Bruce Lehrmann has been committed to stand trial on rape charges.
The 29-year-old faces two counts of rape, alleged to have occurred in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, in October 2021.
A magistrate, Mark Howden, found sufficient grounds to commit the former Liberal party staffer to trial on Thursday, rejecting his argument that he had “no case to answer”, two and a half weeks after the complainant gave her evidence and was cross-examined in closed court.
“In my view, when considering the evidence as a whole, it is sufficient at this stage for me to reach a conclusion that a reasonable jury, properly instructed, could return a verdict of guilty,” Howden said.
The trial will be heard at the Toowoomba district court at a date to be set.
Before Howden’s decision a packed courtroom heard facts agreed upon by Lehrmann’s barrister, Andrew Hoare KC, and the prosecutor, Nicole Friedewald, relating to the night and morning following 9 October 2021.
It was agreed that Lehrmann and the complainant, who cannot legally be named, met at a strip club after both had been drinking alcohol and the complainant had taken cocaine. The pair went on to take cocaine together and, in the early hours of the morning, took a taxi to a Toowoomba home, occupied by a schoolmate of Lehrmann, where the pair engaged in consensual sex.
But the complainant claims she awoke to find Lehrmann on top of and penetrating her without a condom, despite her having insisted upon contraception during their earlier consensual encounter.
She alleges she pulled her body away and told him to “stop what you are doing” but that he instead climbed back on top of her saying, “it’s OK, it’s OK,” continuing the unwanted sex before ejaculating inside her.
“I did not consent to him penetrating me,” she would later tell police. “I was not enthusiastically laying there. I was so in my head, I was in shock.”
After messaging her friends about the alleged assault on 6 November, the complainant went to police 20 days later.
The court was told she made her formal complaint the day after seeing news coverage of the allegations by Brittany Higgins that Lehrmann raped her in parliament house and realising he was the same man who she knew only as Bruce who she alleges raped her the month prior in Toowoomba.
Friedewald told the court the complainant, as was “not uncommon” in cases of sexual assault, had taken some time to “come to terms with what had happened to her”, citing a message to her friend in which she said was “starting to feel really shit” and “hadn’t really processed what had happened” or admitted it to herself.
“I just feel so shameful,” the complainant wrote to her friends. “Who is going to believe me?”
Hoare had argued that the length of time between the alleged rape and the formal complaint, coupled with opportunities to come forward earlier and the heavy consumption of alcohol and cocaine on the night, made the complainant’s account of events unreliable.
The barrister listed several instances after the alleged assault in which the complainant could have raised her allegations, including when buying the morning-after pill while Lehrmann waited in a car outside the pharmacy, and when seeing a GP for a WorkCover claim.
Hoare cited a message sent to a friend on the night of 10 October in which she wrote that during the previous evening she had had a “bunch of fun with my friends”.
“My mate put on a really good show and we all got drunk after,” she wrote.
He also cited a report by a forensic physician who had been asked to provide his general opinion on the effects of cocaine and alcohol on cognitive abilities and memory.
Hoare argued that “even in the absence of memory the complainant is capable of consenting, but just not remembering, those circumstances surrounding the act”, a proposition he said was supported by “internal contradictors” in statements made by the complaint.
“It is submitted as a consequence of that, that when the complainant is using the term, ‘I woke up,’ that is in fact a simile for, ‘My next memory is this,’ and the explanation for that statement is… the combination of alcohol and cocaine which effects how memories are in fact implanted,” he said.
But the magistrate said he did not find the medical report “particularly useful” as the forensic physician was only asked for a general opinion of the combined impacts of cocaine and alcohol.
Howden then said that after “taking all these matters into account” he had formed the view that there was a prima facie case to be made against Lehrmann and that the reliability of the complainant’s evidence was “a matter for an arbiter of fact, be it a judge sitting alone or a jury”.
Addressing Lehrmann, who appeared via phone, Howden formally charged him with two counts of rape and asked if he had anything he wished to say in relation to the two charges.
“Not at this time, thank you, your honour,” Lehrmann said.
