Rolf Harris is an arrogant and blatant serial molester who treated women and girls as “sexual objects to be groped and mauled when he felt like it”, a court has been told.
Hmm.
Detailing the allegations connected to the main alleged victim, the childhood best friend of Harris’s daughter, Bindi, Wass said the entertainer abused a girl 35 years his junior until she was “psychologically destroyed and trained to perform like a pet”.
Wass told the jury: “He simply used her for his sexual gratification, like she was a blow-up doll.”
While the prosecution say Harris first assaulted the girl when she was 13, the artist and TV star insists the first sexual contact came when she was 18. However, Wass said, even Harris’s description of the relationship made it appear perfunctory and mechanical, rather than his “Mills and Boon scenario”.
If she was 18 and it was consensual (which everyone seems to agree that part at 18 was) then sorry, but the law does not and should not provide any protection against a lover being a callous bastard. Nor even about perfunctory and mechanical.
If she was 13 then of course it’s all different. Being a shit, even being deceptive, about sex is not a crime.
“…then sorry, but the law does not and should not provide any protection against a lover being a callous bastard.”
But don’t we have a bunch of female crusties demanding just that over the undercover police affair?
@JuliaM, yes, to which the sentiment I believe was: “Gentlemen lying to ladies to get ladies to take their undergarments off? My oh my we must do all in our power to clamp down on such unusual behaviour”.
Please stop being sexist about this. Women are as likely to be “callous” etc as men; I’m not saying this is wrong or right, it’s just how people are. Ultimately all our relationships come down to utility; we are friends with people because we want something from them; companionship, lend me a fiver, LOLz down the pub, whatever. It’s all about that.
What this court is trying to do is declare what amounts to personal ethics to be a matter of criminality. It comes of course from the insane ideology of Feminism and its Victorian moral values, but also from absurd and unrealistic fantasies about human nature.
And anything discussed here is not confined to men. It is ubiquitous. It is normal human nature. “I want her”. “I want him”. That’s the bottom line.
Of course they say the so-called abuse started at 13–there is no case to answer otherwise. As to Harris’s vague memories of 40 year old events –well the CPS wasn’t bothered by the poor memory of the accuser in the William Roche case who changed her story about being raped by Roche in 1968 after being warned what a bad egg he was by “Mike Baldwin” (actor Johnny Briggs). When it was pointed out to her that Briggs was not on set and had no connection with the show until 1974, she at once changed her mind and said it was actor Peter Adamson (Len Fairclough–ironically himself an early victim of the paedohysteria) who had warned her. Strangely the jurors chose not to believe.
The CPS are supposed to have put their best lawyers (all females of course) on the job to try and secure convictions of their aging victims.
If that is so then it makes the Wass female’s performance all the more discreditable. When you have someone bang to rights for a crime, you just need to put forward–“These are the facts–this is the forensic, these are the witnesses, and this is the verdict we want”. If you have someone for the crime you don’t need the whole “What a monsterous monster this monster is” routine that Wass is busy running thro’.
The CPS creeps are finding Rolf’s trial a bit tricky. The got Max Clifford cos’ all of the allegations were un(des)proveable “he-saids/she-saids”. I suspect that any future such trials will use only that kind of accusation. But Harris’s trial is one that has a mix of the such allegations with much more “colourful” tales. A “he said/she said” cannot be disproved but it can be disbelieved by the jury when it is presented alongside absolute confabulated tripe. There is a lot of that in Rolf’s case.
I’m not even convinced Rolf has been all that much of a shit (beyond cheating on his wife, which I have a very low opinion of). Leaving aside the arguable paedophilia angle, the prosecution’s case is that he had non-consensual sex with an adult woman who spent years trying to convince him that the sex was actually consensual. She supposedly did this because (a) she was so psychologically damaged and (b) she was terrified of Rolf because HE WAS ON TV. We saw the same in the Bill Roche trial: even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the prosecution case was correct, the allegation was that he had sex with a woman who privately didn’t want to but made damn sure she externally appeared willing.
I am not hopelessly in awe of people just because they’re on TV, but we see all the time that a lot of people are. If you’re on TV (or even the radio, apparently), it is completely routine and normal to meet attractive strangers who want to have sex with you. And what we’re learning now is that mixed in with those enthusiastic groupies are an unknown number of people who will act exactly like the others, as if they want to have sex with you, and who will even act that way during the act itself, but who will privately decide, if you pick them, that they have been raped. If you’re a basically decent man, how the fuck are you supposed to tell the difference? This cannot be a crime.
And that’s what we saw in that letter of Rolf’s to the “victim’s” father (which, incidentally, no predatory paedophile would ever have written): utter mortification at the very idea that the affair had been unwanted; bafflement that she would go on seeing him if she didn’t want to; and complete comprehension failure that someone might be actually frightened of him BECAUSE HE WAS ON TV. I mean, it’s not like he was playing Hannibal Lecter or something. He was drawing pictures of Tom & Jerry to encourage kids to get into animation. What kind of fuckwit would be frightened of him?
What has really appalled me about these cases is the number of things which should have been ruled inadmissable. Especially the greeting card Rolf sent. A cheesy innuendo pre-printed in a factory can now, apparently, be used against you in court. DLT initially refused to answer questions about extramarital affairs with adults, on the grounds that they were legal, and the judge should have backed him up on that. Gross dereliction of duty by the judges in both cases.
Meanwhile, we get lectured about morality by Margaret Hodge, a woman who slandered genuine victims who were brave enough to come forward about the appalling crimes committed against them by her employees, and who apparently saw no conflict between that and being the first ever Minister for Children. Any prosecutions against Islington Council yet for the systematic destruction of evidence relating to their enablement of industrial-scale pimping of children? No, let’s go after another celeb because he groped a nineteen-year-old in the Eighties.
Not been watching this except when something blatant comes up on the BBC website like the prosecutor claims Rolf was lying about not being in Cambridge in (?1978) when there was documentary evidence of him being in Canada because he was filmed doing some silly programme in Cambridge several years later. I haven’t heard her response to evidence of Rolf not being in Portsmouth when he is accused by a second “victim” whom he has apparently never met of sexually assaulting her but she (the prosecutor) claims that since there are four accusers they must be right despite hard evidence that at least two are making everything up (no idea what the fourth said or whether it has already been disproved).
The jury have to decide whether Bindi’s friend is lying after failing to blackmail Rolf or is telling a slightly implausible truth. If she is telling the truth the other obviously false accusations do not matter. If not, they are a slur that may distort the jury’s perception and including them is an abuse of judicial process.