On the set of The Reckoning, the four-part BBC drama about Jimmy Savile, the horrific sexual abuse he committed and the culture that enabled it, Susan watched the monitors during filming. Steve Coogan plays Savile, the DJ and TV presenter who, after his death in 2011, was revealed as a sexual predator. “I got a shiver,” she says. It was the same, years before, whenever she saw Savile appear on TV. “He would make me feel sick. He was creepy, just the most disgusting human being I’ve ever met. Sleazy.”
Susan, who doesn’t want to give her surname, is one of four survivors who are interviewed on camera, appearing alongside the drama. The writer Neil McKay approached her after she had been in the 2016 documentary made by Louis Theroux, his examination of how – during making a previous documentary on Savile, and their odd friendship that developed since – he failed to spot his abuse. McKay visited Susan around six years ago. It was daunting, she says, and at the time she had no idea she would feature in the film. “I might have had second thoughts,” she says. “But I felt I needed to do it, to help anybody else. If I could do it, then hopefully there’s another woman somewhere who’s going through the same thing, who hasn’t had the guts to come forward.”
In 1972, Susan was a trainee optician in Leeds. Savile was one of the practice’s customers and she first met him when he came in for an eye test. He was clearly a strange character around the city, but she hadn’t heard any rumours about him. “I knew he was a bit weird, but I never gave it more thought.”
The sight-test room was in the basement, and she remembers being uncomfortable being alone with him. “He was creepy. I didn’t dare tell him to put his cigar out, so he smoked the whole way through the eye test.” Savile asked for a home visit to fit his glasses, and asked them to send Susan, or as he described her, “the one with the big knockers and the short skirt”. She was sent off in a taxi to Savile’s terrace house. How did she feel going there alone? “I had no option,” she says. She was nervous, partly because of her feelings about him before, but also because she was a naive 21-year-old, and Savile was a celebrity in his forties. It felt intimidating.
When he closed the front door behind her, he locked it, though it was only later that Susan remembered that. His house, she says, was “disgusting” with clutter everywhere. “He used to wear those big medallions – there was a pile of those on the table. There were dirty tracksuits on the floor, empty cornflakes boxes on the side. It was just horrible.”
Savile was wearing a tracksuit which was open to the waist with his bare chest showing. When Susan put the glasses on his face to adjust them, Savile grabbed her breasts. “He stuck his tongue down my throat.” She told him to stop and tried to push him off. “He was strong. I just pushed and pushed.” Then he pulled down his tracksuit bottoms and exposed his penis. It felt like the assault happened over several minutes, she says, but once it was over, he acted as though nothing had happened.
He had an old recording machine nearby and he reached for it, and asked to interview her for his BBC Radio 1 programme Savile’s Travels. Shocked and confused, Susan agreed, though she can’t remember what he asked her or what she said. Looking back, it seemed to be Savile’s way of restoring “normality”. Maybe there was a sense that he was offering it to her as a kind of privilege? “Yes: ‘do you want to be on my radio programme?’ Maybe it was a ‘reward’,” she says. Or as a way of keeping her quiet, or pre-empting doubt – that if she did report him, he could have said that nothing happened, because here she was happily being interviewed. “Absolutely,” says Susan. “‘Look, she’s done this’.”
She told him she needed to get back to work, and that he needed to take her. “We went through the kitchen, which was equally dirty, and out through the back door and got in his Jag, which was at the back of the house.” He drove slowly, waving at people and sounding the horn, “with me in the passenger seat. I can remember feeling really sick and shaky.”
Back at work, and clearly upset, Susan told her manager and colleagues what had happened. What did they say? “Nothing in particular. They just laughed about it.” She didn’t report it to the police – a couple of years earlier, she had been sexually assaulted on her way to university, and when she reported that, the police didn’t take her seriously. “That came to nothing. The police just laughed, said ‘you were lucky’ [it hadn’t been more serious].” With Savile, “he was famous. Who was going to believe me against him? There were no witnesses.” Although she told friends, she didn’t tell her parents. “I was embarrassed. It was shameful.”
In the years afterwards, Susan often thought about it. She got a mobile phone long before anyone else she knew, because she felt vulnerable making home visits. “I think it made me very wary of being out and about on my own. You can’t trust people.” She isn’t sure if it affected her relationships with men, although she had a turbulent first marriage, but a happy second.
She saw Savile again a few years after the assault in a park in Leeds. She went up to him and asked if he remembered her, and the time she went to his house. “He said ‘I’ve never seen you in my life’.” What was she hoping to achieve? “I’m not sure. Was it because I was going to say something about what he’d done to me? I don’t know. It was just the first time I’d seen him, and I thought I’d challenge him. But since he completely dismissed me very quickly, that was the end of it.”
Susan would tell friends what happened, and her three grown-up children know. She is retired, but when she was working as an optometrist she would even mention it to patients whenever the subject of Savile came up – one told her she had also been assaulted by him, but found it too painful to talk about and refused to come forward years later. Another patient had worked with Savile at the BBC and essentially said his behaviour was an open secret. Talking about it, says Susan, “maybe was my way of dealing with it.”
But still it never occurred to her to report it officially. She didn’t, at the time, really think of it as sexual assault, more a lucky escape from, she says, a “dirty old man”. “That’s how men were to women in the 70s,” she says. Ever since she developed large breasts, “they were a target. I was always made fun of. I think I just accepted it. Because I was like I was, men were ‘allowed’ to tease, and grab.” (She later had breast reduction surgery.) At the time, she says, “Men were allowed to go around grabbing women, and nobody ever did anything about it.”
It wasn’t until other reports of Savile’s abuse emerged that Susan decided to come forward, reporting her experience to West Yorkshire police. How did she feel when she discovered there were hundreds of victims? “I realised I wasn’t alone,” she says. Her story was “part of the jigsaw” – the 70s are believed to have been within the peak of Savile’s abuse, though it would continue for another couple of decades – and once she heard the accounts of rape, she felt relief that her experience wasn’t worse. But this also left her with a kind of survivors’ guilt that makes her wish she had spoken out at the time.
“I’m so sorry now that I didn’t go forward. How many girls and women would not have been raped and assaulted if I had insisted on being listened to?” she asks.
“Because maybe other women would have come forward at that time, and he wouldn’t have had the opportunities for another 20 years to do what he was doing. I feel guilty that I wasn’t listened to and I didn’t make enough of it at the time. But in the 70s, who listened to a big-boobed, short-skirted girl against this icon? That’s really why I’ve done the programme – to stop it happening to other people.”
Revisiting that experience of 50 years ago has brought back the anger. She has fury at Savile, at the people who didn’t take her seriously, at a culture that blamed women for attracting the wrong kind of attention. But ultimately, the rage she feels all stems from the same thing: “The anger that remains is that of course he remains unpunished.”
The Reckoning airs on BBC One on Monday 9 October.
