Janet Albrechtsen, a columnist for The Australian, says she was “never terribly interested” in what happened on the night Brittany Higgins alleges she was raped by Bruce Lehrmann and her focus has always been on whether the accused would get a fair trial.
“I was never, and I don’t want this to sound callous, but I was never terribly interested in what happened that night,” Albrechtsen told The Australian’s subscriber event last week. “I was interested in whether there could be a fair trial.”
Higgins alleged Lehrmann, a former colleague, raped her in Parliament House in 2019. Lehrmann, who pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual intercourse without consent, has always denied the allegation of rape and no findings have been made against him.
The editor-in-chief of The Australian, Michelle Gunn, introduced Albrechtsen – who has written extensively on the Higgins case and has become somewhat of a player – as “the best columnist in Australia”, adding “I am a bit biased but it’s true”.
Albrechtsen made the comments while speaking on a panel of four journalists from The Australian, alongside its editorial director, Claire Harvey, literary editor, Caroline Overington, and legal affairs correspondent, Ellie Dudley. The video uploaded to YouTube is titled: “Janet Albrechtsen: Did Lehrmann rape Higgins? That’s not the point.”
Billed as a fearless discussion by the conservative newspaper’s journalists, the panel discussed women’s and transgender rights, the #MeToo movement and the justice system’s approach to sexual crimes.
Albrechtsen’s concern for Lehrmann extended to Higgins’ then bosses Fiona Brown and Senator Linda Reynolds but she made no mention of the alleged victim.
In a defamation trial in April, Justice Michael Lee found that on the balance of probabilities Lehrmann raped Higgins on the minister’s couch in Parliament House in 2019.
Albrechtsen said the “trial by media” that ensued when Higgins made her allegation of rape to news.com.au and Channel Ten’s The Project “was terribly unfair to two women who were at the centre of that”.
Higgins alleged on The Project in 2021 her alleged sexual assault had become a political “problem” for Reynolds, as well as the wider Coalition government.
Albrechtsen praised Lee for finding there was no political cover-up and lamented there were two women “who had been accused of a horrendous act of covering up a rape”.
In articles in The Australian, Albrechtsen has accused Higgins of “making false allegations against” Reynolds and Brown.
Reynolds is suing her former staffer over three social media posts she said were defamatory.
Albrechtsen claims that once the former prime minister Scott Morrison apologised to Higgins in parliament “it was impossible to have a fair trial” and it was “unfair to a defendant [Lehrmann] who had been charged and not yet heard in a court of law”.
“I think at The Australian we have done such a tremendous job of making sure that we covered this case from just about every angle that we could, because it seemed to us that much of the media were not interested in hearing from other women in this case; that ‘believe all women’ only applied to Brittany Higgins,” she said.
Albrechtsen’s attitude towards Lehrmann’s guilt appears to have shifted from a view that he should never have been prosecuted to one in which she was “never terribly interested” in the truth.
“In the end, there was no forensic evidence of a rape,” she said in late 2022. “There was no objective evidence that sex happened, consensual or otherwise.”
But the former Queensland solicitor general and president of the Queensland court of appeal, Walter Sofronoff, found in his report on the aborted criminal trial that it was appropriate to prosecute the matter.
A trove of text messages and emails between Sofronoff and Albrechtsen was revealed this month.
Sofronoff made 55 calls to journalists at The Australian, the majority directly to Albrechtsen, and sent her a copy of his report in late July, before its official release in August.
The ACT government said it was “extremely disappointed” that the report had been provided to two journalists before it was given to the chief minister, Andrew Barr.
In response to questions from Guardian Australia, Albrechtsen said that “in a ‘he said/she said’ scenario concerning an allegation of sexual assault, I could never be, nor should I ever be, any kind of arbiter of what happened that night”.
She said what did interest her was “whether the institutional responses from some in the media, on social media, in major magazines, at the Press Club too, and, of course, by politicians, including by the then prime minister Scott Morrison – made a fair trial difficult.”
Gunn was approached for comment.
