Day Freddie ‘pounced’
She’s the woman whose TV testimony triggered the Savile scandal. Yet Freddie Starr – who she also accused – says Karin is a fantasist. Read her harrowing story and decide who YOU believe
THE day comedian Freddie Starr appeared on Jimmy Savile’s Saturday night variety show Clunk Click, 15-year-old Karin Ward couldn’t have been more starstruck.
Sitting in the audience directly behind the comic, Karin — dressed in her favourite yellow blouse and with her dark hair worn loose — laughed at Freddie’s jokes and watched his antics with awe.
After the recording, Karin — clutching her autograph book — rushed into Savile’s dressing room at BBC TV Centre to meet her idol. The room was filled with children, many care-home kids like her, who’d been invited as a treat by Jimmy.
While cigar-chomping Savile held court like a demi-god, ordering BBC lackeys to fetch snacks, sweets, drinks and sandwiches with his trademark slogan: ‘Now then, now then’, Freddie Starr entertained with his quick-fire jokes.
Teenagers swarmed around the platinum-haired Top Of The Pops host and his equally famous guest star, who lapped up the attention from their adoring young fans. A nearby table groaned with food and drink, including alcohol. Although Savile was teetotal, he turned a blind eye to the underage girls helping themselves to rum and coke and puffing away on the cigarettes he’d given them.
‘In the dressing room, Starr was surrounded by young girls who doted on him, hanging on his every word,’ says Karin, now 54, of that day 40 years ago.
‘He was a very big star, almost as big as Jimmy Savile. So how cool was that to be in the same room as Jimmy Savile and Freddie Starr?’
What happened next is the subject of fierce dispute and, potentially, a police investigation.
Last week, Karin — who says she was repeatedly assaulted by Savile, including being forced to perform a sex act on him in his Rolls-Royce — alleged on ITN News that Starr groped her in Savile’s dressing room after this appearance on Clunk Click. She also alleges that she saw pop star Gary Glitter having sex with an underage girl in the DJ’s dressing room.
Karin claimed that when she recoiled from Starr’s alleged attempt to grab her breast and buttocks, he humiliated her by shouting out in front of the guests that he wasn’t interested in touching her because she was flat- chested. It prompted Starr, who became patron of the Yorkshire Children’s Trust last December, to seek an injunction to prevent the claims being aired, but his High Court application was rejected.
On Friday last week, when he went on stage in Wolverhampton on the first night of a stand-up comedy tour, Starr branded Karin ‘a liar’ and told his audience ‘My brief is going to tear her to pieces. I’ve never been to the BBC.’
Inviting reporters into his Warwickshire home, he further said Miss Ward was a ‘nutter’ and accused her of ‘picking my name out of a hat’. He insisted he met Savile only twice and denied ever meeting Karin. This week, when Channel 4 News unearthed footage of Karin standing behind Starr on Clunk Click, he was forced to admit he was ‘mistaken’ but still denied the ‘awful allegation’ of abuse.
On Wednesday, an emotional Starr, appearing with his pregnant fiancee Sophie Lea, 34, told ITV’s This Morning that he still couldn’t recall appearing on Clunk Click, and added: ‘I have never, ever groped a woman … If I have a heart attack and die, on my gravestone it’ll be: “I told you I was innocent.” ’
Saying he would welcome a police investigation, Starr denied he’d ever been in Savile’s dressing room and described the DJ’s sexual activities as ‘despicable and disgusting’.
Clips from Freddie Starr’s interview are playing on the TV as I arrive at Karin Ward’s housing association home in Oswestry, Shropshire. As she listens to Starr complain that the stress of her allegations has made him ill with heart palpitations, she says: ‘I’m sorry to see him distressed. He obviously can’t remember and I firmly believe, in his mind, he thinks he didn’t do anything wrong.
‘How would he know that something he might have considered acceptable behaviour at that time would have a profound effect on a 15-year-old girl throughout her life? He’s not the only one who suffers from palpitations.
‘He was just like any other bloke in the mid-Seventies and at the time I never even thought of it as anything other than normal behaviour. He grabbed a handful of bum and went to grab a handful of boob and when I said: “Get off me,” he said: “I wouldn’t want to touch you anyway, you are a t**less wonder!”
‘He was a comedian, he had a quick answer for everything and everyone in the room roared with laughter, but I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me. It was the humiliation which hurt me the most. It has lived with me all my life.’
She adds: ‘He may not remember, but I do, vividly, and I find it appalling for him to stand on stage now and call me a f*****g bitch, an effing liar and a “nutter”. I am the first to admit my life has been a train wreck, but I am the sum of all that has happened to me over the years.’
AND why, as Freddie Starr’s fiancee pointed out, didn’t Karin complain to the police years ago instead of talking to ITN 40 years after the event? ‘For a very long time I didn’t even think of it as abuse and who was ever going to believe me anyway?’ she says.
Listening to Karin, it is hard not to disagree with her assessment of her life. A qualified legal secretary, she has rarely worked on account of her chronic depression and anxiety.
Last year, she was diagnosed with bowel cancer. She has been married and divorced three times and has seven children by five different fathers, the youngest of which — a 15-year-old son — lives with her. Three of her children were taken into care as babies, and a fourth at ten years old.
She spent a year in prison when pregnant with her fourth child in 1982 for deception, having written cheques knowing she had no funds to honour
them. All the result, she believes, of the abusive childhood she suffered.
By her own admission, she was damaged long before Savile drove into her life in his big Rolls-Royce, bearing sweets, cigarettes and records — which he exchanged for sexual favours from underage girls.
Born Karen Eddolls in Norfolk, her parents split up before she was born, and she never knew her natural father.
When her mother remarried, she became Keri Alcock, but describes a miserable childhood of abuse by her step-father. She says it was the memory of this which caused her to recoil from Freddie Starr, whose smell of cologne mixed with stale sweat reminded her of her step-father.
Aged 12, after being expelled from a convent boarding school for hitting another girl, she was sent to Garfield House in Norfolk, a council-run assessment centre. Karin claims she was molested by a care worker at this home, making a formal complaint to Norfolk Police in 1999, but no action was taken because the man had died.
It was while living at Garfield that she met Jimmy Savile during a holiday to Jersey, where the star was visiting Haut de la Garenne children’s home — which in 2008 became the focus of a police investigation into child sex abuse.
‘We were camping, but were taken to Haut de la Garenne one day to mix with other children,’ says Karin.
‘Jimmy Savile was there and everyone was excited. He was covered in kids, they were all clamouring to sit in his lap. He had sweets and cigarettes and everyone was going: “Ooh look, it’s a famous person.” ’
The next time Karin saw Jimmy was at Duncroft Approved School for Girls in Surrey, now defunct, which is where she was sent aged 14.
‘When I arrived at Duncroft I was appalled because it was effectively a prison. Staff walked around with keys on their belts,’ says Karin, who was 14 when Savile first started sexually abusing her.
‘The rules were strict, so you can imagine that to have a big star like Jimmy Savile visit us was like manna from heaven.
‘We’d think: “Jimmy’s here, we might get to go out.” If he came in his RollsRoyce, he could get several girls in there and he would take us to the park, to a restaurant or London.’ There was, as the girls found out, a price to be paid for such generosity.
‘He wasn’t interested in us as people, he was only interested in one thing. We’d say: “He’s a dirty old man, a pervert,” but we’d laugh about it. We didn’t care because we were going to get sweets and fags and be taken to London to be on his show.’
Karin adds: ‘You knew what he was going to do. If he wanted to take you down the lane in his car, you knew his hands were going to be in your knickers, up your shirt and his tongue down your throat. You’d probably have to do something disgusting.
‘It’s amazing how quickly you can get used to that kind of thing. I don’t think any of us at Duncroft regarded it as abuse at the time, we regarded it as payment for the treats he gave us.
‘I can’t tell you how awful he smelled. The cigar smoke mixed with sweat was nauseating, but we put up with it. Jimmy liked lay-bys and picnic areas and he’d park the car and ask one girl to stay behind with him.
‘We’d sit at the tables, smoking, thinking: “Poor cow, I wonder what she has to do,” and then we’d go: “Never mind, another trip to London.” ’
On one occasion, Karin claims, Savile persuaded her to perform a sex act on him in his Rolls-Royce on the promise of seeing one of his shows. ‘I thought I was going to be sick. Jimmy just opened the door and said: “Not in the car, not in the car.”
‘One or two girls tried to tell the staff at Duncroft that Jimmy had touched them inappropriately, but they were told: “How dare you say such awful things,” and were sent to the isolation room with padded walls.
‘He was a big star who raised millions for charity. Everyone knew we were from a “bad girls” school. We knew we’d be called liars so there was no point in complaining. But it was no secret. The girls vied for Jimmy’s attention, so they could boast they got the best presents, the best outings.’
Karin and her fellow pupils were regular visitors to BBC Television Centre, sometimes going every week to sit in the audience of Savile’s shows. Afterwards, she says, he would routinely grab them and jiggle them around on his lap, making no effort to hide his physical arousal.
ON ONE occasion, Karin became aware that one of her fellow underage pupils was having sex with another Savile guest, pop star Gary Glitter — since convicted for unrelated sex offences — behind a curtain in an alcove in Savile’s dressing room. ‘The 14-year-old girl having sex with Gary Glitter was one of his biggest fans. She was thrilled that her idol had swept her into his arms and wanted to make love to her,’ says Karin.
‘Back then we all had these soppy ideas that didn’t revolve around sex, but around being loved, being swept off our feet and marrying. We didn’t realise these men were abusing their power and taking advantage of us.
‘The powers-that-be at the BBC may not have been aware what was going on, but the production staff must have known. They were in and out of his dressing room with snacks. We were drinking alcohol and they must have seen Jimmy with his hand up someone’s top.’
It took a mental breakdown in 1999 and a therapist for Karin to recognise this was abuse. On the advice of her counsellor, she started writing her biography six years ago, in which she described what happened to her, using initials to identify Savile, Gary Glitter and Freddie Starr — never thinking their names would be made public.
The book, Keri-Karin Part One, and written under the pseudonym Kat Ward, is published on Monday.
The TV is flickering in the background as Karin talks. Both the BBC and police are investigating Savile’s activities, said to be on a ‘national scale’ dating back to 1959. Police have warned that other celebrities could face prosecution.
‘For years I have watched Jimmy Savile on TV, clenching my jaw until the bones crack and thinking: “If only people knew.” Now they do, but I think this goes beyond Jimmy Savile. There are probably a lot of famous people who are now terrified their names might come up.
‘Sadly, I don’t think all of it will come out because money and social standing buys you the power to silence it. Jimmy Savile is proof of that. He silenced it for 40 or 50 years.’
KARIN WARD was not paid for this interview.