees of those parties
to prove that nothing like that happened, because of what
we know happened now. I've noted a few times in
these episodes that several friends of Jimmy's, including Gary Glitter,
were brought down by child molestation scandals, but Jimmy remained

(54:28):
untainted throughout the rest of his life and career. Some
of this was surely due to his royal connections. Saville
was invited to Prince Charles's fortieth birthday, and when Jimmy
turned eighty in two thousand and six, he received a
box of Cuban cigars and a set of cuff links
from the Now well, now he's king. He wasn't king
in two thousand and six, but from Prince Charles, with
a note saying, nobody will ever know what you have

(54:50):
done for this country. This is to go some way
in thanking you for that.

Speaker 5 (54:55):
Hmm.

Speaker 4 (54:56):
He's stupid or creepy or both.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
He's probably just talking about the marriage counseling and the
pr stuff probably not worth looking into. Probably fine, probably
fine ll. Prince Charles probably didn't know anything about, you know,
all the rape and stuff. King Charles definitely innocent, for sure,
for sure. It was just just Prince Andrew was the
only bad one, and Lord Mountbatten only bad ones. You know,

(55:20):
we're good anyway, cool stuff. Princess Die unfortunately remained friends
with Savill for the remainder of her life. So far
as I can tell, she traveled with him to Stoke,
Mandibal and other hospitals for charitable events, and she seems
to have held him in high regard. I don't know.
I don't know how much of that was set dressing.
I don't know her in her life. I don't know
what she would have been aware of. Probably I assume

(55:43):
Savill would have tried to hide the details of what
he was doing. But again, enough stuff was obvious. We've
quoted so much from him being interviewed. She can't have
not known something. She has to have been a little
aware at the very least that something wasn't right with
this guy. I don't know. I can't say for sure.

(56:05):
In the late nineties and early two thousands, Jimmy was
no longer a massive TV star in his own right,
but he was now famous for being famous, and he
was regularly trotted out in documentaries and TV shows. He's
a big guest star in this period of time, and
a lot of like BBC shows. In nineteen ninety five,
the journalist and TV host Andrew Neil has him on

(56:26):
for an episode of Is This Your Life? Which I
think is like a supposed to celebrate different kind of
famous people in British life, right. So Neil has Saffalon
for a friendly interview which includes some cheeky questions about
his romantic history and his past is a wrestler. And
even then, when he's being interviewed about his life on
TV in nineteen ninety five, Jimmy can't avoid throwing in

(56:49):
some side remarks hinting at his crimes. So here's the
segment from that episode where he's talking Andrew's asking him
about his time as a wrestler. He used to be
a wrestler.

Speaker 7 (56:59):
I still hi, I'm fit in every girls school in
this country.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
Great. Got a lot of laughs, ha ha, a crowd
of wild I do like the look on because after
he says that one of the people who's on the
show with Neil is like a black woman who's like,
I'm assuming some sort of journalist to present her and
she has this like, oh you just said that. Huh, yeah,

(57:28):
I don't know anything else about that, lady, but her
eyes say a lot. Sure, but you can, I mean
you can just hear in the joke how casually he
is about it, right, Like, just the audio of it
says enough that the how casually he jokes about wrestling
children a girls school, those are kids, and the uproarious

(57:48):
laughter from the audience very funny. Hah, Jimmy, Yes, it's
so funny how you joke about molesting little girls? We
love it.

Speaker 5 (57:54):
Here.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
In the year two thousand, one of Britain's best documentarians,
Louis Thereau, published a documentary on Jimmy and the flat
that Jimmy had originally purchased for his mother. One of
the shortcomings of these episodes is we're not nearly going
into enough to tale about how weird Jimmy is about
his mom, but it's clearly the only person he ever
loves and when she passes on, and she had In

(58:20):
two thousand, when Louis throw shows up at his flat.
To this documentary, Jimmy's mom had died twenty seven years earlier,
and he still kept her room exactly the way it
had been the day she died. Her clothing was like
shrink wrapped in plastic, but still folded in her wardrobe.
As I noted earlier, Threau does probe some of the

(58:40):
rumors around Jimmy in a, you know, a legally safe way,
like starting when he asks him like, why did you
claim to hate children? And Jimmy's like, well, it stops
the tabloids from looking into stuff? And after that line,
Louis asks, is that basically so the tabloids don't pursue
this hole? Is he or isn't he a pedophile line?
And Saville replied, oh, I how do they know whether

(59:01):
or not I am? How does anybody know whether I am?
Nobody knows whether I am or not. I know I'm not.
That's my policy and it's worked to dream.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
Cool riddle bro Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (59:12):
Yeah, fun fun stuff now. In a write up on
all this, the UK Mirror notes quote Louis had attempted
to report Savill for abuse after the production, but the
report was not followed up on. He claimed that he
attempted to report him in two thousand and one after
a female came forward and claimed that she to have
been one of Savill's girlfriends when she was fifteen. So

(59:32):
Louie doesn't do nothing, but I gotta say like, and
I've been a fan of the guy for most of
my adult life. He had a big influence on how
I interview people, how I approach stuff as a journalist.
I really do have a lot of admiration for him,
and particularly he's very good at not giving at getting people,
not just getting people to talk, giving them enough rope
to hang themselves, but pressing them on things that are

(59:54):
hard to press on, that are awkward and like uncomfortable.
Like that's a thing Louis has made a career on doing,
and he doesn't do nearly enough considering what he must
have known. And one of the things that frustrates me
is after Savile dies, even knowing all this, even having
allegedly reported him in two thousand and two thousand and one,
Louis makes a big show of publicly mourning Savile, of

(01:00:16):
calling him basically a great Britain right after he dies.
Up until the allegations spill out, and I think it's
just my guess would be once he dies. There's first off,
there was massive immediate public mourning. It doesn't come out
immediately like he has a huge He has basically a
state funeral. The Royal Marines are there escorting his fucking

(01:00:37):
gold casket, so there's a big The whole country is
mourning him. I think number one, Louis probably didn't want
to be the only person being like I think this
guy was a pedophile, he's a BBC personality. There's probably
professional pressure. He just doesn't And I shouldn't be focusing
on Louis more than all of these other editors that

(01:00:59):
we've talked about, because he did more than nothing, but
it just wasn't enough. And that's all I'll say. I
don't think this is like damning of him into perpetuity.
From my understanding, Louis regrets not doing more. He's talked
pretty openly about like the fact that he wishes he
had done a better job, and that's life. It's all
I'll go on from there, but I think it's worth noting.

(01:01:22):
In two thousand and seven, one of the Duncroft girls
Saville abused went to police in Surrey and reported him.
The police ultimately concluded there was not enough evidence to
pursue a case. Later investigation has made it clear that
the evidence was mishandled and the department was pushed to
avoid following. Up to the end of his life, Saville
maintained friendships with influential members of the Yorkshire Police, hosting

(01:01:43):
what he called his Friday morning club, in which he'd
have coffee with various senior inspectors and the like. It's
like him having coffee with a bunch of cops every Friday.
These is really at the end of his life once
all of his pedophile friends go to prison. His primary
social group is cops who I'm guessing also have been
pedophiles or.

Speaker 3 (01:02:02):
At least covering up for him.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
Certainly covering up for him, we know they did. That
was Jimmy maybe using his access to teenage girls to
provide police officers with access to teenage girls, a thing
he kind of insinuated doing or previously. I don't know,
someone should look into that. Maybe Jimmy's influence was such
that in two thousand and eight, the Yorkshire Police picked
him to voice several West Yorkshire Talking Street signs giving

(01:02:27):
advice to locals on of all things crime prevention. A
great two thousand and eight, cool two thousand and eight.
But in the aughts stories kept spreading online about Jimmy.
A victim had come forward in two thousand and three,
and a complaint in two thousand and eight was reported
on by the Sun. So it's starting. This wall he's

(01:02:48):
got between him and the media is starting to falter
and flicker out even by that point in time. In
two thousand and nine, Jimmy was interviewed by police in Surrey.
He said, up the complaint. That's why I have up
in Yorkshire where I live in Leeds. It's a collection
of senior police persons who come to see me socially.
I give them all my weirdo letters and they take
them back to the station and say, oh, have you
seen what Jimmy's got today? When the police asked whether

(01:03:09):
Savill gives them to the police, and so basically he
says this, and he's being interviewed and they're like, well,
do you give these letters to the police to investigate Savills?
Then response no, no, not investigate them, no, not to
do anything with them. But if anything happens to me.
So he's basically insinuating, Oh, I just give these to
the police in case some crazy fan murders me. Right,

(01:03:30):
what's actually happening here is he's whenever he has a problem,
whenever he thinks he's going to get reported on, he
has his cop friends he goes to and they were
pretty good at making it go away. Jimmy Saville was
able to outrun justice his entire life, but he did
not outrun death. He dies on October twenty ninth, twenty eleven.
Once he was gone, his power to stop such investigations

(01:03:51):
came to a sputtering end. In less than a year.
He went from publicly mourned and buried in a gold
coffin escorted by the Marines, to having his headstone ground
down to rubble. They removed the big headstone he's got,
which says his epitaph was it was nice while it lasted.
Em like they have to in order to stop people

(01:04:12):
from like defacing the cemetery. Basically they have to grind
it into fucking crumbs and ushould just let people to
face it. But yeah, you know, numerous police and institutional
investigations are launched, and by December of twenty twelve, just
a year after his death, the number of alleged victims
had reached four hundred and fifty. That is, a year
after he dies. Where are we now in terms of

(01:04:35):
total victims known? Well, I'm going to quote from a
twenty fourteen article in The Guardian. The BBC will be
plunged into a major crisis with the publication of a
damning review expected next month that will reveal its staff
turned a blind eye to the rape and sexual assault
of up to one thousand girls and boys by Jimmy
Saville in the corporation's changing rooms and studios. Dame Janet Smith,

(01:04:56):
a former Court of Appeal judge who previously led the
inquiry into the by doctor Harold Shipman, will say into
her in her report that the true number of victims
of savile sexual proclivities may never be known, but that
his behavior had been recognized by BBC executives who took
no action. I want to really highlight something we know.
He rapes and molests at least a thousand boys and

(01:05:18):
girls in BBC changing rooms and studios. I've see this,
mister Porter, is a thousand victims. That's just a thousand victims.
In BBC property.

Speaker 5 (01:05:28):
Yeah, I've been talking about the home.

Speaker 3 (01:05:32):
Thousand in the hospital thousands, yes, thousands.

Speaker 5 (01:05:38):
Also, the original victims are old as ship by now
and most of them are dead, probably died, yes.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
And he's specifically going after people who are probably statistically
going to die earlier because they're folks who run into
trouble with the law. They're folks who have mental health
or physical health problems.

Speaker 4 (01:05:54):
You know, the children that he uh assaulted when they
were in the hospital for terminal illnesses. That's one of
the worst things I've ever heard.

Speaker 2 (01:06:04):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yep.

Speaker 4 (01:06:08):
What did he die from?

Speaker 1 (01:06:10):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:06:10):
Being an old piece of shit? I forget he dies
in his home peacefully.

Speaker 3 (01:06:15):
I was hoping it hurt.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
Yeah. I don't have that for you. I do have
one little bit of satisfaction Shoten Freud or whatever from
earlier in his life. And I mentioned there's a wrestling
story that I didn't tell earlier that I wanted to
save for until now, right, because this is pretty bleak
and I don't have a good Jimmy got his comeuppance,

(01:06:38):
but there is one time where he got a little
bit of punishment for being a giant monster. So we're
gonna talk about that now. So during his wrestling days,
there's this wrestler named Exotic Adrian Street who like he's
he's like he's one of he's a heel, right, He's
somebody fans loved to hate. I think he's like a
guy who dresses like very flamboyantly, you know, in order

(01:06:59):
to and that's part of like his uh, this fucking
evil like weirdo. Right, And so he's matched with savile
at some point and he would let it. And I
found all this in an article for Whales Online. So
it was Wales Online that talked to Adrian Street about
this quote. The promoters were trying to put Savel across
is a bit of a tough guy in those days,
and they were trying to get other proper wrestlers to

(01:07:20):
throw their matches with him. It was all part of
some big, stupid gimmick, says Street. And when I found
out I was up against him next, I wasn't very happy,
not least because I'd just beaten world lightweight champion George
Kid at Noddingham Ice Rink the night before. In fact,
I'd put him in the hospital. So when it was
it suggested like, hey, why don't you know you're gonna
fight this DJ, Well, let's have it in a draw.

(01:07:42):
That'll be good for everybody. And Street's like, fuck that
shit quote. His cronies were telling me, don't underestimate Jim,
he's trained with the Royal Marines. But I was having
none of it. I kicked his legs from underneath him,
so he hit the deck that I picked him up
by his hair, held him upside down, and dropped him
on his skull. Then when I looked down at my hands,
I realized that were covered in hair saveles. I'd torn

(01:08:02):
huge clumps out of his scalp. He absolutely crucified the bloke,
And when I spoke to my wife afterwards, she said
I'd looked like a hungry fox going after a chicken.
Savile never returned to the wrestling ring after that, and
I never clapped eyes on him again, like that's that's
the that's the story. And he did tell whales online.
Had I known then the full extent of what I
know about him now, I'd have given him an even

(01:08:23):
bigger beating, were that physically possible. So at least we've
got that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:29):
Okay, that was That was a little treat we needed.

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
I definitely you guys deserved something.

Speaker 3 (01:08:35):
Thanks for the sprinkle.

Speaker 2 (01:08:37):
Thank you Adrian Street for beating the shit out of
Jimmy Saville.

Speaker 4 (01:08:42):
Someone had still fuck up that this man lived to
what twenty eleven did you say, or twenty twelve, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:47):
Twenty eleven. He dies late twenty eleven.

Speaker 4 (01:08:49):
Yeah, and he that all of the survivors of this man,
which there were thousands, thousands of victims, did not get
to have any sort of justice while he was alive. No,
they did not get to confront him. Nobody believed them.

(01:09:09):
The libel laws fucked them over. The BBC is despicable.
Royal Family is the Royal family. Yeah, it's just unfathomably
gross that this man was one of the worst pedophiles
of maybe all time, and of the one of the

(01:09:32):
pedoist of the files for sure, and was you know,
united by both the Royal family and the Catholic.

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
Church, and was.

Speaker 4 (01:09:43):
Given I don't know, there's certain thoughts that things that
are like you know, impregnating minors and the fact that
he was given an apartment at.

Speaker 2 (01:09:51):
That girls fucking.

Speaker 4 (01:09:57):
Psychiatric hospital. Sorry, so many people just like let this
happen and let him be this person.

Speaker 5 (01:10:08):
Yeah, it's disgusting, and Robert kind of brilliant storytelling in
episode one when you give us the graphic horrible scene
because everything we've been through after I just keep remembering
because it's easy to kind of gloss over the scope
of it. And when you think about that times five thousand,

(01:10:30):
ten thousand, we have no idea, Holy shit.

Speaker 6 (01:10:35):
Yeah, at least at least we know who to really
blame for the Princess Diana, Prince Charles divorce, the guy advice.

Speaker 2 (01:10:46):
Jimmy Savill's who's to blame?

Speaker 4 (01:10:49):
Maybe if somebody else we couldn't those those those kids
could have stayed in love. It wasn't you know, for
all of Charles is hateful and Fidelas.

Speaker 2 (01:10:57):
Is surely the only thing wrong, only thing wrong with
their relationship.

Speaker 4 (01:11:01):
Yeah, anyways, Court, you want to plug your book for us?

Speaker 3 (01:11:05):
Yeah, I need a shower. But check out my book.
It's called Girl Gone Wild.

Speaker 5 (01:11:11):
It is it's a coming of age story about trying
to make it in Hollywood, and it is a feminist
story that you definitely need after this.

Speaker 3 (01:11:21):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
Yeah, that's a great idea. Why don't you all enjoy that?
And I will cook up some horrible for you, but
honestly probably a lot less horrible than this next week.
Bye weoll bye.

Speaker 4 (01:11:42):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:12:04):
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