When Lin Berwick held her hand out to greet Rolf Harris, who was the special guest on her hospital radio show, she didn’t feel especially vulnerable – but in the presence of Harris, she certainly was.
This happened in September 1977 at Moorfields eye hospital in London, where Berwick presented a weekly programme for patients. She was 27 and blind, with severe cerebral palsy. Berwick walked with the aid of tripod sticks but was already seated when Harris arrived. “I’d heard him come down the corridor, whistling and making quite a lot of noise,” says Berwick, “so when the door opened I put out my arm to shake hands.” Almost immediately Harris said: “Has anyone told you you’re a lovely looking woman?”
Her own account of the next 10 minutes forms a small part of ITVX’s two-part documentary Rolf Harris: Hiding in Plain Sight. It tells the now depressingly familiar tale of a household name who was loved, lauded and richly rewarded while simultaneously assaulting and abusing women and girls. There’s plenty of footage of Harris through the decades. He’s singing, dancing, playing his didgeridoo, guesting on Jim’ll Fix It, presenting an anti-child abuse video (“My body’s mine to use as I choose. Not to be threatened or forced or abused”), performing at Glastonbury and painting the Queen. All these clips are juxtaposed with chilling accounts from the women who encountered him along the way.
Berwick’s own experience might be hard to believe if it wasn’t so similar to so many others. Harris was acquitted of the assault on her; nonetheless, she stands by her account that it happened. Harris had, it seems, a breathtakingly brazen method of operating, throwing jokes and banter while his hands reached everywhere, hidden beneath the table, or behind someone’s back, often in public, even on live TV. Although many reports have been quite squeamish in their coverage, this wasn’t “harmless groping” that was “permissible back then”. It included intimate contact, digital penetration, and for one victim, a family friend, years of sexual abuse from the age of 13.
To Berwick, in that brief encounter, Harris was like an “octopus”. Within seconds of their meeting, she says, he had moved round the table behind her, lowered himself to her level and was pushing his body against her chair. She says she could hear him breathe into her ear and feel his beard brush her neck. “He was quite big and heavy and I literally couldn’t move. He pinned me,” she says. According to Berwick, he took her dark glasses off and put them on the table, saying: “I can see your face now.”
“People might think: ‘She’s blind. What’s the problem?’” says Berwick. “I’d had one eye removed; the other was incredibly painful. They were my shield.” When Harris put his hands beneath her clothing, and began twisting her nipple, she grabbed his fingers and bent them backwards. That’s when the assault ended, she says, as Harris kept up his banter. (“Ouch! That hurt. That’s not very nice. I’m a touchy-feely sort of person!”)
“The whole thing was probably over in 10 minutes,” Berwick says. “Not very long – but it happened in 1977 and I can still remember it as though it were yesterday. Nobody in my life had ever treated me like that before and no one has since. I lived at home; I was cared for by my mother and father.” In shock, on autopilot – and because there is no “normal” response to an entirely abnormal experience – Berwick went ahead and recorded the programme with Harris, as planned. He showed her how to play the wobble board.
Back then, she had no intention of reporting it. “I thought I was the only one, and he’d only done it to me because I couldn’t move and I couldn’t see,” she says. “Who’s going to believe a working-class woman over a celebrity? No one. I went home and told my mother. She said: ‘It’s your fault for wanting to do this kind of work.’” That assault could easily have derailed her life. “I have to trust everyone that deals with me,” says Berwick. “My family, my carers, the public, everyone. If I lost that trust, I would not survive. I decided that he was an absolute dirty bastard, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I just had to get on with my life. For 40 years, that’s what I did.”
And through much of this, along with other victims of celebrity abusers – be that Harris or Jimmy Savile, Harvey Weinstein or R Kelly – Berwick had to witness the man she knew to be a monster living a charmed life. He won the hat-trick of honours – MBE, OBE, CBE – and was awarded a Bafta fellowship in 2012. He graduated seamlessly from rising star to household name to national treasure. Many pundits have made the point that Harris provided wholesome, safe, family viewing. According to the upcoming documentary, rumours swirled round Savile for decades but Harris had always been “squeaky clean”. Watching the old footage, he remains strangely unknowable – every appearance, every interview is a performance, and quite an odd one. (Jake the Peg? Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport? Wobble boards? Didgeridoos?) Did this “eccentric uncle” image mean that any strange behaviour was written off, given the benefit of the doubt instead of scrutiny? There’s little sense of the person beneath.
The most harrowing part of the programme concerns Harris’s abuse of his daughter’s best friend, known at the time as Victim A. In the documentary, her psychotherapist speaks on her behalf and tells how innocent physical contact from her friend’s famous dad – a man she had known since she was two – morphed into a gradual pushing of boundaries. Aged 13, she was invited to join the Harris family on a dream holiday and it was there, while she was vulnerable and far from her family, that Harris entered her hotel room and digitally penetrated her. The longer it took her to tell anyone, the harder it was to explain why she hadn’t. The abuse escalated. At sleepovers, as Harris’s daughter slept right beside her, or as they watched TV on the sofa, with both girls under a blanket, he performed sex acts or coerced her into performing them on him. It reached the stage where she couldn’t face him without drinking first.
All this came out as part of Operation Yewtree, the police investigation into sexual abuse allegations set up in the wake of Savile. In June 2014, Harris stood trial for 12 counts of indecent assault, seven involving Victim A; the other victims were aged from eight to 15. His behaviour in court was quite extraordinary. He sketched, he sang, he stared upwards when the victims testified as if it had nothing to do with him. He pleaded not guilty – his defence with Victim A was that their sexual relationship began when she was 18. The other victims, he claimed, were either lying or mistaken. The jury found him guilty on all 12 counts – though his legal team managed to have one (not relating to Victim A) overturned years later – and he was sentenced to five years, nine months.
After that trial, Berwick also decided to come forward. By then, she had achieved much. As a lecturer, writer and speaker specialising in disability awareness, she had an honorary doctorate and an MBE – but there had also been huge challenges. A spinal injury had left her dependent on 24-hour care, and a permanent wheelchair user. “Rolf Harris was just an unfortunate blip in comparison to the rest of my life,” she says, “but the way he took advantage had been disgusting. I feel incredibly lucky to have normal speech as somebody with cerebral palsy. I’ve always felt that God wants me to use it. I wanted justice to be done.”
In January 2017, Harris was on trial again at Southwark crown court for further indecent assault charges against seven women and girls. Berwick was one of them. He didn’t give evidence this time but pleaded not guilty via video link from Stafford prison. “It was quite a terrifying experience,” says Berwick. “It’s a huge place, you’re struggling to find your way around, and I couldn’t see what was going on.” Berwick remembers, in the witness box, giving only a brief account of the assault – then the defence started. “They made mincemeat out of me,” she says. “I was in that witness box for three hours 40 minutes, and by the end my body was like a rigid plank.” The defence played excerpts from the show Berwick and Harris had recorded and asked if this sounded like a woman who had just been assaulted (“I know how it would seem,” Berwick told the court, “but I can assure you [the assault] happened. When you see Rolf as he is there, you would never believe he’s the same person.”)
Harris’s main defence – against Berwick and all the other witnesses – was that this was a cynical attempt to make money from a ruined celebrity. Why didn’t they come forward sooner? Berwick was asked about her current financial situation and the high cost of her care needs. “Did you fabricate this in the hope that you may be able to get some of Mr Harris’s money?” asked the defending barrister. (“Certainly not, sir,” she replied.)
Harris was found not guilty of assaulting Berwick; for the other charges in this second trial, the jury either found him not guilty or were unable to reach a verdict. Berwick was informed by phone. “I just broke down and sobbed my heart out,” she says. “If anything like that ever happened in the future, I’d be very hesitant to report it.”
Four months after the trial, Harris was released on licence after serving just under three years of his original sentence. He has been stripped of his honours, his Bafta fellowship was annulled and his paintings now gather dust in storage in galleries and museums. Now 93, he struggles to speak and eat due to neck cancer and – like Berwick – requires 24-hour care. “I understand he’s very sick now,” she says. “I wouldn’t wish anyone to have the kind of problems I have in my life. I have compassion for the fact that he’s sick. But as an individual who is going to have to meet his maker and atone for the things he has done: I’ve no compassion at all.”
Rolf Harris: Hiding In Plain Sight is on ITVX from Thursday.
