Do you not.
Next part of the article which is why Mark Lawson got called to give evidence. I recommend reading that in detail. Now, let us be clear. I respect Dame Janet Smith very much. But she can only work with the evidence that she was given, and people are often disinclined to incriminate themselves.
extract
BBC Television Centre, London, 26 July 2006
Front Row has been offered “behind the scenes access” to the final recording of Top of the Pops, which is ending after 42 years. I go with a producer who can now only legally be identified as C23, her code in Janet Smith’s 2016 report into Jimmy Savile and the BBC.
The press officer has sent her a list of potential interviews and we choose Tony Blackburn and Reggie Yates to represent both ends of the chronology. We are offered Savile, who had fronted the opening show and is co-hosting the closing one, but decline for the reason that, not being senior BBC management, we have heard all the stories. I also want to keep my colleague from an encounter with a man whose greetings to women are known to involve laboriously kissing or licking the length of their arm (both Thatcher and Princess Diana reportedly suffered this).
We have happily talked to Blackburn and Yates and are packing up to go when Savile splits the double doors of the studio and lopes out, characteristically track-suited, top unzipped to show medallions nesting in chest hair. He is 79. “Now then, now then, now then,” he exclaims. “What’s all this about Radio 4?”
I struggle to write the next paragraph but Smith, in her section 5: 262, records what happened with the pellucid neutrality of legal prose:
He said “hello” to everyone except C23. Then he stood beside her, grabbed her round the waist with his right hand, put his legs round her left thigh (so that her leg was between his two legs) and rubbed his crotch up and down. So far as C23 can remember, he did not say anything. She felt that he was giving a performance. Fortunately Mr Lawson saw what was happening, came over and distracted Savile, then positioned himself between Savile and C23. The interview took place.
There is one detail Smith omits for the proper reason that it is experienced by a witness not a victim. When I block Savile, he is furious, thwarted. His strength is extraordinary for a man four months away from 80 but I have enough height and heft to hold him off, though not without briefly feeling his erection against my leg. (Many have suggested that his favoured baggy leisure wear was doubly calculated for easy removal and to advertise his arousal to his prey without doubt.) Let me be clear that this experience is nothing at all compared to the impacts on his victims, but it is a weird memory to have and gives me some tiny insight into the suffering he inflicted.
In later years, I will agonise over whether I should have stopped the interview happening. But Savile, with a tactical cunning likely developed through his depravities, created a situation in which we would appear to be reneging on an interview that had never been agreed. And at the time, though I know I have definitely seen something happen, it is impossible to be sure exactly what until discussing it on the tube back to Broadcasting House. As seems to be regrettably often the case in such situations, my colleague does not want the incident reported. She is doubtful of the BBC backing us against Savile (as, privately, am I) and asks me not to say anything. But what has happened is confirmation of 30 years of rumours, and puts me in the clear position of having not just heard something but now seen it. So when we get back, I inform my line manager and subsequently gain the impression that the information has been spread more widely.
When this incident becomes public a decade later, the BBC line is that no action was taken because I failed to make a “formal” complaint. I have no recollection of ever being offered a choice of whistles to blow. My memory is that the BBC told me the matter could only be taken seriously if the complaint came from the victim. I will also later be informed that I am mistaken about the number of BBC managers among whom news of the 2006 assault was shared.
[bold mine]