“Despite the allegations, despite the headlines, Bruce Lehrmann has never told his side of the story. Not one. Single. Word,” the 7News voice over portentously intones as the camera swoops towards the former Liberal staffer, ahead of his first public interview regarding allegations he raped his former colleague Brittany Higgins in Parliament House in 2019.
But several media outlets, particularly The Australian, have already been telling Lehrmann’s side of the story without an interview. As early as February, the national broadsheet was running stories that promised to tell readers the “story you haven’t heard” regarding Higgins’ version of events.
The allegations, which Lehrmann has always denied, became public in early 2021 via an interview between Higgins and then host of The Project Lisa Wilkinson and came to dominate politics that year as surely as the ongoing pandemic did. Leading up to and following Lehrmann’s interview — which, according to Lehrmann, was contrary to legal advice he had received — News Corp has provided sympathetic coverage similar to that enjoyed by disgraced soldier Ben Roberts-Smith.
Reviewing the Seven interview, Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian was blown away by the interview aired on Sunday, which she described as journalism that “explored a story of national significance, explaining it, probing it, asking hard questions”. One tough question that Lehrmann might have faced but didn’t, as noted Richard Ackland in Guardian Australia, was “why didn’t you give your version of events at the trial?”
Had he been cross-examined at the criminal trial it is likely the questions would have been more rigorous and forensic than those bowled up by [Seven’s] Spotlight star Liam Bartlett — although we might have missed the news about him being a mother’s boy and proud of it.
Albrechtsen clearly had no such complaints. Contrasting Bartlett’s work with The Project‘s initial interview with Higgins, she concluded that Lisa Wilkinson should return the Logie it won her:
The torch has turned on the Ten celebrity to reveal someone who appears hellbent on launching a #MeToo juggernaut, maybe picking up an award here and there, with a large side-serving of political partisanship, nasty invective about women and gratuitous snide gossip.
Albrechtsen’s glowing review is the culmination of weeks of commentary and news regarding the case. The same day, she and Stephen Rice reported on an “angry letter” Higgins apparently wrote to Wilkinson five days after the 2021 interview, “accusing her of putting together a second program based on footage not used in the first, without her knowledge or consent”.
Prior to that, The Australian had produced a series of reports suggesting the journalists were motivated by commercial imperatives, an inappropriate closeness between journalist and subject, and an apparent fixation from both on the profile of Higgins’ case. Over the weekend, there was the report that Wilkinson, Higgins, Higgins’ boyfriend David Sharaz and Wilkinson’s producer Angus Llewellyn had discussed the likelihood that various politicians would take up Higgins’ case and ask questions about it in Parliament.
“The recording revelations came as Bruce Lehrmann accused Ms Higgins of lying about being raped to save her job, and for the first time revealed how her sexual assault allegation forced him to contemplate jumping in front of a train to kill himself,” the piece notes.
At the end of May, the paper rewrote a report from Daily Mail Australia which featured “leaked texts” from Wilkinson’s husband, Nine columnist Peter FitzSimons, offering Higgins help regarding his employer’s reporting of her book deal. Before that, on May 27, Albrechtsen had attacked Higgins as the “wrong face” for Australia’s #MeToo movement, on account of what Albrechtsen called a “media first, police second” approach. In her piece from February, Albrechtsen fixated on a Carla Zampatti jacket that Higgins was seen wearing the night she alleges she was assaulted.
The paper’s straight report of the Lehrmann interview replays what it describes as “bombshell CCTV footage” aired by Seven, appearing to contradict Higgins’ claim that she was so drunk as to need help walking when she arrived at Parliament House on the night of the alleged assault. The piece notes that Lehrmann hasn’t ruled out suing Higgins for defamation, and that he is “currently suing Network Ten and Ms Wilkinson for defamation over Ms Wilkinson’s interview with Ms Higgins”.
What is left off that assessment is that until very recently, Lehrmann was also suing News Corp. The parties settled their case at the end of May.
