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Savile sex attack testimony dropped by Newsnight is aired on ITV News

By Dominic Ponsford

One of Jimmy Savile's alleged abuse victims has spoken to ITV News repeating testimony that was kept secret by BBC Newsnight ten months ago.

Karin Ward has waived her right to anonymity as a sex attack victim to tell ITV News the same story that she told Newsnight.

It has emerged that Newsnight spoke to ten alleged victims of Savile for a 10-minute segment that was due to air two months after the DJ's death.

Newsnight editor Peter Rippon wrote last night on the BBC Editor's Blog that the decision was taken not to publish because "we had not established any institutional failure" on the part of the Crown Prosecution Service which had dropped an investigation into Savile in 2007..

According to ITV News, Karin Ward said she discovered the Newsnight item had been dropped when she received a text from a member of the production team.

She told ITV: "At the BBC, I told Newsnight that I saw Gary Glitter have sex with a girl in Jimmy Savile’s dressing room…in that little alcove bit. I didn’t see it completely but that’s what was going on and nobody batted an eye-lid. I also told them that I was horribly, horribly humiliated."

She also said she was subject to a "very bad attack of wandering hands" by another television star who groped her:

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"I didn’t like him because he smelled like my step-father and it frightened me and freaked me out. I rebuffed him and he humiliated me in front of everyone in the dressing room by saying something really unkind about my lack of breasts, which to a 14 year old girl was just awful. I…urgh…I was appalled and really, really upset. I’m pretty sure that’s all I told Newsnight because that’s really all there was to tell except that we used to go out to parties afterwards and met some wonderful celebrities."

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