TV Tonight: Australian victims step forward for Rolf Harris documentary
Violations by a showbiz legend conducted in Australia were never brought to trial prior to his death. Now his victims speak out.
Published by David Knox
on June 9, 2026
It has taken Karina Holden some 4 years from concept to bring the story of Rolf Harris’ abuse to screen.
Head of Factual at Northern Pictures, she partnered with John Smithson of UK’s Arrow Media and director Nick Sweeney for Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator.
Harris was convicted in 2014 of 12 indecent assaults, jailed for five years and nine months. Once a national treasure, he would show no remorse, released in 2017 after serving nearly three years.
As Holden explains, there were challenges around defamation to make a documentary while he was alive, but following his death in 2023 aged 83, the path became clearer.
“When Harris was convicted, there was obviously a lot of media churn at the time. There was interest in a documentary floating around… but it was going to be very tricky while he was alive. I started a conversation with John Smithson in 2022 about this project, with the idea that enough time had passed and that the reckoning of women in Australia hadn’t really happened,” she tells TV Tonight.
“He then died soon after, so the road became a lot clearer to be able to do that without any risk of defamation, and all of those things that come along with it. It gave us an opportunity to work more broadly with the victims in both UK and Australia.
“You can’t defame the dead, but I guess it’s the wraparound of all the people around him as well. You’ve obviously got to be very careful about those things. His wife, Alwen, passed away almost two years ago now, when we were starting production, so there were some issues like that that we wanted to be clear of, in telling this story.”
The two part documentary draws upon vast amounts of archival footage of Harris, from both television and radio.
While Harris was convicted of crimes on UK soil, those perpetrated in Australia were never brought to trial.
“He did his time for in jail for crimes that were committed on UK soil against women. One of those women had actually been an Australian, but the assault had happened when she was a 14 year old in the UK,” Holden continues.
“But the crimes that he committed against Australian women on Australian soil were never taken to trial.
“We worked closely with the detectives from (Scotland Yard’s) Operation Yewtree, which was the UK investigation team, Gary Pankhurst and Ben Markham, who you see on screen.
“They had come out to Australia during the 2010s to start that investigation process, looking for people who could cooperate on stories, who could set patterns of behaviour, as well as speaking to people who potentially had been in the UK when crimes had been committed.”
Several Australian victims speak on camera for the first time. How willing were they to talk about such dark chapters and how did producers track them down?
“We make the approach. We didn’t put a call out, it was a very sensitive thing, managed mainly through the detectives themselves, who had remained in contact with a lot of the victims.
“They were open to speaking, and we made those approaches in a way that didn’t feel like we were hounds, trying to chase a story. We would do it in a respectful way, and we would do it in a way that was most comfortable for them.
“Pretty much everybody that we approached wanted to be part of it,” she confirms.
“I think that the people who hadn’t spoken felt like they could, because Harris had passed and I think that while he was alive he was still taunting people and had been doing ‘right of replies’ in the media to them.
“They had spoken out (about) undermining them, so I think that there was a fear factor that had been overcome with his death, I would say.”
The doco also hears from Yewtree detective Ben Markham, writer Kathy Lette, and former BBC host Lynda Bryans.
But not everybody was willing to co-operate.
“The person who didn’t participate was Bindi, Harris’ daughter, and her friend (Victim A), who was part of the allegations. She has remained anonymous from the very beginning.”
Harris’ violations weren’t limited to underage children, but also to women in their 20s.
“It was all pretty much young people. He was very much trapped in his Peter Pan mentality of who he was, and how he saw himself in life,” Holden believes.
“I think he still saw himself as a playful young thing, and somehow gravitated towards younger people. He talked in court very much about being attracted to Victim A, in particular, when she was only an 11 year old. So it was very obvious that what he was prepared to do was with very young children, and younger still, as we found in the documentary.”
Yet Harris is not the only showbiz name to have been ‘hiding in plain sight.’ Does Holden plan on telling other stories about Australian enertainers?
“Defamation laws in Australia are so much harder than the US, so telling those stories is extremely hard, which is why we’ve taken this one (which is) retrospective,” she explains.
“But it still does speak to what is an issue. That exploitation of power, the enablement of institutions that don’t hold people to account, and the ‘normalisation’ of misconduct that’s disguised within showbiz and celebrity.
“Utimately you tell the story of one celebrity sex offender, representative of a very small fraction of abuse cases, but effectively you’re shining a light on something that people might watch, and hopefully that is actually having an impact into the way that we think about our own society and how we operate. We become more vigilant on this behaviour, not just about celebrities, it’s about what’s happening in our own environment, our schools, and our workplaces, and our homes.
“So I guess you take a tale like this and you try to shine a light on a broader issue.”
Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator screens 8:30pm Tuesday on ABC (concludes June 16).
Lifeline 13 11 14
Beyond Blue 1300 22 46 36
Bravehearts: 1800 272 831.
Rape and Domestic Violence Services Australia.
