Rolf Harris leaving Southwark crown court: the 84-year-old was found guilty of 12 indecent assaults going back to the 1960s. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
Stephen: I’m not sure how well-known Rolf Harris is outside Australia and the UK, but he has been a showbiz icon in both countries for well-over 60 years: musician, singer-songwriter, composer, painter (he’s painted The Queen), and former television personality. He’s received many, many awards including the prestigious Order of Australia and a CBE, the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
Like many kids, I grew up with his famous songs, including ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’, ‘Jake the Peg’ and ‘Two Little Boys’. He’s even fronted anti-child assault campaigns (see video below). I can’t tell you how deeply sad I feel today for his victims and their families; his wife, daughter and family; and kids everywhere who grew up with him as a hero – and, yes, even the man himself – that he committed such crimes.
By Peter Walker and Matthew Weaver, The Guardian - July 1, 2014 – http://tinyurl.com/o6xqpzf
The director of public prosecutions has hailed the bravery of a woman whose evidence about being indecently assaulted by Rolf Harris led to the veteran entertainer facing a long jail term. Alison Saunders argued that the conviction vindicated the policy of targeting such historic abuse cases and showed that “nobody is above the law”.
Harris, 84, was found guilty of 12 indecent assaults spanning almost two decades from the late 1960s, with a series of other alleged victims giving evidence to his trial or coming forwards subsequently.
Overnight, officials in his home country of Australia began the process of removing tributes to the star, and he was ejected from the country’s recording industry hall of fame.
Saunders said she was pleased the trial vindicated the victims’ efforts. “They have been very brave in coming forward,” she told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme. “We should make sure we don’t triumphalise in these instances because what it means is that abuse took place against young girls and women and therefore I think we ought to think about them first.”
Saunders denied her team got caught up in public hysteria historical sexual abuse connected to the Metropolitan police’s Operation Yewtree investigation, offering the Harris convictions as evidence.
Challenged about Yewtree’s low conviction rates (17 arrested, two convicted) she said: “What it [Yewtree] has shown is that nobody is above the law.”
“The reason why we are here is so that we don’t do that,” she said. “We have very clear guidelines about when we will prosecute. We have to have enough evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction. If we don’t have that the case won’t go ahead no matter what and who we are looking at. And then we will look at whether it is in the public interest. And only when we have satisfied those test will bring a prosecution.
“We get convictions in 86% of those cases that we take. So we are not risk-averse. We have to be very careful that we don’t get to a situation where we are only taking very sure cases.”
The DPP said Harris’s unanimous convictions for assaults – including groping a girl of eight after signing an autograph for her, and grooming and molesting his daughter’s best friend from the age of 13 – endorsed the prosecution’s portrayal of the 84-year-old TV star and artist as a “Jekyll and Hyde” figure who used his celebrity to target girls and young women.
As plans were drawn up to remove tributes to Harris in Australia, including a plaque in his birthplace of Bassendean, which is also considering removing his status as a freeman of the town, the country’s prime minister said it was “sad and tragic” to learn the truth about such a celebrated figure.
“I feel gutted and dismayed but it’s very important that we do everything we humanly can to protect vulnerable young people,” Tony Abbott told ABC radio. “Sexual abuse is an utterly abhorrent crime.”
While the court heard from 10 victims of Harris, the true number is likely to run into the dozens. The evidence of seven more complainants was not put before the jury for legal reasons, while a series of other women made allegations to Australian media during the trial. The NSPCC children’s charity, meanwhile, said it was processing calls from 13 more people who said Harris abused them, with others contacting police.
Harris “believed his celebrity status placed him above the law”, DCI Mick Orchard, who led the police investigation, told reporters outside Southwark crown court following the verdict. The force had received “a number” of other allegations about Harris which were being looked into, he added.
While the assaults date back to the late 1960s, the first victim, Harris’s daughter’s friend, only came forward in 2012, in the wake of allegations about Jimmy Savile and other celebrities.
The seven-week trial rested on what the prosecution argued were significant similarities between many of the assaults, beyond the bounds of probability given all but two of the alleged victims had never talked to each other.
The defence case was more simple still: Harris, one of the most prolific and enduring entertainers of modern times, had an unblemished record from 60 years in showbusiness and should not be condemned on only the word of the victims, who were liars and fantasists or else gravely mistaken.
The jury of six men and six women spent more than 36 hours deliberating but were eventually unanimous on all counts.
As the forewoman, speaking softly, announced “guilty” to charge after charge, Harris sat slightly slumped but impassive in the glassed dock. His relatives and supporters, including Harris’s wife of 56 years, Alwen, and their daughter, Bindi Nicholls, said nothing, although Nicholls tearfully hugged her father’s publicist outside the courtroom.
The entertainer will be sentenced on Friday, following medical reports. The judge, Mr Justice Sweeney, warned Harris’s defence team that a jail term was “uppermost in the court’s mind”.
Seven of the 12 counts were connected to Bindi’s childhood friend, who said Harris first groped her when she was 13, on a holiday in the late 1970s. She described a concentrated process of grooming by the entertainer, who kept up an intermittent and almost entirely romance-free sexual liaison with her until her late 20s. The woman described how the stress of the assaults, some of which took place at Harris’s family home in Bray, Berkshire, and even in front of a sleeping Bindi, caused her to drink heavily from the age of 13 to quell panic attacks.
The youngest victim said she was about eight when Harris groped her crotch at a public event in Portsmouth in the late 1960s after signing an autograph for her. Another victim, Tonya Lee – she waived her right to anonymity as she gave an interview to Australian TV – developed anorexia after being groped by Harris in a pub aged 15 while on a youth theatre tour.
The evidence of the fourth victim on the counts – the other six gave evidence as so-called bad character witnesses – proved arguably crucial.
Harris insisted he could not have groped a teenage waitress at a celebrity event in Cambridge in the late 1970s as he had not visited the city until years later. However, mid-trial, a member of the public sent the prosecution video footage of Harris taking part in an ITV show called Star Games filmed in Cambridge in 1978, calling into question his alibi and the credibility of others.
The jury was not told that seven more complainants alleged Harris groped or assaulted them, claims covering almost 30 years and involving women and girls aged from 14 upwards. These accounts were given in pre-trial hearings, but were not pursued in the main trial for legal reasons.
One woman said she was 14 in 1977 when Harris, on a visit to Sydney, grabbed her bottom and pursued her into another room, saying, “Rolfie deserves a cuddle”. Harris played with the underwear of another witness, a well-known British celebrity, as she recorded a TV interview with him in the mid-1990s.
Additionally, new complainants came forward in Australia during the trial, among them a radio host and her male co-presenter.
It is a grisly conclusion to Harris’s immensely long and hugely successful career, which began when he arrived in London from Perth in 1952 switching from art to cabaret and then children’s TV. Over the decades he hosted prime-time entertainment shows, had a series of novelty pop hits and presented cartoon programmes and then animal shows.
Much of his career was based on his skilled and rapid sketching and he eventually acquired some renown as a serious artist, painting a portrait of the Queen in 2006.
Rolf Harris – Kids Can Say No campaign, 1985