The review, described Thursday by a former Court of Appeal judge, Dame Janet Smith, blamed a culture of fear within the media institution for being behind employees’ failures to criticize a celebrity or escalate their concerns to senior managers.
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The BBC has come under fire after a new report has claimed that the corporation failed to intervene in Jimmy Savile’s repeated sexual abuse of minors because of a “culture of fear”.
Savile’s producer Ted Beston was named as one of the people who were aware of his activity, Dame Janet said he “knew that Savile would have casual sex with teenage and slightly older women as and when he could get it”.
Be Civil – It’s OK to have a difference in opinion but there’s no need to be a jerk. Hall was jailed in 2013 after he pleaded guilty to 13 charges of indecent assault involving girls between the ages of 9 and 17 over 30 years.
“Usually, Savile either met the victim at the BBC or else he groomed the victim by offering the opportunity to attend the BBC before taking the victim elsewhere, often to his home or camper-van”, Dame Janet’s report on Savile reads.
The long-serving Radio 2 DJ says he is planning to sue his former employers after being sacked before the publication of a report into sexual abuse at the corporation, which was triggered by the Jimmy Savile scandal. “They are destroying my career and reputation because my version of events does not tally with theirs”, added Mr Blackburn.
The BBC Trust published a statement in response to Smith’s report, saying: “No one reading the reports can be in any doubt that the BBC failed [the victims]”.
Three centred on staff dealing with Savile and two with Hall, who between them were responsible for almost 100 BBC-related assaults.
In a 1,222-page report, Dame Janet Smith said the body bred a culture of deference in which stars were “untouchable”.
In her investigation, Smith identified a total of 72 victims, with eight of them classified as rapes.
The veteran DJ, who has accused the BBC of making him a “scapegoat”, denied in evidence that he had ever been made aware by the BBC of a complaint against him by a teenager in 1971 even though the corporation told the inquiry he had been.
The BBC missed a string of opportunities to stop child sex abuse by Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall, an inquiry has found.
But, surprisingly, Dame Janet said she would not make “detailed recommendations” on how the BBC could take steps to “ensure that any repetition could be avoided in future”. It was only after Savile’s death that the extent of his crimes became clear – touching off a national shock wave of rage and introspection about how best to deal with sexual abuse charges, particularly involving the famous.
Dame Janet said that “most” of the incidents of “rape and attempted rape” that she investigated in relation to Savile took place on BBC premises.
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Hall served half of his 60 months sentence and was released in December.
