Scandal Without End: Sir Jimmy Savile, Child Sexual Abuse and the BBC Crisis Event

On 3 October 2012 a heavily trailed ITV documentary branded Sir Jimmy Savile as a manipulative sexual predator. The resulting scandal around ‘Savile-as-child-abuser’ destroyed Savile’s ‘cultural icon’ status and implicated multiple institutions on charges of facilitation, failure and denial. The intensification of the scandal has to date resulted in the establishment of police investigations into hundreds of sexual abuse allegations, arrests, official inquiries, vigilante activities and the resignation of the Director General of the BBC. In this paper we trace the origins and development of the ‘Savile-as-child abuser’ scandal, and apply the 'scandal amplification spiral' (Greer and McLaughlin, 2012) to make sense of how, why and with what consequences the affair has escalated into a full blown institutional crisis for the BBC.