Many Australians are now very familiar with the story.
On 23 March 2019, Bruce Lehrmann and Brittany Higgins drank with colleagues in a Canberra bar. Then, in the early hours of 24 March, they caught an Uber to Parliament House and went to minister Linda Reynolds’ office where they both worked.
What happened in the 40 minutes that followed is at the heart of a weeks-long, high-profile defamation trial.
Higgins told Network Ten’s The Project in an interview that aired in February 2021 that she was raped by a colleague in Reynolds’ office, and was later found by a security guard either naked or semi-naked.
Lehrmann, who was later identified as the accused, has consistently denied the rape, saying he and Higgins parted ways after arriving at the office. Lehrmann was not named in the broadcast, but he argues he was identifiable and Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson defamed him.
Thousands of people watched the daily livestream of the defamation trial on YouTube. The court heard from Higgins, her parents, Lehrmann and Wilkinson, among others, as they gave at times emotional testimony about that night and the subsequent fall out.
Now the case comes down to one man, and whether he accepts Ten and Wilkinson’s defences of truth and qualified privilege.
Justice Michael Lee must decide whether Ten and Wilkinson’s argument that the story broadcast was substantially true – and if not, whether the story really was in the public interest and the journalists involved took reasonable steps.
The defence of truth
Higgins told the court in a vivid description of the alleged rape that she remembered saying no to Lehrmann “on a loop”.
“My head was jammed in a corner and he was on top of me,” she told the court. “I was spread open and exposed. I had one leg open on the side of the couch.
She had previously recounted the allegations in Lehrmann’s 2022 criminal trial, which was aborted due to juror misconduct. A second trial was abandoned due to prosecutors’ fears for Higgins’ mental health.
Lehrmann, cross-examined in court for the first time since Higgins’ allegations aired, had a different story, denying any sexual contact occurred that night.
Lehrmann told the court that after entering Reynolds’ ministerial office, he and Higgins parted ways. He said he annotated briefs for question time by hand. Then, about 40 minutes later, he said he left without checking on her.
Under cross examination by Network Ten’s barrister, Matt Collins KC, Lehrmann admitted to telling three different stories about his after-hours visit. He lied to security guards, telling them he was picking up papers for the minister. He lied to his chief of staff, Fiona Brown, telling her he was there to drink whiskey.
The truth, he told the court, was he was there to collect his house keys and work on ministerial briefings. He said he believed if he told the truth about needing to pick up his house keys “that security would have said ‘bugger off and come back next week’. And I needed to get home”.
During cross-examination by Lehrmann’s lawyer, Steven Whybrow SC, Higgins admitted to lies of her own. She said she lied to police about seeing a doctor after the alleged rape because she was embarrassed she didn’t get a rape kit done. She also admitted lying to her boss and a friend about her plans to go to the doctor, saying she was “terrified” to go.
Whybrow suggested to Higgins that she lied about the alleged rape in order to keep her job, and didn’t accuse Lehrmann until she realised she may have been in trouble at work after passing out drunk in the minister’s personal suite. Higgins hit back.
“It’s insulting and it’s incorrect, but you’re entitled to your opinion,” Higgins said. “My job is not that important.”
Lisa Wilkinson’s lawyer, Sue Chrysanthou SC, said there was just one rational explanation for why Lehrmann and Higgins were there: that sex must have occurred.
As she concluded her case this week, Chrysanthou told the court there “can’t be any doubt in anyone’s mind that there was sex” on the night Higgins was allegedly raped.
She questioned why Higgins would have been found naked if there had been no sex.
“Unless there was some sort of freak heatwave in Canberra at the end of March and the air conditioning wasn’t working well in Parliament House, it just seems unusual that she had had no clothes on, and on balance, your Honour would be satisfied that there was sex that occurred,” she said.
In his own closing submission, Collins said if Justice Lee was persuaded sexual intercourse occurred “then what has happened in this trial is monstrous – absolutely monstrous”.
It would mean Lehrmann had brought a defamation case on a “fundamentally false premise” and “allowed the complainant to be cross-examined on that false premise over days freed from the constraints that might protect her in a criminal trial”.
Over the course of the trial, the court heard details about the time leading up to the alleged rape. Nicky Hamer, a former Liberal party media adviser told the court that in early March 2019 Lehrmann had told her he thought Higgins was “good-looking” and asked Hamer to invite her to the pub for a drink. Another former colleague, Nikita Irvine, told the court that when she started working in Reynolds’ office she had “bad vibes” about Lehrmann, adding: “It was women’s intuition … I just didn’t really want to spend time with him.”
Tim Reedy, a lip-reader who travelled from the UK and studied CCTV footage from the night of the alleged rape, said Higgins had been “plied with alcohol” after seeing a segment of the footage in which Lehrmann lined up drinks for her on the corner of the table.
Reedy’s transcript of the CCTV had Lehrmann saying “drink that all now”. According to Reedy’s analysis, Higgins replied: “I don’t want to”.
Whybrow said the video showed Lehrmann was just being friendly when he lined up the drinks in front of her. “Rather than some evil against-her-will-plying, one can see from this … it’s just an innocuous social exchange,” he said.
The defence of qualified privilege
When the Project’s episode aired in February 2021, it began with the opening words: “Tonight, claims of rape, roadblocks for police investigation and a young woman forced to choose between her career and the pursuit of justice.”
Text messages released to the court showed that in January 2021, Wilkinson sent a text to Project producer Angus Llewellyn saying she had a “huge” story about an “extraordinary cover-up involving Linda Reynolds, Michaelia Cash and the PMO”.
Wilkinson had been briefed in a telephone call and an email about the so-called cover-up by Higgins’ partner, David Sharaz, an acquaintance of Wilkinson’s.
Under cross-examination, Wilkinson stood firmly behind the story, saying it had been investigated “extremely well”, hitting back at suggestions she had behaved “like a cheap tabloid journalist”.
She denied “coaching” Higgins on how to answer questions about why she didn’t press charges against Lehrmann. She defended the story’s assertion there had been a systemic cover-up, despite Reynolds’ and Brown’s claims they told Higgins they would support her if she wanted to report the matter to the police.
“When within days, two of the most senior advisers to prime minister Scott Morrison turned up in the office, you know that damage control is going on,” Wilkinson told the court.
When Brown was questioned by Whybrow if she had heard of there being allegations of a cover-up for “political expediency” of the alleged rape, she said “there was none, absolutely none”.
However she did agree with a suggestion by Chrysanthou that Reynolds and special minister of state, Alex Hawke, were “covering themselves”, or protecting themselves, after they instructed her to make a police report. Brown said she didn’t make the police report because she did not want to take away “agency” from Higgins.
Llewellyn admitted during cross-examination he “did not have proof” before the program aired that if Higgins pursued the rape allegation she would lose her job. He did not agree there were inconsistencies in Higgins’ account.
During her cross-examination, Higgins conceded that a timeline of events that she prepared contained errors. This included saying in an interview that she woke the morning after the alleged rape after security guard yelled into the office while she was asleep on the couch.
Higgins told the court she believed at the time that what she said to Ten was true, but she knows now that her memory isn’t perfect and she got elements of her story wrong due to trauma.
Higgins also told the court Reynolds “did not meet her duty of care” towards her and she felt “unsupported” by Reynolds and Brown – but she did not count them as “villains” and was “still a Liberal” at the time she went public.
Collins said that television is “transient” and the words said at the beginning of The Project’s episode about there being a “roadblock” to Higgins reporting the alleged rape should not be taken too literally.
“Viewers watch it only once,” Collins said. “They don’t pore over the transcript in the way that we do in the artificial way we do it in this courtroom.”
Chrysanthou sought to distance Wilkinson from the story, saying Wilkinson “had no decision-making power as to the final content of the broadcast”.
“I think about 80 to 90% of the material she’s not copied into,” Chrysanthou said. “On the most part, her suggestions were not taken up by the producers.”
Justice Lee is expected to give his ruling next year over whether he accepts Network Ten and Wilkinson’s defence – or whether he finds in Lehrmann’s favour.
On the second to last day of the trial, Justice Lee gave an insight into how he viewed Lehrmann and Higgins’s accounts.
“One of the challenges in this case, it seems to me, is that the two principal witnesses [Lehrmann and Higgins] have real credit issues.”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault, family or domestic violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit www.1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000. International helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org.
