A celebrity’s denial outweighed multiple children’s abuse allegations in police eyes

Evidence

Many complaints of sexual abuse were filed with local police, but they were ignored or dismissed for insufficient evidence. The word of a child against a denial by a knighted celebrity did not have much chance of being taken seriously. A national crime database, which did not exist at the time, would have cast a pattern of local allegations in a more believable light. Early on, the BBC investigated some complaints. They absolved Savile of any wrongdoing. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 554

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the moral disengagement theme of how institutional power structures let harm continue unpunished.

Related

• Complaints against powerful figures are dismissed because no systemic database reveals a pattern (similarity 0.87)
• Celebrity and philanthropy shielded a child abuser from scrutiny for decades (similarity 0.85)
• Savile believed his institutional value made him untouchable from prosecution (similarity 0.80)
• Collective professed ignorance allowed an abuser to operate openly for decades. (similarity 0.79)
• Fear of defamation lawsuits deterred press investigation of abuse allegations (similarity 0.78)
• Libel laws deterred media from exposing credible child abuse allegations (similarity 0.78)