Some career moments are more memorable than others, but a young Suzi Dent could never have known that a one-off gig doing make-up for one of the country’s most beloved entertainers could truly change the course of her life.
Speaking to Woman’s Day from the Gold Coast, Suzi, now 64, explains she almost said no to taking part in Primetime Predator; the latest documentary about Rolf Harris, and the third TV project she’s been in reliving that awful day he sexually assaulted her in 1986.
Part of Suzi just “didn’t want to talk about it again”. But more so, she hesitated to open herself up to judgment from online trolls who have accused her of lying about her story. Some have even blamed her for not stopping Harris from assaulting others.
“I never used to engage with the trolls, ever, and then two years ago I made that mistake – I wanted to educate them,” she explains.
“People say horrible things, some of them you don’t forget. I had two women tell me, not to my face, its always via typing, that because I didn’t do more when I was 23, 24, [Harris] went on to molest little girls. And that was all my fault.”
Back then, Suzi was a bright and bubbly make-up artist, eager to earn her stripes in the exciting world of network television. She can remember receiving the call that she would be part of the team getting Harris ready for the cameras at the Channel 7 studios in Sydney, but it wasn’t long until the popular children’s entertainer showed his true colours.
Throughout their time on set, Harris repeatedly groped and molested Suzi, to the point where she had to hide in a cupboard to avoid further abuse and humiliation. She was also terrified that if they somehow ended up in a private room together, the star would have done far worse.
“He touched me up and felt me up and stuck his hands up my shorts for over six hours, dozens of times,” she says of Harris’s behaviour on a busy set. “I told him to stop, but the director on that shoot egged him on, so where’s my power?
“At 23/24 in ’86, I just had to get through my day being polite and nice because back then, it was a ‘boys will be boys, men will be men’ [mentality].”
As well as being a very different time in the workplace in general, Suzi concedes that Harris being “the biggest star that had walked through Channel 7’s studios” didn’t help her case.
“I felt incredibly safe in the entertainment industry, but that day was different because everybody was in awe [of him], and he was given the full red carpet treatment,” she says. “When I did go to complain to the head make-up artist, she said to me, ‘I thought you knew… his nickname’s The Octopus, he does that to all the make-up artists’.
“She then said to me, ‘I have a message for you from the powers that be, the men upstairs. They wanted to commend me on how I had handled myself with him. Then the penny drops and I realised that they were all watching from the control room.”
Before his crimes came to light in late 2012, Harris had been a well-known, and revered, figure in showbiz for over 50 years, not only in his native Australia but also in his adopted home of Britain.
Harris was once a celebrated artist, singer and television host
In recent times, other comments responding to Suzi’s story of sexual assault are in line with a harmful narrative that’s hard to shake completely – that a woman’s appearance, or the way she dresses, is somehow to blame.
“Because I had been wearing shorts with a little rip in them, I had another man say, ‘I bet you pushed forward so he could really get in and give you one’,” Suzi recalls.
The mother-of-one stresses that those negative encounters are the minority, and for the most part, she’s had an overwhelming level of support since she started speaking out against disgraced Harris.
“I’m really grateful to have a lot of really wonderful supporters who have contacted me, men and women, who have come forward and told me their sexual assault stories,” Suzi says. “They’ve heard me speak and said they felt empowered. And that’s such a gift, when people reach out to you to tell you their story.
“When you’ve been assaulted and when you’ve had horrible things happen to you in your life, the only way you heal is when you start to speak.”
Being a voice for other victims and pushing for societal change are the reasons why Suzi’s chosen to keep talking about her traumatic experience on set with Harris.
“I’m 64 now and I feel that life, god, the universe, chose me when I was 23 /24 to have a bad day with a dirty old man to be the strong woman that stood up in the court, and to have these powerful headlines that I really felt would help the other witnesses,” she says.
She’s referring to Harris’s highly publicised trial in the UK in 2014, where her brave “bad character” testimony on the Australian pedophile played a big part in the prosecution being able to send him to jail for his assault on underage girls.
At the time, Suzi was still protected by anonymity, but she vividly recalls walking in and giving her testimony in front of a sea of faces at Southwark Crown Court, only to have Harris’s legal team label her a liar.
“After telling the truth and to have someone call you a liar… I snorted with derision,” Suzi recalls. “Then I got off the stand, and the only person I looked at was him. I glared at him, and he did not make eye contact with me once. He turned that swivel chair around so his back was facing towards me. There’s a guilty man for you.”
As a woman who was sexually assaulted when she was just 12 years old, Suzi says deep down, she felt a responsibility to speak out against Harris on behalf of his other underage victims.
Harris was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for 12 indecent assaults against four girls, one aged just seven or eight, in the years spanning 1968 to 1986. One victim was a childhood friend of his daughter, Bindi.
“You have shown no remorse for your crimes at all,” the judge told him. “Your reputation now lies in ruins, but you have no one to blame but yourself.”
Harris was released from jail in 2017. He died from neck cancer in 2023 at the age of 93, at his home in Berkshire, having never apologised to his victims.
Suzi explains, “I went forward for the little girls who he’d assaulted, I did not do it for me.
“The first time I got sexually assaulted I was 12, and it changed my life. I was in that courtroom, and I knew the little girl inside me was not going to let me be quiet this time.”
Suzi has one son, who is now 24 but was only 12 when they travelled to the other side of the world so she could face her famous abuser in court. She says being a strong role model for him was another motivating factor.
“He knew why mummy was doing it, he was a huge supporter of mine. I’ve raised a man who is a feminist,” she says.
“[At the time] My favourite headline was ‘Australian television make-up artist dramatically stares down Rolf Harris in court’ – and I thought, I did that. That was me.”
While Harris was convicted of his crimes in the UK, those perpetrated in Australia were never brought to trial.
The latest documentary, Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator, goes back through extensive archival footage of Harris from both television and radio, to piece together how such a monster was hiding in plain sight for decades.
The two-part ABC documentary also features interviews with his Australian victims, many of whom are speaking for the first time about their sexual abuse and grooming ordeals.
Five years after Harris’s UK trial, inspired by the social progress that had been made by the powerful MeToo movement, Suzi revealed her identity to continue the fight for other victims. By that point, she was finally ready to share her whole story with the world – and she felt the world was ready to hear it with an open mind.
“I’d done enough of my own healing and regained a lot of confidence,” she says. “But I had to wait for society to catch up. I talk about that in the documentary – millions and millions of people around the world loved Rolf Harris, I watched Rolf Harris as a little girl on black and white TV. I was excited to meet him – until I met him.
“I was not going to waive my anonymity back in 2014 because I don’t think anybody would be able to accept that level of hatred from so many people, just for telling the truth.”
Over the years, Suzi acknowledges there’s been some significant, and encouraging, changes in society’s response to stories of abuse. But in 2019, she was disheartened by the lack of evolvement, particularly since the Rolf Harris case was the one “that started the whole domino effect in the entertainment industry”.
“The MeToo movement was going great guns in America and New Zealand and the UK, and in Australia, it had ground to a halt,” she recalls.
“Our laws were not being changed like everywhere else, women were not having things changed in the workforce in Australia like they were in other places.
“Only a couple of months before the Rolf Harris case was the Robert Hughes case, from Hey Dad, and I worked on that show too.
“I did not think I was going to become the voice of the [Harris] case; I never came forward for anything other than to stand up and to remind Australia that these things started with us.”
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