Bruce Lehrmann has been accused in court of lying about why he attended Parliament House with Brittany Higgins in the early hours of 23 March 2019.
On Tuesday the trial of Lehrmann, a former political staffer, over the alleged sexual assault of Higgins inside Parliament House began in Canberra. Lehrmann has denied the allegation and has entered a plea of not guilty.
During his opening address to the 16-person jury, the ACT director of public prosecutions, Shane Drumgold SC, said the jury would hear evidence Higgins had been “as drunk as she had ever been in her life” on the night of the alleged assault after a long drinking session at the Dock and 88mph bars in Canberra.
CCTV evidence to be shown to the trial will suggest Higgins had about 10 drinks and at least one shot on the night, Drumgold said, and that, as a result, her memory was “unsurprisingly patchy”.
He said Higgins remembered leaving the 88mph bar in the early hours of the morning and sharing a taxi with Lehrmann, who told her he needed to go via Parliament House to pick up documents.
After passing through parliament security, Drumgold said Higgins remembered sitting in the office of their boss, the then defence industries minister, Linda Reynolds, before waking up “on the couch with the accused having sex with her”.
He said she remembered being woken by “the pain in her leg” which she said was caused by Lehrmann’s knee digging into her thigh, “crying throughout the entire process” and saying “no at least half a dozen times”.
Lehrmann has denied the allegations, and Drumgold told the court he expected that he would argue he never had sex with Higgins.
Drumgold told the court Higgins’s evidence – to be played to the court – was that after saying no half a dozen times Lehrmann “looked at her, stopped, and then left”.
He told the jury the prosecution would argue Lehrmann gave differing accounts of why he had chosen to attend parliament in the early hours of the morning and that he had “lied” about his reasons.
The jury was told Lehrmann and Higgins arrived at parliament at about 1.41am on the night of the alleged assault. He did not have his security pass with him, and told security personnel he was attending after hours “to pick up some documents”.
But the following Tuesday, when he was questioned about why he had entered parliament by Reynolds’s office manager Fiona Brown, a breach of security protocol, he said he had returned “to drink some whiskey and had [about] two glasses”.
In April 2021 however, when he was first interviewed by police, Drumgold said Lehrmann had offered two separate reasons which he said the prosecution would argue were a lie, and “highly unlikely”.
In that police interview Lehrmann allegedly said both that he had purposely left the keys to his apartment at the parliament before going out on that night, and that while out drinking he remembered he had to “attend the office to do some work”.
That work, Drumgold said, involved sticking tabs on a briefing document for the minister.
Drumgold told the jury the prosecution would argue both it was “highly unlikely” Lehrmann had planned to return to collect his keys given he did not have his security pass.
He said the prosecution would argue the second reason “is a lie”.
“It would be highly unlikely he would tell his boss that he returned to the office to drink whiskey, but then tell police that he returned for work purposes,” he said.
Earlier the court heard that Scott Morrison’s former chief of staff, plus the former Coalition ministers Linda Reynolds and Michaelia Cash, are among 52 potential witnesses in the trial.
The trial, set to run for two months, began in the Australian Capital Territory supreme court in Canberra on Tuesday morning.
Lehrmann, seated in the courtroom wearing a navy suit and glasses, rose and entered a not guilty plea before the empanelment of a 16-person jury.
The final jury included 10 women and six men.
Before the jury was chosen, Drumgold SC, read out a list of 52 potential witnesses in the case.
They included Reynolds, the former defence minister, as well as Channel 10 journalist Lisa Wilkinson and News Corp reporter Samantha Maiden, who first aired the allegations in media reporting.
The list of potential witnesses also included Morrison’s former chief of staff John Kunkel, as well as Cash, the shadow minister for employment and workplace relations.
Barrister Steven Whybrow, acting for Lehrmann, read out a name of 10 witnesses, which included former federal Coalition MP Steven Ciobo.
Higgins arrived in court flanked by her partner, David Sharaz, on Tuesday morning. Both are due to give evidence in the trial.
Higgins alleges she was raped by Lehrmann, who was then her colleague, in Reynolds’s ministerial office in the early hours of the morning on 23 March 2019, an allegation that Lehrmann denies.
The case attracted significant media attention after Higgins went public with the allegations, and the trial has repeatedly been delayed in part because of pretrial publicity.
During the empanelment, the ACT supreme court chief justice, Lucy McCallum, stressed to the potential jurors the importance of their “impartiality”.
The case, she said, had become a “cause célèbre”, and any jurors who had signed up as “a member of the party faithful” should excuse themselves.
“It’s become a trial that has a momentum of its own,” McCallum said.
She said people who had attended the March for Justice in March 2021, followed Higgins on Twitter or attended a function at which she spoke should consider if they had “signed up to one view or another” on the case.
