Rolf Harris will face no further legal action over allegations of historical sex abuse after a jury was unable to reach verdicts on four charges and prosecutors said they would not seek a second retrial.
The disgraced entertainer and artist, who was jailed in July 2014 for unconnected sex attacks on young girls and women, was being tried for the second time over alleged sex attacks on teenage girls in the 1970s.
The judge Deborah Taylor formally found Harris, 87, not guilty of all four charges of indecent assault, which he had denied, after a second trial jury at Southwark crown court was unable to reach verdicts.
Jonathan Rees QC, prosecuting, told the court the Crown Prosecution Service had reached the “firm view” that another retrial would not be appropriate.
Harris said in a statement read by his lawyer outside court that he felt “no sense of victory, only relief”.
He had been accused of sex attacks on three girls, the youngest of whom was 13 at the time. The musician was alleged to have touched her after a recording of the BBC children’s show Saturday Superstore in 1983.
He was also accused of indecently touching a 14-year-old girl in 1971 after she asked him for an autograph at a music event for children in London. A third teenage girl claimed Harris twice groped her after appearing on the ITV celebrity show Star Games in 1978 and telling her she was “a little bit irresistible”.
The entertainer’s lawyers claimed he did not remember any of the events in question, and he did not give evidence. They accused the women of being motivated by greed, coming forward after he was convicted in 2014 of 12 counts of indecent assault.
After deliberating for almost five hours, following a trial lasting two weeks, the jury of seven women and five men said they were unable to reach unanimous or majority 10-to-two verdicts.
Harris initially appeared via video link from HMP Stafford, where he was serving the sentence for his 2014 convictions for indecently assaulting girls as young as eight. The judge Alistair McCreath had ruled in December that Harris did not have to come to court in person because of his age and health. It was believed to be the first time such permission was granted.
After he was released on licence less than three years into a five-year-and-nine-month sentence partway through the trial, he began attending in person.
He had asked to appear via a video link from his Berkshire house after his release from prison, to be close to his ill wife, Alwen, 85, and offered to foot the bill for a professional video link to be installed. But Taylor rejected his request after hearing arguments in private. She granted him bail with respect to the charges the jury were considering and ordered him to attend court every day.
As he left the courtroom on Tuesday, there was a cry of “Well done, Rolf” from the public gallery.
Harris was the second person to be convicted under a wide-ranging police investigation set up after the Jimmy Savile revelations. The eight-year-old girl had asked for an autograph before Harris groped her. He was also found to have molested two other young teenagers and to have carried out a catalogue of abuse against his daughter’s then best friend, whom prosecutors said Harris groomed from the age of 13 and used like “his little toy”.
In 2015, after his convictions, Harris was stripped of the CBE awarded to him by the Queen. He had previously been stripped of honours in his native Australia.