Brittany Higgins broke down in tears while telling police about her fears of the “party implications” of her alleged rape inside Parliament House, telling officers she “made it hard” to verify key details by having conversations in person and using encrypted messaging apps because she was “scared of coming forward”, a court has heard.
In interviews with police in February and May last year, played to the court on Wednesday, Higgins cried while explaining she had paid cash for a doctor’s appointment after the 2019 election to deal with the “mental implications” of the alleged rape.
In the second police interview, on 26 May, Higgins told officers she had been “really cognisant of all the party implications all the way through”.
“Because of the pressure I was feeling I made it hard for myself,” she said.
“I would have conversations in person, I spoke on WhatsApp [it was] so naturally ingrained because I was so scared of coming forward.
“I think I made it harder for myself in hindsight … I made it a lot harder for myself to verify … it was so stupid.”
In the same interview, police revealed the man Higgins alleges raped her in 2019, Bruce Lehrmann, sent an email to her personal address on the Sunday after she says the incident occurred.
However Australian federal police officers were unable to find the contents of the email, and she did not recall receiving it.
Earlier, the court heard Higgins told police she felt “trapped” and “not human” during her alleged rape by Lehrmann, a former political staffer.
In the first interview with police recorded in February 2021 and played to the court on Wednesday, Higgins told police she regained consciousness inside the office of her then boss, the former defence minister Linda Reynolds, to find Lehrmann on top of her.
“I told him no. I told him to stop,” she said in the interview.
“It felt like I was on repeat [but] at that point, I don’t know why, but it felt like it was going on for a while [and] it was an afterthought. I was suddenly there and it didn’t matter.
“I wasn’t screaming but there was obviously an urgency to it … I was crying at that point. Kind of as soon as I came to, I started crying, because I couldn’t get up.”
Higgins has alleged she was raped by Lehrmann, who was then her colleague, in Reynolds’ office in the early hours of 23 March 2019.
Lehrmann has denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty to one charge of sexual assault without consent.
The case attracted significant media attention after Higgins went public with the allegations in February 2021.
The court previously heard 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, and the ACT director of public prosecutions, Shane Drumgold SC, told jurors on Tuesday that as a result, her memory was “unsurprisingly patchy”.
In her recorded interview with police in February 2021 Higgins said she shared a taxi with Lehrmann after the night out, and had gone via Parliament House when he said that he needed to pick up documents.
After waiting inside Reynolds’ office she regained consciousness and allegedly found him on top of her. She said after the alleged rape there was a “strange moment” when they made eye contact before Lehrmann got up and left.
“At that point I didn’t say anything to him any more,” she said.
The jury previously heard the two exchanged work-related emails on the following Monday, and during her police interview, played in court, Higgins said that the mood in the office had been “tense”.
“Tense. Strange. He bought me coffee,” she said. “I was trying to overcompensate to make it normal.
“I was broadly nice to him still. We didn’t discuss it. We didn’t talk about it.
“He didn’t seem ashamed. He didn’t seem upset or anything, it just didn’t feel like something he wanted to address.”
Despite being “upset” all weekend, she told police in the interview that it wasn’t until she first raised the alleged rape with her chief of staff, Fiona Brown, on Tuesday the next week that “it fully hit me”.
“The moment I vocalised and said it to Fiona, that’s when it fully hit me and [I] identified it as rape … I knew what had happened, I knew it was wrong,” Higgins said.
After telling police she initially feared she would lose her job for entering parliament out of hours, Higgins described having a “full and frank” conversation with Brown.
“At the end of that meeting as soon as I identified it as a rape … I started to cry and that’s when the gears shifted and it became less about me and more political,” she said.
The trial began on Tuesday, with Drumgold telling jurors Lehrmann “lied” about why he attended parliament on 23 March 2019.
Drumgold told the court Lehrmann had offered a number of different versions of why he had gone back to parliament with Higgins after a long night of drinking in Canberra.
In his opening address to jurors, Lehrmann’s barrister, Steve Whybrow, accused Higgins of having “erased” key details from the night, including, he said, evidence from witnesses that the two had been seen kissing earlier on the night in question.
