The Enabler Machine: How TV Industry Power Structures Protect Predators Across Decades

Letters spanning four decades and three countries converge on a single structural point: media industry safeguarding fails because the incentive to protect revenue-generating talent overwhelms every formal protection mechanism.

Four readers — a former makeup artist from the 1980s, two women who grew up in 1990s lad culture, and the mother of a teenage daughter — write in response to Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett's column on the Russell Brand and David Walliams cases. Their testimony spans the 1980s to the present day, and the consistency of the pattern is the story.

Claire Parkman, a makeup artist who worked in media during the 1980s, names the mechanism bluntly: she was warned never to be alone with Jimmy Savile or Rolf Harris, and says men like them were 'the majority, not a minority.' The enablement was institutional. Managers and directors sanctioned the behaviour through inaction, and anyone who complained was 'seen as trouble and hounded out.' The extraction pattern is clear — revenue-generating talent was insulated from consequences, and the cost was borne entirely by workers lower in the hierarchy. Parkman's structural indictment goes further than the individual perpetrators. She argues that until executives who enabled abuse through inaction are held accountable alongside the abusers, 'the TV industry will remain a ripe hunting ground for sexual predators.' Current safeguarding laws, she writes, are 'completely ineffective in the face of power, money-making and obstructive management structures.' This is a governance failure dressed up as an individual misconduct problem. Kirsty Lees, writing from Canada, adds a second extraction layer: the 1990s 'ladette culture' that convinced women that mimicking poor male behaviour was empowerment. The result was women becoming 'complicit in their own dehumanisation and objectification' — a cultural mechanism that transferred accountability from the system to its victims. The lads' mag ecosystem didn't just enable individual assaults; it built a cultural grammar that normalised objectification at industrial scale. Sarah Wolf, writing from Melbourne, demolishes any notion that the problem is historical. Her daughter faces the same threats today — drink-spiking is common enough that protective drink covers are commercially available online, domestic violence is rising, and street harassment remains constant. Wolf reports being told by a man her own age that he wants to assault her daughter. The delivery mechanism has shifted from magazine culture to online platforms, but the power dynamics are unchanged. Melanie Tuck, born in 1961, confirms the continuity: 'the miniskirt myth, the she had it coming view of rape victims, the trivialising and the jokes' were alive in the 1960s and 1970s, and the cultural infrastructure that sustained them predates anything specific to the 1990s. What the Brand and Walliams cases reveal is not a historical aberration but a structural feature — an industry where revenue generation buys impunity, and where formal safeguarding mechanisms are overridden by informal power. The through-line across all four letters is institutional incentive failure. Safeguarding exists on paper but collapses in practice because the people responsible for enforcement are also the people whose careers depend on protecting the talent generating revenue. This is a classic principal-agent problem: the agents tasked with protecting workers have stronger incentives to protect the revenue stream. Until the cost structure changes — through meaningful personal liability for executives, independent oversight, or structural separation of safeguarding from management — the pattern will repeat. The geographic spread alone — Brighton, Canada, Melbourne, Oxfordshire — tells you this is not a British problem or a 1990s problem. It is a power-structure problem, and the letters collectively argue that neither cultural shifts nor formal regulation have meaningfully altered the underlying incentive architecture in over four decades.