Nonchalant Harris and a bizarre river trip to court
SMILING and seemingly in high spirits, Rolf Harris delivered one last insult yesterday to his tormented victims.
In a bizarre finale to his eight-week trial, he set off by boat from his home on the Thames on the first leg of his journey to court.
And later as he waited to be sentenced, he sat relaxed, smiling and chatting to security guards – minutes after the court had been stunned into silence by the testimony of four victims in impact statements describing stolen childhoods, ruined lives and psychological damage inflicted by the perverted entertainer.
The Thames launch took Harris and his daughter Bindi from the family’s riverside home at Bray, Berkshire, to a car waiting elsewhere to drive him to Southwark Crown Court in London.
The 7am trip was one of the few times he has been seen publicly outside the confines of the luxury house since his arrest last year.
From TV helicopters overhead, Harris was filmed laughing with four other people on board the open wooden motorboat before transferring to the car.
At Southwark he smiled briefly as he arrived – then walked slowly through the ranks of cameras and onlookers to prepare to learn his fate inside.
It might have started off as a lighthearted boat trip but inside, he would have to listen as a judge effectively sent his career and his life downriver.
Not that you might have guessed that from his demeanour. His appearances here have become a daily ritual played out before the TV cameras – or, as some believed, a cynical farce. It emerged during the case that the group travelled separately before assembling a short walk from the court to arrive in a carefully choreographed show of unity – a cheated wife, a daughter betrayed, friends and relatives humiliated.
But yesterday, in the last act of that drama, one of those players was missing. His 82-year-old wife Alwen, whom he married 56 years ago, was not in court to see Harris sentenced to five years and nine months in jail.
Instead the group included Bindi, her husband Craig Nicholls, Harris’s niece Jenny Harris, friends and security men.
How any unity appears to have survived the sickening accounts that were detailed again in court yesterday is hard to fathom.
Yet Bindi – tightly clutching her husband’s arm – listened to every word of the victims’ statements yesterday, and to the judge when he underlined their harrowing testimony before sending Harris to jail.
She sat just 20ft from her father but barely looked at him in court.
Had she done so, she would have seen him sitting with his arms folded, leaning back in his seat, and at one stage stretching both arms out to rest on the backs of two chairs either side of him.
He asked one of the dock officers for the time – and once appeared to stifle a yawn. No visible remorse, no hint of worry. He had already been warned by the judge that prison was inevitable and he sat alongside a large, brightly coloured suitcase full of belongings. He even had a cool-bag packed with drinks and a snack.
If you had to guess, you might have imagined he was a tourist waiting on an airport bench for his flight, not someone waiting to learn if he might die in jail.
Yet you did not have to look too far to understand how serious this was for others. A smartly dressed woman sat closest to him outside the dock, silent, motionless, almost within touching distance had it not been for the glass screen. She had first encountered him when she was 16.
She was one of his victims.