My editor trashed my inquiry into child sexual abuse. Now I know why
by Dean Nelson, Guardian:
Peter Wilby, who spent years denigrating victims in the media, has been convicted of possessing the most appalling images.
One morning, a fortnight ago, I checked the BBC headlines to find my old editor, Peter Wilby, peering out. He’d been exposed as a paedophile and convicted of possessing child sexual abuse images. I still feel sick at the discovery.
It would be disturbing enough to discover anyone you knew had done something so terrible – he was convicted of possessing images of children being raped since the 1990s. But Wilby wasn’t anyone. He was a pillar of the media establishment, an editor of the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman, and a Guardian columnist.
Journalists who had worked with Wilby were appalled at his crimes, while others raged at his “hypocrisy”, but what shocked me was the creeping realisation that he had used his position as an editor and columnist to create what the writer Beatrix Campbell has called a “hostile environment” for victims of abuse.
It dawned on me that he had applied that “hostile environment” to me at the outset of my career when I was a freelance reporter at the Independent on Sunday, and he was its news editor.
In April 1991, I learned of mental and physical abuse at Ty Mawr children’s home in Gwent, south Wales, where some residents had attempted suicide. The claims emerged in the wake of abuse claims at other children’s homes – the “Pindown” scandal in Staffordshire where staff used violent restraint on children, and sexual abuse by social worker Frank Beck at homes in Leicestershire. I thought Wilby would be excited at the prospect of a scoop, but he couldn’t have been less interested. I took it to the daily Independent, which put it on the front page and made a campaign of it.
Seven months later, I reported on an abuse scandal in north Wales, centred on the Bryn Estyn children’s home in Wrexham, where former residents said they had been sexually assaulted by care home staff and a senior policeman. The story led the front page of the Independent on Sunday, where Wilby was then deputy editor and, I later learned, had advised the editor against publishing it.
Read also: Why so little MSM outrage about this vile paedophile (who happened to be an MSM editor)? by Liz Hodgkinson, TCW
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