Hollie greig is basically a girl with downs who (mostly through her controlling mother who has been the driving force behind this so I cannot blame the girl herself given she is mentally retarded) has accused essentially anyone who is anyone in the north east of scotland (and wider!) of being involved in a ginormous paedophile ring.
This campaign has attracted all kinds of loonies, including one who was sent to prison (I do not support this btw) because of the extreme-ness of his attacks.
It’s mostly to be found supported by David Icke types but I am surprised you haven’t heard of it as it’s been spammed to almost any major UK forum.
Anyway my point was that the saville stuff seemed not much more plausible than those people. So maybe I will turn out to be wrong and there’s an enormous paedophile ring involving everyone in the world raping a kid with downs.
I just read that 300 people have come forward about being abused by Savile.
300!
I don’t know anything about the guy, but that number seems a bit excessive. Any British dopers think/feel that there is a bit of a witch-hunt atmosphere about this?
It does seem a lot, and I share your feelings that there might be some bandwagon jumping, however, consider - he came into personal contact with an enormous number of people during his celebrity career - in fact, that was what he was all about - meeting people.
Plus the hospitals, children’s homes and other institutions he had access to. A couple of these places even provided him with an office and living accommodation.
In the US this is still a non-story. I’m getting my information from this thread. I’m curious, this started off as a poll before the documentary came out. I’m wondering, has anyone changed their minds from before?
I have. I voted “I would say that the allegations are too unclear but in my gut it feels wrong and I think he did it” but would now change it to “I would say that the allegations are serious enough he probably (>50%) was a mollester”, I am uncomfortable saying “I would say he was a mollester beyond reasonable doubt” without a proper trial and investigation.
That’s the odd thing - I think the police stated that Savile was a predatory pedo, but can they say that just on evidence? It took Vietnam to lock up Glitter, I don’t know what their laws are like - obviously better than the UK though.
Nah, Glitter got several months in UK prison for possession of child pornography (discovered by PC World technicians) before he fled to Vietnam. In Vietnam he got several years for fiddling with little girls, and then kicked out and had to return here because no other country would have him. Chances are, if he’s now convicted of abusing children he won’t see the outside of a prison until he’s taken out in a box.
IIRC, Savile is on record saying (not long before his death) that his reputation would be destroyed by revelations. In addition, we’re finding out that all of this has been a rather open secret.
I’m flummoxed that 300 (or more) people would wait until after he died to speak up. Even more, I’m having a hard time understanding both
(a) How Savile knew this was going to happen, and
(b) That it actually happened the way he described - that he would be OK as long as he lived, but after he died his reputation would be destroyed.
It’s like everybody said “Well, now that he’s dead, we can go after the old pedophile!” But why not before he was dead?
OK, think of it this way… you’re a 13 year old girl, you get groped (or worse) by Jimmy Savile in 1978. 20 years later, it’s 1998, you’re 33 and with a 10 year-old girl watching Jimmy Savile and your daughter says “I like him, mommy!” And you say nothing? You don’t get upset that this guy was able to do what he did to you, and not only got away with it, but is in the same arena, allowing him access to other kids? You’re not horrified by what your daughter just said, enough so to say “I’ve got to put a stop to this!” and start writing letters to the Sun and Times?
Multiply this by 300+ victims and, well, confusion on my part.
It does not surprise me at all. I’m not saying that all of the 300 were true but it would not surprise me if most were given his access. I have dealt with several cases of predatory sex offenders. Often the victims bury the abuse and never talk about it. It takes one to come forward and the flood gates open. I’m currently work a case in which it took well over ten years to have one person come forward. Once she did it led to name after name. Once they knew someone talked about it the accounts come freely. These are people who have no chance of financial gain. It’s a very common way for these things to play out.
People had made complaints about his behaviour before he died, but they were all rubbished and made to feel bad for even suggesting it.
The most remarkable thing is that a man who any half-decent private detective could have dug up a ton of dirt, or at least dirty allegations, on, could have been allowed to be in the company of any royal. If the bbc are sweating, I’m sure there are other high ups who are shitting bricks.
Libel laws are much, much stricter in the uk than the usa - american celebrities sometimes choose to sue for libel over here rather than at home if both were an option, even occasionally when the uk connection is tenuous. This is one of the main reasons given for the media not printing stories about savile - he would have bankrupted them.
And it really is not easy for people to speak out against past abuse, especially when it’s teenage girls - they might have thought it was their fault, that no-one would believe them, that the press would make their lives hell (savile raised huge sums of money for charity and was knighted for it), and that social services would get involved.
If they’d known there were hundreds of other women to back up their story, maybe it would have been different, but they didn’t.
Btw, no little girl (especially in 1998, when his show wasn’t on tv) would have seen savile on tv and liked him. He was always strange-looking and creepy. Plus, somehow I suspect that his victims didn’t regularly sit down to watch his show with their kids.
It is hard to accept, but he managed to build up an almost mythical reputation (almost to the point of taking on a life of its own) as a philanthropist - allegations here and there could just be waved off as people trying to make trouble.
If they’d all come forward at once, maybe something would have happened during his lifetime, but there was definitely a powerful cult-like aura surrounding the guy - I mean, consider - the BBC knew there were reports of what we’re seeing now, but still chose to put on a tribute show instead.
Well, I’m likely reading a number of things incorrectly in this story: As a Yank reading about somebody British who is unknown to me, it’s analogous to one of the UK’ers here trying to figure out how Jerry Sandusky was able to get away with it for most of his life too. But Sandusky kept his crimes limited compared to what I’m reading about Savile - Sandusky “just” raped young boys, carving out his little dark place in central Pennsylvania, but Savile is being accused of doing everything including fucking corpses, molesting brain-injured patients, groping girls on live TV, and being, frankly, open about it. Young, old, healthy, sick - it apparently didn’t matter to him. As far as I can tell, the only limit was that the victims (so far) seem to be female*.
I understand that victims don’t want to speak out, but some of the stories linked to in this thread had wording like this:
All those nurses, for all those years, in such detail that they are recounting conversations from 30 years ago. All those kids being warned. In this one hospital, even.
Then there’s this one, same story:
Really? For 35 years, there was nothing you could do about it? You had to wait until you saw a TV show before you felt “safe” enough to come forward? What courage, June!
Er… sorry about that.
But this case seems full of stories like this, where large groups of people have seen, witnessed, been victimized by, heard about, gossiped about, warned child patients about, Jimmy Savile… and they all up and decided to say nothing because they felt that they could say nothing. And he obviously felt safe enough to pretty much open about this.
I understand that the means of “speaking out” were more limited in the 70s (and possibly even more so in 1970s Britain vis the US), but we have here people in positions of authority whose best idea to prevent child patients from being molested was to advise them to “act sicker”. And, unfortunately, “acting sicker” was not, as we found out, a libido killer for the man.
In short: My wife says her readings (she’s quite the Anglophile) show that there is a culture of “looking the other way” in regards to child abuse in Britain, and that this is finally cracking. This case is doing nothing to dispel her suspicions (and, being a Doctor Who fan, she is also worried that Billie Piper suffered at the hands of this guy, but that’s another thread.)) Brit dopers: Do you think there is any truth to her claim? Is/was there a culture of willful ignorance about child abuse in Britain?
*I’m likely wrong here, but I don’t want to research any more about this, sorry.
Well to be totally fair, remember a lot of this so-called paedophilia is just sexism and if you think that 70s were fine with sex with young girls, a conclusion I have basically come to, then actually a lot of this is perfectly fine behaviour by the morals of the time.
For example here’s a video that’s just come out of Jimmy Savile “groping a teen” live on TV.
(Said teen is nineteen in the vid by the way)
Anyone who did that these days would be sacked. But back in the 70s it seems to me that you could go around pinching girl’s bottoms.
So I’m starting to really think that 80-90% of this is not to do with Savile and is just what all men were like in the 1970s, with the difference that he liked younger women - but also that in the 1970s “younger women” meant 14 rather than say 18.
And thus a huge amount of this is just everyone realising that behaviour in the 1970s was wrong. I hesitate to write that sentence because I am reluctant to judge the behaviour of other ages by our standards, but there we are.
Seems very unlikely to me that Billie Piper suffered at the hands of paedophiles like Savile. She was too busy having her 17 year old nipple slips printed in newspapers before marrying a fifty-something ginger guy at 18.
No bloody way. There is serious paedophile hysteria here. But I would say there is a slight difference in what is “too young”.
However as I said in my earlier post then in the 1970s there was a wilful ignorance about sexism, and also wilful ignorance about what is a child (I’m going to guess the cut off in the 70s was around 13 - bear in mind you could leave school aged 14 back then). So they wouldn’t have seen it as child abuse back them, just being a sexist pig which was not as bad back then either.
I hope we don’t end up going too far with with this and making it so you have to be 21 to drink. We already raised the age of cigarette buying to 18 not so long ago. I was basically allowed to do whatever I liked from the age of 14 onwards and I think everyone would be better off if that was the case for everyone.
