To still be stunned that The Royals were close with Jimmy Savile?

[ThatCleverExpert]

It still blows my mind that the Royal Family had such a long-standing relationship with Jimmy Savile. Prince Charles sought his advice multiple times and he was treated like some kind of national treasure, even given access to hospitals and prisons.

Meanwhile, this was a man who was later exposed as a prolific predator - someone who abused vulnerable people, including children and even corpses in hospital mortuaries.
How did nobody see it? How was he so protected? And how was someone like that allowed so close to people in power?

I know it was a different time but AIBU to think the whole thing is still just horrifying?

You're surprised that the family who covered up the "Pedo formally known as prince" were friends with Jimmy Saville?

Why are you surprised? They have been covering up for a sexual preditor from their own family for years. They are more concerned about a appearances than basic human decency. We should end the royal shit show now.

They will have been briefed. And the people who did the briefing would have known.

Do you honestly think the Saville’s of this world advertise their disgusting depraved behaviour?

Why do you think he got away with it for decades?

He groomed them and was very manipulative.

So basically they were no worse than 99% of the rest of the UK population.
Hindsight is always 20/20.

Saville was a big charity fund raiser that brought him into contact with the royal family and many other influential people, and of course many of his victims. He was very manipulative and had a number of 'friends' who protected him from most of the suspicion. Almost everyone was fooled by him.

The one person I remember who seemed to have seen right through him was Terry Wogan, I remember him being asked about why Saville wasn't involved in Children in Need and replied that he wouldn't have him anywhere near his charities. Seemed a bit strange at the time, but very perceptive in hindsight.

We all discussed how grim and creepy he was when I was at school. It was mainly adults who “didn’t know “.

It wasn't just the royals that were fooled by him. Heaps of people were. I never saw anything other than what he wanted to see.

I know now on MN everyone says that "they always found him creepy", but look at some of the threads before he died. There was the odd one or two, but more often not.

And have you never been fooled by someone? There's someone who likes to push themselves into the public eye locally; people are marmite about him.

Some people say he's so kind, looks out for everyone, so sweet of him for doing these things. He's very good at controlling the narrative. There's a few people actively hero-worship him.

He's very good at making connections with the right people who will push him forward with him saying "oh really, little me, I'm only trying to help, I'm not sure I can... but as a massive favour because I can see there's no one else, then I will...".
And he won't let them see his real side. He assesses people into people that can push him up, then goes out of his way to woo them. People who can't help, or would stand up to him, he either ignores or discredits them.

From personal experience I can tell you that he's a practiced manipulator, who will lie to save himself, and throw others under the bus without pausing to think. He's an expert on coercive control. As far as I know there are no pervy allegations about him, but he's defended people who do (and in at least one situation been convicted by the courts).

People who see that side of him, if they stand up and say anything are shouted down by the other people.
I suspect when he is gone there will be plenty coming out about it, and half the hero-worshippers will be queueing up to say how they really suspected it. If they did, then they are guilty of enabling him - but I don't think most do. He hides it well to the people he thinks matters.

Yep im 52 so remember Jim,I'll Fixit very well
I always eye roll when people say oh I always knew he was a "bad un' even as a small child
It was an incredibly popular programme with kids everybody i knew wanted to be on it
Yeah he had the jingly,jangly jewelry, big cigar ,and now then ,now then catch phrases but it was all.part of the persona
I dont doubt peoole high up knew though
And the only reason he got away with it was becsuse he raised millions for charity .

Do tell who knew? I don't think many people would cover up sexual abuse of children, disabled people in hospital and even the dead.

Well yes many Psychopaths can be very charismatic.

Price Charles and Margaret Thatcher were good friends with him. It’s been common knowledge for years.

Mountbatten, who was Charlie’s mentor, had a certain reputation around young navel cadets - the royals didn’t care. 🤷‍♀️

I mean he had the keys to broadmoor and was allowed to wander around at.,will I think he even had his own room there?
What other celebrity would be allowed to do this ?

I agree that these were different times. My dad was a teenager in the 70s and he remembers a PE teacher whom all the boys had to shower in front of. He was creepy, everyone knew it, but my dad’s view was that he wasn’t creepy enough for anyone to do anything if he didn’t touch anyone and, if he did touch someone, he would have faced unofficial justice before the police caught up with him - a dad or big brother would have beaten him up, basically.

This is the main reason why jimmy savilles and others got away with it - the sanction for sexual depravity was just as likely to be unofficial and relied on having a protective male figure in one’s life. Something that many kids didn’t have and boarding school and children’s institutions were places of intense vulnerability. Groomers/sexual abusers and county lines etc are still exploiting that today (kids in care being sexually abused, kids from vulnerable families being targeted etc). I’m obviously not arguing that we should be a society of viligante justice and mob rule or shame, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the idea that we should or can rely on swift state intervention for sexual wrongdoing has not always been ever present.

The flip side of where we are today is that the State now has quite a lot of intervention to do in the age of the internet (the percentage of men who have looked at child porn is really terrifying) and is now quite heavily burdened by this for the resources it has. And sometimes the “state is responsible and would intervene if it needed to” approach can lead to individuals not feeling enough individual responsibility to protect the vulnerable from predators too. We live in more dispersed communities and live online, so in past times it is possible that people like Huw Edwards might have been more widely suspected to be a wrong un earlier than he was (the Sun looked through their records and found quite a lot of things had been reported over the years without sufficient weight for them to publish), but back then people might still have turned a blind eye or been insufficiently condemnatory about it or not regarded it as a police matter.

What percentage of men have looked at CSAM, do you know? I’d be interested to see the statistics on that. I’ve always thought it must be much higher than people think.

I’m afraid it portrays Charles as a very poor judge of character.

Actually that’s a very good point. Don’t Mi5 assess anyone mixing with the royals and the PM?

Or would the attitude have been back then, oh he’s “only” a harmless paedo?

If you watch the Sutcliffe documentary on Netflix, it clearly demonstrates how misogyny hampered the investigation. Attitudes today about sexual abuse are completely different thankfully.

I think younger people forget that we didn’t have 24/7 access to many, many different media outlets, official stuff but also commentaries, blogs, social media etc. which means that everyone is able to see the evidence for themselves.
We had three tv channels and newspapers, that was it. Now people have compiled all the media appearances of Jimmy Saville and watched collectively the weirdness is more obvious, but we only saw him for half an hour on Jim’ll fix it, a couple of times a week on Top of the Pops, at the London Marathon, and then occasional articles or interviews about his charity work.
We didn’t know what he was up to, how could we?
Plus he obviously didn’t abuse every single child he encountered. I have a friend who was on Jim’ll fix it and had a great time. So there were lots of people who genuinely liked him.
I agree with the poster above who said that, in those days, the speculation that he might be gay was much more outrageous than he might be sleeping with underage girls.

Given Andrew’s reputation I don’t see how this is a surprise?

IMO JS was very clever at presenting himself favourably.

My folks used to live not far from Broadmoor Hospital and were friends with the chief psychiatrist there, and his wife. At least once they were invited to some fundraising do there when JS was present, and were introduced. My DM (always a hyper sensitive type anyway) said at the time (the 70s) that JS gave her the absolute creeps, so I’ve wondered more than once how the chief psychiatrist didn’t pick anything up. Or maybe he did, but put it down to some personal prejudice on account of JS’ appearance, etc.

Many years later a friend who married someone who turned out to have (usually carefully concealed) decidedly narcissistic traits, was told before by a psychiatrist who knew him only socially, to think very carefully about marrying him, since he possessed ‘a very complex personality’.

Wasn't just the Royal Family was it?
Other people including members of his family and organisations (Stoke Mandeville Leeds General Infirmary to name 2 ) welcomed him.

I think people were very naive about paedophiles in the 1970/80s.

Er, paedophila was not invented in the 60s. Not unknown to society. It's always been there. It's more a case of we are trying to pretend we care about the victims now.

I was a child / teen in the 70s and I had no idea. And the benefit of hindsight has not changed my view of the past; I definitely did not see it. I found him corny and extremely tedious, that was all.

Don’t Mi5 assess anyone mixing with the royals and the PM?

Of course they do. The same way the NHS assess who might be in need of a vaccine ....