Rolf Harris performing Time Me Kangaroo Down Sport at the Royal Albert Hall.

 

In this video I will discuss not only Rolf Harris and the witch-hunt that put him behind bars, but some of the background to this hysteria. I will show you not only from whence it came, but where it is leading, and how this may well concern you in the future, especially if you come into contact with children, teenagers or women during the course of your work. And no, I am not addressing men only, women too can be and have been accused of and indeed convicted of far more heinous crimes on the basis of no credible evidence whatsoever.

From about the late 1960s, Rolf Harris was a big star, and from about the 1980s onwards he was an A List celebrity in both the UK and in his native Australia. All that ended on June 30, 2014 when a jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted him on 12 charges of sexually abusing underage girls. His name has been mud ever since.

The crimes of which he was convicted are far less serious than murder – although some would have us believe otherwise – but there is no way back for him, even if at his advanced age he wanted to step back into the limelight. Contrast this with convicted rapist Mike Tyson; there is even at least one showbiz personality who was convicted of murder (before he took up acting), and he has not been made a non-person.

I’m not interested in comparisons though, what I am going to argue is that Rolf Harris is innocent, that he was framed by a gaggle of demented, publicity seeking or simply evil women, and railroaded by a corrupt criminal justice system. As he was convicted on all 12 counts involving 4 alleged victims, you may think this is a tall order. Hopefully, you won’t think so at the end of this video, but before discussing the background and the perversions of the rule of law his conviction involved, let me ask you one question.

Imagine you were accused of committing a crime, any crime; there is one witness: the victim. She says you committed this crime over 40 years ago, but she hadn’t reported it. Okay, if you’re not that old, let’s call it 5 years ago. The police ask you for your explanation. There is nothing to explain, you say, it didn’t happen, or if it did happen, then someone else committed it, besides, I’ve never been to – wherever the crime was alleged to have been committed.

The police say okay, we’ll check out your story, and they do. They find absolutely no evidence you were ever there, or that you had ever met the victim, but they charge you anyway. At trial, the judge dismisses an attempt to remove the charge from the indictment, this woman you have never met gives tearful testimony anonymously to the effect that this encounter ruined her life, and the jury convicts you.

That is what happened to Rolf Harris re the Portsmouth allegation; it was believed because other, similar allegations were made by other alleged victims. Actually, the allegations were not that similar, but they were all of a sexual nature. In other words, the very fact that the allegation was made means it is true. That is the definition of a witch-hunt. And as I said, that is what happened to Rolf Harris.

Okay, now let’s go right back to basics, how did this modern witch-hunt begin? It began with the death of Jimmy Savile. Like Rolf Harris, Savile had been a well-known face on television in the UK, although not as big a star. He was a classic English eccentric in the same fashion as Elton John, Quentin Crisp, or the Marquis of Bath. He was also a Marmite sort of person, that is either you loved him or you hated him. Some adored him, others say he gave them the creeps.

Like many famous people, Jimmy Savile had been the subject of rumours; as he never married, these rumours concerned principally his sexuality. And as in England you can’t libel the dead, it would be only a matter of time before his reputation was tarnished posthumously by scandalous allegations. Not much time as it happened. It was less than a year after his death that Exposure: The Other Side Of Jimmy Savile was screened. This one-sided documentary was given heavy publicity prior to its screening, and shortly the man who had been given a funeral fit for a king found himself lying in an unmarked grave as the headstone was ripped off, smashed up and sent to a landfill.

Following the screening of this documentary, an appeal was made for further victims to come forward, and come forward they did, literally in their hundreds. What are we to make of this? What the tabloids and indeed the authorities made of it, was that Savile had been the most prolific serial sex abuser these islands had ever produced. It remains to be seen how many of these victims were really victims, but there was publicity in it for some, undoubtedly some made money out of it, and so did lawyers, including this woman, Liz Dux, of the ambulance-chasing law firm Slater & Gordon.

 

If Liz Dux looks happy, it’s because she’s making big bucks tarnishing the reputations of dead celebrities.

 

A police investigation called Operation Yewtree was set up, and it was this that led to the conviction of Rolf Harris.

There are some people who claim Jimmy Savile was completely innocent; I’m not prepared to go that far, but people who have done solid research on the case paint an entirely different picture from the one drawn by the tabloids and indeed even by the respectable mainstream media – quote unquote.

Here are a few examples, the Duncroft allegations. These concern a school for wayward girls which Savile was alleged to have treated like his own personal harem. In October 2012, an investigation by the Daily Mail reported the existence of a fake letter that attempted to incriminate Savile, a letter on Surrey Police headed notepaper.

Now let’s look at a few genuine documents. These are from extensive investigations carried out in hospitals the length and breadth of the country; I’ve posted links to the full reports below:

“The victim said that as she recovered from her operation ‘someone wearing a green gown, cap and a mask around their neck put their hands beneath (her) gown and inappropriately squeezed and handled her chest.” At this time the patient was alone in a single room next to the operating theatre recovering from her surgery. The patient’s medical records and operating theatre records confirmed that she had undergone surgery on the day she alleges the assault took place.

As the incident occurred following the patient’s operation, the investigator described a clinical scenario to the victim in which ECG electrodes were being applied or removed from a patient’s chest. The victim was asked whether this could possibly have explained what had occurred.”

Apparently not. This was said to have happened in 1954. A woman recovering from surgery, ie under anaesthetic. There was no evidence Savile had visited this particular hospital at any time in the 1950s yet we are told “Support has been offered to the victim by the Operation Yewtree team prior to the involvement of [the hospital] and by [the hospital itself] during later discussion and meetings.”

It isn’t clear what this “support” was or is, but a good starting point would be counselling for alcohol abuse, or whatever drug it is that she’s been taking.

This is from Queen Mary’s Hospital, Carshalton: “In December 2013, the Trust received information from the Metropolitan Police via the Department of Health...The information was from an anonymous informant who alleged that [Jimmy Savile] and three associates were denied access to a ward within Queen Mary’s by a junior nurse in the 1970s. [He] allegedly threatened to stop the BBC Christmas outside broadcast which was due to be held at Queen Mary’s if access was refused.”

So was this Savile and his paedophile ring? An anonymous informant who saw a nurse talking to a man forty years earlier? And no, this man was not Savile.

And another one, this relates to “a conversation which took place in the presence of Patient A in the day room of a ward at Wythenshawe Hospital in 1962/1963, but concerned Jimmy Savile’s conduct at his home and not at Wythenshawe Hospital. During the course of a general conversation, Patient A, made a comment about Jimmy Savile. During this conversation Patient B told a group of patients, including Patient A, ‘Jimmy Savile was a dirty old man up to no good’ and that he used to hold parties at his house and very young girls were amongst the guests.”

Jimmy Savile was not an old man in 1962, but be serious, was public money really wasted on “investigating” this sort of tittle tattle?

And one more: “Circa 1959, the alleged victim...then aged 7-8 years old was admitted to Booth Hall Hospital to have an appendectomy. She was in a ward with other patients, there were no staff present. Savile came in to visit accompanied by the patient’s father, the patient’s full statement details the fact that her father not only abused her but allowed Savile to do so. She alleges that this happened numerous times over a period of years...During the visit to Booth Hall Hospital Savile put his hands under the bed clothes and sexually assaulted her. She was not sure how long this took and does not remember it happening again at Booth Hall Hospital. She told no one.”

But half a century and more later like so many other “victims” she showed “great courage” coming forward with her story.

In 1959, Jimmy Savile was an unknown, he had been managing dance halls and the like. He appeared on TV for the first time in May 1960, and it was only some time after that he became involved with charity work, visiting hospitals and such.

Not all the allegations against Savile are so ludicrous, but the majority of them have little or no substance, yet you wouldn’t think that from scanning the mainstream media. Before returning to Rolf Harris, I will give you some more background into this sort of nonsense.

Nobody put it better than the Daily Mail columnist, the late Lynda Lee-Potter when she wrote: “The police know that individuals continually invent malicious stories about famous people. They do it out of malice, envy, for money or a pathetic yearning to feel important. They know that the current position, which allows the accused to be named without a shred of evidence, is an added inducement to the greedy, malevolent or mad.”

Lynda Lee-Potter in the Daily Mail, 2003, regarding false allegations against the famous.

The police may have known that when she wrote those words, but they appear to have forgotten it now. In the pre-Internet age, relatively few people had any meaningful access to the mainstream media, so scurrilous allegations against the rich, the powerful, the famous and indeed the infamous seldom made it into print or onto the airwaves. In addition to this, the law of libel kept the media in check, even when the notorious were libelled. For example, in August 1988, BRMB Radio of Birmingham paid Colin Jordan £400 in an out-of-court settlement in connection with a broadcast earlier that year. From 1956 until his death in 2009, Colin Jordan was Britain’s leading National Socialist theorist, and a man who was proud to call himself anti-Jewish.

Colin Jordan (1923-2009) with his first wife, the heiress Françoise Dior, who was a fanatical anti-Semite.

Talking of Jews, here is Oprah Winfrey being taken in by one of the madwomen Lynda Lee-Potter warned against. She may be worth $2 billion, but Oprah is clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Predictably this interview caused outrage when it was screened in 1989.

Oprah Winfrey.

That’s enough of that; incidentally, the book you may have noticed at the beginning of that clip was Satan’s Underground by Lauren Stratford, alias Laurel Rose Willson, alias Laura Grabowski.

Satan’s Underground author Lauren Stratford (1941-2002).

There were only two real alternatives for defaming people: self-publishing and spreading rumours. Publishing a book was an expensive process, up until the 1970s and later it was not economical to publish a print run of less than around a thousand copies. The same was true of pamphlets or even of leaflets, and even if you printed a scurrilous pamphlet, how would you distribute it? So largely it was rumours. Today, anyone can sit in front of a computer and start a rumour, or spread a lie that may reach the far corners of the Earth – go viral, as they say. The proof of that pudding is in the eating, on YouTube especially you will find all manner of scurrilous videos produced by people who are long on imagination, short on facts. Many of these rumour-mongers, or conspiracy theorists as they are often erroneously called, don’t do any fact-checking at all, nor do they have they any idea of how to evaluate evidence, they simply spread existing rumours, often adding their own embellishments, wilfully or otherwise.

You can find all manner of allegations from sexual abuse – some of which are true – to claims by men and women that they worked for secret government agencies or even that they were abducted by aliens. Some of these people are not liars in the conventional sense, rather they are fantasists who believe their own delusions. The most frightening thing about this is that many of them appear ultra-rational. We read and hear a lot about body language, so-called lie detectors and so on, but the reality is that it is very often impossible to determine when someone is telling the truth, lying or fantasising. If you want a rough and ready proof of that, check out a few Oscar-winning performances on YouTube, or even the latest episode of your favourite soap opera, then ask yourself if you didn’t know these people were acting, wouldn’t you believe this was for real?

A rape scene from the soap opera Coronation Street.

For me, this is the strongest pointer towards the total innocence of Rolf Harris, because when I say you can find all manner of garbage about all and sundry on-line, I mean precisely that. Max Clifford was convicted of historical sex crimes shortly before Harris. Interestingly, Clifford was accused of supplying children for the sex trade by a nutter who also accused the Queen – as in ’Er Indoors – of being involved in something even worse. But with all the rubbish you can find on-line from Lyndon Johnson ordering the Kennedy Assassination to the American Government or the Mossad organising the 9/11 attacks, to politicians and even world leaders abusing or even murdering children for their sexual gratification, one person not even the craziest of the crazies had anything bad to say about was Rolf Harris. It was not until the Savile case that the first allegation was made against him. To me this is extremely significant. Since his conviction there have been all manner of stories and “revelations” made about him, indeed during the trial all manner of scurrilous allegations were made by witnesses who were not really witnesses but had simply been thrown in, in an attempt to blacken his character, but there is not one document predating his arrest that points the finger of suspicion at him in any way, manner, shape or form. The only one that comes near is a handwritten letter by the man himself to the father of his former mistress, or victim as she is now called. Victim indeed.

Okay, first let’s look at the number of allegations. This is I feel the reason the jury convicted Harris, although they were out for seven days the jurors allowed themselves to be bamboozled by this tactic. After all, these women can’t all be lying. Can they? Well yes, they can. As I said before, you will find countless allegations made against the high and mighty, the rich and famous all over the Web.

There are two techniques at work here, one of them is trawling, something legal professionals like Barbara Hewson have long warned against. Another is what we might call the celebrity factor, but it is not something that is unique to celebrities. Let’s take a rather bizarre and somewhat humorous example. In case you are not familiar with Hindu mythology, in this religion there is god called Ganesh, who has the head of an elephant.

Barbara Hewson has courted legal controversy with her claims about rape, but she is spot on about the dangers of trawling for victims.

It is customary to offer statues of Ganesh milk. In 1995, someone offered milk to a statue in a Hindu temple. And the statue drank it. Before you could say chapati, there were statues drinking milk in temples worldwide. In some places they were literally queing up to see this, and these were not ignorant peasants, they were civil servants, business people and the cream of the Indian diaspora. Could they have all been mistaken? The same phenomenon has been known to happen with flying saucers, that’s called a saucer flap. If Rolf Harris had been accused of stealing ladies underwear from a washing line, there would have been ten, a dozen or a hundred similar allegations fielded against him before you could say tie me kangaroo down, sport.

Ganesh – if you see this fellow in your neighbourhood, be sure to offer him a glass of milk.

We don’t know how many accusers there were, but what happens in cases like this is that the vast majority are easily dismissed as cranks, fantasists and such – like our Savile “victim” from 1954 – and the rest are said to show a pattern of deviant behaviour, a modus operandi.

Let’s look at another case, veteran comedian Jimmy Tarbuck. Here I can do no better than quote someone who will remain anonymous:

"The Jimmy Tarbuck revelations actually really let the cat out of the bag (no wonder they have been buried by the media) – 
the initial lunatic charge was then added to with EIGHT different women saying the same thing – 
that he molested them at BBC Television Centre in 1963 whilst appearing on Top Of The Pops.

The eight women saying the same thing would work as 'corroboration' with each other, 'proof' if you will.

Except: 

1) Jimmy Tarbuck never appeared on Top Of The Pops; 
2) Top Of The Pops didn't start until 1964;
3) Top Of The Pops was not filmed at TVC until late 1969. In fact in 1964 & 1965 it was filmed in Manchester.

So why and where would eight different women come up with the same demonstrably false story?
 
Surely they aren't all associated with the same disreputable law firm, a firm who are very much involved in these many proceedings?"

Or maybe they were all simply liars or fantasists?

Jimmy Tarbuck – the one without the tail.

Incidentally, have any of these women been charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice by making gratuitously false allegations against Jimmy Tarbuck? What about the false accusers of Jim Davidson?

Comedian Jim Davidson was yet another of the falsely accused.

Or the women who lied under oath at the trial of William Roache?

William Roache, the longest serving soap star in the world and one of many celebrities falsely accused of rape by demented women.

There is in English law something called similar fact evidence, this is valid, but it has limitations, or at least it used to. Let’s take a real example.

In 1915, George Smith was tried for the murder of his wife who had drowned in the bath. Not only had Smith been left a substantial sum in her will, but two of his previous wives had also drowned in their baths. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one wife in such circumstances is unfortunate; to lose three sounds suspiciously like foul play. Serial bigamist Smith was tried only for one murder, but evidence of the other two was admitted as similar fact evidence – or system as it was then called – and he was promptly convicted. He was hanged on August 13.

George Smith who was hanged for murder in August 1915; his trial saw the bona fide use of similar fact evidence.

Most people – lawyers and non-lawyers – would agree that evidence of such striking similarity should be admissible, and that its probative value far outweighs its prejudicial effect. The same cannot be said for the Rolf Harris trial, nor for the Max Clifford trial before it. These both saw the admission of not simply similar fact evidence but bad character evidence. This is a fairly recent development in English law, and an extremely sinister one. For example, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in this country who have convictions for burglary or some other crime of dishonesty. What is to stop the police arresting a man who has a previous conviction for burglary and charging him with ten, fifty or a hundred unsolved burglaries because he was seen in the vicinity of a certain house an hour before it was burgled?

There is also a very big problem with people who are famous for whatever reason, this is that as soon as a name leaks out, the floodgates open. Let me explain this, again using a real life example.

In September 2000, Nicholas Edwards was given a life sentence for rape. The case caused no little controversy because the Crown was allowed to adduce as similar fact evidence the fact that he had been tried for and acquitted of rape no fewer than five times, that was in addition to his two previous convictions, which at one time would not have been admissible either. This is clearly a bad principle, but just as clearly, Edwards was playing the system, he had claimed on every previous occasion that the victim had consented, the classic she said/he said scenario, and he was given the benefit of the doubt five times. The legal argument went all the way to the House of Lords before his trial was allowed to go ahead. In this case the previous victims had not come forward but had been contacted by the police.

The big difference is who is Nicholas Edwards? Five women accusing an ordinary man of rape independently, or five people accusing anyone of any crime – on separate occasions each with no knowledge of the others – that must count for something. Four, forty or four hundred women accusing a celebrity of sexual offences after his face has been all over the media is an entirely different proposition, notwithstanding the dishonest rhetoric of Sasha Wass QC and her ilk.

Nicholas Edwards had two convictions for rape, yet it took a ruling by the House of Lords to have these admitted at his trial.

We have come a long way in less than a decade, when it was necessary to go to the House of Lords to have similar fact evidence admitted against a twice convicted rapist to now when men with no previous convictions, indeed men of exemplary character, can be traduced in open court by witnesses trawled literally from around the globe.

I mentioned trawling earlier, this is something similar. The police did in fact trawl for evidence against not specifically Rolf Harris but against celebrities in general; they and the media asked for victims to come forward, and “victims” came forward in droves. We have seen this sort of thing happen in a number of trawling operations since the 1990s involving children’s homes, Operation Granite for example. These have resulted in both the persecution of the innocent and some terrible miscarriages of justice.

These mendacious trawls did not begin with Yewtree; check out Operation Granite sometime.

Okay, let me deal now with the supposed damage inflicted by Rolf Harris on two of his so-called victims, firstly little miss anonymous from Portsmouth, and then Tonya Lee from Down Under. According to Sasha Wass, this first “victim” asked for Rolf’s autograph then “All the happiness had gone”. What exactly is he alleged to have done? He is said to have leaned into the girl, ran his hand down her back and touched her between her legs. She told the court “It was very quick.” Then it happened again, aggressively. And that was it. Her life was never the same again.

Tonya Lee is the only so-called victim to have waived her anonymity, she told a similar tale for a five figure fee. Actually, it wasn’t that similar, even though the duplicitous Sasha Wass and her gang would like us to believe it was. She was quite a bit older, for one thing. Here is Tonya Lee.

I didn’t scream, she says, I don’t know why. How about because these assaults never happened? Harris is supposed to have groped her twice in a crowded public house, yet no one saw what happened, and of course she never screamed nor told anyone. Not until after the Savile scandal broke and the tsunami of filth unleased by both the media and other deranged women threatened to engulf Harris and literally dozens of other celebrities, at which point she sold her non-story to a national media outlet in Australia.

Here is some critical commentary about Miss Lee by another anonymous netizen; I am quoting verbatim here:

"There are a few things about this case that seem rather odd.
(1) The uncanny resemblance of Tonya Lee's lap-sitting abuse scenario to the situation described seven months earlier by Caroline Savile 
(and available on Youtube). Everything is the same, from wearing a skirt, to being in a room with other people who don't notice, 
to fleeing to the toilet. Lee even mentions, in passing, sitting astride Harris's legs. For a chat. This seems implausible. I believe 
she had seen that interview and included that detail because she was trying to convince the interviewer. It was also mentioned in 
the voiceover accompanying the interview that she had obtained a PTSD diagnosis in 2012. That, plus obtaining the court transcript, 
seems to suggest planning: to maximise a compensation payout and keep her story straight in later accounts."

And here are some edits for you to make the comparison yourself.

Tonya Lee, who cried all the way to the bank.

Like the anonymous Portsmouth woman, Lee blames her brief encounter with Rolf Harris for in effect ruining her life. This is a consistent feature of these types of cases, as one pundit said, even the mildest type of sexual abuse is considered to be a virtual murder of the soul. Shortly we’ll be hearing from some victims of sexual abuse of the worst possible kind, but here is some food for thought. The following clip is of young girls being groped legally by security officers at American airports.

You’ll find a lot more of this sort of thing on YouTube, boys as well as girls, and adults of both sexes. Clearly these body searches can be distressing, for parents as much as for kids, and some of them border on sexual assaults. There has been uproar over them, but distressing though they may be at the time, and perhaps for some time after, have the lives of these kids been ruined?

Here is a not-so-young female who has been subjected to an intimate body search at an American airport. She was very upset at the time, but she got over it.

Finally in the same vein – sort of – here is a screengrab from the science fiction TV mini-series The Langoliers. Kate Maberly was no more than 13 years old when an actor three times her age put his hand on her breast. She died in the film, but this scene did not ruin her off-screen life.

An underage actress has her breast touched by an older man, an incident that didn’t ruin her life or even her career.

Now back to the whiners, here is another perpetual victim, one who is even worse than Tonya Lee; her name is Emma, she claims to have been sexually abused as a child; I have no reliable information about her, so let us assume she is telling the truth. Anyway, here she is.

According to her, she has been treated for a plethora of psychiatric complaints for over a decade. Did sexual abuse do that to her, or is she simply a fruitcake?

Self-styled survivor of sexual abuse, fruitcake and professional victim Emma.

  Let me put it another way, would you want to share an empty elevator with Emma? If you were working in the same office as Tonya Lee, and the boss asked you to work late, just you and her, what would you say?

Needless to say, the survivor industry is an equal opportunity employer; here is a male “survivor” explaining to a conference at the Eisenhower Auditorium on October 28, 2012 how the abuse he suffered as a child was responsible for everything that went wrong in his life. His account of the actual abuse contains a paucity of detail, but when he was about eight years old he appears to have been invited or enticed to a man’s house, and there to have been encouraged to wrestle with the man’s young son stripped down to his underwear. There is other stuff too, but let’s not mention the camera, and let’s assume he is telling the Gospel truth. Although he had a successful career, he had too perhaps more than his fair share of misfortune, both his parents died when he was relatively young. He married, but his first marriage imploded because he had an affair. He implies this latter was because of the abuse, a simpler explanation is that like Rolf Harris, he couldn’t keep it inside his trousers.

I cheated on my wife because I was abused as a child. Wonder what the judge made of that if she applied for alimony.

Like Emma, he’s also been in therapy, which is probably part of the problem rather than part of the solution, I’ll come to that in due course. Also, by his own account he was a loner, the kid everyone always picks on, clearly he had poor social skills, yet this fairly brief period of his childhood in which he was interfered with perhaps in a fairly minor way, is the root cause of all his problems.

Here is another male “survivor” whose downfall was blamed on sexual abuse. In case you don’t recognise him, his name is Joshua Komisarjevsky. In July 2007, he and his partner-in-crime Steven Hayes invaded the home of Dr William Petit where they found him sleeping downstairs on the couch. They battered him with a baseball bat, tied him up and dumped him in the cellar. You can find the full sickening details with your search engine, but after a botched robbery, Komisarjevsky raped the doctor’s youngest daughter, and photographed her naked, then he stood by while Hayes raped and then strangled the doctor’s wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit. Finally, the two men fled the scene of the crime, but not before they had set the house on fire, presumably to destroy forensic evidence. Fortunately, they didn’t get far, but both girls perished in the fire.

The two were tried separately, Hayes first, and he was sentenced to death. Komisarjevsky was likewise convicted, and then came the penalty phase of the trial. Why should a man who has snuffed out three lives the way he and Hayes did be spared the death penalty? Well, he was sexually abused as a child, apparently by his foster brother, Komisarjevsky was adopted, and unlike Tonya Lee, this sexual abuse does not appear to have been a figment of his imagination, his abuser has an unrelated conviction for sexual assault, so let’s not only say it happened but let’s accept it was as bad as he claimed. Did that abuse make Komisarjevsky so angry at the world that he snuffed out the lives of three strangers after doing what he and Hayes did? Komisarjevsky has a daughter, who was 9 years old at the time of his trial, so how badly could he have been screwed up by this sexual abuse? And didn’t he think of his own daughter before he raped an 11 year old girl? Needless to say, the jury were not impressed, and they sentenced him to death.

Joshua Komisarjevsky – a genuine victim of childhood sexual abuse. This compelled him to participate in a triple murder, how precisely?

There is this ludicrous belief that sexual abuse can be used not only to excuse anything, but that anyone who has suffered it, however briefly, must be permanently damaged. Here is a leading American rabbi explaining the truth about it, and as this sort of damage is primarily spiritual, you should pay more attention to him or to your local imam than to this vast army of counselors, therapists, and other clowns who are making a comfortable living dispensing tea and sympathy.

Rabbi Manis Friedman – plain speaking and common sense about sexual abuse.

Did you hear what he said, even so-called professionals often do more harm than good, and basically it’s down to you. We all have issues, we are all damaged, so do the best you can. Self-styled survivors of sexual abuse – real and imagined – are committing the well-known fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. In case that is not well-known to you, it means believing that because B followed A, A was the cause of B. Imagine a superstitious person acccidentally walking under a ladder; the next day she falls over and breaks her leg. Is there really a connection? By the same token, what is the connection between Tonya Lee’s train wreck of a personal life and what did or did not transpire between her and Rolf Harris in a London public house all those years ago?

I’m not trying to make light of people’s suffering, if we are lucky enough to live long lives, we will all experience pain, suffering and heartache. For most older people, physical pain is no stranger. Just for the record, I have had more than my fair share of this; I haven’t had a day entirely free from pain since October 1988, and since the turn of the Millennium I’ve written obituaries for more than a few people I’ve known well. Like this guy. And her. Sometimes our lives can be changed dramatically by what for other people may seem trivial episodes. As I write these words, the world is mourning the comedian Robin Williams who committed suicide at the age of 63. Even the rich and famous are not exempt, but there is a pattern to victims of sexual abuse – real and imagined – or as they are called now, survivors of (trivial) sexual assaults, it’s almost like they’re reading from a script, but it is really a case of empty vessels making the most noise.

Robin Williams who committed suicide in August 2014.

Before we discuss therapists and false memories, let’s look at a couple of victims of real sexual abuse, not this “Rolf Harris touched my leg when I was 8 years old and ruined my life” garbage. The first is Kara Robinson.

Kara Robinson, who was kidnapped by a serial killer and lived to tell.

When she was 15 years old, Kara was kidnapped at gunpoint, held captive for 18 hours, and raped repeatedly. The man who did this was Richard Evonitz; it was later established that he had murdered three young girls five years earlier. He didn’t stand trial because he committed suicide after a high speed car chase. Here is what Kara said about her ordeal, and her escape from certain death.

This is Elizabeth Smart, who at the age of 14 was kidnapped, held captive for months, and raped repeatedly.

Elizabeth Smart who was kidnapped and raped repeatedly at the age of 14.

Okay, these are two remarkable young women, but contrast them with Tonya Lee and our aforementioned male abuse victim, then ask yourself if all the latters’ problems can be blamed on the trauma they supposedly suffered.

Here are a few other names you might just recognise:

Soul Surfer Bethany Hamilton who at the age of 13 had her left arm ripped off by a shark.

Bethany Hamilton makes less noise about her terrible ordeal, near death and permanent disability than Rolf Harris “victim” Tonya Lee about a transient grope in a public house.

Malala Yousafzai – shot in the head at the age of 15. Look at her now.

The inspirational Malala Yousafzai.

Naomi Oni who had acid thrown in her face.

Acid attack victim Naomi Oni who suffered and continues to suffer far worse than any survivor of occasional wandering hands.

Child bride Aesha Mohammadzai whose husband cut off her nose and slit her ears.

Aesha Mohammadzai smiles for the camera wearing her prosthetic nose.

And let’s not mention the girls, and boys, too numerous to mention, who suffer in other ways. Like this amputee.

Denise Castelli lost her leg but not her mind.

Jake Tharme age 12, who required hundreds of stitches after a car crash.

All these people have suffered terrible physical trauma. For Kara Robinson and Elizabeth Smart that was temporary, and is now long gone. For others it is permanent, some of these victims have to get used to living with pain for the rest of their lives. Some suffer psychologically, and at times they can be difficult to live with or simply to be around, but on the whole they cope extremely well, and some are truly inspirational. The biggest contrast between these real victims and the Tonya Lees of this world is that by and large they don’t wallow in self-pity, and they don’t blame all their problems on or allow themselves to be defined by one fleeting incident. As I said, empty vessels make most noise.

Now I’d like to say a bit about the dangers of using so-called historical evidence. Memory is a complex thing; human memory does not operate the same way computer memory operates. When you want to retrieve some specific data from your computer, you interrogate it with a search command, and if it’s there, up it comes exactly how you stored it. Unless you’re suffering from file corruption. Human memory doesn’t retrieve information in such a fashion, it rebuilds it, it is fluid, which makes it unreliable, and at times even dangerous. Then there is confabulation, this is when we get dreams and memories mixed up. This may sound bizarre, but it is not only people who are “mentally ill” this affects. Then there are other factors that can and do affect our memories. One of these is alcohol; people who consume large amounts of alcohol risk damaging their brains. Then there are recreational drugs which a lot of people use today. Then there are drugs used for legitimate purposes. Then there are all sorts of other things like additives in our foods and even lead in the air. We don’t know to what extent these things can and do affect our memories, but environmental toxins do most definitely affect our bodies.

Then there is therapy, so-called. Let’s stay with alcohol though; both Tonya Lee and Harris’s mistress – the woman we are supposed to call his principal victim – are said to have struggled with alcoholism. Tonya Lee is also a mother of three, and at one time her kids were taken away from her and put in care. The gullible may argue that her encounter with Rolf Harris was responsible for that, but it is clear that it didn’t put her off sex anymore than their encounters turned our male victim and Joshua Komisarjevsky off sex. Seriously, are we supposed to believe this rubbish?

The big question regarding the so-called main victim is why if Harris was abusing her did she keep coming back for more? There is such a thing as an abusive relationship, even intelligent people can become ensnared in those, and for reference, check out the truly shocking case of Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum. But she was not living under the same roof as Harris, not permanently; did he have some kind of Svengali-like hold over her? It just doesn’t wash. Clearly he was a fool and worse, he admitted as much, but a paedophile?

Harris’s legal team did not appear to do a very good job, ditto Max Clifford’s, because there was no expert evidence about the unreliability of memory, with or without alcohol. Here is a very short clip that should give you food for thought. Elizabeth Loftus is the world’s leading expert on false memories.

You don’t have to go to such lengths to validate what she says here. Check out a film or TV programme you watched a few years ago, then when you come to a point where you think you can remember the dialogue or what happened next, stop the tape, and see if you can predict what comes. You’ll be surprised how often you get it wrong.

Confabulation is very import, and this might just be the reason the so-called victim from Portsmouth pointed the finger at Harris. Unlike Tonya Lee, who has serious credibility problems per se, this woman appears to be convinced she met him, but what if instead she had confused him with someone else, or if her entire memory is false? You think that is so implausible? In 1985, Harris made a child safety video called Kids Can Say No! I haven’t included a clip from it here, but you can find it on YouTube. This video was not his idea, and it was made with some input from the NSPCC, although that organisation is somewhat coy about that relationship now. This video warned about “stranger danger” rather than Satanic abuse or abuse within the family. It is quite likely that she saw this video or something similar, and confused an unpleasant experience in her past with the character she saw on the screen. Or perhaps the memory is entirely false.

People who have these delusions – men as well as women – are not lying in the accepted sense, and their testimony can be extremely compelling. Forget all you’ve heard about body language, polygraphs and so on, they don’t come into it. If this woman had claimed she met an alien instead of Rolf Harris, or if she claimed she’d seen him strangle a child and drive off with the body in the boot of his car, she would have been dismissed as a fantasist, a crank, or something similar, but because her allegation was plausible, he was charged, and in spite of the total lack of evidence, convicted.

And just in case you didn’t notice, this is the way young girls usually react when they are touched by strangers.

Now let’s talk a bit about therapy. There are all types of therapies, but here we are talking about...talking. That is all it is, the patient, or perhaps one should say the victim, talks, and the therapist listens. The most noticeable thing about such therapists is their gullibility, this is where a lot of this garbage about Satanic abuse comes from, and false memories. While therapists listen, they also talk, and some of their talk is, frankly, disturbing. Here is airhead therapist Kati Morton espousing the virtues of The Courage To Heal Workbook.

Self-styled mental health expert Kati Morton is one of a large number of airheads who endorse the dangerous nonsense of The Courage To Heal.

This book is widely recommended by therapists including another American airhead, Peggy Oliviera, who is also a “survivor” of sexual abuse. In case you hadn’t noticed, this is part of the rhetoric of this movement – I think we can call it a movement. Kara Robinson has the right to call herself a survivor, as does Elizabeth Smart, but if some creep feels you up on the train home, or touches your leg when you are seven years old, you don’t get to call yourself a survivor.

Peggy Oliviera, one of many survivors/counselors.

The book to which Miss Morton alluded is an updated version of the 1988 book The Courage To Heal...This was initiallly targeted at women “survivors” of child sexual abuse. Robert Sheaffer published an excellent and quite damning review of it in 1994, which you will find linked below, but here is my two cents’ worth.

The first thing to note is that both authors are lesbians, which you may think is neither here nor there, but how about this from page 81:

“If you don’t remember your abuse, you are not alone. Many women don’t have memories, and some never get memories. This doesn’t mean they weren’t abused.”

And the next page: “If you don’t have any memory of it, it can be hard to believe the abuse really happened”.

This book is written on the assumption that child sexual abuse is not simply widespread but endemic, and that women especially suppress or repress their memories of it, in other words it is pure Freudian garbage.

The Courage To Heal – one of the most mendacious and dangerous books ever written.

If you tell a mentally disturbed young woman like our friend Emma that she has been sexually abused as a child and that she should remember her abuse, she will, or some of these self-styled victims will. Some of these women may have suffered real abuse, perhaps minor physical abuse, slapping...that’s what it’s called nowadays, although if you grew up in the 1960s like I did, it was taken for granted that your parents and even your teachers would on occasion administer physical discipline. At one time the local copper on the beat would give a young hooligan a thick ear and either send or march him home. Today, a police officer who did that would end up in court himself.

We don’t know how many of the so-called victims of Rolf Harris, Max Clifford or Jimmy Savile have been brainwashed by books, videos or therapists that try to convince them they were sexually abused, but don’t bet against it. Let me be quite clear about this, if Max Clifford had lured a 12 year old girl into a Jacuzzi while assisting his disabled daughter and induced her to mastubate him, he deserves every day of his eight year sentence, but does anyone really believe this incident happened?

Max Clifford with his daughter; however odious he may be, Clifford is like Harris both a victim of a witch-hunt and a terrible miscarriage of justice.

I’m not saying either we should throw out the baby with the bathwater, there have been a number of sexual offence convictions of people in and around the media that have been warranted. The most notable of these is Jonathan King, who was given a seven year sentence in 2001.

Jonathan King, whose 2001 conviction is qualitatively different from the convictions of Rolf Harris and Max Clifford.

King is a homosexual, as is Chris Denning. The investigation into the allegations against King was initially low key; there was also a great deal of quality evidence, and he has changed his story over the years. These facts indicate that his conviction was sound.

Convicted paedophile Chris Denning.

Stuart Hall has been tried twice for sexual offences against underage girls, although he was cleared of all major charges, ie rape. Innocent people do sometimes plead guilty, but there is no reason to question Hall’s convictions, any of them. Because of his guilty plea at his first trial, very little information has been released into the public domain.

Convicted paedophile Stuart Hall.

It appears though that Hall took his prey somewhere they were able to recognise and thus corroborate decades later. Such corroboration is not always to be trusted as we will see shortly, but it appears to be trustworthy here.

Interestingly, Hall’s legal team called expert evidence to suggest his alleged victims were victims not of sexual abuse but of false memory, a claim the prosecution dismissed as “psychobabble”. Perhaps Learned Counsel should have been made to read The Courage To Heal. Or perhaps better than that, all police officers and state prosecutors should be required to undertake a course in this particular branch of psychology; even if they were to spend only a day or two in the classroom and watching videos they might not destroy so many innocent lives in the future. Having said that, as stated, the case against Hall was corroborated when at least one of his victims was able to give specific details that tallied many years later; there was no such corroboration for any of the allegations against Rolf Harris, certainly not for the Portsmouth non-victim and Tonya Lee.

This brings us to another important point regarding publicity. After the raid on the home of Cliff Richard in August 2014, news of which was leaked in advance to the BBC, a contributor to a blog discussion made some interesting comments. The following is quoted verbatim:

The police "now have a complete knowledge of the layout. This is a trawling expedition and the police are capable of subtly influencing 
other claimants with details of Richard's home.

And they do it : when I first came to Australia I did some work for a solicitor the late John Marsden. Marsden was a high profile 
powerful lawyer, president of the Law Society and a member of the Police Board, gay and a target.

He was accused by a tabloid TV show of abusing under-aged rent boys. We all knew John was into 'rough trade'- the more tattoos 
the better, preferably truck drivers. Marsden sued for libel and the TV network bitterly fought the case for 10 years. It all hinged 
on details of Marsden's house, the decor, layout and so on. Eventually it emerged that local police, who had it in for Marsden had 
supplied details of his house to the TV Station & the claimant. Fortunately for Marsden we found his decorators who had re-designed 
his house 10 years after the claimed abuse and who still had the photos of the old decor. The Judge awarded Marsden the biggest 
ever libel payout in history- $6M plus costs probably twice that." 

Unquote.

Cliff Richard has long been the subject of rumours about his sexuality, but the recent raid on his home may be a step too far.

John Marsden (1942-2006).

This is another reason trawling should not be allowed.

One other thing we should cover in connection with this witch-hunt is the obvious one – money. We mentioned this earlier, but it reared its head in the Rolf Harris case too, not simply with Tonya Lee. Harris said his principal so-called victim, ie his mistress, or perhaps that should be his first mistress, had tried to shake him down for £25,000 in 1994. Later, the beans were well and truly spilled, and Harris wrote a grovelling letter to her father; by this time she was not a girl but a woman, well and truly. That letter was the only piece of physical evidence – such as it was – that was produced in the entire trial. Furthermore, it was the only piece of contemporaneous evidence that was used.

Andi Kingston – Harris was said to have had an affair with her right under the nose of his wife.

There was film of Harris at Cambridge which the Crown tried to use duplicitously to claim he had lied about being there in the 1970s when some of his alleged groping took place, but that was easily explained. Harris is now very old, and clearly not in the best of health. The presenter Sue Cook was called as a defence witness to explain this apparent lapse of memory, but about that letter, did her father really believe her claims? Let me put this another way, if your daughter told you that since the age of thirteen she’d been groped and groomed by a man three decades and more her senior, what would you do, sit down and talk about it? Or would you march round there and punch his lights out? Any father worthy of the name would at least have contacted the police, and in the case of an A List celebrity, leaked the story to the press.

Finally, after his conviction, we saw a whole slew of so-called victims come forward claiming they’d been groped by the once great Rolf Harris, like this one. The one on top.

Vanessa Feltz

Seriously, would any man with half a brain grope Vanessa Feltz against her will?

There is one other matter I should mention; after his conviction, much was made of Rolf Harris allegedly searching for child porn on his computer. I won’t say too much about this, but it will be sufficient to point out that the claims made by a certain nefarious tabloid are wildly inaccurate. To begin with, the images date only from 2012. The latest charges in the trial date from May 1986 when Harris was 56 years old. In 2012, he was 82; how many 82 year old men “use” child porn? But in case you hadn’t noticed, Harris and all his family are artists. Talking of which, here is food for thought.

Mother And Child by Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) – art.

Niki by Rolf Harris – porn.

Okay, this video is called Rolf Harris And You, but where do you come in? As I said earlier, if it can happen to an A List Celebrity, it can happen to you, in fact it has happened already to ordinary people, as I pointed out when I mentioned trawling cases. Allegations of sexual assault are extremely easy to make, and all but impossible to disprove. In the Portsmouth case – little miss anonymous who has now been given a name, Wendy Wild (presumably after her imagination) – Harris was convicted of indecently assaulting her by dint of the allegation being made, not only was there no evidence he was at Portsmouth at the time, but what little evidence there was indicated that he was not.

This must surely be unique in modern English criminal history, but there have been other miscarriages of justice that have resulted in men receiving heavier sentences.

In 2002 I set up a website for Michael Stone, the man convicted of the Chillenden Murders; the evidence against him is likewise non-existent. Then there is Omar Benguit, like Stone, Benguit is serving a life sentence, in his case for a murder that was almost certainly committed by Danilo Restivo who murdered a woman in Italy as well as another one in the UK. Michael Stone is behind bars because he is alleged to have shouted a confession through a prison wall. Benguit was tried three times for the same murder, and much of the evidence against him was clearly perjured, contrived, or invented at the behest of the police.

Michael Stone, Britain’s longest serving miscarriage of justice prisoner.

Nevertheless, the conviction of Rolf Harris sets a new low even allowing for these two cases. What it means is that if you or indeed anyone is accused of a crime ten, twenty, thirty, even forty or more years earlier, you can be convicted purely on the word of the complainant or witness. In a sex case this individual will be granted lifelong anonymity, will testify from behind a screen, just in case you give her the “male gaze”, and furthermore, other so-called victims will be permitted indeed encouraged to make similar or perhaps not-so-similar allegations against you, again with no corroboration, and nothing backing them up.

The rationale for this is that in rape and sexual assault cases, women seldom if ever lie, indeed that the vast majority of rapes go unreported. This is a colossal piece of fiction that is plugged tirelessly by the misnamed women’s movement, by militant feminists, and by agenda-driven special interest groups like Women Against Rape. To this end they and their fellow travellers have produced all manner of ludicrous studies based primarily on contrived statistics that are said to prove that one women in five, one in four or even one in three will be the victim or rape, attempted rape or some sort of serious sexual offence in her lifetime. This nonsense has even found its way into peer-reviewed journals; I published an analysis of one such piece of academic trash earlier this year; the link is given below.

The reality is that women and girls make false allegations of sexual abuse with alarming frequency, and at times so do men and boys, especially when there is the prospect of compensation. Furthermore, unlike rape, which almost always leaves forensic evidence in the age of DNA profiling, an indecent assault may leave no evidence at all, it is simply a case of she said/he said. And if enough allegations are made, at some point even the most worldly-wise of juries will think: this guy must be guilty, however unworthy of belief the prosecution evidence. So yes, this does affect you. If you are a teacher, a doctor, even a police officer, you could be arrested ten, twenty or more years from now, charged with and convicted of a crime that never happened on the basis of a totally uncorroborated allegation by an anonymous woman who has a history of alcohol abuse or perhaps some deep-seated psychiatric malady for which you will be blamed.

Brian Banks, another sad but ultimately inspirational story of a life wrecked by a false rape allegation.

False rape accuser Landen Gambill – the slightly deranged look in her eye says it all.

And if you are a woman, don’t think your gender will let you off the hook, the women in the McMartin pre-school case didn’t get a free pass. And there have been others as well, the most horrific and indeed insane of which has to be the case of Kelly Michaels who was convicted of heinous crimes against preschoolers in spite of rather than because of the evidence. Her convictions were eventually quashed, but not until she had spent five years behind bars.

Kelly Michaels: read all about this unbelievable case here.

If you work or have worked with teenagers or women at any time, even if you are a humble shopkeeper, you could find yourself in this unenviable position. The CPS under the odious Alison Saunders is already committed to increasing the conviction rate for rape; one of the more bizarre complaints it aired recently was that the number of rape convictions was falling, as though fewer women being raped was bad news. So what is to be done? One suggestion at least with these sort of cases is to lower the age of consent to thirteen. That is not the answer. Girls of that age should be in school, not out having sex. The age of consent is currently sixteen, and there are girls of fifteen and fourteen having sex regularly, mostly with their slightly older boyfriends. If the age of consent is lowered to thirteen, we will see sexual predators taking advantage of younger girls, perhaps ten or eleven year olds, and that can’t be right.

The angelic Sarah Payne was murdered by a sexual predator; lowering the age of consent would increase the vulnerability of all young girls.

Indeed, at the time of writing we have seen all manner of revelations relating to organised paedophiles operating in Rotherham. While the scale of the abuse may have been exaggerated, there is no doubt whatsoever that it happened; there have to date been a number of high profile trials of so-called grooming gangs in other areas. Where were the police while this was happening? Chasing ageing celebrities for allegedly groping teenage girls who never complained until they smelt compensation decades later.

This gang of sexual predators from the Rochdale area got away with abusing underage girls for years while the police were chasing ageing celebrities for alleged historical misdemeanours.

What is needed is not to lower the age of consent, but common sense, something that is far from common nowadays. The very first thing we need is a statute of limitations, one that for historical sex offences indeed for most or all historical offences could be set at five years or even three. Let me though tell you what is an historical offence, or rather what is not.

A family move into a new house, and decide they want to dig a pool in the back garden. They call in a landscape gardener, who uncovers what he thinks is a human bone. The police are called in, and they find the body of a woman which is identified as belonging to a housewife who had lived in that very house, and who was reported missing by her husband thirty years ago. There is physical evidence, and clearly hubby has some explaining to do.

A woman is found walking along a road in a distressed state; she is taken to hospital where she claims she has been raped. She is bruised, and there is semen on her dress. No one is brought to book, then twenty-five years later, a DNA match is found. There is physical evidence and the crime was reported at the time, so this is not an historical case.

Finally, a charity receives a six figure cheque from the executor of a man’s will which says the benefactor is leaving the money in memory of his mother, who fifteen years earlier left the same charity a similar sum in her will. The accounts are examined, and there is no record of any such similar donation. Clearly someone has some explaining to do.

Now contrast this with “Fifteen years ago when I was in Mr Smith’s class, he dragged me into the store cupboard one day and fondled my breast. I didn’t tell anyone because I thought no one would believe me”.

If they wouldn’t believe her then when there may have been forensic evidence, why should anyone believe her now?

A statute of limitations is an antidote to such legal tyranny.

Another, sensible precaution is to restrict the access men have to underage girls and women; this latter can be difficult in the workplace, but it would drastically reduce both claims of indecent assault and allegations of sexual harassment, a phrase that is defined so vaguely as to mean almost anything. Wherever possible, women below about fifty and especially girls should be chaperoned, including in the doctor’s surgery.

A third and a most important reform is to remove all this anonymity garbage. Okay, where a complainant is under 16, fair enough, but a woman who is capable of making allegations of sexual impropriety against a man is capable of doing so in an open and above board manner. This ludicrous law makes rape or indeed almost any sexual offence seem a fate worse than death. If that were truly the case, there would be a dramatic increase in the number of rape convictions, because a woman who resists her attacker will almost always suffer some form of bruising or other injury, which is a small price for any woman to pay for defending her honour.

An offshoot of this should be the requirement for corroboration. A serious offence should require serious corroboration. This does not mean CCTV nor even a detailed confession, but some corroboration should be mandatory. Remember, Stuart Hall protested his innocence but changed his mind when corroboration was forthcoming; that was after years and indeed decades. Detectives are trained professionals and should behave as such instead of like sneak thieves or thugs.

Yes, there is such a thing as an abusive relationship, as I pointed out earlier, then there were the recent grooming cases involving organised gangs of mini-cab drivers who preyed on vulnerable young girls, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule, and are almost always easily recognised as such.

Finally, women and indeed men who make wilfully false allegations of rape or other sexual assaults with malice aforethought, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The recent case of Rhiannon Brooker was breathtaking in its audacity, as were and are her apologists who have continued to paint her as some sort of victim instead of an evil woman who attempted systematically to frame an innocent man.

Rhiannon Brooker – you can read a bit about this rape liar here.

Okay, that’s about it, if I haven’t managed to convince you that Rolf Harris was the victim of a colossal stitch up, you must I am sure agree that he did not receive a fair trial, and that the use of historical, some might call it ancient evidence, is not condusive to justice. Harris could still have been tried for the main alleged offences, dodgy as that may have been. He might still have been convicted, certainly his reputation would have been tarnished – rightly or wrongly – but this nonsense, where does it all end?

As things stand, this sort of historical crime reporting nonsense applies only to sexual offences – real and imagined. If you were to walk into your local police station and report a burglary or an ordinary assault that happened five years ago or even one year ago, you would be shown the door in double quick time unless there was some extremely compelling reason for the police to give you their attention. That is the way things are at the moment, but don’t expect that to always be the case. Unless the rot is stopped and PDQ, the intellectual prostitutes who prosecute these cases and their co-conspirators in the police will soon be stitching up people left, right and centre for all manner of historical offences. The time to make a stand is now, not for the sakes of Rolf Harris and Max Clifford, but for the ordinary victims of so-called justice to come. And one of those victims might just be you.

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