Part Two: Jimmy Savile: Britain's Unending Nightmare

Robert explains how Jimmy Savile went from bike race commentator to pop music DJ and gatekeeper to the stars, and how much of Britain clamored to give him access to young girls as a reward. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Hey, everybody. Robert here, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences have announced that three different Cool Zone Media shows have been nominated for awards at the 30th Annual Webby Awards. You can vote on these now if you just Google the name of the podcast and the category. Behind the Bastards has been nominated in the Experimental and Innovation Podcasts category. It Could Happen Here is in the News and Politics Podcasts category, and James Stout's miniseries, Migrating to America: A Dream Worth Dying For, has been nominated in the Podcasts Documentary category. And you can find links to vote for each of these podcasts in the episode description and in the posts on social media

• 0:47Robert Evans?

  for episodes of It Could Happen Here and Behind the Bastards. Thank you. Welcome, Pod, to Behind the Bastards cast of Robert Evans with Courtney Kosak and Sophie Lichterman. How everyone be?

• 1:04Speaker 01

  We are good.

• 1:05Robert Evans?

  Is that good, Sophie? Is that a good intro?

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I liked it. I just gave Anderson, my dog, like, a really big treat, and she's enjoying it, which makes me happy.

• 1:14Robert Evans?

  Good, good. I just scarfed a bunch of trail mix.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Love that for you.

• 1:20Robert Evans?

  And tidied up slightly upstairs.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Hey, Courtney, what's that cute-

• 1:23Robert Evans?

  We're now recording part two.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Courtney, what's that cute thing behind you?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  This, this is my book cover for Girl Gone Wild.

• 1:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah? You want to tell the audience about it a little before we talk about a pedophile more?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully you listened to the first episode, but it is-

• 1:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it'd be weird if you didn't.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  That would be weird. Yeah, it's called Girl Gone Wild. It's about when I sold t-shirts on the Girls Gone Wild Tour. It's about acting in independent films. It's basically about learning about what society thinks of women, which is a lot like this episode.

• 1:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately so.

• 2:05Speaker 03

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• 2:37Robert Evans?

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• 3:09Speaker 05

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• 3:42Robert Evans?

  Well, I guess let's get back into it, shall we?

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:46Robert Evans?

  So, when we left off, Jimmy had just tried his hand, or at least his legs, at becoming a professional cyclist, and found out that he wasn't quite good enough for that, but he was really good at being a weirdo, and that got him a gig commentating for bicycle races, right? So, his first proper media job was calling races for The Daily Express, because that was the newspaper that was funding the first tour of Britain Race. Back in the day, newspapers used to have money, and they would, like, fund or support of stuff like big races and the like. Been a while since newspapers worked that way.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  That was like a pain laugh. That was like a triggered cackle. I was like, oh.

• 4:30Robert Evans?

  But it wasn't all good, because clearly that's how Jimmy Savile gets his fucking break, right? So this newspaper that's funding the races he's doing, like sees, oh, this guy might have, this guy might have like it, you know, what it takes to be a star. So they make him a race commentator, and he is very good at that job. They pay him a sizable fee in 1954, and this jumpstarts his career as a bona fide celebrity. He becomes the face and voice of the Daily Express, and that starts to earn him attention from the BBC and from Radio 1, which is the BBC's radio thingamajigger, right? Now, back then, the British media environment was much more restrictive than it is today, and the BBC has essentially a monopoly on legal radio play, right?

• 5:13Robert Evans?

  You're not allowed to just have another radio station, right? You could get in trouble for that. Now, as a result, the BBC is like, they're very much see themselves as cultural gatekeepers of like what should be acceptable and popular in Britain. And this pisses off everyone, because people who run the BBC are old, stuffy, rich assholes, and they have terrible taste in music. And this is the moment in which pop music is starting to explode. You know, you have this period of time, like the mid to late 50s, early 60s, where we've taught, we talked about this on our, our episodes about Phil Spector with, with my buddy Will, Greasy Will.

• 5:55Robert Evans?

  This is the first time in which teenagers are like a demographic that you're marketing towards and selling towards, and that music is angled heavily towards the teen set. Because previously, you go back 50 years, teenagers are all working in the mines or something. They're not dancing at party clubs or whatever. They're not, they're not, they're certainly not like a, a chunk of the, of the populace that you are like trying to sell stuff to, right? That is also started to change right now. Now, because the BBC has essentially this monopoly on what can be on the radio, there's this vibrant community that pops up of pirate DJs who are like, very literally pirate DJs. This is some very cool stories that come out of this, because these guys are like

• 6:40Robert Evans?

  living on boats and old defense platforms in the sea.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 6:44Robert Evans?

  Broadcasting youth music illegally to the island. It's fucking awesome.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  They're legit pirate DJs.

• 6:52Robert Evans?

  Like literal pirates, yes. There is a movie called Pirate Radio that's at least ostensibly about this. I don't remember how good a job it did, honestly. I just remember it exists. So the very idea, again, of youth culture is new and scary to a lot of influential people in British media because these are members of the upper class and they're, they're kind of worried in part because they're all, everyone who's got money in the Western world is terrified of the communists, right? And so there's this, this fearful understanding that these young people have different values. Maybe it'll lead them towards like socialism and all these other scary things. And there's also just this aspect of this has never been a thing that existed before.

• 7:34Robert Evans?

  Teenagers and there being a whole media industry geared towards teenagers. Is it good, is it making them bad? Is it going to damage them? You know, there's a lot of concern about that sort of thing. And unfortunately, the concern is focused on like the kind of music as opposed to maybe the people making the music and playing it on the radio, which is who they should have been scared of harming the youth of Britain. The music itself isn't really doing any damage. But I bring all this up to point out that it is very difficult and is a very strange and noteworthy historical fact that within this kind of sclerotic and, and very much like not welcome, not open to newcomers, not open to like different ideas, this, this

• 8:18Robert Evans?

  like media culture, that a guy like Jimmy Savile becomes prominent because Jimmy talks like a working class man from Leeds and he dresses well, like this. Sophie will show you one photo of the guy where he's got like, he's wearing like a black velvet mask around his face. He's got his hair slightly curled, his long white hair and he's got like a lace fucking gauntlet around his hand, it looks like. It's hard to tell what is going on with his sleeve there. Yeah, he looks like a cat.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Loki, Loki loves the sleeve.

• 8:53Robert Evans?

  And he's always, every time he goes out in public, every time he's DJing at an event, every time he's like broadcast, he's doing, because he's going out to these like races, he's always dressed weird in some way. He's always wearing costumes and he never talks about it.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  I hate to be the person, I would wear the shit out of that blazer with the lace cuff.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Yes, also the mask, the mask is an improvement over the, just the plain face.

• 9:21Robert Evans?

  The mask helps, weirdly enough.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  The mask hides his, but you know.

• 9:26Robert Evans?

  But one thing that's important here is, he never talks about the way he's dressed. And if, when people ask him, he'll try to deliberately avoid the question. And he writes about this, I think it's because he knows basically, if you talk about it or explain it, it's not nearly as, it doesn't, it's not nearly as interesting. If you just show up dressed like a maniac and pretend like you're a normal person, like everyone else, that gets you more attention. And yeah, that's, that's what he's doing at this point in time.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  He learned his lesson from the, the coal mine situation.

• 9:58Robert Evans?

  He really did. And part of what he's learned is that if you're dressed like a weirdo, not only does it get you attention and can it quote unquote pay off, but people don't poke too much around you. They're not going to look to see, they're not, no one's going to investigate to see if you're like a dangerous weirdo, because they already know you're some kind of weirdo, right? That's something he starts to realize about, about this, about like dressing this way. Is it, weirdly enough, standing out and looking like a maniac, diverts suspicion and interest away from his actual behavior.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 10:34Robert Evans?

  Jimmy is immediately successful as a broadcaster. People love him, particularly teenagers. Even though by this point, he's well into his twenties, he talk, he understands their slang. He talks like a teenager. He understands the music they like. He understands how they're spending their time, because he socializes almost exclusively with teenage girls, right? And he's doing this because he is having sex with slash molesting them. The legal definition is dependent upon the age. That they are, again, as I've noted.

• 11:06Robert Evans?

  But that's exclusively who he hangs out with. So he does understand them, right? And at the time, other people in the media are just like, well, he's the only one these kids seem to really like get. He, you know, he understands the kids and we, we know there's a lot of money there. So we better keep paying Jimmy Savile because he's the only adult we know who can communicate with the teenagers, right?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  How old is he?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Nobody thinks to go, and I wonder why that is.

• 11:34Robert Evans?

  And I, no, no, no, not at this point in time. There's no, nobody's concerned about that.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Is he like mid twenties? Sorry.

• 11:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's in his twenties. He's in like his mid twenties by this point.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:44Robert Evans?

  Mid to late twenties during this period. And part of what's happening is they're scared of the teenagers, right? This is a frightening and anarchic seeming new segment of the culture and Jimmy can control them. So a big part of his early success and fame is his ability to convince people in the media who come from money and who are part of this like, you know, this rarefied air of, of people who got to do that job back then, that I can make these kids less scary and uncontrollable to you. I know how they tick and I can control them, right? That's why they're hiring him, right? So that's great. Basically, he, he provides these media elites in Britain at the time

• 12:28Robert Evans?

  with a degree of control and predictability over a bunch of teenagers who scared the living shit out of them. Now, good stuff. Uh, nothing like this has ever happened since. His main job was still DJing and by this point, he's helping to manage the Mecca Dance Hall. He is like the manager of the whole dance hall and he's often doing shows. And he hits upon the brilliant idea in 1955 of playing top pop hits for his audience while they waited for the house band to rest between sets. So normally you just have the band stop and either maybe you have a secondary band do something or whatever. But Jimmy comes in and he starts DJing and just putting on, playing the hits for these kids. And he's really good at knowing what they want to hear and he's good at, you know, he's talking in between putting on these songs. He's getting the crowd.

• 13:13Robert Evans?

  You guys know what a DJ does, right? But very few people are doing that at this point. He's one of the first generation. He's not, he'll often claim to have been the first DJ. I don't think that's really true. But he's part of the first generation of guys doing this, right? And this proves to be extremely popular and it earns him a promotion. So he's, he's given a job managing a different, much larger dance hall in London. So he's now moved from Leeds to London and he's running this big dance hall. And he's got access to this full sized ballroom and the power and funding to try something more ambitious than that crude gramophone wired to a speaker that he'd used previously. According to the book, In Plain Sight, he was connected to the company Westrex, who made turntables.

• 13:57Robert Evans?

  And quote, "He said he walked into the Palais, which is the, the dance hall he's running, to find an electrician fitting a record deck in the box from which the lighting was operated. He told the man he wanted two turntables and for them to be installed on the stage, one next to the other. It was, he claimed, the first twin turntable system in history." Now, it wasn't. An article I found on CNN notes commentators have pointed out they were available decades earlier. But he was one of the very first guys to do this. Jimmy is legitimately quite novel. I'm sure he saw someone else do it maybe, but there aren't a lot of people who did that before Jimmy Savile, who had a twin turntable system running, right?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Probably a black guy. Everybody in music's ripping off

• 14:40Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Black people at this point.

• 14:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. But Jimmy, Jimmy does get that reputation as being like the first DJ to do this. Like, and he's got that reputation for quite some time. He also develops a reputation for always traveling with a security team of large and angry bouncers, which he bragged about for years, using to brutalize people who stepped out of line during his shows. He had a zero tolerance policy and he talks about this a lot in interviews and stuff. Cause he was, he really liked telling stories about having these big, dangerous men beat the shit out of people at his command. Now, the fact that Jimmy was always surrounded by dangerous men was, Davies suggests, probably due in part to the fact that at night- He would pick out one or more of the girls at his shows to invite backstage.

• 15:27Robert Evans?

  And he was scared of their parents, right? So Davey suggests he's kind of lying about the fact that he needed these guys to keep order in his shows. He wanted a bunch of scary big guys around him because he's fucking a bunch of teenagers and their parents get angry, right? And at this point, this is when this stopped by the, I mean, it had happened at some point previously, but by this point, he's like 28 years old. It is no longer, even within the standards of the time, people think it's a bit weird that he's pretty much exclusively going after like 16 year old girls, sometimes younger.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  So he's molesting a bunch of teenagers. He's sexually abusing a bunch of teenagers.

• 16:08Robert Evans?

  Some of them for in legal, I would say in moral terms, yes. In legal terms, a lot of these are still 16 year year old girls. And that is legal, right? This is important in terms of like, why nothing is done, right? So one of his first victims was Kathy Kirby, who became a prominent singer later herself, but at age 16, went to see 28 year old Jimmy Savile at the Palais. She claims he pursued her and her even younger sister, which is not legal. Now she turned him down, but the next year, 1956, Kathy got to perform on stage at the Palais and was invited to tour with the bandleader, Bert Ambrose. And she says that she hit on Bert, but he turned her down because he was 40 years older than her.

• 16:50Robert Evans?

  And I don't know if this is Bert actually trying to be a good guy or just being creepy, but the way he frames, the way he explains turning her down is that like, you need to get some experience. Now, it, he may have just meant, I don't, I'm not gonna get with a teenage girl that's fucked up. But she interprets this as, oh, I need to go have sex with somebody else first, that that's what he wants. And maybe that's what Bert did want. I don't know the guy, right? But Kathy, because again, she's a teenager and she's using the logic of a teenager, decides not to say no the next time that Jimmy propositions her so that she can get experience. And again, she's 17 at this point. This is legal, right?

• 17:29Robert Evans?

  But that's one of the first stories we have of she's very uncomfortable. She's particularly uncomfortable that he's hitting on her 15 year old sister. But she does eventually sleep with him because basically she thinks it'll get her in with someone in the industry she really like wants to have a relationship with and work with. And this should get to kind of how murky a lot of it is at this period of time.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:50Robert Evans?

  Right. This is, this is not at all something we can talk about directly using all of our modern terms, right?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Well, actually, people today love to cite that this was quote unquote, "normal" back in the day.

• 18:04Robert Evans?

  It's, it's not normal, we can say, because again, she thinks it's weird that he's hitting on her sister, right? But she also doesn't think it's weird when she's 17 to hit on like a 40 year old guy, right? So there is, this is a different time with different values. But what you should note is that by this point in time, this early in the story, people note it's weird and that Jimmy likes them young and that that is weird even within a time period in which it's not at nearly as abnormal for older men to have sex with much younger women, right?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 18:37Robert Evans?

  Even in that period of time, Jimmy is weird and gets a reputation for liking them young, women and girls, right? Cause he's, he's doing both, you know? Professionally during this period, Savile seems to go from strength to strength. He starts mixing popular songs together when he's on stage in a, in a manner much more familiar to modern day listening as DJing. But again, he's not interested in making music or the artistry of any of this. The appeal to him here is always control. Hence, once he turned his second dance hall into a hit, he started stopping shows regularly to announce "smooch time," in which he gave the teenage participants permission to grind and make out with each other. This was totally novel. As one regular, this is someone who was attending these shows as a teenager at the time, later

• 19:22Robert Evans?

  told biographer Dan Davies, "He was giving teenagers the chance to get together. Teenagers had the chance to hug each other and fall in love. It was a romantic, fantastic time."

• 19:34Robert Evans?

  And I can see how for the teenagers at the time, this would be really nice, right? You've got a culture that's much more repressed and there's, you're suddenly getting this permission in a public space that like, it's okay to make out with other teens, right?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  All right.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:49Robert Evans?

  It's like you're with your boyfriend, you're out at the club and he's like, okay, it's not, you can all make out now, right? It's, it's very popular, I guess, is, is what I'd say. Like a lot of people, and again, he's not, this is, he's the one on stage. He's not making out with anyone at this point in time. He will after the shows. But what he's doing here, as much as a lot of these kids like it, is he's normalizing the fact that it's like, it's not weird to have sexual and, and like romantic, physical contact at what is his place of work, right? And even though he's on stage when he's announcing smooch time, this is going to help to normalize what is going to become predation from a nearly 30-year-old man to a bunch of largely 15 to 17-year-old girls.

• 20:34Robert Evans?

  That is part of what's happening here, but nobody, it's not noticed as that because all the teens are just happy that someone's saying, it's not bad for you to make out with your boyfriend or girlfriend, right?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:45Robert Evans?

  Like you can, you could get how that camouflage is it, right?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  It's, it's excellent camo. I mean-

• 20:50Robert Evans?

  It's really good camo.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  He's kind of a genius. Yeah. Evil genius.

• 20:56Robert Evans?

  Unfortunately, he is very good at this. In 1958, he's hired by Radio Luxembourg, an independent station on the continent that was popular with the youths. This gives him access to pop musicians, to the biggest stars of the day. He's, he's, he's talking with the Beatles. He's talking with the Rolling Stones. He's talking with fucking Elvis, right? I mean, at varying points in time, that's not all starting in 1958, but if someone is a pop musician who is famous and beloved, he knows them and you've heard him talk to them on air, so you know he knows them. And this gives him a huge amount of power over the teenage girls in his audience. Now, to the adults who are running the business and who own these venues,

• 21:39Robert Evans?

  this helps to reinforce Jimmy's status as a teen whisperer, right? Although this is largely based on a misconception they have about his fame. Because they see like, oh, wow, the teenagers love Jimmy. What's really happening is the teenagers know Jimmy has access to the musicians they love. And so they follow him because he provides access to these pop stars, right? And he increasingly grows skilled when he's talking with these teenage girls who are lining up outside of his office after the show, at making himself into a gateway between these kids who are obsessed with their favorite musicians and those musicians. That is what provides him with the bulk of his victims. He is the door.

• 22:20Robert Evans?

  If you make Jimmy happy, Jimmy can introduce you to the fucking Beatles, right? What won't you do for that guy? If you're a 16-year-old girl in this, in this period of time, right?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  It's like Weinstein can get you a part in a movie.

• 22:34Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep. It's how it works pretty much always, right?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yep, disgusting.

• 22:40Robert Evans?

  One former employee at the Plaza, which is one of the dance halls he managed, recalled seeing a line of girls outside of Jimmy's office queuing up regularly for what was euphemistically called "a chat with Jim." He used to always say, "I'm going to interview this young lady for a job." That's all he'd say. "I don't know what went on behind those doors, but I do know that he was a man." I, we know what was going on behind those doors, right? And again, while a lot of these girls are legally of age, a lot of them aren't. And we know a lot of them aren't because people talk about him hitting on them when they were 14 or 15 or even younger, right? And I don't have an exact list of, and here's the age and number of the girls that he molested and the girls who, you know, were of age and maybe consent.

• 23:24Robert Evans?

  I, I don't know how that breaks out as a ratio. But none of this is okay, because none of this, all of this is, even in the case when they're legally of age, he is making them have sex with him to get access to famous musicians. And that's bad? Like, it may not have been a crime at the time, but it's bad. Um, now Jimmy's making good money now. Uh, and despite the fact, this is something that will be with him most of his life. Despite the fact that he now makes good money, he's always driving around like fancy sports cars, Rolls Royces and stuff. He lives in squalor. His apartments are always disgusting and like the cheapest place he can possibly get. His house in this period of time is this gross mold-covered flat nicknamed the black pad

• 24:08Robert Evans?

  because he painted the walls and everything else black to disguise the grime. So that like it wasn't as obvious how gross it was. Rent was a pound fifty per week. He's just cheap.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:21Robert Evans?

  And he doesn't, I don't think he spends a lot of time in his apartment too. So he doesn't see the reason to spend much money on it at this point. He spends a lot of money on his cars and usually if he's not having sex in his office, he's having sex in his car. Now he does bring people back to his pad to party too. And he's lit the space with red light bulbs to further hide how disgusting it is. But it's, it was, it's gross.

• 24:46Robert Evans?

  Now-

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Could you get a better place with like a ball pit or something?

• 24:50Robert Evans?

  We probably don't need to be giving him notes.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  I'm sorry.

• 24:53Robert Evans?

  But it is like weird. It's kind of a noteworthy thing about how he does this. You know who else lives in squalor?

• 25:01Robert Evans?

  Well, that may not be true.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Businesses behind the products and services?

• 25:04Robert Evans?

  Yes, that's right.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  They're definitely not.

• 25:05Robert Evans?

  Yes, living in squalor, living in, living in mold-covered apartments and trash pads.

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• 26:49Robert Evans?

  Ah, and we're back. So, uh, in public, Jimmy always wore expensive ostentatious clothes and drove luxury cars, particularly Rolls Royces. And these also helped to draw teenage girls into his orbit. And by the time they got back to his disgusting pad, he'd usually done a good job of roping them in, promising, I can get you backstage at the show. You can meet your heroes and get you to come in when, you know, we're, we're going to have Elvis in or whatever the studio and you can meet him, you know, if you just do something for me, right? Now Jimmy is as good as his word usually when he makes these promises for a very good reason, right? This isn't, he's not fulfilling the promises he makes these girls who he then molests because he cares about being as good as his word.

• 27:33Robert Evans?

  He is also providing pop stars with groupies who are quote, ready to go. That's the term he uses and that's part of his job. He is a fixer for these musicians who are traveling all over the world. They're coming past, you know, they're doing part of their tour in London. So they're going on the radio to talk to Jimmy. He's talking to them about, you know, the show they're doing. And it's expected, hey, you know, you guys are going to be in town for just like two nights. Jimmy can hook you up with some girls who are ready to go, you know? Like that's, that's what he's doing. We don't know specifically who he did that for, but he does it a lot. And it's part of the appeal. It's part of why you go to Savile's parties is if you're famous, he'll get you, he'll hook you up with some groupies, right? It's very normal at the time. It's very bad.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  It's very bad. And yeah, you asked me at the beginning of the first episode how I knew him. And it's those stories. It's like

• 28:23Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  The story of the girl who gets like a fish put inside her or like whatever that are like likely underage girls with these famous musicians.

• 28:34Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yeah. And, you know, even when it's they're not legally underage at the time, it's still bad.

• 28:43Robert Evans?

  Jimmy Donnelly, who attended the Plaza starting at age 16, right around this time, was interviewed about Davies for his book. And his recollections of Savile helped get across something important. Quote, "We didn't have this word pedophile in them days. We had the word weirdo and Savile was a weirdo. He always had the bobby socks girls, the young girls in his cars. He'd always pull up with the girls in his car. Going home, he'd always have the girls in his car." Right? So again, as normalized as aspects of this were, it's weird. Jimmy is a weirdo for the time. And people are using the term weirdo to refer to the fact that he's a pedophile. Right? That's known. It's not a secret. It's just not seen as as big a problem as it's

• 29:26Robert Evans?

  later going to be seen. But it's not a mystery. Nobody doesn't think he's doing this.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  The word's important, though, because weirdo can mean a lot of things.

• 29:36Robert Evans?

  It can be. And that's what Jimmy understands is that his very oddness, the fact that he is so strange and so, so purposefully strange, is a cloaking device.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 29:47Robert Evans?

  It helps to hide the fact that he's a predator. Jimmy dressed, and it's not just that, it's that Jimmy dresses in a way because he's dressed so weird and ostentatiously, he regularly gets called a poofter or various other slurs for a homosexual person. Right? And he's fine with this because if people think he's queer or just off in general, then the fact that he's always surrounded by teenage girls is just another mark of his eccentricity. Right?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:12Robert Evans?

  And in fact, part of his strategy is he deliberately doesn't have sex with or grow up most of the young girls that he's hanging out with. The majority of the girls that he's surrounded by at any given time, he is not molesting because that provides further cover. Right? Most of the girls who are out there will say nothing happened, you know? And that makes him seem safer and it makes it seem less worth paying attention to. Dan Davies relates the story of Penny Anne Rolls, who met Savile when she was a teenage girl working at a coffee shop that was also a concert venue, which Jimmy part owned. She recalled, quote, "One Sunday night, he used to take a few of us to a restaurant, an Indian place in the curry center of Manchester. We used to go there for curry and he would

• 30:57Robert Evans?

  park his Rolls Royce up. Afterwards, he would take us home with the roof down on his car and we'd all be singing our heads off." She remembers, "There were three or four girls that Savile took out regularly, but insists he never tried it on with her. I never saw him in a relationship with anyone," she maintains. "Between you and I, I don't know whether he was gay." And tactics like this were very much in line with Jimmy's repeatedly elucidated approach to life. He talked about this as a strategy. I'm gonna quote from one specific interview he does near the end of his life, but he repeats this sentiment in numerous places over half a century. "You see, I never, ever thought that I was clever. Tricky, yes, I'm a very tricky fella, but tricky is much better than being clever. If you are clever, you can slip

• 31:41Robert Evans?

  up because you're clever, but if you're tricky, you don't slip up. You never slip up if you're tricky."

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Fuck off. Fuck off, Jimmy.

• 31:50Robert Evans?

  Unfortunately, it works.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:52Robert Evans?

  But he talks, like, he's talking, this guy is being like, "I'm tricky, I'm always around teenagers, no one ever has noticed what's wrong with me." What a mystery, this guy was molesting people for decades. We couldn't have known.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  What a slippery little fuck. What a little grimy little worm.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Is tricky also because, like, people expect less of the trickiness versus the cleverness? I don't know.

• 32:16Robert Evans?

  Right. Yes, exactly. Now, in books and interviews, reporters would always note that Jimmy never talked about his inner life, right? You can go through all of the, he wrote books about himself, multiple ones, and you don't get anything about what he actually does on his own or who he is as a person. And in fact, Jimmy claimed not to have an inner life. He would talk about this regularly.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  I believe it. Yeah.

• 32:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I kinda do too. He keeps incredibly busy, not just with work, but with sporting events. He continues to be an athlete of varying kinds this whole period. And while he's rising to fame, during this time when he's, you know, emceeing events and running all these dance halls and stuff and this popular DJ and on the radio, he's also a prominent wrestler. And in fact, he tried to use his, he gets into wrestling and he tries to use his fame, the fact that he's kind of famous as a broadcaster, to jumpstart his wrestling career. And the fact that he is so well-known does make him popular to promoters, like promoters love having Jimmy Savile on because people will show up to watch him wrestle. But other wrestlers hate it because he's not really a wrestler, right?

• 33:24Robert Evans?

  And he's kind of like, he's kind of like stealing his way to the top.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  He's like Logan fucking Paul in WWE.

• 33:32Robert Evans?

  He's Logan Paul-ing it, right?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, real WWE fans hate that guy.

• 33:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The website Pro Wrestling Stories notes, "His toe was broken in his very first match. After one bout, he visited the hospital after his testicles had been kicked up into his body."

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Nice. Thank God. Yeah, love that for him.

• 33:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. There's a couple of good bits here of him getting hurt. Savile claims to have fought in over 100 bouts and proudly lost all 35 of his first matches. Despite this, and despite his appearance, he was very popular with female fans. One wrestler who did not like Savile and beat him brutally in the ring recalled years later that Savile bragged about girls lining up to see him after fights. He would tell them, "I'll take you and you and you. The rest of you, come back another time. You might get lucky."

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Ew, bro.

• 34:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, for reference, here's how Jimmy looked back then as a wrestler. And just, what an upsetting-looking man. I don't know, like, he looks like one of the, like, in this, at least, his hair isn't shock white, it's a bit shorter and black, he's like shirtless, like, he's in good shape, you can tell. But again, he just continues.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Those eyes.

• 34:41Robert Evans?

  He's so, his face is so upsetting, always, to me.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's got like real potato-shaped face and then just like crazy. And the hair does not do the job. Lord Farquhar ass hair, the bangs, again, not sure. I mean, I'm, I don't want to harp on his appearance, but also fuck him.

• 35:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's, I mean, but also his appearance is a big part. He's conscious.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right.

• 35:09Robert Evans?

  His appearance is a performance, right? So there is, you know, it's not totally.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Question on the wrestling.

• 35:15Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Because, did you say at the beginning that he also messed with boys? Is there any evidence?

• 35:20Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  We're getting there?

• 35:22Robert Evans?

  I don't know when that starts. I don't know that anyone does. But yes, he molests a shitload of boys. Very young ones, as we'll be talking about. I don't know when he begins doing that. We really don't. I will, we will be talking about it later. I have kind of the earliest point that we know he was by, but I don't know how far back that goes.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:43Robert Evans?

  I should also note, the kind of wrestling Savile did was a mix of like the pure entertainment pro wrestling that we Americans know and love today, and actual competitive grappling. So these are real fights, right? Like where there's like a winner and a loser that's not decided ahead of time. And I will talk about one of those fights much later at the end of these episodes. You're gonna need it as a palate cleanser. But that's getting, we'll do that later. Because again, it's gonna be necessary. However, it's important you know that the fact that he's bad at wrestling doesn't mean that his time as a wrestler was a failure for Savile. In fact, it's one more thing that makes him seem terrifying and impossible to resist to his victims. The fact that he's a pro wrestler helps, helps ensure that when he's molesting someone, they don't fight back.

• 36:28Robert Evans?

  Because he's scary. He's in really good shape and he's huge. He is a big man. He's physically dangerous. This is not a, this is a guy who is in fights. This is a guy who knows how to hurt people and who knows how to use his body to hurt people. He even told one wrestling magazine, "If I arrive at the gates of heaven and Saint Peter says, 'You've been a very tricky man. You can't come in here,' I'll break his thumbs, because I'm qualified to do that, because I've earned a living being a wrestler and I've not had a problem yet with anyone whose thumbs I've broken."

• 36:56Speaker 05

  Oh, fuck.

• 36:57Robert Evans?

  No one could have known. Impossible to know this guy was praying on kids. There were no signs. There were no signs.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  To even think of that scenario in your head.

• 37:07Robert Evans?

  Also, the fact that, again, he's periodically in his life being like, "I'm not clever, I'm tricky, and no one can catch you if you're tricky." And then in this, he's like, "St. Peter wouldn't let me into heaven because I'm tricky." Really lets you know what he means when he says he's tricky.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 37:23Robert Evans?

  In 1964, the BBC asked Jimmy Savile to be the first host of a new television program. Well, I think it's a radio program that becomes TV later, but I think it is TV at this point in time. It's a little, because a lot of media, it's kind of hard to find from 1964. So I think this is a TV program at the time. It's called Top of the Pops, and it's a video showcase of the hit bands of the era that becomes this massive hit. And Jimmy's not the only host. They rotate DJs. So like, every episode, you'll have somebody different, right? But Jimmy is like, the first one to host the show. And he's like, one of the most regular people that they bring back to host Top of the Pops during this period of time.

• 38:04Robert Evans?

  And throughout the 60s, and I think into the 70s, he's repeatedly voted Britain's favorite DJ. Like, he's the top DJ in the country by pretty much any person's, like, standards. And so he also gets the job regularly when these huge bands that are, honestly, probably bigger in a lot of ways than any popular musician is today, when you talk about the Beatles or the Stones at their height, he's the guy onstage introducing them whenever they play in England, right? And he continues to, he'll dress in bizarre costumes. I saw one video where he's like, opening for the Stones, and he's dressed as like, a stereotype of a Japanese woman, wearing like, a kimono and like, waving a fan to cool himself down as he approaches the microphone.

• 38:48Robert Evans?

  Um, he's got his catchphrases like now then, now then, and now how about that then? Because catchphrases were easier to have back then. More than anything, Jimmy had access. This is a guy who talks to the Beatles repeatedly. He's in like a Top of the Pops, they do like a TV skit with the Beatles where Jimmy, because he's so huge and tall, is like, he's like the abominable snowman. And they're all out like hiking and he's like one by one, like eating the Beatles, basically. And I don't think they're actually friends. I don't think they know, like, they're certainly not hanging out socially the rest of their lives, but he knows them. And if you're a teenage girl, all you see is that like, wow, he knows the fucking Beatles, you know?

• 39:33Robert Evans?

  On stage, when Jimmy wasn't surrounded by pop stars, he was often quite literally buried in girls, which further helped to normalize and disguise his behavior. Here's one example from an episode of Top of the Pops in the 1970s that Sophie's gonna play for you here.

• 39:48Speaker 08

  I tell you something. The fellow could get used to all this, as it happens, he really could get used to it. So ladies and gentlemen, all we can say is good night from all of us here on Top of the Pops, and it's number one time, and of course, if you believe me now, it's from the one and only Shi Ca Gao, and thank you very much indeed.

• 40:07Robert Evans?

  So for those of you who couldn't see that, Jimmy is surrounded by like a dozen young, very young women. I can't tell their age. And one of the girls, the girl next to him, keeps like jumping and making like, ooh, sounds, I think because he's grabbing her the whole time.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 40:23Robert Evans?

  This is the most popular show in the country, one of them at the time. He's just onstage with a bunch of teenage girls groping one of them on video. This is so normalized. This is not hidden. This is not, like, I have to really emphasize, there was no reason not to know what Jimmy was doing here.

• 40:45Robert Evans?

  While I was looking for that clip, I accidentally came across another clip from a 1965 episode of Top of the Pops, and Jimmy's only on for the first second, but once I heard the words to the song he's introducing, I had to include this too, just because it's, it's just a very, I don't know, funny bit of irony. Sophie's gonna play that clip to you now from the 65 episode. The song is called "Little Children."

• 41:16Robert Evans?

  Little children, you dare not tell on me.

• 41:25Robert Evans?

  That's absurd. Why was that a song?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  I know.

• 41:29Robert Evans?

  Just to kind of talk, make the point about how like, some of this is that things were fucked up at the time. Why is that a song?

• 41:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, just Jimmy Savile, the pedophile introducing a song about telling kids not to tell on adults. Great.

• 41:49Robert Evans?

  So by this point, by the time, and again, we're in kind of like the mid 60s in this era. Jimmy's moved on from the mecca. He's hosting, he's running things at a new 3,300 person dance hall called the Top 10 Club, which promised live music by famous pop stars and top international DJ Jimmy Savile. On ads for the club, Jimmy was pictured with a chimpanzee for some reason, and the text, "It's a gas, it's a ball, it's like crazy, man." The club only allowed people 16 and up, which was again, the age of consent. But numerous people who attended in those days have made it clear that lying about your age was so easy as to be essentially encouraged. No one's checking or cares if you're not actually 16, right?

• 42:34Robert Evans?

  And in fact, there's some evidence that, you know, the bouncers, the people like at the gate, are specifically trying to bring in younger girls for reasons I probably don't need to elaborate on here. Now, the Top 10 Club becomes Jimmy's primary, like, hunting area. And he, in order to maintain sort of this, like, his kind of specialness, he forbade, none of the other DJs were allowed to play top 20 hits, right? Because Jimmy knows his popularity is based entirely on his perceived closeness to fame. And this further helps to make him seem special and make it seem like he's got access. Jimmy Donnelly, who we heard from earlier, recalled that Savile always left with girls from their mid to late teens, and that it was well-known Jimmy Savile liked them young.

• 43:20Robert Evans?

  Now, the Top Ten Club is going to become probably his most reliable hunting ground in this period of life. That's the term Davies uses for it through the mid to late 60s. And both he and the BBC are recruiting girls from the Top Ten Club, right? Savile is recruiting them because he wants to molest them. And the BBC is recruiting them for the studio audience of their hit new TV show, Top of the Pops, because they have just teenagers come in to dance, right? Like, these girls are being brought in to, like, dance on stage, be in the background. It's like in that clip I've shown you, you just have them as set dressings, right? And so you've got, like, Cecil Corr, who is the assistant producer for the show, and a 29-year-old man, he'll go talent spotting

• 44:02Robert Evans?

  out at club nights at the Top Ten Club, and he'll hand out tickets to girls. And he had said later, "I was looking for girls aged 13 to 17," right? That's who he's handing out tickets to be on TV to, said one Top of the Pops director. "If they were dancers or were attractive, obviously they got on." So again, both the BBC and Savile are preying on underage girls. The BBC, because they, the BBC recognizes that they have "sex appeal", quote unquote, "to the audience, to the musicians, to the DJs, and they want there to be girls younger than 16 here." The BBC makes that decision, too. This is not just Jimmy deciding

• 44:44Robert Evans?

  to molest kids, but BBC wants to put kids in a position where they will be molested. That is a choice made by the people running the BBC, and it is a choice they keep making for decades. That is a very important part of the story.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  And truly, they're not getting paid, like...

• 44:59Robert Evans?

  No, no, no.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  They're getting paid in the ticket to get molested.

• 45:03Robert Evans?

  They're getting paid in the ticket, you know, and maybe you'll get, you know, with your favorite pop star or whatever, right? That's the, I think, what draws a lot of these kids in, right? Because obviously, they're kids. Jimmy maintained his reputation as Britain's oldest teenager by speaking like kids, knowing their lingo and their music. But his larger appeal was the simple fact that he represented access to the pop stars they idolized. Savile was constantly on the air, on TV, or in concerts, introducing The Beatles, Manfred Mann, and of course, The Rolling Stones. And while the kids perceived him as having a close relationship to all these guys, the reality was often uglier. Let's take The Stones as an example. Savile was an early advocate of the band, even when the record company, Decca, wasn't sure they had what it took to outshine The Beatles.

• 45:46Robert Evans?

  Savile had seen the way audiences went nuts for the group. He described it as rioting, and he supported them in his "He Gets a Newspaper" column, so he's writing newspaper articles about the pop industry at this time, and in his discussions with industry insiders. This does not mean that he was friendly with or liked by the band members. In 1964, after their first number-one record, The Stones were booked to play at the top-ten club. The crowd that night was, for lack of a better word, insane. Fights broke out constantly, and the police even had to show up. And The Stones, to an extent, part of like what they're doing in this time is playing up how crazy their concerts get. This is what's going to kind of culminate in the, like, there's a, like, somebody gets killed at one of their concerts by a Hells Angels, like, back in the US, not crazy long

• 46:30Robert Evans?

  after this period of time, because that's part of like what makes The Stones famous, is how nuts their shows go, how crazy their fans go for them. But things get so bad this night that The Stones refused to play when their time came up, in part because, like, they've lost their, their instruments, like, the instruments they were supposed to have didn't show up, and they didn't want to play with, like, the venue's, like, backup set of instruments, they didn't think they were good enough. And that's just gonna make the fans even crazier, which makes them less want to go onstage. So Jimmy, who's out DJing to try and calm the crowd down, gets called up by an aide, and he goes backstage to see what's wrong. And he's told that, like, you know, the band isn't going to play, these instruments aren't good enough, like, they're, they're just going to leave.

• 47:14Robert Evans?

  And I'm gonna quote now from the book "In Plain Sight." Savile's response was characteristically blunt. He pointed to where three of his largest minders were standing and growled- You've got the time it takes this stage to revolve, to make your mind up. If you're not going to play, you're going to be unconscious because my minders are going to chin all of you. I'll accept drummer Charlie Watts, that is. Savile claimed that Watts looked him up and down before speaking. "You would, wouldn't you?" he said. "No danger," replied Savile, "and I'll throw you to the fucking audience. I guarantee you that." And the Rolling Stones agreed. They take their preferred, preferred audience, uh, instruments? And they play on their, and they, they go play their show, right? This is, uh, he does this with other people. This is just one example of like the way he is. He is very comfortable threatening violence, even on these big pop stars, right?

• 48:01Speaker 02

  That's

• 48:01Robert Evans?

  And to be fair.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  That's, that's wild.

• 48:05Robert Evans?

  Like, that's Yeah, it's crazy.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  That's unhinged behavior. That, that level of aggression, like, I'm sorry, to make, to Mick Jagger?

• 48:13Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, to Mick Jagger, yeah. And again,

• 48:16Speaker 01

  But also Mick Jagger, like, what's he gonna throw?

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're kids at this point, too. They're not that much older than their teenage fans, whereas Jimmy Savile is now pushing like 30 something, like, he's a mature adult.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:28Robert Evans?

  Like, you can't think of the Stones as like, these massive figures that they are today.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  At this point, they're a lot less sure of themselves.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  That's, that's great context, thanks.

• 48:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So the Stones agree, they play the show, and Savile later told an interviewer that "Had they refused, I would have had the bastards chinned and slugged to the crowd. If they lived or died, it wouldn't have mattered to me." He's very open about all this stuff.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  What a, what a maniac.

• 48:56Robert Evans?

  What a fucking maniac. By this point, in the late 60s, he's a well-known emcee and public figure. Savile got hired to host shows all over the country. In 1967, the town of Ottley hosted their annual civic ball and named it the Pop Civic Ball to attract youngsters. Of course, Jimmy Savile was asked to attend as chief guest, and he responded with a list of conditions for his appearance. The first was that his normal 200-pound fee had to go to a local charity, right? So that's what you start, your first demand is, "Don't pay me, send the money to a local charity," right? Because that deflects suspicion. Particularly, it deflects suspicion before his second and third condition. I wish to sleep the night on the sheven, which is like a park or something nearby,

• 49:40Robert Evans?

  in a tent, which you will organize, plus sleeping bag and a large torch. And this is the answer that the venue gives. I will personally organize a tent, plus sleeping bags and a large torch for you to sleep overnight, and moreover, will hold you to it. And his third demand is, a guard of honor of six young ladies, in another tent, of course, to keep me safe. And the venue answers, I'll organize a guard of honor of six young ladies, but I won't be held to their compliance or your safety. Get it? The town, you know, whatever representative of the town is like, I'll make sure there's the six young ladies for you, but I won't make sure you don't molest them. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  That's called-

• 50:17Robert Evans?

  This is in writing.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  That's called sex trafficking.

• 50:21Robert Evans?

  This is in writing.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  That's-

• 50:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  That's horrific. That's deeply horrible. That's repugnant.

• 50:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, oh, it gets so much worse. This happens all the time.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  I'm getting-

• 50:34Robert Evans?

  Again, his-

• 50:35Speaker 02

  I've been angry this entire episode, but that-

• 50:37Robert Evans?

  It's crazy.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  That in writing is absolutely just, I'm disgusted.

• 50:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and this is public at the time. He talks about it to the media, that he made the town provide him with six teenage girls, and they did. Everyone knows this. It's not hidden. His fourth condition is that he be given a tour of the local hospital, because he likes volunteering at hospitals. We'll talk about that a lot more, but he loves going out and doing it, you know, doing his good charitable work at these hospitals, right? And so you see, you sandwich, I want teenage girls and privacy so that I can molest them, in between money to charity, volunteer at a local hospital, right? You see what he's doing here, you know?

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:19Robert Evans?

  Now, all of these become standard demands for him in the years to come. Whenever he's asked to do something like this, he is constantly hosting events, and he will always say, okay, I need you to provide me with this number of girls as an honor guard, or whatever, you know? Sometimes to camp with, sometimes to hang out with, sometimes to like, wake him up in the morning, right? And he'll always open with a charitable donation, and then in the middle is the girls, and at the end is some other, like, good call. Is volunteering at a hospital or something. All of these demands, particularly for the honor guard, were publicized at the time. Local press wrote about this. Jimmy wrote about this in his autobiography. In his autobiography, which is published after he is awarded the OBE,

• 52:04Robert Evans?

  or Order of the British Empire, which is a step below knighthood. In his autobiography, he describes the teenage girls that this town provided with him, him with as looking good enough to eat. Now, I don't know precisely, yeah.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  What?

• 52:20Robert Evans?

  This is not hidden.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  What year are we in, Robert, here?

• 52:23Robert Evans?

  Sixty-seven, sixty-seven.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  And how old would he be roughly?

• 52:27Robert Evans?

  He's like, he's gotta be, he's like twenty-nine, pushing thirty.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  And has the face of, that is his face.

• 52:34Robert Evans?

  And looks like Jimmy Savile, yeah.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:36Robert Evans?

  Uh, I don't know precisely how old the girls were, but they all seem to have been under eighteen. Uh, in the book, In Plain Sight, Davies writes. And he's talking about a woman who told it, who was one of these girls and talked to him years later about it, right? The woman recalled that it was bitterly cold when the girls got into their sleeping bags in the separate tent that had been set up for them in that clearing. It was at this point in the early hours of the morning that Jimmy Savile, who had been plying them with vodka all night, but not drinking himself, came in and tried it on with each of the girls. Although the woman refused to elaborate on what had happened on the grounds that she didn't think it fair on the others in the tent that night, she did describe Jimmy Savile as a disgusting old man and a pervert. Her version of events was that they were saved when youths from the rugby club shot out the paraffin lamps with air rifles.

• 53:22Robert Evans?

  They had followed us up there, she said. She described the girls huddling in the tent while a fight broke out between Savile and the youths. Savile was violent, really nasty, once he turned, she added. Thank God. Salute to those teenagers.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yes, good for you.

• 53:36Robert Evans?

  Shooting them in a tent with an air rifle. Thank God for you.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  The honor guard term is like so ironic and disgusting.

• 53:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also.

• 53:45Robert Evans?

  It's one of the grossest things I've ever heard. Yeah.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  I was gonna ask you, you said the vodka thing, but like, is he, is this a common thing?

• 53:52Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  That he's like plying them?

• 53:54Robert Evans?

  He does not seem to have been very much of a drinker or much of a, I'm sure he did some, but he, he, he doesn't seem to have much of a drinker or much into drugs, but he plies girls with them. He does a lot of that in this period of time and later. So.

• 54:11Robert Evans?

  We'll talk more about that, but this is as good a time as any to go to ads, I guess.

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• 55:51Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, the same year that Jimmy Savile helped host the Otley Pop Civic Ball, a magazine called People, I don't think this is the People magazine we have today, I think it was a different magazine called People, launched an investigation into Savile's predilection for young girls, based on numerous complaints by underage girls that he had raped or otherwise abused them. This is happening as early as 1967. The investigation was never published, though, because the editor of the magazine, Sam Campbell, had hired Jimmy Savile as a columnist, because he's going to draw in young readers. And so, basically, he's like, we're not going to publish an investigation over whether or not this guy's molesting girls. He's one of our most popular columnists, you know?

• 56:36Robert Evans?

  In January of 1972, after receiving the OBE, People, this magazine, published a four-part series with Jimmy titled, "Me and My 3,000 Birds: At Last, Jimmy Savile's Own Story." Give you a guess as to what that's about.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Disgusting.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 56:53Robert Evans?

  Yep. Now, when you're, and 3,000's a very realistic, I don't know, maybe not at this point in time, but his victims' number in the thousands. And when you're abusing women-

• 57:06Speaker 02

  A pedophile of distinction with his OBE.

• 57:09Robert Evans?

  With his OBE, yes, yes. Pedophile OBE. Now, when you're abusing women and girls, at the rate Jimmy was during this period, you're gonna need a close circle of cop friends if you want to avoid trouble. And from the start of his period of major fame in the late 60s through the early 70s, up to the end of his life, the adult men that Jimmy Savile primarily socialized with appear to have been police officers.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:35Robert Evans?

  When he's hanging out with other adult men, they are often, if not mainly, cops. Those are his best friends, is the cops.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, they would be.

• 57:43Robert Evans?

  All the cops. Yeah, they would be.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Bastards.

• 57:47Robert Evans?

  During the height of his dancehall days, Manchester police officer Louis "The Lion" Harper was, per Davies, Jimmy Savile's eyes and ears. He's watching to hear if there are any complaints he needs to take care of. Harper was the chief superintendent of the city center and a prominent member of the vice squad. As a note, when Harper died, he left more in his will than he had earned in total during his time on the police force. Not cricket at all.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:12Robert Evans?

  Not getting bribed by Jimmy?

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. He gave him that nickname, fucking like-

• 58:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, "The Lion."

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Tywin Lannister-ass shit? What the fuck?

• 58:21Robert Evans?

  One of my sources for these episodes was an article in the UK Tribune by Farrell Kenny. He notes that in Savile's out-of-print 1974 autobiography, As It Happens, Jimmy referenced a female Manchester police officer who attempted to bring charges against him for harboring a teenage runaway. That means a girl ran away from home and Jimmy was keeping her in one of his houses, right?

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:45Robert Evans?

  However, this officer was, in Savile's words, dissuaded from going through with this by her colleagues. Quote, "Because it was well-known that were I to go, I would probably take half the station with me." Now, does that mean that if Savile were charged, half the station would quit because they were his friends? Or does that mean that if Savile were charged, he would tell stories about half the station? Because he was providing half the Manchester police force with teenage girls to molest. What do you think's more likely?

• 59:19Speaker 02

  That's so shady.

• 59:19Robert Evans?

  I know what I think is more likely.

• 59:23Robert Evans?

  The finest, Manchester's finest. Yeah, good guys. Now, we know that during this period where Jimmy was managing his dance halls, doing Top of the Pops, and starting with the TV show he's going to start, we'll talk about in part three, Jim Will Fix It, he impregnated at least two teenage girls.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 59:41Robert Evans?

  I am only going to give you one of these accounts, and I'm sure there were more. I'm gonna only give one of these accounts in the interest of just not breaking everybody's spirit, but you should know this is happening more than the one time we're talking about.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  My spirit's pretty broken before you even got to this part. This is just like...

• 59:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:00:00Robert Evans?

  Now, this particular allegation that I'm going to relate came out in October of 2012, which is after Savile's death. But the alleged crime occurred in 1964, when the woman in question was 16 years old and a virgin. She had started an Elvis Presley fan club, and Savile invited her on his radio Luxembourg show to talk about the fan club she had. And he tells her afterwards, "Well, I'm flying to America soon, and I'm gonna visit Elvis. I'll be hanging out with him. So why don't you send me a picture of you that I can give to the king?" Right? So she does this. And I'm gonna quote from in plain sight as to what happened next. According to the woman, who did not want to reveal her identity, on returning from the States, Savile phoned her house and told her he had a present for her from Elvis.

• 1:00:42Robert Evans?

  She was understandably thrilled and recalled walking to the London hotel where Savile was staying. She said he met her in his pajamas. He then took her into his room, pinned her to the wall, and started kissing her. The man said she pleaded for him to stop. He whispered, "You're an angel," before pushing her onto the bed and raping her. Afterwards, when he's done, he tosses her some badges from the new Elvis Presley movie, Kissin' Cousins, and leaves. That's the present from Elvis. So she goes home after this. She misses her next two periods and she realizes that she's pregnant. She attempts to induce a miscarriage. Eventually, her father takes her to receive an illegal abortion, which she endures without painkillers. This was physically damaging enough that she endures

• 1:01:23Robert Evans?

  multiple miscarriages as a young woman in her twenties. Again, not the only story like this. And again, to a point of even when someone's technically legally of the age, he is still often raping the people who are legally of age. It's just that who's gonna charge him with rape? The cops he's friends with?

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Wow, Robert.

• 1:01:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  I wasn't quite ready for that.

• 1:01:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That's what we're, we're only gonna relate one of the that, the stories of girls that he rapes and impregnates, but there's more than one. There's more than one. I don't know how many there were. Could have been hundreds, to be honest.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Robert Evans?

  Could have been hundreds.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  It's hard to hear, but it happened and like, we can't ignore

• 1:02:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  that these types of things had to happen to so many people, but wow.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, behind the euphemism of honor guard or whatever, there's a lot of that shit.

• 1:02:18Robert Evans?

  There's a lot of real bleak stuff behind these euphemistic terms.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, just to say, I'm so fucking glad that guy's dead. I really enjoyed.

• 1:02:27Robert Evans?

  He's for sure dead.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he should have had to pay for it a little bit.

• 1:02:31Robert Evans?

  He didn't ever pay for it. No, I'm sorry.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  And so there's many such cases where this has happened, which is why it's important that we talk about horrific things that have happened in history and today so that like, people know what to look for. But this is like, there were so many people where

• 1:02:49Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  I think that's why.

• 1:02:52Robert Evans?

  That's only gonna be more of it as this goes on.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's part of what's really hard to stomach for me because so many people are aware. And like, honestly, hearing that, you know, not that. You know, any cop isn't a bastard, but hearing that a a woman knew about this and

• 1:03:09Robert Evans?

  A woman officer and tried to do something.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  Tried to do something, but honestly, girl didn't try that hard. And like, that's heartbreaking.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Well, the sister.

• 1:03:18Robert Evans?

  She may have been threatened with murder, like a bunch of her fellow cops may have said, well, fucking like, I don't know what she actually endured. I have no idea.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  You know, I'm just.

• 1:03:26Robert Evans?

  Like, not to not to hold water for a cop, and I literally don't know. And I can imagine it being pretty brutal for her.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  It's just like, all these people are responsible for his crimes. Like, you knew. You fucking knew what he was. And like, he was one of the most vile people to ever live.

• 1:03:47Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Well, and one of the, at this point in the story, you do, you can still say the thing that like, this is all happening within this subculture, pop music and the people who are like presenting it to the nation.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:01Robert Evans?

  Where this kind of behavior is extremely common and normalized. That's true up to this point in the story.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:06Robert Evans?

  It is not going to be true for most of Jimmy Savile's life as a sex offender. Every, when I tell you, at this point, the people implicated in his behavior are some cops and other DJs and like BBC people working at the time. By the end of this story, the entire royal family, including Princess Di, are implicated in degrees of his crimes.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:04:29Robert Evans?

  In addition to the, in addition to Margaret Thatcher, the whole ruling class of England is implicated in what Jimmy Savile did. Um, so that's cool. We'll talk about that in part three and four next week.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  God, I love Princess Di. That ruined it for me.

• 1:04:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe she didn't know anything. I don't know. Prince, Prince Charles sure did. King Charles sure did. Absolutely.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  Well, that doesn't surprise me.

• 1:04:54Robert Evans?

  In the subsequent episodes. I can, I don't know. I know that Di was a good friend of Savile's for the, for a chunk of her life. I don't know what she knew. Um, but we know what Charles knew. And Prince Andrew.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Is so funny is when I saw your Epstein episode, I was like jealous of the guest and I manifested too hard because look what episode I wound up.

• 1:05:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, because he's very much in some ways is kind of like the English equivalent, right? You know, in some very different ways and we'll talk about all that in part three and four. But yeah, you want to plug your book before we roll out here?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ. You guys, Girl's Gone Wild, Girl's Gone Wild is similar to this, but different. But Girl Gone Wild is a feminist manifesto. So if you need something to just wash out that gross taste in your mouth after that brutal rape scene we just heard, order yourself a copy. That's the best plug I have.

• 1:05:57Robert Evans?

  Cool. Well, sorry for these episodes being so bleak, folks. But it's not going to get better. But hey, we'll get to, you know, we will get to talk about Jimmy Savile experiencing some degree of comeuppance. Not unfortunately, if the legal variety, but I am saving a good story for the end of this, just as a palate cleanser. So I'll promise you all that.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Can't wait.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  Well, shit, thanks.

• 1:06:25Robert Evans?

  Until next week, everybody, you know.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Touch grass, pet a dog if they want you to pet it.

• 1:06:31Robert Evans?

  If you know a BBC executive, sock them right in the teeth, you know, I mean, they're probably, at this point, all those guys are gone, but probably still deserve it.

• 1:06:45Speaker 09

  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 in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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• 1:07:50Speaker 05

  This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brew's Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool-deck bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Mess of parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com.

• 1:08:20Speaker 07

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