A jury has been told an ingrained culture of silence among political staffers initially stopped Brittany Higgins from reporting her alleged rape to police.
"I didn't know who to tell, how to action it or what to do," she told police in a February 2021 interview, which was played in court on Tuesday.
Former staffer Bruce Lehrmann is accused of raping Ms Higgins inside a ministerial office in March 2019.
He has pleaded not guilty to sexual intercourse without consent.
His ACT Supreme Court trial was told Ms Higgins described herself "as drunk as she'd ever been in her life" on the night of the alleged incident.
In his opening address, prosecutor Shane Drumgold SC told the jury the level of Ms Higgins' intoxication was important because it was relevant to her ability to consent.
Mr Drumgold outlined the prosecution's version of events and the evidence the jury would hear throughout the case.
He said that on Friday March 22, 2019 Lehrmann and Ms Higgins - who were working as staffers for former Liberal ministers Linda Reynolds and Steven Ciobo respectively - were out drinking with colleagues at a Canberra bar.
The pair then went to a nightclub with two colleagues before leaving in a taxi together in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Ms Higgins thought she was on her way home but Lehrmann told her he needed to stop by Parliament House to collect some work, Mr Drumgold said.
The court was told that at the security gate to enter the building, Lehrmann told guards via the intercom he was with former Liberal minister Linda Reynolds and they had been requested to pick up documents.
Mr Drumgold told the court the security guards who saw the pair into the building observed they were affected by alcohol.
Ms Higgins alleges after the two of them entered Senator Reynolds' office she fell asleep on a couch and woke up to Lehrmann having sex with her.
After Ms Higgins "said 'no' half a dozen times" Lehrmann left the building in an Uber and she fell back asleep.
Mr Drumgold said Ms Higgins woke up alone in the office later that morning when a security guard checked on her.
In text messages after the alleged incident, Ms Higgins told a friend she had been "barely lucid" at the time of the incident.
Defence lawyer Steven Whybrow said the Mark Twain quote "never let the truth get in the way of a good story" rang true in this case.
He told the jury there were "massive holes" in the version of events Ms Higgins gave to the police.
Mr Whybrow said while violence against women was an "under-reported and under-prosecuted scourge on our society", the story Ms Higgins had told was not true.
"This verdict in no way affects the conversations and the focus that is being turned to these issues," he said.
"If we assume because someone has made an allegation that it must be right, we no longer have a presumption of innocence in this country."
Both the prosecutor and defence lawyer urged the jury to listen to all the evidence in the trial before setting their minds to a verdict.
Chief Justice Lucy McCallum, who is presiding over the trial, also reminded jurors of the importance of impartiality to a fair trial.
She labelled the trial somewhat of a "cause celebre" due to its high-profile nature.
Senator Reynolds has been named as a witness in the trial, along with Liberal senator Michaelia Cash and former Liberal MP Steven Ciobo.
The trial is expected to run for between four and six weeks.
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