This two-part ITV documentary lets the presenter’s victims tell their stories with sensitivity, as well as asking wider questions – about the people who enabled his sexual assaults
There can be few people who, when the outpouring of allegations of historic child sexual abuse against the late Jimmy Savile began in 2012, did not at least acknowledge that there had always been something unsettling about the man, even if their only exposure to him was a few seconds of Jim’ll Fix It. Those who followed him more closely would have read the clues to his monstrousness scattered in his autobiography, the hints he gave to interviewers that his apparent philanthropy was a front to allow him to get away with things, or the casual jokes he made about sex with young girls (“My case comes up next Thursday!”). Of course those who worked in the prisons and hospitals that allowed him free access to patients knew far more – from the nurses who would refuse to leave vulnerable patients alone with him to the higher-ups to whom those nurses did not feel able to complain.
But Rolf Harris was different. When he was arrested in 2013 and charged as a result of the Operation Yewtree police investigation (leading to a conviction on 12 counts of indecent assault – one later overturned – and a nearly six-year sentence, of which he served half), there was genuine shock and disbelief. Nobody saw it coming, I don’t think. Except his many victims, of course, whose years of silent suffering are firmly attested to in this two-part documentary.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/J6jfnXI
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