Rolf Harris found guilty
Rolf Harris has been found guilty of indecently assaulting four girls in Britain between 1968 and 1986.
The jury took eight days to deliver unanimous verdicts on all 12 charges in London.
Each count carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail. Harris is due to be sentenced on Friday.
Justice Nigel Sweeney asked the jury to retire on June 19.
At the time the judge said: “You must not feel under any pressure of time at all.”
Harris, 84, sat in the dock while the foreman read out the 12 “guilty” verdicts on Monday.
He’d previously waited for news at Southwark Crown Court supported by his wife, Alwen, daughter, Bindi, and a small group of other family and friends.
Rolf Harris with his daughter and wife.
Harris in 2013 was charged with 12 counts of indecent assault against four girls in the UK between 1968 and 1986.
The main complainant was a childhood friend of Bindi.
The jury found the performer twice abused the teenager at her own home in south east London and, subsequently, on another two occasions at his residence in Bray west of the capital.
The victim was under 16 when the incidents occurred between 1979 and early 1981.
Harris also indecently assaulted her in his own swimming pool when she was 19.
The jury rejected the entertainer’s claim he’d had a 10-year consensual affair with his daughter’s friend that started after she turned 18.
Harris was also found guilty of assaulting Australian woman Tonya Lee at a London pub in 1986 when she was 15.
Ms Lee had travelled to the UK with a youth theatre group when Harris asked her to sit on his lap after he’d watched one of their shows. He then touched her crotch area.
The star subsequently groped her breast and digitally penetrated Ms Lee outside a bathroom where she’d fled to escape the first assault.
Harris, the jury found, also assaulted a seven or eight-year-old girl in the late 1960s at a community centre near Portsmouth.
She’d gone on stage to get Harris’s autograph but was “aggressively and forcefully” groped between her legs, the victim said in evidence.
He was further found guilty of indecently assaulting a teenage waitress at a celebrity event in Cambridge in the mid-1970s.
She’d been drawn out of a marquee by the sounds of dogs and saw Harris crouched down on all fours barking at a terrier.
He subsequently put his arm around the teenager before “firmly” groping her bottom.
Another six women gave supporting evidence during the eight-week trial that Harris abused them in Australia, New Zealand and Malta between 1969 and 1991.
Harris wasn’t charged over those alleged incidents because they occurred outside the UK.
– AAP
