Betrayed, neglected ...so why did Bindi remain so loyal?
BEING the daughter of Rolf Harris has been the bane of Bindi Nicholls’ life for as long as she can remember. As soon as people find out who her father is, she says, all they want to talk about is Rolf, which she finds ‘utterly tedious’.
But how is Bindi going to cope now people are likely to want to talk about anything but Rolf?
How bitterly ironic it may seem to her that she has finally got what she has wished for.
After his arrest in March last year, Bindi, 50, faced a choice: abandon her 84-year-old father or support him.
She chose the latter. Despite the unspeakable nature of his crimes, he is old and crushed – and he is her father.
But in court the possibility of a less altruistic motivation was raised – her claim on his £11million estate. The trial was shown an email Bindi wrote to her father 2012 saying: ‘I understand that I am sole inheritor of your estate – is this true? It’s like being told that you might be winning the lottery...’
Bindi was her father’s key witness. In her evidence, she asserted that his affair with her best friend began when the girl was about 18 or 19.
The girl said it began when she was 13 – and the jury believed the girl.
It was put to Bindi that she was financially dependent on her father and colluding with him, which she denied.
Whether pity or money or both is behind her loyalty to her father, she certainly feels fury and anguish, too.
Rolf has destroyed her 83-year- old mother’s life and – it may seem at this time – hers, too.
Even before this, Bindi was a troubled soul. Hours after she was born her father jetted off for a work commitment.
His absence, she later remarked, set the pattern for her childhood, which was marked by Bindi’s allconsuming attempts to get her workaholic father’s attention.
We now know that Harris’s sometimes detached and distant demeanour was almost certainly, in part, due to the fact he was secretly abusing her best friend, right under her nose.
Bindi was sent to an all-girls private school in Bromley. She says she was often lonely.
‘Dad was often off in Australia for three or four months of the year making programmes, so Mum was a bit of a lone parent, and I became a bit of a loner, too,’ she said in an interview in 2003. ‘I had a few good school friends. My cats were hugely important to me and I would be devastated when they died.
‘I was a very morbid child, trying to make sense of life and death as well as my own part in the world. I’d imagine that when birds and flowers opened, they were singing the songs of my dead pets.’
She hated being the daughter of someone famous.
‘It made me mistrust people’s motives in wanting to be friends with me. I felt used by people. It was as if I didn’t matter.’
HARRIS said in the same interview that, when it came to encouraging his daughter’s artistic talent, he was ‘ afraid I made her feel that she was never good enough’. He also acknowledged that he had given too much time to his work at her expense, with Bindi asking: ‘You’ll spend ten minutes entertaining their little kid, but what about me?’
Bindi may have felt neglected, but friends say Rolf and Alwen’s lives focused entirely on her.
When he was in England, Rolf sometimes took Bindi to the television studio with him.
At 16, Bindi dropped out of art school, worked in a couple of shops, including Miss Selfridge, and did a stint at a hairdresser’s salon. At 21, she enrolled at Bristol University to study fine art.
Even here Rolf’s fame haunted her. ‘On the first day of term, some guy stood up and started singing, “Tie me kangaroo down, sport”. I thought, oh no, we’re off again.’
After graduating, Bindi began a relationship with Malcolm Cox, a struggling artist. Their son was born in 1996.
Bindi’s world collapsed the following year when she visited her parents with her best friend.
She was perturbed by the chemistry between Rolf and Andrea Kingston, a family friend who had moved into a converted boathouse on the property. Bindi confided i n her f riend, who reacted by saying: ‘What on earth does he see in her? How dare he? Your Dad is a right b******.’
Shocked, Bindi asked her friend if Harris had ever touched her, to which she replied that he had abused her for more than 16 years. The revelation caused Bindi such pain that she destroyed some of Harris’s paintings but she remained in touch with him.
SHE married fellow artist Craig Nicholls in 2008 and while Bindi has enjoyed some success with her work, it has not made her rich, it would seem. In her email in 2012, she pleaded with Harris to keep the contents ‘between you and me’ and not to ‘pass it on to accountants’, adding: ‘Please imagine how it is for me. I still feel guilty about spending any money.’
When her father was arrested last year, Bindi was shattered. But in the run-up to the trial, she and her mother decided they must be seen publicly to support him. The images of her and her mother holding hands became a daily carefully choreographed show of unity.
Bindi often cut a childlike figure. The day the guilty verdicts were reached, she wore a polkadot skirt, dotted tights, shoes with red ribbons on them and a flower clip in her hair.
Yesterday a corsage was sewn on to her black jacket.
Neighbours at Bindi’s North London home say they haven’t seen her since she visited the house with her parents about three weeks ago.
One said: ‘ Rolf came out, followed by Bindi, but she kept her distance. There were no cuddles, kisses or smiles.
‘Rolf and his wife got into a black Mercedes with a chauffeur, the sort of chauffeur you get if you don’t want people to bother you.’
Bindi didn’t wave them off.