In her final memory before blacking out, Brittany Higgins paused for a moment of reflection, she told those closest to her.
From a window perched high among parliament’s labyrinthine network of office suites and hallways, she looked out over the prime minister’s courtyard, quiet in the early morning darkness of 23 March 2019.
Her mother, Kelly Higgins, told court this week that her daughter remembered being struck by two feelings: happiness and pride.
All through high school and university, she had prepared herself for this career. She studied debating and public speaking, and volunteered for the Young Liberals, charting a path to reach Canberra’s halls of power.
“She’s saying ‘I was looking out [the window]’ and … like this was her dream,” Kelly Higgins told the ACT supreme court this week.
“This was everything she wanted and she just remembers feeling … proud and happy.
“And then she passed out.”
Higgins told her mother her next memory was of waking to find Bruce Lehrmann, a colleague and senior staffer in then defence industry minister Linda Reynolds’ office, on top of her, raping her on a couch opposite their boss’s desk.
Lehrmann has pleaded not guilty to sexual intercourse without consent.
In evidence that was temporarily suppressed this week, friends, family and colleagues told the court they noticed a marked changed in Higgins’ demeanour after that night.
The “bubbly” and “happy” young woman, excited for her career in politics, became withdrawn.
Multiple witnesses described her as “broken”.
“It was like a light had turned off in her,” Ben Dillaway, a fellow Coalition staffer who had a close personal relationship with Higgins, said. “She was a broken, shattered person, I would say.”
Kelly Higgins said her daughter became unfamiliar to her.
“She was just so frozen in what had happened to her,” she said.
Early hours in Parliament House
Lehrmann, dressed in a navy suit and tan boots, has for the most part busied himself taking notes in a small black diary as his trial plays out.
He watched this week as multiple witnesses contradicted his evidence on the reason for going back to Parliament House in the early hours of the morning.
In his police interview in 2021, played to the court as part of the prosecution case, Lehrmann said he and Higgins had shared an Uber to parliament after a night of drinking, first at a pub on the Kingston foreshore, and then at 88mph, a club in Canberra’s CBD.
He told police he went back to the office to pick up his keys and do some work on question time briefs for the minister. Higgins, he said, had also needed to do some work, though he had no idea what.
They had been drinking but neither was heavily intoxicated, he told police. Lehrmann told police he didn’t continue drinking in parliament and had no alcohol available to him in the office.
The next week, Lehrmann was hauled into a meeting to explain the late-night visit to his then boss, Reynolds’ chief of staff Fiona Brown.
Also in the meeting was another Coalition figure, Reg Chamberlain, chief of staff to then special minister of state, Alex Hawke.
The Department of Parliamentary Services report recorded that Lehrmann had told security he and Higgins were there for urgent work purposes.
“There was no urgent work purpose,” Brown told the court this week.
Both Brown and Chamberlain recalled Lehrmann telling them he had come back to parliament to drink whisky.
“He said that he came back to the office to drink some whisky and I questioned that and said: ‘That seems a bit unusual to me, who comes back to the office to drink whisky?’” Brown said. “He said ‘people do it all the time’ and I said ‘it’s not something I’ve ever heard of’.”
Chamberlain told the court Lehrmann had never said he was there for work during the meeting with Brown.
“He just said the purpose was to drink.”
A former colleague of Lehrmann, who worked with him when Reynolds was assistant home affairs minister, told the court Lehrmann had previously had access to a “substantial” amount of alcohol.
“He had quite a big range,” the colleague said. “There was spirits, there was whisky, there was wine.”
Lehrmann and Higgins entered Parliament House about 1.45am. A parliamentary security guard, Mark Fairweather, told the court he remembered Lehrmann leaving by himself at 2.33am.
The court heard Lehrmann seemed to be in a hurry.
“I wanted to ask him about the lady,” Fairweather said. “I said ‘are you coming back?’ He just replied hastily ‘no’ and flicked the pass on to the desk.”
“Before I could ask him anything more, he had left.”
Concerned, the security team sent a female guard into Reynolds’ office to check on Higgins. The guard, Nikola Anderson, told the court she found Higgins lying naked on a couch.
“As I’ve opened the door, I think the air from the door has made noise or whatnot,” Anderson told the court. “She’s opened her eyes, she’s looked at me, and then she’s proceeded to roll over into the foetal position, facing the desk.”
The aftermath
Just hours after her alleged rape, about 4am, Higgins called Dillaway, a staffer who had worked with her in the office of Reynolds’ predecessor as defence industry minister, Steve Ciobo.
The pair were “very close” but were not officially together, the court heard. Dillaway missed the call but called her back as he drove to Orange from the Gold Coast.
“It was I’d say a kind of strange conversation,” Dillaway told the court. “She seemed – I just sensed something was off straight away.”
He told the court Higgins had told him she and Lehrmann had been drinking the night before and had gone back to Reynolds’ office in Parliament House, something Dillaway found odd. He pressed her for more information, but she said she didn’t want to talk about it and ended the conversation.
In the days that followed, Higgins told Dillaway that she had been assaulted, he told the court. He said he flew to Canberra to support her.
“I was basically kind of saying again, ‘So, you know, were you – were you raped?’ and again, she kind of broke down and I just remember her, you know, crying and, you know, really breaking down,” he said. “I kind of just had her in my arms and she was very much what I would say would be a broken person.”
After seeking Higgins’ permission, he went to the prime minister’s office on 3 April, about 11 days after the alleged rape, to try to get more support for her. He said he spoke to Julian Leembruggen, an adviser to the prime minister.
“This was at a stage where, from my recollection, she was struggling significantly, wasn’t coping very well with things,” he said, under cross-examination. “She’d tried to see a psychiatrist and the wait was two months or three months or something and I said, ‘Let me discreetly go speak to someone in the prime minister’s office because surely this can move things along, or surely this will get you the help you need’.”
Higgins also told others, the court heard.
Christopher Payne, a departmental officer who worked in Reynolds’ office in 2019, said Higgins told him “within a matter of days” that she had woken up to find Lehrmann on top of her.
“She was very upset so I waited for her to regain her composure,” Payne told the court. “Once I had done that, I said to her … ‘Do you mind if I ask you a very direct question? Did he rape you?’”
“And she said ‘I could not have consented, it would have been like fucking a log’, and at that point she was very upset again.”
Under cross-examination, Payne said he had learned that Higgins had been found in a “state of undress” in the office before she made the complaint of rape to him.
Higgins told colleagues she was worried about her job and, despite initially speaking to police, decided not to pursue a complaint in 2019.
Higgins has given evidence that she felt pressured into not pursuing the police complaint by Reynolds’ office.
That was disputed by Brown, her then chief of staff, who told the court she and Reynolds had offered Higgins their full support.
“[Higgins] was concerned about how this might impact her career, and Senator Reynolds said there would be no impact to her career, and that she’d have powerful support,” Brown told the court.
Higgins initially met two federal agents attached to Parliament House on 1 April 2019. The officers recalled that Higgins was rattled during the 30-minute interview.
“She appeared very upset, visibly upset,” one officer told the court. “She was crying, she apologised for being upset.”
They also recalled Higgins saying she had already been to a doctor in the south of Canberra and was awaiting results. She gave the officers a date and location for the doctor she had visited.
In her 2021 interview, conducted after she reinstated her complaint, police notes record her telling detectives she had been to a medical centre in Kingston, Canberra, two weeks after the alleged rape.
Higgins told the court that was wrong.
No record has been found of her visiting the doctor in the weeks after the alleged rape, the court has heard.
“I wasn’t perfect,” she told the court.
Higgins addresses her alleged rapist
On Friday, for the first time during her evidence, Higgins spoke to her alleged rapist directly.
She had just resumed her evidence after being unavailable for much of the week, and was being cross-examined by Lehrmann’s barrister, Steven Whybrow.
Whybrow repeatedly suggested to Higgins that she had made the complaint of rape only when she realised her dream job might be at risk due to the late-night visit to Parliament House.
He suggested Higgins had acted normally in the office – including in a “completely cordial and normal” email exchange with Lehrmann – in the days after 23 March.
“It was me compartmentalising my trauma trying to do my job which I cared about more than, weirdly, my own life, which is fucked up, sorry,” Higgins said.
Higgins said she had disclosed the alleged rape as soon as she had met Brown, her chief of staff, on the Tuesday, three days later.
Turning to Lehrmann, sitting on the opposite side of the courtroom, Higgins said:
“Up until then I was holding it in, holding it in, holding it in, pretending like everything was fine and it wasn’t,” she said.
“Nothing was fine after what you did to me, nothing.”
The trial continues before the ACT supreme court justice, Lucy McCallum.
