'It takes two to tango': What Rolf Harris 'said to brother of alleged teenage victim after he threatened to beat him up over abuse'



Harris is accused of repeatedly attacked daughter's friend from the age of 13

Southwark Crown Court hears she told a schoolfriend he was a 'dirty old man' who would make her sit on his lap and grope her

Brother says he phoned Harris, 84, and berated him after discovering abuse

Mother 'was never worried about the children's entertainer due to his fame'

He would be alone with the teenager for up to an hour at a time, court hears

Her father 'wrote Harris a furious letter cutting off all ties with him'

Girl said she didn't want to go to the police in order to avoid publicity

Rolf Harris told the furious brother of a woman he allegedly sexually assaulted from the age of 13 that ‘It takes two to tango’, a court heard yesterday.

A successful businessman, the brother rang the entertainer and threatened to beat him up over the alleged 16 years of abuse, which left his sister battling alcoholism and close to death.

Southwark Crown Court heard how the 31-year-old broke down and confessed to her parents and siblings, saying ‘I’ve been abused all my life’ after turning up drunk to a family Sunday lunch.

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Trial: Rolf Harris pictured arriving at Southwark Crown Court today with his daughter Bindi, left, and his niece Jenny, right

Her brother told jurors that he took his sister aside and asked about her drinking. ‘That’s when she confided to me that she’d been sexually abused,’ he said.

‘I was angry, I felt guilty. Apart from the deterioration in her condition, I didn’t understand why she was behaving like that and why she was doing that to herself.’



Her brother immediately phoned Harris. ‘I asked him to not contact my sister any more and I threatened physical violence,’ he said. ‘I told him why I was angry. ‘I said “You have abused my sister”, ‘He said, “It takes two to tango”.

‘The conversation didn’t go on much after that.’



Yesterday the parents of the alleged victim spoke of their shock and ‘disgust’ over the accusations.



They told the court they felt betrayed by a ‘trusted’ family friend who allegedly assaulted their daughter right under their noses.



Jurors were told that Harris, 84, would turn up at the teenager’s home asking to see her and disappear upstairs with her alone for up to an hour.



Her parents said they had ‘no concerns’ because his daughter Bindi had been a friend of their daughter for many years.



Arrival: Harris adjusts his jacket as he arrives for the latest day of his indecent assault trial

The mother said Harris would come round to see her daughter.



‘I remember it once certainly. It was a morning visit,’ she said. ‘He just said “Where’s your daughter?” and I said upstairs. He just went to the sitting room upstairs. I trusted him. You just don’t expect those sort of things.’

The mother, who was friends with Harris’s wife Alwen Hughes, 82, did not notice anything untoward at the time.



She said she was ‘completely amazed’ when her daughter made the allegations at the Sunday lunch in 1996.

Yesterday, her husband said he was devastated by his daughter’s confession. ‘I really could not believe it,’ he said.

‘I wrote him a letter expressing my disgust and saying that I didn’t want to speak to him or have anything to do with him again.’

Harris wrote back two weeks later begging forgiveness for ‘harming’ his daughter and ‘affecting’ her life. But the entertainer claimed the affair started when she was an adult.

Note: Harris sent this light-hearted note to his alleged victim, the court heard

SHE TOLD ME HE WAS A 'DIRTY OLD MAN', SAYS OLD SCHOOLFRIEND

The girl allegedly molested by Rolf Harris confided in a schoolfriend that he was a ‘dirty old man’, the court heard yesterday

She told her classmate when they were 16 how the entertainer would abuse her, the jury heard.

‘She described him as a “bit of a dirty old man”,’ the friend said. ‘What she described was that he used to get her to sit on her lap and then touch her up.

‘It was a shocking conversation because he is well loved by a lot of people. I remember feeling quite horrified on her behalf.’

The friend said she next spoke to her friend about the matter many years later in 1996 when they were both around 30.

‘She basically told me that Rolf Harris had been abusing her throughout her teenage years and beyond,’ she said.

The friend said she advised her to go the police but the girl wanted to avoid a ‘media circus’.

The father told jurors: ‘The thing that really struck me was that if the argument was that nothing took place before my daughter was 19, it seemed to me this was rather at odds with the content and the tone of the rest of the letter.’

The girl’s family told the court that they did not want to contact police at the time because she needed help to battle her alcoholism.



Doctors later warned that the woman, who allegedly started drinking gin at the age of 14 to block out the pain, that she would die if she did not stop drinking.

She is said to have told a number of therapists about the alleged abuse from the mid-1990s.

One told the court in a statement: ‘I got the feeling she was overwhelmed by his charisma and celebrity status and didn’t feel able to say no to him.’