Disgraced entertainer Rolf Harris has been jailed for nearly six years for 12 indecent assaults against four girls – including one aged just seven or eight.
Mr Justice Sweeney said Harris, 84, had taken advantage of his celebrity status and had shown “no remorse”.
The sentence of five years and nine months has already been referred to the Attorney General’s Office under the “unduly lenient sentence scheme”.
One victim said the abuse had taken away her “childhood innocence”.
Harris, who was found guilty of offences that took place between 1968 and 1986, was told by the judge he had “no-one to blame but himself”.
He displayed no emotion and stared straight ahead as he was jailed.Before Harris was sentenced, prosecutors said he would not stand trial over allegations he had downloaded sexual images of children.
They had claimed Harris had indecent images of children, as part of a larger collection of adult pornography, but decided it was not in the public interest to prosecute him.
‘Psychological harm’
During sentencing, the judge said Harris “clearly got a thrill” from committing some of the assaults on his four victims while “others were present or nearby”.
He said Harris touched the youngest victim intimately when she approached him for an autograph in Portsmouth, while another was “groped” at an event in Cambridge.
As well as the girl who was aged seven or eight, Harris’s victims were two young teenagers and a childhood friend of his daughter Bindi. He abused his daughter’s friend between the ages of 13 and 19.
The judge said Harris “fancied” this victim and assaulted her in her home and his, breaching the “trust that her parents had placed in you”.
He said the assaults resulted in the teenager suffering panic attacks, anxiety and led to her becoming an alcoholic, saying she had “suffered severe psychological harm”.
Speaking after sentencing, she said the jail term was “immaterial” but the verdict was “what I wanted, what I went to court for”.
She added: “I do hope that women will come forward now, celebrity or not.”
BBC
