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This is the disturbing story of Jimmy Savile and the conspiracy of silence that protected him for half a century. In many ways, this story serves as a chilling precursor to the Epstein Files. Basically a case study on how power, institutional protection, and willful blindness can shield a monster in plain sight for generations. This one is a little bit morbid, so have some discretion while you're watching it. Anyway, sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world. From all time, forever. Yes, that is what we do here in the campsite. I'm trying to get to the bottom of everything that's ever happened. I'm trying to learn all the history and know all the things. That is my. That is my attempt here at campsite. But. And today's no different, guys. We have a. A fascinating and morbid episode. In lieu of doing a lot of coverage and content sort of around the Epstein files and just how it's kind of changed people's perception of power and institutions in the United States and how all this stuff really operates, I've gotten a lot of people asking if we can do a deep dive on this guy Jimmy Savile and just how disturbing and gross his entire career was and how he was protected by the highest rungs of power everywhere he went, basically, but specifically in England. Now, before we jump in, I just want to say thank you guys so much for, for making the show possible and just supporting us through this, through this time. You guys are truly the best. And every time you click a video, every time you like and comment, you are making my dreams come true. And it's really the greatest thing ever. And I also have great news. If you are interested in getting a little bit closer to the fire and gathering around the campsite, we have a Patreon. That's patreon.com Camp Gagon. That is where basically me and everyone like you, basically get together and we chop it up, we get into all the most interesting stuff. There's, you know, combos, chat rooms, and we're all just kind of hanging out. We also do bonus content. We do zooms every month, extra episodes, ad free episodes, merch discounts, all that stuff. And it's about the cost of, like, a cup of coffee every month. That's it. So you can check it out. Patreon.com Camp Gagnon and also give a shout out to Christos. None of this is possible without this guy. All right? He's the big, big Greek in the sky. You know, that's the way I look at him. He's like Zeus. Zeus is Greek, right? Sure. All right, Christos, I'm sorry, we don't have time for you to do a whole diatribe, but today we're talking about the disgusting and morbid Jimmy Savile. Now, in order to understand who this guy is and how he was able to ascertain so much power and ultimately exploit it for his own disgusting predilections, kind of need to go all the way to the beginning. To a working class Catholic household in Leeds, England, where James Wilson Vincent Saville was born on October 31, 1926. Yes, Halloween. And looking back, the symbolism feels almost too on the nose, right? Too perfect. Like the universe was trying to warn us that this guy was messed up before he even got here. Jimmy was the youngest of seven children. By all accounts, his childhood was defined by two things. Poverty and. And his mother, Agnes Savile, or the Duchess, as Jimmy would call her for the rest of his life, was the center of his universe in a way that was a little too intimate. In a way, it went way beyond the normal maternal attachment. In short, Jimmy worshiped her. He was obsessed with her. And when she died in 1972, he actually kept her body in her home for five days before allowing her to be buried. He preserved her clothes, her bedroom, everything exactly as she left it. He would visit the room regularly, sitting with her belongings, talking to her as if she were still there. He actually once told an interviewer with complete sincerity that the best years of his life were the five days that he spent alone with his mother's body. I mean, just let that image sit with you for a moment, because this is a man that Britain would soon invite into their living rooms and their children's lives, hospitals, be knighted. Like, I mean, he climbed to the highest ranks of British culture, and here he is talking with a journalist, being like, yeah, I loved it when me and my mom was just sitting there and she was all dead. Like, I mean, it's like, crazy that this ever happened. But I guess it was a different time. I guess it wasn't even a different time. I mean, Epstein was run around up until 2019. So now, during World War II, young Jimmy worked as a coal miner, a protected occupation that kept him out of military service. But it was in the mines that he suffered a spoilt spinal injury, which gave him this sort of signature hunched posture and, like, slightly unsettling kind of gait that later became a part of his eccentric Persona. But the minds also gave him something different. It was his first taste of operating outside the rules. You see, after the war ended, Savile didn't return to real work. Instead, he became a scrap metal dealer, which in post war Britain was kind of just a euphemism for someone just, like, doing black market trading. He learned, like, how to hustle and how to charm and how to kind of live in, like, the gray areas where rules don't really apply. And you take a lot of risk, but you can also, you know, make a lot of money. And then came the dance halls. So by the late 1940s, Saville started running unlicensed nightclubs in his hometown of Leeds and in Manchester as well. These were basically underground dance halls where Savile served as a manager and a dj. And he was, by many accounts, one of the first DJs in Britain to actually use two turntables simultaneously, literally pioneering techniques that would later become standard in the industry. You know, he was just like a little hunchback, just, like scratching on the ones and twos. He was charismatic. You know, he was innovative, and people just generally kind of liked him. And even then, rumors of abuse had actually started to circulate right around this time. Former employees and attendees at these dance halls would later Testify that Savile was assaulting young women at these events, using his position of power and his access to private areas and back rooms to basically prey on girls who had just come to these events to, you know, have a good time. And this is a pattern that would define his life. And it was already starting to take shape, right? You create something interesting that people want to go to and you start to create a crowd, then you charm the crowd, then you cultivate an image and, you know, of an image of fun and excitement, something interesting, and use that basically as cover to carry out something much darker and much more sinister. And he got away with it repeatedly. And this was one of the first times that he really saw that. And by the early 1960s, Savile had transitioned from a club DJ to a radio personality, landing a gig with Radio Luxembourg before eventually moving to the BBC. And the timing was perfect. Britain was on the cusp of a cultural revolution. The Beatles were about to explode. Youth culture was becoming like a real market force around the world, but specifically in Britain. And the BBC needed someone who could connect with the younger generation. Jimmy Savile, with his bleached blonde hair and tracksuits and cigars and all these incomprehensible catchphrases like, now then, now then, and how's about that then? Fit the bill perfectly. He wasn't polished by any stretch and he wasn't handsome, but he was weird and different and was strange in the exact way that the moment of the 60s had basically called for. So in 1964, Savile had become the host of Top the Pops, one of the most influential, influential music programs in British television history. Like, I don't even really. It's like MTV before MTV is one way to think of it. Like, I don't even know trl. Maybe it was just the go to spot for music in the 60s. And suddenly he wasn't just a regional DJ with a following, he was a national figure, beamed into millions of homes every single week, surrounded by the youngest, most infamous pop stars of the day and the even younger fan base that would follow them around. And the access that this gave him unprecedented. Teenagers would line up to be in the studio and young performers would seek his approval. And behind the scenes, away from the cameras, Savile was building something completely different, something that he started back in the underground nightclubs. And this was a hidden infrastructure of abuse that would span decades. Now, here is where we kind of need to slow down and really try to understand what Savile was constructing, because it wasn't random. It wasn't opportunistic in the way that most predators operate either. Jimmy Savile built a system, this engineered architectured access, that basically gave him unsupervised contact with the most vulnerable people in his industry. And he did it basically in plain sight, with the full cooperation of the institutions that should have been protecting them. And this is maybe the most disturbing part. It started with charities. Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the 70s and the 80s, Savolo expanded his Persona from entertainer to being a philanthropist. He ran marathons, he organized fundraisers, he raised tens of millions of pounds for hospitals and schools and, you know, kids organizations. And in return for his generosity, he basically just asked for one thing. He just wanted access. As a matter of fact, Stoke Manville Hospital became his primary base of operations. This was a renowned spinal injury center, a place where some of the most vulnerable patients in the country, people who were paralyzed, they maybe couldn't move at all. Many of them were children and they came here for treatment. Savile's charity work had raised so much money for the hospital that they gave him his own bedroom on the grounds. I mean, like, not a visitor's room, not a hotel nearby, a bedroom inside the hospital where he could come and go as he pleased at any hour of the day or night. I mean, is that not the crate? Like, how weird is that? This is a television personality with no medical training, no official role, no accountability, doesn't know anything about medicine, and he's given a bedroom inside a hospital full of immobilized patients. And this wasn't like medieval times, this was in the 60s. And he used it exactly as you would expect a predator to use it. But Stoke Mandeville was just the beginning. He moved on to Broadmoor Hospital, and Broadmoor was and remains one of the highest security psychiatric facilities in all of Britain. This is where they send people that have been convicted of the most serious crimes but are deemed, you know, clinically insane for a regular prison. They can't actually go to jail because they're so crazy. I mean, we're talking like violent offenders, serial killers, the most dangerous psychiatric patients in the entire country. And the administrators of Broadmoor, impressed by Zavo's charity work and his celebrity status and his connections, the people he knew, they gave him an official role on their board. And once again, his own set of keys to the facility. Is this not crazy to anyone else? Like, how is this ever a thing? His own keys to a high security psychiatric hospital where he could just walk around the halls at night, unsupervised among patients who are literally medicated and traumatized and mentally unwell to that, no one would even believe anything that happened to them. Like, this is literally the most vulnerable aspects of our society. And he just had a key to just wander around. Leeds General Infirmary would give him a similar deal, and so did a bunch of other hospitals across England. It's so bizarre. At its peak, Savile had what amounted to basically free reign of more than 28, 28 different institutional settings. I mean, schools, children's homes, hospitals, detention centers. He would basically just, like, show up unannounced, and he would visit patients alone, and he would volunteer for tasks that, you know, gave him physical access to vulnerable people. And because he was Jimmy Savile, you know, because he was a celebrity, he was this famous dj, and he was hanging with all the coolest people and pop stars, and he raised so much money, there's no way this could be a bad guy, right? No one even questioned it. And then there's the morgues. I mean, this is the craziest thing. Like, multiple sources testify that Savile had a particular interest in hospital morgues. I mean, remember the stuff he was doing with his mom just dead in her room, right? Like, this is the guy that's severely disturbed. So he had this weird interest with these morgues, and he would basically visit them during his nighttime wanderings. And he basically had access to the bodies of recently deceased people. And when these allegations first started to surface after his death, fairly recently, they seemed almost too grotesque to actually be believed. Surely this is speculation. Surely this is people projecting the worst possible crimes on a man who is, you know, revealed as a monster. Right? There's no way, but official investigations actually confirmed it. Savile had indeed spent unsupervised time in morgues, a lot of it. And what exactly he did will probably never be known. I mean, he's gone. He can never really testify. But the testimony is consistent enough and disturbing enough that it can't just be dismissed. Every charity event, every hospital, every photo opportunity with the young patient, it was all part of the institutional architecture of abuse. The institutions basically let him build it piece by piece because he brought them money or publicity and, you know, because questioning him or challenging him might bring consequences if, you know, like, what if they go against him and they all of a sudden stop getting funding? Or he tells people to, you know, stop supporting them? This guy is so connected that he's able to use his power to exploit the most vulnerable populations These institutions. Now, if Jimmy Savile had been some shadowy figure operating in secret, his decades of abuse might be easier to comprehend, right? It's like, oh, this is like a fringe doctor that no one knows about. But that's not what happened. The evidence was kind of all there, mountains of it accumulating year after year, you know, person after person looking at the evidence and kind of doing nothing. The first documented complaints to the BBC came in 1964. Now, keep in mind, a lot of these allegations, almost all of them came out after Savile's death, like post 2010. And the first one came in 1964. Now, this is the same year that Saville began hosting Top of the Pops. That, you know, very popular music program. Girls who had attended tapings reported inappropriate behavior. These complaints basically went nowhere. No investigation, no consequences. And the show just went on. And so did Savile. And you got to think like, this is the 60s, okay? This was a different standard for how men and women operated. You know, like, I think open flirting was like, pretty generally accepted. So for women to complain about inappropriate behavior in the 60s, this guy must have been doing some real weird stuff. And the fact that it was completely dismissed is truly crazy. Now, throughout the 60s and 70s, rumors about Savile circulated widely within the entertainment industry. Comedians were actually even making jokes about it. Other TV personalities would like kind of whisper warnings that actually the phrase Jim will fix it, the name of his beloved children's show where he actually made kids dreams come true. This was an actual show that he had. This is crazy. But regardless, this became like industry slang. Like, this was like a euphemism that everyone kind of understood, but no one really talked about. John Lydon, the former frontman of the Sex Pistols, mentioned in a 1978 BBC interview that everyone knew about Savile and what he was doing. But the interview was just never broadcast, and the BBC just shelved it. In 1973, journalists at the Daily Mail attempted to investigate Saville. They gathered testimony, they compiled evidence, and then the story just went nowhere. Officially, there wasn't enough proof. Unofficially, Savile was too powerful, too connected, too valuable to the institutions that benefited from his money and from his influence. I mean, it's really the same thing with the Epstein story. I remember the journalist in 2003 that was like, we have the whole story. We had everything. And the editor canned it. They said, hey, we're not going to put this story out. It's like they had all the stuff. And then it went nowhere. I mean, think about how many innocent people could have been spared. Like how many victims and survivors wouldn't have undergone this type of trauma if they actually did their due diligence when it happened. It's not like this person was some criminal mastermind no one knew about. There were multiple credible complaints. I mean, journalists and interviewers and researchers are bringing up evidence through the 60s and 70s. I mean, it's crazy. Now. Even the police received complaints multiple times over the decades. Like the official police. In 2007, Surrey Police conducted investigation based on multiple allegations of this history of abuse. They passed their findings to the Crown Prosecution Service, who reviewed the evidence and conveniently concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. Savile was in his 80s by then and was still, in many ways a beloved national figure and still made public appearances and was still largely untouchable. And then there was Newsnight. In late 2011, just weeks after Sav's death, the BBC flagship investigative journalism program was preparing an expose. They had victims willing to speak on camera. They had evidence, they had a story that would have revealed the truth about one of the BBC's most famous faces. And BBC executives just stopped it. They literally just pulled the segment. They claimed that it didn't meet editorial standards, that there were concerns about the evidence, that the timing just wasn't right. The timing? Jimmy Savile's already dead, but the countless people that he had abused were still alive and still awaiting justice that really would never come. I mean, what timing are they possibly talking about? It's crazy. The real answer, of course, is that the BBC was about to air tribute program celebrating Savile's life and his legacy and of course, his relationship with the BBC. An expose would have interfered with all of that. So the victims were conveniently silenced once again. And the tributes aired. And Britain mourned a man who spent the better part of 60 years abusing children in the very institutions that were now honoring his memory. And when the truth finally came out, when ITV aired its own documentary in 2012, when Operation U Tree was launched, when victim after victim after victim finally came forward, the scale of. Of what had been ignored became impossible to deny. Over 500 victims were identified. The abuse spanned six decades. It occurred in the BBC studios, in hospitals, in children's homes, in his caravan, in his car, in dressing rooms. I mean, anywhere you could imagine. There's some allegations which are pretty disturbing. I don't even know if we can say them on YouTube. Your children as young as patients, as old as 75. The living. And according to the morgue testimony, potentially even the dead. I mean it's. He was like the most grotesque predator of the. The largest scale. I mean it's crazy. And the saddest part is that almost all of it could have been stopped decades earlier if anyone in power had chosen to act on what many of them all knew.