I'll just remind everybody again that "the plural of allegation is
not data".
While I am very confident that Savile probably used his fame and money to exploit people for sexual purposes, I have already pointed out elsewhere that I can't imagine that anyone in the Seventies (and later) music scene
didn't. As I noted a while back
here in the "Wacko Jacko" thread, luminaries like Bowie and Jagger have been demonstrated to be just as capable of such behaviour as Savile; it's possibly just that no-one has yet been prepared to run the gauntlet of their expensive libel lawyers. I foresee
their fortunes remaining intact, however.
I would remind everyone that advertising in national newspapers that
you could earn up to £60,000 by alleging, with some degree of credibility, that you had been interfered with
forty years ago, is hardly a fine-toothed comb for establishing true numbers of possible victims. Imagine that you were suddenly wrongly accused of squeezing a lass's boob at a party in 1980: How exactly would you defend yourself? Further imagine that said lass was in line to get thousands of pounds of compo for your alleged molestation, and that several other girls at the same party thought to themselves, "
This sounds like a good earner!", and added false stories that you'd twanged their bra straps or smacked their backsides. Your local newspaper gets hold of the tales, and next day your name is mud and your life as you knew it is over, because "
There's no smoke without fire", and "
Victims and c
hildren don't lie".
For anyone who's about to start typing furiously, I'd just remind them of one name:
Carl Beech:
"Operation Midland was a British police investigation into alleged abuse, conducted by the Metropolitan Police in London from November 2014 to March 2016. The operation focused on investigation of several high-profile British citizens—politicians, military officers and heads of security—over claims of historic child sexual abuse and homicide.
The 18-month operation failed to find sufficient evidence to support the claims, and an inquiry into the police investigation afterwards concluded that the people involved had been falsely accused, leaving them dealing with considerable damage to their lives and reputations."
I would also suggest a study of the writings of the late lamented
Anna Raccoon, a respected blogger. She - IIRC - attended one of the schools where Savile was supposed to have committed his depredations, and found some of the allegations to be impossible or implausible. She went on to research them in some depth, with interesting findings. Here, for example, is her pithy summary of the final court hearing in July 2016 (Osborne Clark is the legal firm acting for
themselves many of the alleged victims):
"So,
we now have his excellent report in today’s Sunday Times detailing the expenses incurred by the ‘legal feeding frenzy‘. I commend it to you. If you don’t happen to have a copy of the Sunday Times, I shall spell it out for you…
"The hearing on Thursday – lasting a matter of two hours, cost £61,000.
The estate has now been whittled down to £2,042,000 from £4,300,000.
Osborne Clarke have received £1,800,000.
Only 78 cases remain from the ‘hundreds of abused victims’ – the 78 are merely those where no one could disprove the claim. They said they were in ‘x’ spot in ‘y’ year when ‘z’ occurred at the hands of Jimmy Savile and there is no evidence to show that either Savile was elsewhere, or the claimant hadn’t been born yet, or the premises didn’t exist at that time, or any of the other myriad ways in which claims have been dismissed.
The lawyers, the ten different firms representing these ‘can’t be disproved’ claims will share £689,000. A poke in the eye with a sharp stick for those whose share price is dependant on a healthy ‘work in progress’ estimate….
The 78 ‘victims of alleged abuse’ will receive an average £13,000."
maximus otter