Rolf Harris has been accused by Vanessa Feltz and Linda Nolan of indecent assault.
The women have gone public following Harris’s guilty conviction and sentencing to five years and nine months jail over the sexual abuse of girls as young as eight.
Feltz (pictured above), a popular TV and radio presenter in the UK, described how in 1996 Rolf Harris allegedly slipped his hand inside her underpants live on television while she interviewed him for The Big Breakfast.
Feltz told the Sunday Express the now convicted sex pest attacked her while they were filming the ‘On The Bed’ section of the show and that his wife Alwen had been in the room at the time.
She said that she “could not look down” because they were on live TV, as she felt Harris’s hand creeping up her leg.
Feltz, then 34 years old, says she stopped the interview to go to an advert break as his hand went under the elastic of her knickers and then “jumped away from him”. He acted “as if nothing had happened” when they came back from the break, she said.
“I have not a shadow of a doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing and he was getting excited about it, doing what he was doing while he was on live television,” Feltz said.
The presenter said she had contacted the police about her story when the allegations against Rolf Harris started to emerge in 2012. Scotland Yard reportedly obtained the Big Breakfast footage to support her claims and hoped to introduce it as part of the Harris trial in London. However, it was apparently too late to give adequate notice of the video’s submission to Harris’s defence lawyers.
Meanwhile, Irish singer Linda Nolan (pictured, left) has claimed she was groped at the age of 15 by Rolf Harris while supporting the entertainer on a tour of South Africa 40 years ago.
Nolan and her singing sisters from The Nolans had joined Harris for a six-week tour when the Australian, then 44, allegedly cornered her backstage and started kissing and licking her neck.
Nolan told UK newspaper the Sunday Mirror she was wearing a dressing gown and about to get ready for a show when Harris “came out of nowhere and in seconds his hands were all over me”.
“He came right up to me and got me in a huge bear hug,” Nolan, now 55, said.
“His arms were all over my back, right around me so his hands were touching the sides of my breasts.
“He rubbed up and down and started kissing and licking the back of my neck.
“He towered over me. If I’d had to fight him off, I couldn’t have. It was horrible and I was totally dumbstruck.
“But after a couple of minutes of me trying to wriggle him off without him stopping, I whispered to him `please don’t Rolf, please, please stop.’
“He did stop then, but looked at me like I was an idiot. He laughed it off and said `don’t be silly, I’m only giving you a hug.'”
Harris was sentenced on Friday to five years and nine months’ jail for indecently assaulting four girls in Britain between 1968 and 1986.
Nolan paid tribute to the abused women who testified against Harris in court.
“Them speaking out made me realise that I wasn’t a silly little girl, and that what he did to me was as wrong as I thought it was that day,” she said. – with AAP
