Savile abuse victims set to launch compensation claims

MORE than 50 victims of ­Jimmy Savile’s decades of sexual abuse plan to bring compensation claims against the BBC, the NHS and the former DJ’s estate, their lawyer has said.

Liz Dux said the number of people coming forward is still growing. “All the victims that we are representing are wanting to pursue civil claims,” Dux said. “Compensation is the only thing we can really do for them but that is not their particular motivation for doing this.”

“It is for getting their stories out there to get them believed and to prevent it from happening again. You don’t do it for the money. All of them have claims against Savile’s estate, and in addition the BBC and various hospitals and so on where the abuse took place.”

The full scale of the late presenter’s abuse was revealed in a report published on Friday. His crimes spanned six decades, from 1955 to 2009, his entire career at the BBC, and included sexually touching a teenage girl at the final recording of Top of the Pops in 2006.

Yesterday the BBC launched a search for the next editor of Newsnight, the news and current affairs programme which dropped a report into allegations of sexual abuse against Savile. Peter Rippon, who took over at Newsnight in 2008, stood aside when his explanation in a blog about why the investigation was pulled was criticised for inaccuracies.

Whoever gets the job will report to a new head of news programmes, after Stephen Mitchell resigned having been criticised for removing the Savile investigation from a list of the BBC’s potentially difficult programmes.

Meanwhile, Mark Williams-Thomas, who presented the ITV documentary that first exposed Savile, has said the number of victims could yet double, with current figures “a mere drop in the ocean”.