Arcane libel laws and the greed of people in power enabled British media personality and sexual offender Jimmy Savile to dodge the legal system for over 30 years, says journalist Meirion Jones.
Jimmy Savile Photo: YouTube screenshot
Meirion Jones Photo: Supplied
After Savile's death in 2011, Meirion Jones produced an exposing documentary that eventually helped kick off a police investigation.
He tells Kim Hill that he first stumbled across the "Jimmy Savile story" in the early 70s.
As a teenager, Jones visited his aunt and grandmother at his aunt's workplace.
"My aunt ran this bizarre institution [Duncroft School in Middlesex] which was a cross between a prison and a finishing school for 14 to 16-year-old girls."
Occasionally, Duncroft hosted garden parties with VIPs, including Jimmy Savile, who at the time was launching his wildly popular kids TV show Jim'll Fix It.
What was weird about Savile was that he kept turning up at the school, Jones says.
"You'd see his Rolls-Royce convertible on the gravel drive. And we sort of thought 'what on earth is he doing here?'
"I didn't think he was evil but I thought he was hiding something. He had all these stock phrases - 'now then, now then', 'boys and girls', 'as it happens'. And it felt like sort of a screen that was hiding him from the real world. So I always thought there was something a bit strange there but I didn't actually think he was evil."
Jones's view of Savile changed dramatically in 1990 when Lynn Barber confirmed in a written piece in The Independent that most of her British journalist peers thought he was a pedophile.
"I started thinking what had I actually seen there? I'd seen a man who is nearly 50 driving out in his Rolls-Royce with one, two, three 14-year-old girls in his car."
Over the decades, our concept of who can be a sexual abuser has changed, Jones says.
"The picture we were painted of pedophiles [when I was a child] were they were strangers in white vans who handed out sweeties. not the uncle-type figure, mum's new boyfriend, the guy who hangs around and is helpful at the school, the school teacher. That wasn't the picture we had of pedophiles."
But how did Savile get away with so many offences over so many decades?
It's true that he "groomed" the nation, Jones says. Two women who visited the UK in the 1970s told him that they could not comprehend Savile's popularity.
"The guy is so obviously sleazy, shady, dodgy, dangerous. They couldn't work out why we, as Brits, just sat there and lapped this up and went 'ho ho ho, isn't he funny, isn't he great, he's a friend of The Beatles, Margaret Thatcher, Prince Charles. He must be okay'."
Jimmy Savile and Prince Charles Photo: YouTube screenshot
Savile was also protected by Britain's libel laws, which are "stacked in favour of the villain", Jones says.
"Time and time again people attempted to tell the Savile story and they were never able to get it past their newspaper lawyers.
"For decades, Jimmy Savile got away with this because every time anybody got close to revealing it British libel law kicked in and there was no way of telling that story without being sued.
"At the moment, you can be a Jimmy Savile or a character like that, and the libel law will be in your favour. When public interest is so amazingly strong… there must be more defence for journalists. We must be able to tell those stories."
"Time and time again people attempted to tell the Savile story and they were never able to get it past their newspaper lawyers."
Savile was unchallenged by people in power, Jones says, particularly those high up at the BBC who had known he was an abuser since at least the early 1970s.
At one point, Savile was interrogated by BBC bosses about taking underage girls home, he says, but because they valued his huge earnings so much they didn't actually tell him to stop doing it, just to keep it quiet.
By refusing to expose Jimmy Savile for who he was, the BBC were covering up their own 30-plus year cover-up, Jones says.
The broadcaster's claim that they'd never investigated Savile was effectively "a cover-up of a cover-up of a cover-up".
"At the top levels of the BBC from 1973 on, they actually knew what was going on and did nothing about it. They just kept going with this man who was drawing in 20-million [strong] audiences every Saturday night.
"When Savile was dying, there were discussions at a very high level of the BBC about whether or not they should do an obituary of him. The decision was not to do an obituary because of what they called 'the dark side of Jimmy Savile'.
"I think they knew a lot about what that dark side was."
Meirion Jones appears in Netflix docu-series Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story:
