‘Harris abused girl as his daughter slept in the room’

Veteran entertainer Rolf Harris abused a teenage girl while his own daughter was asleep in the same room, a court has heard.

One of the star’s alleged victims told Southwark Crown Court that Harris, 84, appeared to get “a thrill” out of indecently assaulting her while her friend and Harris’s daughter Bindi was present.

Describing how he allegedly put his fingers inside her before performing oral sex on her, she said: “He didn’t feel inhibited, I think he got a thrill out of it”.

Giving evidence from behind a curtain, the woman claimed that Harris — who is accused of a string of indecent assaults between 1968 and 1986 — first abused her during a holiday in Hawaii when she was 13, touching her when she had just got out of the shower.

She said that as she stood in a towel during the trip in 1978: “He just came over and gave me one of his big hugs and tickles.” While her family gave each other “proper hugs”, she said the way Harris embraced her was “a bit creepy”.

After Harris put his fingers inside her, the woman told the packed court: “He just took his fingers out and pretended as if nothing had happened and said ‘See you downstairs’.”

Harris, sitting in the dock, looked down at the floor as he listened to proceedings through a hearing loop, taking notes at some points.

The alleged incident is not included among charges that Harris faces, because it happened abroad before such offences could be prosecuted in the UK. But the woman is named on seven of the 12 indecent assault charges against Harris, all of which he denies.

She said he struck again during the same holiday, fondling her crotch as he wrapped a towel round her on the beach just a few feet from where his wife and daughter were sunbathing.

Asked why she did not tell them or shout out, she said: “I was a very shy child, excruciatingly shy really, and I just hadn’t got the guts to shout out and I thought, well, if you shout out it will cause mayhem anyway...”

Later in the same holiday, she was again fondled by Harris while wearing her bikini, the woman claimed, and alleged that he later told her the bikini she wore had “always turned him on”.

The alleged victim, who described being scared of Harris from an early age, said she once woke up to hear the “clicking of a camera” and found him taking photographs of her.

She said she “buried” the alleged holiday assaults after coming back to the UK, and later began drinking, “swigging” glasses of gin and tonic water when her parents were not around.