The cult of personality can come with blinders

Sir Jimmy Savile (1926-2011) was an institution, one of Britain’s most beloved celebrities. He began his career in British media in 1964 as a radio DJ with the BBC, then as a television personality. He was the star of a children’s TV show called Jim’ll Fix It, in which he made the dreams of children come true, and a presenter on Top of the Pops, which featured the performances of the most popular rock bands. My Scottish husband watched Jim’ll Fix It as a child. We watch reruns of Top of the Pops together.

A self-described devout Catholic, Savile had a reputation for piety, charity and lovably zany behaviour. Kids and teenage girls flocked to him. He visited the sick and even had his own office at the famous, high-security psychiatric institution Broadmoor Hospital. He frequently visited a school for troubled girls and a childrens’ home. He was pals with princes, princesses and prime ministers. He raised £40 million for charities. He was knighted in 1990. When Savile died, a columnist in England’s Catholic Herald complained that the media accolades hadn’t mentioned that the nation’s treasure was a Catholic.

They also neglected to mention that Savile was a sex abuser. There had been rumours at the BBC for decades that Savile was bedding underage girls, but the one time he was asked about them officially, he denied the allegations and the matter was dropped. Soon after his death, a team of BBC journalists followed up the rumours and interviewed people who claimed to have been molested by Savile in the 1960s and 1970s. Their boss shelved the documentary and the BBC ran a Boxing Day tribute to its late star. Rival station ITV broadcast its own expose on Savile’s alleged crimes last month.

The UK is in an uproar, and watching the BBC report on itself is surreal. Only now are people asking why Savile had so much access to vulnerable young people in the BBC studios, on the road, in children’s homes, in special schools and in hospitals. Authorities are insisting that they didn’t know about the abuse. Fellow DJs are muttering that they knew, but they didn’t think they would be believed, or that sex with underage girls was part of the culture of the 1970s. And, amazingly, it turns out that Savile hinted in his own autobiographies of his sexual misdeeds. Joking about his lustfulness was part of his zany routine. Savile had been hiding in plain sight.

People don’t want to believe that their heroes — people who make dreams come true, people who raise millions for charity, people who bring in the highest ratings, people who sell the most tickets — are capable of the sexual abuse of vulnerable people. But the sad fact is that some people who appear to be very good, who care very much about the sick and the young, use their personae as zany, funny, generous people to get access to vulnerable people. They wriggle their way into trusted institutions and use the reflected glory to attract victims. And in return, the trusted institutions do what they can to preserve their reputation — either ignore or deny a problem, or cover it up.

What the Savile scandal illustrates, as did the Penn State scandal in the United States, is that sexual abuse and the reluctance of an institution to appropriately deal with the problem is not merely the problem of religious communities but of institutions in general. Institutions have to recognize that it is in the nature of an institution — whether it is a family, a university department, a television station, a national icon — to preserve itself at any cost. They must transform that nature so that it puts the good of vulnerable people first.

It also illustrates that the trust people put in celebrities can be unwise and misplaced. We must resist being so beglamoured by someone’s celebrity or position in a community that we allow them to break rules or to behave in an eccentric way, when their eccentricities include being unkind or abusive to vulnerable people. We must not excuse the hurtful behaviour of friends with a sigh and “That’s just Jim.” Everyone is responsible for the protection of the vulnerable.

And, finally, it illustrates that among the pious and devout are people who use their piety and devotion as a disguise or even to make deals with God. When decades ago someone asked Savile how he, a devout Catholic layman, could have sex with teenage girls, Savile said he had a deal with God. The deal was that because Jimmy did so much for charity, God would overlook his sexual behaviour. There is absolutely no excuse for a Catholic to think this way, and priests and schools are duty-bound to make sure we don’t.