One of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Britain during the present century has been the conviction of the entertainer Rolf Harris following several allegations of historic sexual offences. The full background to his trials is outlined in a recent book by William B. Merritt who was his defence team’s specialist investigator. His revelations confirm what many have suspected that Rolf was innocent of all the charges brought against him, and that he was the victim of an organised campaign by the authorities to obtain celebrity convictions in the wake of the Jimmy Savile furore.
Rolf Harris was found guilty of all twelve charges he faced made by four accusers during his first trial in 2014. He was one of a number of aging celebrities who attracted a police investigation arising from the hoax ITV Exposure programme which peddled numerous fabrications against Jimmy Savile, summarised here http://bit.ly/2dybGYs . The fallout from this duplicitous programme created widespread outrage that Savile had ‘escaped justice’ for all the many ‘crimes’ he was posthumously found guilty of in the kangaroo court of public opinion, fomented by a hysterical campaign of demonisation whipped up by the media and some politicians. Under the aegis of the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Yewtree a witch hunt of well known celebrities was instigated to deliver scapegoats to appease the baying mob. They struck gold with their biggest scalp, Rolf Harris.
It is worth examining each of the accusers’ claims during his first trial. The first and most damaging was that Rolf carried out an indecent assault against an eight year old girl while attending an event at a small community centre in Havant, Hampshire. This was alleged to have taken place in autumn 1969, nearly 45 years before the trial. No evidence was presented that Rolf Harris had ever visited this community centre. Police investigations were unable to track down any local residents who could recall his attendance there. At the time Rolf was a major TV star and his appearance would almost certainly have generated enormous publicity in such a location. Given the complete lack of any corroborating evidence it is a mystery why this charge was allowed to stand. Despite all this the jury found Rolf Harris guilty and his accuser received £22,000 in compensation.
During this first trial Rolf Harris did not employ his own investigative team. Instead his defence team had to rely on the evidence obtained by Operation Yewtree officers, which the specialist investigator Mr Merritt described as ‘later exposed as being inept and biased’. Rolf appealed against the Havant community centre conviction and this time employed a team of investigators to uncover evidence that should have been presented at his trial. The outcome of their research was that many new facts came to light which proved that Rolf Harris had never attended this community centre, and that his accuser must therefore have been lying. In November 2017 the three appeal judges unanimously agreed that Rolf’s conviction on this charge was unsafe, and his conviction was quashed. However, the false accuser still retained her compensation and she never faced a charge of perjury, showing that the trial was less about justice and more about pursuing the ‘believe the victim’ agenda.
The second accusation against Rolf was that he indecently assaulted a 13 year old girl during the recording of the BBC TV game show It’s A Knockout. This allegedly took place nearly forty years previously in a Cambridge park. The complainant testified that this event had taken place in 1975 at Parker’s Piece, a green in the centre of Cambridge. In reality the TV recording took place at another site, the Cambridge City football ground. Despite getting the location wrong the accuser’s account was accepted by the prosecution. Rolf’s defence team produced irrefutable evidence that he could not have appeared at this event as at the time he was performing in a concert in Canada. However, Rolf then made a claim that was to cost him dearly when he stated that he had never been to Cambridge prior to 2010.
This attracted widespread publicity, and it prompted a new witness to come forward to inform the police that Rolf had participated in ITV’s Star Games programme from 1978. This event was held in yet another location known as Jesus Green to the north of the city centre. Television footage confirmed that Rolf Harris had indeed been a participant at this event. At the time this was revealed his defence team had based their case on refuting the 1975 claim. But in mid trial the judge made the highly prejudicial decision to allow this charge to be changed to incorporate the newly revealed 1978 event. This meant that the accuser’s age had been changed to 16, the venue had been changed, the TV programme had changed and the broadcaster had changed. No adjournment was allowed to provide the defence team an opportunity to investigate these changes, and the complainant was not recalled to the witness stand to explain the serious inconsistencies in her evidence. Additionally, the investigator Mr Merritt has uncovered evidence to suggest that in 1978 the accuser was living in Oxford, not Cambridge.
The prosecuting counsel took full advantage of Rolf’s belief that he had never visited Cambridge before 2010, with the underhand objective of convincing the jury that he had lied deliberately to cover up his appearance at the Star Games in 1978. This was entirely false as Rolf Harris would have attended thousands of events during his career. It was common practice to bring celebrities by coach to these kinds of events, held in parks that are interchangeable with hundreds of others throughout the country. Over three decades later Rolf would have had no reason to recall that the Star Games event had been held in Cambridge. Despite all the inconsistencies in the evidence Rolf Harris was found guilty of this charge.
The third accuser accounted for seven of the charges brought against Rolf Harris at his first trial. She had been a close friend of Rolf Harris’s daughter for many years and was the first to contact the police with her complaints. He was accused of grooming her when she was in her early teens. Rolf Harris admitted that he had sexual relations with her after she had turned 18, but that this had always been consensual and continued intermittently until she was in her late twenties.
After their relationship ended she telephoned Rolf to ask for £25,000 to finance a bird sanctuary in which she had an interest. Rolf Harris refused her request, the result of which was that the accuser’s parents were then told about their affair and Rolf was threatened that the newspapers would be informed if he did not give her the money. The accuser’s father wrote to Rolf to inform him that he was disgusted with his behaviour. Rolf burnt this letter but eventually reconsidered by deciding to reply asking for forgiveness, but making clear that all sexual activity had been consensual. This letter was used extensively by the prosecution, and was distorted to make it appear as a confession when in reality it had been sent as an issue of conscience.
One particular comment in Rolf’s reply to the father would cause him problems. During a holiday he told the accuser when she was 13 that she ‘looked lovely in her bathing suit’, which the accuser as an adult retrospectively distorted as being ‘just the same as physically molesting her’, which is of course utterly delusional. This correspondence took place in the mid 1990s but the accuser waited until November 2012 before contacting the police. The police held numerous interviews with the accuser during the course of which she changed part of her initial statement. Rolf’s defence counsel referred to this extensive police involvement as a ‘rehearsal’, describing the actions of the Yewtree officers as ‘grooming a witness’. Despite the lack of any real evidence Rolf Harris was found guilty on all seven charges.
The fourth accuser was a 15 year old member of an Australian theatre youth group on a five week tour of England in 1986. She accounted for three of the charges against Rolf, claiming that he had carried out indecent assaults against her in a pub during an informal dinner. Nobody in the crowded pub had noticed anything untoward, nor did the accuser tell anyone at the time about what had supposedly happened to her. Rolf Harris denied the allegations made against him pointing out that there were inconsistencies in her evidence concerning the timing.
This accuser first contacted the British police when the allegations against Rolf were being extensively covered in both the British and Australian media. However, before doing this she had previously contacted an Australian publicist who agreed to sell her story through his media contacts. He obtained a contract for A$60,000, but the publishing outlet interested in her story insisted that she must first report her allegations to the police which she did. As a result Operation Yewtree detectives flew to Australia to take a statement from her, but with a strange lack of professionalism, appeared unconcerned that she had sold her story to the media prior to the trial.
During the trial this accuser claimed that the assaults took place at the start of the tour and because she had been so affected by what had happened she lost about a stone in weight during the tour, an outcome that appears highly unlikely. However, research carried out by Rolf’s defence team proved that the pub dinner took place near the end of the tour. When challenged about this she responded that it had taken place so long ago and she could not be expected to remember everything. It was also discovered that the arrangement of the seating and the tables in the pub made it impossible for an assault to have take place as she described that involved sitting on Rolf’s lap. Despite all the inconsistencies the jury again found Rolf Harris guilty on all three charges.
As well as a lack of any real evidence each accusation appears to be highly improbable on practical grounds. Three of the accusations occurred in crowded venues or events where there would have been plenty of witnesses. Such behaviour would be reckless, and carrying out a sexual assault in such circumstances appears almost incomprehensible by a celebrity likely to be under constant observation by the public. The remaining accuser, the close friend of Rolf’s daughter, appears to have been happy to be a regular visitor to the Harris home in her teens when the alleged grooming was supposed to have taken place. She appears to have never raised Rolf’s alleged grooming behaviour with her friend, his daughter. Moreover, even when she was demanding money from Rolf she never accused him of carrying out any illegal acts when notifying her parents about their relationship.
The investigator Mr Merritt was critical of the way the police had conducted the case against Rolf. He considered that the police were ‘neither prepared, nor adequately trained, to handle the number of historic sexual abuse cases’ they were now being asked to investigate. As a result they changed their normal procedure for gathering evidence. Rather than seeking evidence that could stand on its own, they undertook fishing expeditions to persuade women to ‘come forward’ to make allegations against celebrities. This was done on the theory that ‘they can’t all be wrong’.
This assumes that everyone who came forward was honest and nobody would make a false allegation tempted by the promise of significant financial compensation coupled with an assurance by the police that they would be believed. Since there would be no risk of prosecution, as shown by the bogus Havant claim, unscrupulous opportunists would have nothing to lose by making false accusations. Not all of these are necessarily made by compensation seekers; some can bear a grudge and seek revenge, whereas others are subject to false memories, often prompted by questionable therapy techniques.
Mr Merritt is critical of the bad character evidence that Rolf was confronted with at his trial. These witnesses were used to bolster the evidence of the complainants whose own evidence was regarded as too weak to stand on its own. According to Mr Merritt, the police refused to carry out ‘even the most basic checks to ensure that the evidence being provided by a bad character witness is genuine’ adding that the police ‘chose to accept anyone who was prepared to slate Rolf Harris’. At the commencement of his first trial Rolf had no previous criminal convictions and there was nothing untoward in his history. Despite this the prosecution went to great lengths to convince the jury that there was a ‘dark side’ to Rolf Harris, insinuating that he was a sexual predator, experienced in grooming young girls.
As a result of his convictions a further seven women made allegations of sexual assault against Rolf. They resulted in eight fresh charges which Rolf Harris faced in two trials held in 2017. This time Rolf did not make the huge mistake at his first trial of relying on the police to carry out an investigation. Instead, he appointed a team of private investigators led by Mr Merritt. As a result of the thoroughness of their enquiries they were able to provide compelling evidence that Rolf was innocent of all the charges made against him at the two later trials. Full background details on how this information was gathered are provided in Mr Merritt’s book. As a result Rolf was acquitted of all the later charges.
One can only agree with the conclusion of Mr Merritt that the ‘conduct of the Operation Yewtree detectives and investigators, in overlooking and ignoring evidence that supported Rolf Harris’s innocence, cost him both his freedom and his good reputation’. There have been many calls for a retrial. Although, due to his advanced age there are questions as to whether Rolf would be willing to endure further legal proceedings, a retrial appears to be the only realistic option if he is to clear his name and reclaim his reputation.