transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2:
[00:05] Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history that, I don't know, sometimes you just want to change up how you introduce your show. You know, do it the same way every time.

Speaker 1:
[00:20] This guy.

Speaker 3:
[00:21] This is the biggest bastard. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[00:24] This guy's in the running, is what I'm saying. One of them, right?

Speaker 2:
[00:26] Yeah, he's way up there. Bigger bastard than all the pollen in the fucking air right now, is turning into cursed spring.

Speaker 1:
[00:33] Jesus, the pollen is out of control.

Speaker 2:
[00:35] I know.

Speaker 1:
[00:35] Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2:
[00:36] Terrible.

Speaker 1:
[00:37] It's awful.

Speaker 2:
[00:37] We just need another 12 months of winter. Come on, guys. Like a real winter this time.

Speaker 1:
[00:43] I have the opposite. You know, when people are like, oh my gosh, I get seasonal depression in the winter, I'd say no. Winter rocks.

Speaker 2:
[00:51] Yep. Winter is so much better.

Speaker 1:
[00:54] I love winter.

Speaker 2:
[00:54] And you know what's even better than winter? Learning about a pet, well, we're going to start anyway. Courtney's back. With our guest, Courtney Kostak. Hello, Courtney. How are you feeling?

Speaker 3:
[01:04] Hello.

Speaker 2:
[01:05] As we talk about this monster.

Speaker 3:
[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. That's not what you do with your friends, buddy. Spend time talking about Jimmy Saville.

Speaker 1:
[01:26] That's what you do with your friends.

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

Speaker 3:
[01:31] That's what Jimmy Saville does with his friends.

Speaker 2:
[01:33] It is 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 1:
[01:39] Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 2:
[01:47] So, we left off last episode with me mentioning that we're gonna talk more about the Duncroft approved school for girls. And like approved schools or government approved schools where you like send kids who are having trouble, right? One of the things happening at the time is that in this period of like mental health history in the UK, there's this kind of belief that you have 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 to, as Davies writes 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, 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 14-year-old in 1972 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' care, that's the woman running the facility, for dabbling with drugs, anorexia, attempting suicide, or for running away from children's homes or abusive parents. So some of these kids are just kids who have been shuffled through the system, but were noted as being like intelligence, and so it's worth trying to reform them. But a lot of these girls are like rich girls who have embarrassed their parents.

Speaker 3:
[03:35] That's a really good way to say it.

Speaker 2:
[03:37] Yeah, and often embarrassed them by getting molested, sometimes by their parents or by an uncle or something. That's so horrible.

Speaker 1:
[03:44] One of these rich creeps.

Speaker 2:
[03:46] 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 Saville. Because Duncroft was a school for the daughters of prominent people, it attracted a lot of celebrity attention when fundraising was needed. Saville very quickly became the most prominent and reliable famous friend of the school for an obvious reason. It gave him access to teenage girls. Because Saville was seen as a good volunteer, he was allowed to sleep overnight at Duncroft with some regularity.

Speaker 3:
[04:18] What?

Speaker 2:
[04:19] He was even allowed to take, yeah, yeah, they let him crash there.

Speaker 3:
[04:22] That is crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[04:24] It's wild how many hospitals and facilities just do that. Yeah, he stays overnight a bunch of times. 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 it's not a fun place to be, right? Margaret's theory is that one of the ways you fix these kids who have behavioral problems, you give them shitloads of chores. So like constant chores are seen as a therapeutic aid. So it's a boring place where you're being kept away from your friends and your music and parties and the things that a normal teenage girl would like and you're just doing chores all the time. And then this famous guy shows up and is like, hey, anybody want to ride? You want to leave school for a day? Right? You could see why this is appealing to a lot of these young ladies starting in 1970.

Speaker 1:
[05:13] But who's running these places that are allowing this?

Speaker 2:
[05:16] 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. All he does is raise money for good causes and volunteer his time. These other celebrities are out partying and living it up. Jimmy's volunteering as an orderly at a bunch of hospitals, like a surprising, a 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 a journalist, like a BBC journalist, and actually, he's one of the 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 I think his parents both work there at least part time. So he's around Duncroft all the time, and he just notes like, this weird guy's around a lot. He would later say, he was full of banter, though had no real conversation as such. I had a feeling that he was somebody with whom you didn't really know what was going on. One time, Myron saw Savile 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. It's okay, it's fine. Don't look into it.

Speaker 3:
[06:42] God, so convenient.

Speaker 2:
[06:43] It's really convenient. We don't know how many Duncroft girls were abused by Savile, 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 2008, and at that point, 50-year-old woman named Carrie wrote a biography as part of a 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 1972 at age 14. So she writes this autobiography as like a therapeutic exercise and she publishes it online. And in this online autobiography, she writes about the people who molested her, 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:
[07:39] Hmm, could it be Dame Judi 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 as gifts. That tells you a lot about the time that like the number one gift for 14 year old girls, cigarettes, cigarettes and records. 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 hanging 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 where like in the 60s, the average Americans smoke like 4,000 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.

Speaker 1:
[08:37] You know, what? This episode's hard enough.

Speaker 2:
[08:41] This is an episode sponsored by the Health Cigarette. The Health Cigarette, it's a cigarette that'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 is, it's the one funny part, is that all these kids are chain smoking. Oh man, just cartons. Yes, this man came to the girl 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 1:
[09:13] The least he could have done to these kids is give them cancer.

Speaker 2:
[09:19] So Carrie came to cherish Saville'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 jail where you're just doing chores all the fuck. You're desperate for attention. It sucks. 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 14-year-old, 15-year-old girl, right? So she likes the visits, like she cherishes them, but she also writes, quote, 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 layby 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 at my partly formed breasts. He promised me all manner of good things if I would give him oral sex. Eventually, she agrees and does it. The bargain is that Saville will take her to see him record one of his TV shows at the BBC. He does follow through with this promise. As far as I can tell, I think he pretty much always does. 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, follows through.

Speaker 3:
[11:00] Well, thank God for that.

Speaker 2:
[11:01] It's easy, it's easier. If you're actually not following through, some people are gonna tell, right?

Speaker 3:
[11:08] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[11:09] You'll deal with more problems. This isn't a good thing about him. 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, we'll never know how many, at least dozens, probably hundreds of girls that he is abusing onto BBC property for a period of nearly half a century. For decades, he is taking teenage girls, maybe taking teenage boys he's abusing too. 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 as part of the abuse. That's part of the quote unquote transaction that 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 Janet Smith review, ensured lower level employees knew 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 at the only place, really, to have a career in television in Britain at this time. That's good.

Speaker 3:
[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 1980s wore on, Saville only grew more and more skilled at finding victims and discouraging them from talking to anyone. 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 1985, Saville convinced Prince Charles and Princess Di to guest host a two-hour anti-drug special called Drugs 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, it must have. Thank God, Princess Di and Prince Charles were there too, really to lend an air of responsibility to the proceedings. I'm sure that got a lot of kids out of bad places. That same year, during an event for health care officials, Prince Charles jokingly referred to Savile as my health advisor. He talks about him constantly. Savile was also known to Pope John Paul II, who met, so Pope John Paul visits England during this period. For the first time, a pope had visited London in some period of time. I don't know. I don't know. But it was a big deal, obviously, given 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 England and in Ireland, obviously. So the fact that a pope is visiting England is a big deal, right? And John Paul II, he'd been shot over in 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 like a major part. He's one of the first people the pope meets in England. Because Saville is a famous Catholic.

Speaker 3:
[15:05] Is the pope ironically the only non-pedophile in this story?

Speaker 2:
[15:12] I don't want to go to bat for JP the Second that hard. He definitely, I am certain, again, I'm not an expert on John Paul the Second specific involvement in the Catholic Church's covering up of sex crimes. But I don't believe he was uninvolved. So I'm certainly not going to say that. He was the pope while the Catholic Church was hiding. Yeah, I doubt he was completely in the clear. I'm not an expert on his involvement. Sure, sure, sure. 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 Saville's behavior, as I noted, he is an expert on the UK's libel laws. And these, to make a long story short, 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 part of the problem with like rowling, right? Where people are getting in legal trouble for saying accurate things. Like JK. Rowling being a fucking bigot. Like Jimmy Saville is very good and a 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 Saville is a child predator, reporting, even reporting on individual 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 journalist or paper that wanted to write about Jimmy 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 Saville is abusing people, they're just automatically spiking any story about his private life, quote unquote, private life, right? That's awful. Anytime anyone wants to talk about is Jimmy Saville raping people, those stories just get spiked automatically because legal is not going to let it through, right? Why even try, right? Who would want to risk your newspaper's survival to report on some he said, she said thing about a beloved humanitarian like Jimmy Saville? 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 3:
[17:42] I do get it though because it's your publication on the line.

Speaker 2:
[17:47] Sure. 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 18 or 17-year-olds, that's legal. I may think it's gross, but I'm not going to 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. Now that said, a lot of people go much further than they need to in 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 goes from his 30s to his 40s, rumors continue to dog him about his outrageous lifestyle, but it's never 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. 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 and 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, as he gets wealth, yeah. Yeah, you get brain damaged 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 and he purchases like-

Speaker 1:
[19:20] Hey, Court, it's a newlywed. How's that going for you?

Speaker 2:
[19:23] Yeah, yeah. How you doing? How's the brain damage? I mean, I will say being in a relationship does do 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 gets something. But Savile is so worried about this quote unquote brain damage that even as he gets rich and he buys homes and condos across the country, he makes sure that they're, 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 in interviews. What? That's so dumb. 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, right? Everyone knows he's dating, he's 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 or their ages, and they just assume he's a star who's sleeping with a different woman every night. That's not what's happening, but that's the assumption people make. It's an assumption people are, I think, often consciously forcing themselves to make, because they know something is bad, but they don't want to stir the pot. They're like, yeah, he's a real swinger. He's a hip guy. He's just got a large appetites or whatever. People find ways to have it not be their problem.

Speaker 3:
[21:07] I feel like the libel laws should cover the slander against all grown-up women in relationships.

Speaker 2:
[21:16] Yeah. Shockingly, it doesn't. That you're clear on. Saville would also publicly in interviews, he would repeatedly insist that he hated children. I don't like kids. I don't like him 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 1:
[21:30] Doug, were you not hosting a child show? What?

Speaker 2:
[21:34] Yeah. That people thought that was weird. It got people talking about the film. He hates kids, but he does this child show. He's basically Santa Claus. That's odd. In the twilight of Jimmy's career, documentarian Louis Thoreau 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, that's a lie basically. And 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.

Speaker 1:
[22:11] Okay. A hunt of what, Jimmy?

Speaker 2:
[22:14] A hunt of what? Well, yeah. And Louie kind of asks, I love Louie as a general rule, he doesn't 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 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 won't cry.

Speaker 1:
[22:40] The hunt of what, mother?

Speaker 2:
[22:42] Listeners to this show, 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 have a romance. 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 oddities. And people, I've had people make very uncomfortable decisions.

Speaker 1:
[23:08] There's a difference between being private and secret. Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[23:12] But this is a big difference. He's specifically saying, no, no, no, I just lie about hating kids because it gets, that way people don't look into what I really do with kids. He's saying that. He admits that and it is an interview in like 2000, but like he's not completely hiding this shit.

Speaker 3:
[23:29] I am proud of Thoreau 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 criticable 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 about that later though. But it's all this stuff, these rumors about his outrageous lifestyle and how promiscuous he is, which he does talk about. It's interpreted, again, that 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. 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 a guy who talks about this kind of stuff. But old Maggie, she keeps pushing. She really is dedicated to this cause. 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 article Feral Kenny wrote for the UK Telegram. In a revealing 1982 cartoon in the Sun, Saville is depicted as a gangster, complete with fedora and machine gun, with Margaret Thatcher showing him pictures of Arthur Scargill, as well as labor politicians Michael Foot, Tony Benn and Dennis Healy with the caption, bump off these lot and I'll see that you get a knighthood. There's a recognition that Thatcher is using Saville. He is an important and central wing of her PR machine, and also that he's doing it to get a knighthood. People know this at the time. It's not hidden from anyone paying attention. In 1986, Margaret had her private secretary, Nigel Wicks, write to the honors committee saying that she was most disappointed that Mr. Saville's name has not been recommended. He added, 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 Mandeville. 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. It's important work.

Speaker 2:
[25:41] They're doing great sleep, but we'll talk about the sleepovers at Stoke Mandeville. 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, 1986 or so, the AIDS 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 knight. 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 life, or like the gang of thugs that 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 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 gonna care about because it was like 10 or 15 years ago. And these guys are like bad guys as he always frames it, they're hoodlums. They're provoking him. They're causing problems. They're not 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 Saville, they can find some stuff. And it's stuff that they can talk about to 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 19, yeah. You know what else? Oh wait, we already did that. Sorry. I guess we're just gonna, we're gonna raw dog this next part. This is bad. This is real bad. In 1988, the entire management board of Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where Jimmy volunteered quite regularly, was suspended by the Department of Health under Thatcher appointee, Ken Clark. The board basically shits, the psychiatric hospital was not well run. 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 Broadmoor is replaced by a task force appointed by the Thatcher administration. And the task force is run by Jimmy Savile. No. Now he's running a psychiatric hospital. Jimmy had started volunteering at Broadmoor in the 1960s. And in 1988, he got total control over what happened at the facility or near total control. He's effectively running it. Per the Tribune, quote, this decision was rubber stamped by Junior Health Minister Edwina Curry, who wrote Attaboy in her diaries on hearing Savile's plans for reform at the hospital, which included union busting as Savile alleged that inflated overtime payments were rife among the unionized workforce. Curry later conceded that this was likely Savile blackmailing staff who could blow the whistle on his abuse. So Savile's like, now that I'm running things, you know the real problem at this hospital, these damn unions made it way too expensive. All these guys, we need to fire a bunch of these people because they're faking their own.

Speaker 1:
[29:18] I'm just so shocked that Savile would be anti-union.

Speaker 2:
[29:23] Yeah, but we had to get rid of these guys. 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 bust a union. Fucking Maggie loves that shit, and Saville's doing, he's literally, I cannot overstate, this is not a side thing. She didn't happen to be friends with this guy. Jimmy Saville is a significant, meaningful part of Thatcherism. He is a major and important part of her entire regime. That has to be driven home to people, how key he is in this whole period of time in British political history. The fact that he's now running this hospital, he's now able to fire basically anyone he wants to 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 Saville's behavior and tried to intervene, this doesn't just happen at Broadmoor, there are employees everywhere that he volunteers who try to say something, but it never goes anywhere. It is important to emphasize there are people trying to intervene. 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 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 to his crimes is, oh, this was just a monster who manipulated in a hidden plain sight and he tricked everybody. We all fell for it. No one knew anything was going on.

Speaker 3:
[31:10] Yeah, nobody had any idea. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[31:13] People knew. Jimmy was allowed to rape and abuse people. Thatcher and everyone in her admin, 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 Broadmoor. If they didn't know he was outright raping kids, they knew he was raping people. They knew he was having, they would probably affirm just having sex with people who were underage.

Speaker 1:
[31:36] They knew what the fuck he was.

Speaker 2:
[31:37] They knew what he was doing. And they knew they were putting him 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 1:
[31:47] They knew he wasn't, they knew he was at minimum a sketchy creep.

Speaker 2:
[31:54] Yeah, and they knew what they were doing.

Speaker 1:
[31:56] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[31:57] Thatcher knew what she was doing. Farrell Kenny writes, quote, read the NHS investigations into Saville. And there are numerous examples of everyday people with little power standing up to Saville, 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 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 going to fucking blow your mind. Broadmoor gives him a suite of rooms permanently that he is allowed to occupy and live in, and is a private apartment in 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 room sometimes. Or if he's the one taking them in for intake, he'll just bring them on up to his room and do whatever fucking sex crime he's going to do, and then he'll put them wherever they need to go, right? He's getting victims delivered to his apartment at the psychiatric hospital in the women's wing.

Speaker 3:
[33:08] This is psychotic. Also, it's not charity anymore. Nobody was wondering why he wants to run this fucking place and 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, just Jimmy.

Speaker 1:
[33:29] What was the word we decided at the end? Loathsome.

Speaker 2:
[33:32] Loathsome. Now, the website Investigative Psychiatry, in 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 1:
[33:49] Yeah, who signed off on that? Who's signature is on that?

Speaker 2:
[33:55] I mean, Curry's is, right?

Speaker 1:
[33:56] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[33:57] Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm sure that's documented. The article has a footnote there. 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. Now.

Speaker 1:
[34:18] are 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.

Speaker 1:
[34:27] First of all, hospitals have, what?

Speaker 2:
[34:32] Yeah, yeah. It's fucking insane.

Speaker 1:
[34:34] When my mom had surgery to beg for a cot, what the fuck?

Speaker 2:
[34:37] Yeah, it's crazy stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[34:40] Hi, mom.

Speaker 2:
[34:42] Stoke Manival was not his first major volunteer effort, but it makes him a fixture within the NHS. 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 Savile sexually abused patients at each of these facilities. Per 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 at one point in time. As he aged, Savile seems to have preferred patients who were dying in hospice. The standard recounts one story of an 11 to 12-year-old dying boy at Great Ormond who admitted shortly before passing that he had been touched inappropriately by Savile. 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 older, that's a big thing he does.

Speaker 3:
[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] He's crazy. He's crazy.

Speaker 1:
[35:52] That might be one of the worst things you've ever read on this podcast.

Speaker 2:
[35:56] It's pretty bad. It's pretty, like I said, this is like one of the only research at bits, binges I've been on a while that actually had me crying.

Speaker 1:
[36:05] Yeah, I understand.

Speaker 2:
[36:06] Yeah. In 1990, the last year of Thatcher's time in office, she finally succeeded in getting Jimmy Saville knighted during that year's Queen's birthday honors. He was knighted for his charitable services. From that moment on, Jimmy Saville, OBE, was now Sir Jimmy Saville. He received personal congratulations 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. Saville, 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 a lively couple of years with the tabloids sniffing about, asking around the corner shops, everything, thinking there must be something the authorities knew that they didn't. Whereas in actual fact, I've got to be the most boring geezer in the world because I ain't got no past. 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 a lot easier for me to commit sex crimes without getting noticed. Thanks, the Queen. Off I go. He just says that.

Speaker 3:
[37:18] Wow. The quotes are crazy.

Speaker 2:
[37:22] Now, the same year, 1990, he gets knighted by the Queen, because that's not enough. Saville also receives a papal knighthood. The Pope knights him too.

Speaker 3:
[37:34] I mean, apropos.

Speaker 2:
[37:36] The Catholic Church and the British Royal Family. Just no notes, guys. Nailing it.

Speaker 1:
[37:41] Like Pope John Paul II?

Speaker 3:
[37:43] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[37:44] JP too. Makes him a knight. Now, as an interesting side note, when all of this comes out and it becomes incredibly obvious to the entire world that Jimmy Saville has been a massive pedophile the entire time and abused God knows how many people, there's people who are like, hey, should we strip him of his knighthood and his papal knighthood? Maybe we like, that probably should happen, right? And that can't happen actually. It's impossible to do that because there's no permanent register of knights, right? Once you die, you just drop off the list. You're no longer a knight. That's just like how being a knight 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 or the British Royal Family should ever get to forget that they knighted this guy. I think he should be Sir Jimmy Savile forever.

Speaker 1:
[38:43] I was like, why?

Speaker 3:
[38:45] But that makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[38:47] I see your point, but also term limits, baby, term limits.

Speaker 2:
[38:51] Not the first pedophile knight, not the last. Honestly, probably more pedophile knights than non-pedophile knights. If you're going historically, that's crazy. Good stuff. Again, I don't think either of these institutions should ever get to, or the BBC should ever get to be free of the shame of having been affiliated with Jimmy Saville. But there are some very funny interviews with this representative of the Catholic Church. The Vatican spokesman at the time was Federico Lombardi, at the time that Saville died. I found one interview with him in the AP that includes this line. He also said Saville 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. Oh, really? Is that so, Federico? Vatican's never supported sexual abuse of children. That's good. I was just reading about how 200,000 or so 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. Great. I know because the Catholic Church and this current Pope have had some pretty good takes on certain things happening politically recently. That's good. I'm glad the Catholic Church is especially pushing back on our administrations like nightmarish genocidal immigration policies. War crimes. I don't hold every member of the church as responsible for the things that were 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 grand scheme of those crimes, but it's part of it, right? Good stuff. It's probably time for an ad break.

Speaker 1:
[40:40] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[40:40] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[40:41] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[40:42] Let's take five.

Speaker 1:
[40:42] And then just trauma dump it on, buddy.

Speaker 2:
[40:46] Yeah. Okay, we're back, and we're just gonna power through the rest of the horrible things.

Speaker 1:
[40:57] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[40:58] In 1990, in the years right before he was knighted, Saville is known, and people who were around the royal family noted that he acted as a fixer for Charles and Diana's marriage. When they started having like marriage issues, he's brought in to be like their relationship coach, basically.

Speaker 1:
[41:14] The guy who's never been in a relationship?

Speaker 2:
[41:16] Love that. Never been in a relationship. Love that.

Speaker 1:
[41:19] Whose bright idea was that?

Speaker 2:
[41:21] Yeah, I think it was Prince Charles, although I think Princess Di was fine with it. They both seem to have liked him, genuinely liked and admired him.

Speaker 1:
[41:30] That's the only thing they've ever agreed on is that Jimmy Saville is a good guy?

Speaker 2:
[41:34] Yeah, that's kind of how it seems to me.

Speaker 1:
[41:36] It's really fucking weird.

Speaker 2:
[41:38] Per the Guardian, Saville is understood to have visited Prince Charles' official London residence several times in the late 1980s when he was acting as a kind of marriage counselor between Charles and Princess Diana. There's been a lot of the British equivalent of a public records request, both around Thatcher and around the Royal Family and Saville. We've gotten some stuff. 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 censored or whatever. It's, I guess, sensitive or whatever. So we don't know. There's actually a surprising amount that's been enacted of his relationship with Thatcher, which I'm very curious to know. 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 Saville 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 like a former coal miner from the North. So he's like a down home country boy basically. But in England.

Speaker 1:
[42:51] And was buddies with Lord Manbatten, who was like a father figure to Charles. Yeah, so there's all that too.

Speaker 2:
[42:57] He was friends with Mountbatten and also, Charles sees him as like a representative of the common man. He's not going to actually talk to real poor people, but he can talk to Jimmy and Jimmy can tell him how commoners think and how commoners will react to things. So you trust Jimmy more than you trust your fancy, or you can go out to eat or whatever, 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 Dickie Arbiter, who was media relations liaison for the Prince and Princess of Wales at the time, Saville cut an upsetting figure even within the rarefied world of the royal household. Quote, 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 St. James' Place. The women were in their mid to late 20s doing typing and secretarial work.

Speaker 1:
[43:55] No, no.

Speaker 2:
[43:57] Yeah. Gross. Deeply bad. You'll hear about this a lot. This is an important tactic of his, what he's doing. The whole these that when he's casually meeting women in the world, these are adult women, but he'll do these like really exaggerated like Gomez Adams, you know, style like kissing all the way up their arm gestures, right? He does this a lot. You'll also find people talking about this in like these analyses that different institutions like Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville published, right? About how Savile 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 Psychiatry's write up, quote, Savile 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 up to your lips, he knows, okay, if I want to, this is someone who's more vulnerable. Right? 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:
[45:13] 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, oh, Jimmy's like that with everybody. He's just really like, no, no, no. He's not, this isn't being sexually inappropriate. He's like that with everyone. That's just how he is, you know, to women.

Speaker 3:
[45:32] Also, if you're 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 1991, Saville sat down for a BBC radio interview on the show In the Psychiatrist's Chair with Dr. Anthony Clare. Saville made some statements that would subsequently become quite famous. For one, he claimed to have no emotions. Quote, that would make me bad news 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 on 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, 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. That's why he's doing this. The only thing that's really remarkable to me is how well this all works. Part of why, this is something I'm 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 were often called, uniquely British eccentrics. There's a long proud tradition of like weirdos in public life, in British history, that is up to a point celebrated. If you get famous enough for something, then the fact that you're like a weirdo stops being a thing that you get like mocked for, and like something people celebrate, right? It's just kind of this aspect of, it's not, Britain's not the only place where this happens, but it's known as like a very British thing. And in fact, in Thatcher's, like her announcement of his knighthood, she talks about him as like, he's one of the great British eccentrics. You know, sometimes our wonderful little island 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 analyses that I've read and seen summarized that like this whole persona, this thing is calculated. Like 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, right? 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, right? 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 why 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 across as minimizing the other thing, but when you're talking about like some like famous musician who statutory, commit statutory rape on like a 13 or 14 year old girl, because like she's around and he doesn't give a fuck and he's being provided with with with girls, right? You know, he shows up to do it and he's provided girls and he doesn't care how old they are. And that happens at a point in this musician's life. That's like a bad thing. There should be accountability for that. That's not okay. It's a real problem. If that doesn't ever recur outside, if that person is not continuing to go after people of that age, that there's a difference between that and predatory behavior, where you're actively going out of your 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 that 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 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 know?

Speaker 3:
[49:58] To the point where they're doing charities so that they can hurt people. 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 Broadmoor Report, talking about his interactions with women is a really important thing to understand because the fact that he's doing reconnaissance is noteworthy. And there's a good line in that investigative psychiatry write up that reads, quote, he was constantly probing for the point where Jimmy being Jimmy ended and Sir Jimmy Saville began. I think that's an important thing to note. The term grooming is usually deployed to refer to something abusers do to their victims. What I like about that article is that it talks about institutional grooming, right? 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 Broadmoor and fulfilled them to create a debt of gratitude. This symbolic power then allowed him to operate in a clinical vacuum. So this is a complex, multi-part process. He's putting a lot of thought into this and a lot of effort. Once he's got an in, sorry.

Speaker 3:
[51:15] 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 people think he's a spy or whatever. That's the point. That's the level of institutional grooming he's doing. That's super interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[51:36] Yeah. Yeah. 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 however he gets in, Savile will start dressing when he's working at these hospitals like a member of the clinical staff. He wears a white coat, he helps in aspects of patient care, he's helping during intake. He's not just grooming his victims, he's grooming the staff to accept him as legitimate. And the fact that 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, he's supposed to be there. There is some evidence, not direct, but like you can tell it by inference, that during the 90s Jimmy Savile 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, 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 1990s, I used to see teenage girls with eyes the color of vervein 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 ages or protest their presence. Was I complicit? I'm like, yeah, yeah, 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 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 to like the BBC to see film and we so we know he's taking girls that he is raping and taking them to secondary and tertiary locations 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 think so. It's not a crazy leap.

Speaker 2:
[54:07] 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.

Speaker 1:
[54:20] Right.

Speaker 2:
[54:20] 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 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' 40th birthday, and when Jimmy turned 80 in 2006, he received a box of Cuban cigars and a set of cufflinks from the now, well, now he's king, he wasn't king in 2006, but from Prince Charles with a note saying, nobody will ever know what you have done for this country. This is to go some way in thanking you for that.

Speaker 1:
[54:56] You stupid or creepy, or both?

Speaker 2:
[54:58] He's probably just talking about all the marriage counseling and the PR stuff, probably not worth looking into, probably fine, probably fine. Prince Charles probably didn't know anything about all the rape and stuff. King Charles, definitely innocent, for sure, for sure. It was just Prince Andrew was the only bad one and Lord Mountbatten, only bad ones, we're good. Anyway, cool stuff. Princess Di unfortunately remained friends with Savile for the remainder of her life, so far as I can tell. She traveled with him to Stoke Mandeville 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 inner life. I don't know what she would have been aware of. Probably, I assume Savile 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. In the late 90s and early 2000s, 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 in a lot of BBC shows. In 1995, the journalist and TV host Andrew Neal has him on for an episode of Is This Your Life? Which I think is supposed to celebrate different kind of famous people in British life, right? So Neal has Saville on for a friendly interview, which includes some cheeky questions about his romantic history and his past as a wrestler. And even then, when he's being interviewed about his life on TV in 1995, Jimmy can't avoid throwing in some side remarks hinting at his crimes. So here's a segment from that episode where he's talking, Andrew's asking about his time as a wrestler. You used to be a wrestler, didn't you? I still am. I'm feared in every girls' school in this country. Great. Got a lot of laughs. That crowd went wild. I do like the look on, because after he says that, one of the people who's on the show with Neil is a black woman, who's assuming some sort of journalist or presenter, and she has this like, oh, you just said that, huh? Yeah. I don't know anything else about that lady, but her eyes say a lot.

Speaker 3:
[57:31] Sure does.

Speaker 2:
[57:32] But you can just hear in the joke how casually he is about it. The audio of it says enough. How casually he jokes about wrestling. Children, a girl's school, those are kids, and the uproarious laughter from the audience. Very funny. Ha ha, Jimmy. Yes. It's so funny how you joke about molesting little girls. We love it here. In the year 2000, one of Britain's best documentarians, Louis Thoreau, 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 detail about how weird Jimmy is about his mom, but it's clearly the only person he ever loves. When she passes on, in 2000, when Louis Thoreau shows up at his flat to do this documentary, Jimmy's mom had died 27 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, Thoreau does probe some of the rumors around Jimmy in 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 whole is he or isn't he a pedophile line? And Saville replied, oh, I, how do they know whether 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 work 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 Saville for abuse after the production, but the report was not followed up on. He claimed that he attempted to report him in 2001 after a female came forward and claimed that she to have been one of Saville's girlfriends when she was 15. So Louis doesn't do nothing, but I got to say, 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 just getting people to talk, giving them enough rope to hang themselves, but pressing them on things that are hard to press on, or awkward and uncomfortable. 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 2000, 2001, Louis makes a big show of publicly mourning Savile, of 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, 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 gold casket. What? 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. He's probably professional pressure. He just doesn't, and I shouldn't be focusing on Louis more than all of these other editors that 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. So I'll go on from there. But I think it's worth noting. In 2007, 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 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 are 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 might also have been pedophiles.

Speaker 3:
[62:02] Or at least covering up for him.

Speaker 2:
[62:04] 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 previously? I don't know. Someone should look into that maybe. Jimmy's influence was such that in 2008, the Yorkshire police picked him to voice several West Yorkshire talking street signs, giving advice to locals on, of all things, crime prevention.

Speaker 1:
[62:31] Great. 2008. Cool.

Speaker 2:
[62:35] 2008. But in the aughts, stories kept spreading online about Jimmy. A victim had come forward in 2003, and a complaint in 2008 was reported on by The Sun. So it's starting, this wall he's got between him and the media is starting to falter and flicker out, even by that point in time. In 2009, Jimmy was interviewed by police in Surrey. He set up the complaint, That's why I have up in Yorkshire, where I live in Leeds, 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 Saville gives them to the police, 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? Saville then responds, 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? What's actually happening here is 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 29th, 2011. Once he was gone, his power to stop such investigations 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. And in order to stop people from defacing the cemetery, basically, they have to grind it into fucking crumbs. I think you should just let people deface it. But numerous police and institutional investigations are launched. And by December of 2012, just a year after his death, the number of alleged victims had reached 450. That is a year after he dies. Where are we now in terms of total victims known? Well, I'm going to quote from a 2014 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 a thousand girls and boys by Jimmy Saville in the corporation's changing rooms and studios. Dame Janet Smith, a former Court of Appeal judge who previously led the inquiry into the murders by Dr. Harold Shipman, will say in her report that the true number of victims of Jimmy Saville's 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 girls in BBC changing rooms and studios. I've seen this misreported as a thousand victims. That's just a thousand victims in BBC property. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[65:30] When I've been talking about the homes and the hospitals and- Thousands. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[65:36] Thousands.

Speaker 3:
[65:37] Also, the original victims are old as shit by now, and most of them are dead, probably too. Have died. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[65:46] 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 1:
[65:55] The children that he assaulted when they were in the hospital for terminal illnesses, it's one of the worst things I've ever heard.

Speaker 3:
[66:05] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[66:07] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[66:08] What did he die from?

Speaker 2:
[66:10] Oh, being an old piece of shit, I forget. He dies in his home peacefully.

Speaker 1:
[66:14] That sucks. I was hoping it hurt.

Speaker 2:
[66:17] Yeah. I don't have that for you. I do have one little bit of satisfaction, I think, from God and Freud or whatever from earlier in his life. 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 God has come upance. But there is one time where he got a little bit of punishment for being a giant monster. So we're going to talk about that now. So during his wrestling days, there's this wrestler named Exotic Adrian Street, who he's a heel, right? He's somebody fans love to hate. I think he's like a guy who dresses very flamboyantly, in order to, and that's part of his fucking evil weirdo, right? And so he's matched with Savile at some point. And I found all this in an article for Whales Online. So it was Whales Online that talked to Adrian Street about this. Quote, the promoters were trying to put Savile across as a bit of a tough guy in those days and they were trying to get proper wrestlers to 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 Kidd at Nottingham Ice Rink the night before. In fact, I'd put him in the hospital. So when it was, it's suggested like, hey, why don't, you know, you're going to fight this DJ. Well, let's have it in a draw. 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. Then 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 they were covered in hair. Savile's, I'd torn huge clumps out of his scalp. I 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 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 bigger beating. Were that physically possible? So at least we've got that.

Speaker 3:
[68:29] Okay, that was a little treat we needed. We definitely needed it.

Speaker 2:
[68:33] You guys deserve something.

Speaker 1:
[68:35] Thanks for the sprinkle.

Speaker 2:
[68:37] Thank you, Adrian Street, for beating the shit out of Jimmy Saville.

Speaker 1:
[68:42] God, it's so fucked up that this man lived to what? 2011, did you say, or 2012 or something like that?

Speaker 2:
[68:47] 2011, he dies late 2011, like October.

Speaker 1:
[68:49] Yeah, and he, that all of the survivors of this man, which there were thousands.

Speaker 2:
[68:56] Thousands of victims.

Speaker 1:
[68:58] Did not get to have any sort of justice while he was alive.

Speaker 2:
[69:03] No.

Speaker 1:
[69:04] They did not get to confront him. Nobody believed them. The libel laws fucked them over. The BBC is despicable. Royal Family is the Royal Family. It's just unfathomably gross that this man was one of the worst pedophiles of maybe all time.

Speaker 2:
[69:31] One of the pedoist of the files, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[69:34] And was knighted by both the Royal Family and the Catholic Church, and was given, I don't know, there's certain thoughts that things that are just like, you know, impregnating minors, and the fact that he was given an apartment at that girl's...

Speaker 2:
[69:53] At the fucking Broadmoor, no, at the girls' ward of the psychiatric hospital.

Speaker 1:
[69:57] Psychiatric hospital.

Speaker 2:
[70:01] You were saying Courtney?

Speaker 1:
[70:02] Sorry, so many people just like, let this happen and let him be this person.

Speaker 2:
[70:07] Tons of them.

Speaker 3:
[70:08] 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 5,000, 10,000, it's like-

Speaker 2:
[70:31] However many, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[70:32] We have no idea.

Speaker 3:
[70:33] Holy shit.

Speaker 2:
[70:35] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[70:38] At least we know who to really blame for the Princess Diana, Prince Charles divorce. The guy giving the marriage advice.

Speaker 2:
[70:47] Jimmy Savile. He's who's to blame, surely.

Speaker 1:
[70:49] Maybe if somebody else, those kids could have stayed in love. It wasn't for all of Charles' hateful infidelity.

Speaker 2:
[70:57] That was surely the only thing wrong.

Speaker 1:
[70:58] Only thing wrong.

Speaker 2:
[71:00] With their relationship.

Speaker 1:
[71:01] Yeah. Anyways, Court, you want to plug your book for us?

Speaker 3:
[71:05] Yeah. I need a shower, but check out my book. It's called Girl Gone Wild. 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. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2:
[71:22] Yeah. That's a great idea. Why don't you all enjoy that, and I will cook up something horrible for you, but honestly, probably a lot less horrible than this next week. Um, bye.

Speaker 1:
[71:37] Well, bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/atbehind the Bastards. We love about 40 percent of you, statistically speaking.