He then went on to assault her three times. She was assigned to assist Harris on the day and “for the first couple of hours he was lovely”. Karen Gardner was 16 in 1978 when she jumped at the chance to help in the filming of Star Games (a celebrity version on ITV of the BBC’s It’s a Knockout). Except his many victims, of course, whose years of silent suffering are firmly attested to in this two-part documentary. When he was arrested in 2013 and charged as a result of the Operation Yewtree police investigation (leading to a conviction on 12 counts of indecent assault – one later overturned – and a nearly six-year sentence, of which he served half), there was genuine shock and disbelief. Of course those who worked in the prisons and hospitals that allowed him free access to patients knew far more – from the nurses who would refuse to leave vulnerable patients alone with him to the higher-ups to whom those nurses did not feel able to complain.īut Rolf Harris was different. Those who followed him more closely would have read the clues to his monstrousness scattered in his autobiography, the hints he gave to interviewers that his apparent philanthropy was a front to allow him to get away with things, or the casual jokes he made about sex with young girls (“My case comes up next Thursday!”). There can be few people who, when the outpouring of allegations of historic child sexual abuse against the late Jimmy Savile began in 2012, did not at least acknowledge that there had always been something unsettling about the man, even if their only exposure to him was a few seconds of Jim’ll Fix It.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |