Jury told similar accounts add up to guilty for Harris
Jurors in Rolf Harris’ sex abuse trial have been urged to find the entertainer guilty on the basis that 10 alleged victims have given “chillingly similar accounts”.
Prosecutor Sasha Wass, QC, said indecent assault cases often relied on the word of one alleged victim against a perpetrator, but with Harris many women had described his “deviant sexual behaviour”.
Harris is charged with assaulting four girls in Britain between 1968 and 1986. Six other women have given supporting evidence that the artist abused them in Australia, New Zealand and Malta.
“In this case it’s the word of 10 independent victims, all whom have given chillingly similar accounts of sexual abuse and exploitation by a man whose public image was pristine and lilywhite,” Wass said in her closing speech yesterday.
The prosecutor told Southwark Crown Court the victims saw the dark side of Harris, who admitted during the trial he was sexually attracted to a 13-year-old girl.
The 84-year-old was a “sinister pervert who had a demon lurking beneath the charming exterior”, Wass said.
The collective evidence painted a picture of an arrogant and brazen man who treated girls and young women “as sexual objects to be groped and mauled as he felt like it”.
“Is it really being suggested that all of these women are fantasists?” the barrister asked. Harris did just that a fortnight ago, telling the court: “They are all making it up.” But Wass insisted: “There can be no doubt they are telling the truth.”
The main complainant is a childhood friend of Harris’ daughter Bindi.
She claims he first abused her when, aged 13, she joined the family on an overseas holiday in 1978.
Wass said a letter Harris wrote to the girl’s father in 1997 was the key to the case.
“This is a confession of child abuse,” she said, arguing Harris had simply moved events in time to suggest there was no physical relationship until Bindi’s friend turned 18. In the letter Harris talks of being in a “state of abject self-loathing” and being sickened by himself “when I see the misery I have caused”.
Wass said that did not make sense if, as Harris told the jury, his daughter’s friend had instigated the sexual contact.
“She was targeted, groomed and dehumanised over a period of 16 years. He just used her for his sexual gratification like she was a blow-up doll.”
The prosecutor said that by her early 20s the alleged victim “was performing clinically for him like a prostitute”.
Wass contrasted the main complainant’s willingness to hand over her medical records — which show she told doctors and counsellors about the abuse from the mid-1990s on — with Bindi’s refusal to release her therapy notes.
The Crown argues the notes could reveal whether Bindi was traumatised by being told her famous father assaulted her friend when underage.
Defence lawyer Sonia Woodley, QC, was expected to begin her closing speech overnight. Justice Nigel Sweeney will then sum up.