Lisa Wilkinson has said she hopes women will find strength in a judge’s finding that Bruce Lehrmann raped Brittany Higgins on the balance of probabilities.
“Today the federal court has found that I published a true story about a rape in a federal minister’s office at Parliament House in March of 2019,” she told reporters on Monday.
“I sincerely hope this judgment gives strength to women around the country.”
Justice Michael Lee dismissed Lehrmann’s defamation case against Wilkinson and Channel Ten brought over a story aired on The Project in February 2021 in which Higgins claimed she was raped by a Liberal staffer.
Wilkinson, who was represented independently of Channel Ten, thanked her legal team led by Sue Chrysanthou, saying the team’s “expertise and wise counsel has been a source of ongoing strength” during the defamation case.
Wilkinson’s statement came shortly after Lehrmann exited the court. Lehrmann looked ahead as he walked away from court, surrounded by the press pack, and did not answer questions from journalists or make a statement. Guardian Australia has contacted Lehrmann’s lawyer, Steven Whybrow, for comment.
In a statement, Network Ten said the judgment was a “triumph for truth”.
“When put to the test, it was always our obligation to inform the public of these important social and political matters notwithstanding the challenges presented by these laws and today’s judgment vindicates the telling of Brittany’s story,” a spokesperson said.
One of Network Ten’s solicitors, Justin Quill, said the decision was an “unmitigated disaster for Bruce Lehrmann”.
“Bruce Lehrmann is a rapist,” he told reporters.
Quill said he accepted the judgment but that did not mean he agreed “with everything”. He said the implication that Lisa Wilkinson’s Logies speech could have impacted the perspective of jurors, in his opinion, did not “pass the muster”.
“In the end Channel Ten turned up here and defended at great cost this case and Lisa’s journalism, and defended The Project’s journalism,” Quill said.
“His honour found that Channel Ten deserved to be vindicated.”
In his judgment, Justice Lee said Lehrmann was “hellbent” in pursuit of having sex with a woman he found sexually attractive.
“He did not care one way or the other whether Ms Higgins understood or agreed to what was going on,” Lee said.
Lee was, however, critical of the conduct of Channel Ten’s The Project team, saying “the rape allegations were intertwined with the cover-up and the Project team had strong indications of the unreliability of their main source, particularly as to how she lost material on her phone and selected material survived”.
He also criticised their approach to seeking comment from Lehrmann: “If Network Ten wanted to get in contact with Mr Lehrmann, there were ways of ensuring that contact could be achieved. He was not living the life of a hermit.”
Angelique Wan, chief executive of Consent Labs, said the verdict is “in part a reflection of how Australian society’s attitudes towards, and understanding of, consent has shifted dramatically in recent years”.
“We are working towards a society that will no longer accept someone who is ‘indifferent to whether or not there was consent’, or someone who engages ‘with sexual intercourse without caring’,” Wan said.
“We are moving beyond limited historical conceptions of sexual assault, towards more contemporary understandings whereby consent needs to be actively sought.”
Dr Tessa Boyd-Caine, chief executive for Anrows, said she hoped the finding would be a step forward for women feeling like their experience of sexual violence will be recognised in the legal process.
“The law wants to make things very clear and logical, and this is a sign of the law understanding the very human experience of trauma, and recognising that experience in the context of a survivor of sexual assault,” Boy-Caine said.
In his judgment, Justice Lee noted the impacts of trauma on the behaviour of sexual assault victims, noting that the way Higgins engaged with Lehrmann in the wake of the rape did not suggest her allegation of rape was false, nor did her failure to get an STI test.
However, Boyd-Caine said the time it took for Higgins to get vindication shows there is a need for alternative avenue of justice for victim-survivors.
“That is too long and too painful to make it worthwhile for many people to see it as worth their while,” she said. “But we still really need those justice processes to recognise the experience of victim survivors and this is a case [that] has.”
Denis Muller, a University of Melbourne media expert, said the verdict was a “good day for press freedom in Australia”.
Like the Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation loss last year, he said the outcome proved the truth defence works, so “long as the media are painstaking in their research and careful in the way they go about representing the material”.
“We saw this perhaps more vividly in BRS case, but the BRS case turned on a lot of external witnesses and documents, whereas this one turned on the judge’s assessment of the credibility of the two primary figures in the case, Mr Lehrmann and Ms Higgins,” he said.
Muller said a jury might have decided the case differently from the judge due to popular rape myths that might have been put forward in a criminal trial.
“We know a lot about the popular myths about how a rape victim ought to respond, and [Justice Lee] set them aside, would a jury have set them aside? I think that’s an open question,” Muller said.
“I would not be regarding this as a blank cheque for the media to go after stories like this, they are fraught with danger legally and ethically.”
A spokesperson for the ACT government’s justice department said any decision to restart criminal proceedings in the territory would be up to the ACT’s director of public prosecutions.
Under its policy, the DPP has the discretion to “consider a wide range of factors to determine whether to prosecute a case”.
• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
