FACT CHECK: No, Keir Starmer Did Not Admit He Labeled Claims About Jimmy Savile As ‘Frivolous’

A viral video shared on X purports to show U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer admitting he labeled claims about Jimmy Savile as “frivolous.”

For those who haven’t seen it, this is Keir Starmer ADMITTING he knew about the investigation into Jimmy Savile but stopped it as he thought the claims were “frivolous”.

Disgraceful that this man is our PM pic.twitter.com/pbev5CESEF

— Vember (@vyronic_) January 3, 2025

Verdict: False

The claim is false, as the video has been manipulated with artificial intelligence (AI). An AI expert labeled the video a “deepfake” in an email to Check Your Fact.

Fact Check:

Starmer is set to visit Ukraine in the coming weeks, marking his first visit to the country since he became the U.K.’s prime minister, according to The Telegraph. Starmer will reportedly discuss the possibility of sending British troops to Ukraine as part of post-Russia war peacekeeping efforts, the outlet indicated.

The X video, viewed over 800,000 times, purports to show Starmer admitting he labeled claims about Savile as “frivolous.”

“I obviously knew about the investigation into Jimmy Savile. I thought at that time that there simply wasn’t the evidence, the testimony simply wasn’t compelling. Also, Savile didn’t have a great standing with people, so the threshold for any action taken was always going to be higher. And some of the claims felt slightly frivolous. We felt the threshold wasn’t met at that time,” Starmer appears to say.

The claim is false. Check Your Fact conducted a content detection scan using the website, “TrueMedia.org,” and the results indicate the video shows “substantial evidence of manipulation,” including “voice cloning or generation.” In the original video, shared to YouTube by The Guardian in 2012, Starmer discusses free speech and the guidelines for prosecuting cases involving threats made on social media. According to the same video, Starmer was the U.K.’s Director of Public Prosecutions at the time.

Likewise, Starmer has not issued a press release or social media statement publicly commenting on the claim. Additionally, Check Your Fact found no credible news reports to support the claim. In fact, the opposite is true. On Jan. 9, Lead Stories debunked the video, reporting that both the audio and Starmer’s face had been manipulated with AI. (RELATED: No, Keir Starmer Is Not Going To Cancel County Council Elections In May 2025)

Savile was a British television personality and sexual predator who abused children, men, and women from the mid-1940s until 2009, according to BBC News. A report about Savile’s alleged crimes was published in 2013, two years after his death, also according to the outlet.

Furthermore, Dr. Walter Scheirer, an AI expert at the University of Notre Dame, labeled the video a “deepfake” in an email to Check Your Fact.

“This video appears to be a Deepfake of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, where the lips have been reanimated in an attempt to match a synthetic audio track. That reanimation is not perfect, and the audio goes out of sync with the video in places. Further, there are noticeable artifacts in the mouth region where large regions of pixels suddenly appear different in appearance. For instance, at 0:21 in the video,” Scheirer said.

Check Your Fact has also contacted Starmer’s office for comment.