On Tuesday afternoon, Brittany Higgins had only five minutes in the witness box at Bruce Lehrmann’s much-anticipated defamation trial against Network Ten and the TV presenter Lisa Wilkinson, but it was a moment that changed everything.
For the first time since explosive allegations of rape in the Australian parliament triggered two aborted criminal trials, sweeping changes to parliamentary workplace policy, multiple defamation cases and the resignation of a chief prosecutor, the alleged rape victim stood only metres from her alleged rapist as Australia watched on.
The case has been livestreamed for most of its first eight days, and still has about two weeks to run. Cross-examinations have brought to light a series of lies, a bankrolled media opportunity and evidence of alcohol and cocaine consumption.
Streaming on the federal court’s YouTube channel, too, was the heartbreak and sense of powerlessness that arced from the same seat of leadership.
It has become one of the country’s most convoluted and damaging political sagas, polarising the public. “For some people, the guilt of our client, Mr Lehrmann, is an article of faith,” barrister Matthew Richardson SC said in his opening remarks. For others, Lehrmann, 28, is a victim who has lost everything.
And it all slowly unravelled from a night out remembered quite differently by two erstwhile colleagues who came face-to-face on Tuesday.
The allegations
In February 2021, a news story erupted: Higgins, a political staffer, alleged she had been raped in Parliament House in Canberra two years earlier. That coverage included Wilkinson’s interview with Higgins on Ten’s The Project. Lehrmann was not named in the interview, but he said it “utterly destroyed” his life.
The story centres on the early hours of Saturday 23 March 2019, when Lehrmann was an adviser to the then defence industry minister, Linda Reynolds. Higgins, a devoted member of the Liberal party headed by the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, also worked in Reynolds’ office as an assistant media adviser.
She alleges she was sexually assaulted in the minister’s office after a night drinking with colleagues in Canberra. Having entered the parliament building with Lehrmann, she was later found alone by a security officer, either naked or semi-naked on a sofa. Lehrmann, who left the building 45 minutes after arriving, has always maintained his innocence and pleaded not guilty to a charge of sexual intercourse without consent.
In 2022, his criminal trial was aborted due to juror misconduct and a second was abandoned because of prosecutors’ fears for Higgins’ mental health. The defamation case was the first time he was to be cross-examined: his chance to secure the “multimillion dollar” compensation he said he sought.
But so far Lehrmann’s testimony has delivered a character appraisal he might never have hoped for, including admissions he lied to some of the highest authorities in the land.
Admissions under cross-examination
“How’s your mother’s health today?” Ten’s silk, Dr Matt Collins KC, pointedly asked Lehrmann on day four. The question came after forensic cross-examining revealed Lehrmann had lied to Reynolds and his manager, Fiona Brown, about being unavailable for a meeting in the days after the alleged rape.
He told his then employer he had “retreated to Queensland to see my mother who has been sick for a number of months now”. It was not true.
With gentle precision, the barrister drew conflicting details from Lehrmann. He had lied to the Australian federal police about not having alcohol in his office, and had given three different explanations for needing to visit the office after hours. He now told the court the real reason he needed to get in was to collect his house keys and work on ministerial briefings. He had told security it was to pick up papers for the minister and he had told Brown after the night’s events that he had gone to his office to drink whisky. Lying about drinking, he reasoned, would be regarded as less of a security breach than accessing and working on ministerial briefings after a night of heavy drinking.
On the evening the Wilkinson interview aired, he turned to cocaine because he “spiralled” when Higgins went public with her allegation of rape, he told the court under cross-examination.
“Need bags,” he messaged a friend.
Documents tendered to court include plans of Reynolds’ office. Lehrmann’s annotations show him and Higgins parting ways upon entering the suite. Higgins’ show a stick figure supine on a sofa. Exhibit 18 was a photo of the office and the sofa – grey leather, placed along a wall under a modern painting of an ochre shoreline.
After her five-minute appearance on Tuesday, Higgins gave evidence for three full days. The 28-year-old appeared strong and confident – and at times angry and tearful – in the witness box.
During her cross-examination, she described in harrowing detail the alleged assault, and how alcohol played a part on the night – she drank at least 12 vodkas and was “more drunk than she had ever been in her life”, Collins said.
What began as socialising with colleagues turned to Lehrmann being “handsy” with her, she told the court. Then, in the minister’s office in the dead of night, she recalled saying no “on a loop” but that he ignored her, the court heard.
“My head was jammed in a corner and he was on top of me … he wasn’t looking at me he was lurched over the top of me,” she told the court – and the video cameras. “I was spread open and exposed. I had one leg open on the side of the couch …”
Lehrmann’s barrister, Steven Whybrow SC, repeatedly sought to expose her recollections as “reverse-engineered”. What time did she wake up on Saturday morning, 8am or 9am? Who woke her – a male or female guard? Had she woken up naked or with her dress bunched around her waist? Where was her dress? Eventually, she raised her voice to Whybrow and, close to tears, told him: “I was more concerned about the penis in my vagina than I was about my dress … I find it insulting.”
Lehrmann, sitting in the front row but as far from the witness box as possible, looked calm, often leaning against the federal court’s 22nd floor window ledge – Sydney Harbour beyond – as he watched Justice Michael Lee.
Higgins admitted being wrong on several occasions, including having lied to police about seeing a doctor after the assault. “In those moments of trauma, my memory isn’t perfect,” she told the court.
The court heard, too, that she stood to financially gain from the incident after signing a $325,000 book deal with Penguin Random House – a book in which, Whybrow reminded her, assertions of events had to be true.
“The book doesn’t exist but, yes,” she replied. “It may happen one day but also I might not ever want to do this again.”
Then she added: “I declare it now, if I ever actually finish the book, I will donate [the outstanding contractual sum of $216,667] to charity. I don’t care about the money.”
Media tactics laid bare
That book might elaborate on how she came to feel about the Liberal party.
“I was really personally hurt by all these people that I … worked with, that in my time of need when something horrendous happened, all these good people did nothing,” she told the court on day six. “I can’t explain how hurt I was that I was just abandoned like that.”
On Friday, her third full day in the witness box, she revealed she was no longer a member of the Liberal party, despite being “a Liberal through and through since I was born”.
“I was angry at the culture of Parliament House and I was hurt by the Liberal party, but I was still a Liberal,” she said when denying she wanted to hurt the party by going public in 2021.
“No longer, but I was still for a really long time.”
To the side of the main issue at stake, the two defendants are at loggerheads, with Wilkinson demanding Ten pays her legal fees. That matter will be heard at the end of the trial, which may now be extended to 18 December.
For her part, Wilkinson entered court each day smiling and laughing with her silk, Sue Chrysanthou SC. The duo moved with confidence.
Ten’s rival media corporation, Seven, has been the subject of some of this week’s more explosive revelations, including that it covered the cost of Lehrmann’s Sydney accommodation for 12 months – estimated to total more than $100,000 – despite previously claiming not to have paid for an interview he gave to its Spotlight program.
But it’s Wilkinson’s Ten interview that is at the heart of the trial, which has told us more about an alleged crime nearly five years ago than any of the legal proceedings so far. One thing no one disputes is that it has marked both of the main protagonists profoundly.
Lehrmann described being shunned on social media and excluded from friendship groups after the program aired.
“I worked out who my real friends are, that’s for sure,” the court heard. “Which is not many.”
