New footage of Jimmy Savile sexually assaulting a young girl in front of her mother has been found.
The video, which was shot in a restaurant in Leeds in 2011, will be screened for the first time Sunday night as the first installment of a new BBC documentary, Louis Theroux: Savile , as reported by the Independent .
Louis Theroux, whose When Louis Met Jimmy documentary earned him a BAFTA award in 2002, said that he found the footage while searching through his video archive in the hopes of finding new material for his new BBC documentary.
Jimmy Savile gropes teenager in new Louis Theroux footage The BBC are still making kudos from Savile. Despicable https://t.co/OY9IifgF15
— Andrea Davison (@beforethestars) October 2, 2016
Louis said that he thought of releasing a new documentary on Jimmy Savile on account of his guilt over not being able to do more to bring the sexual offender to justice. Theroux came to the realization after one of Savile’s victims accused him for being easily “hoodwinked.”
“At the time, I’d done my best to be tough with him,” he said.
“I knew he was weird and, with all his mannerisms, rather irritating – I had no interest in making a soft piece about Jimmy the Charity Fundraiser.
“The dark rumours – of sexual deviance, of being unemotional, of having a morbid interest in corpses – were one of the reasons I’d taken him on as a subject.
“I wanted to get the goods on Savile. The trouble was, I had no clear sense of what those goods were.”
In his first documentary Theroux asked Savile a plethora of hard questions concerning sexual abuse allegations hurled against him. By the time the documentary was completed, the acclaimed filmmaker admitted that a part of him had come to see the TV personality as “something of a friend.”
‘Looking back on Jimmy Savile’ by @LouisTheroux : https://t.co/jBhZpMPfFX
— BBC Two (@BBCTwo) October 2, 2016
Theroux continued to meet and film Savile on a regular basis. The footage of Savile sexually assaulting a young woman in a restaurant was said to have been filmed the summer after the original documentary aired.
The #BBC failed #Savile ‘s victims. This speaks volumes about how much control they have over ‘our’ lives… https://t.co/SfJ1TpNlZT
— Lady Durrant ?? (@LadyDurrant) October 2, 2016
Theroux and Savile were spotted talking and laughing while leaving the Flying Pizza restaurant not long after the sexual assault.
In 2001, Louis reported Jimmy to BBC over allegations that he slept with a 15-year-old girl. A senior producer decided not to pass on the information to the police.
Not long after Savile died in 2011 at age 84, it was revealed that the legendary broadcaster had sexually abused hundreds of children and women.
Jimmy had reportedly molested victims as young as fiv e at NHS hospitals back when he had unlimited access. His victims amounted to 72 when he was still working at the BBC, according to the Telegraph .
In his 200o documentary, Theroux asked Jimmy about rumors that he was sexually attracted to children. Savile, who was well respected for his charity work, flatly denied the accusations. He had a rather interesting way in denying the allegations too.
“We live in a very funny world. And it’s easier for me, as a single man, to say ‘I don’t like children’, because that puts a lot of salacious tabloid people off the hunt,” Jimmy said.
“Is that basically so the tabloids don’t pursue this whole is he or isn’t he a paedophile line?” Louis asked.
“Oh, aye,” Savile said. “How do they know whether I am not? How does anybody know whether I am? Nobody knows whether I am or not. I know I’m not… That’s my policy and it’s worked a dream.”
Theroux explained in the new documentary how he wanted to make sense of his own failure to “see him [Savile] for what he really was, to see what clues there were in hindsight.”
He said that one of the people who contacted him as soon as the first documentary aired was a 15-year-old woman.
After more than a decade, hundreds more came forward to recount the abuse they had suffered.
“It was upsetting to realise I’d actually met two of the victims while Jimmy Savile was still alive,” Theroux said.
“I wondered if I’d handled the encounter differently they might have said more – or if they simply hadn’t been ready.”
Theroux’s new documentary on Jimmy Savile is set to be shown on BBC2 on Sunday.
[Featured Image by Matthew Lewis/Getty Images]