Jimmy Savile isn’t the only British entertainer caught up in scandal:
…what surely qualifies as one of the more ambitious, and possibly quixotic, law enforcement investigations in Britain in recent years: Operation Yewtree, a nationwide inquiry into sexual offenses that may or may not have been committed decades ago. In American terms, it is as if Captain Kangaroo, Dick Clark and Jerry Lewis were suddenly being accused of committing sexual crimes dating back 30 or 40 years.
I don’t want to seem like I’m trivializing this. But going on:
The result has been a flurry of arrests, about a dozen involving very public people. But even as women’s rights advocates and others applaud a new era of openness, in which once-cowed victims feel able to speak out, lawyers for the high-profile suspects say that in the current climate, the accusers appear to be going out of their way to opportunistically target celebrities.
Among the people caught up in this:
One of the biggest names on the list is Rolf Harris, 83, an Australian-born artist, singer and children’s television host who, according to British newspaper reports, has been accused by a woman of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager. Mr. Harris, also famous for his didgeridoo playing, performed for Queen Elizabeth II at her jubilee last year. Channel 5 pulled his two television programs off the air — “Olive the Ostrich” and “Rolf’s Animal Clinic,” which was showing in repeats — pending the investigation.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 2nd, 2013 at 11:58 am and is filed under Clippings , Law . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.