“Let’s light some fires,” said Bruce Lehrmann in June, during the first of his two-part “bombshell” interviews on Channel Seven’s flagship Spotlight program.
“Everything needs to be out there, in the open, so people can assess this for what it is.”
On Thursday, inside the supreme court of Queensland, the fire Lehrmann lit in prime time would come back to burn him.
The former Liberal party staffer had taken to television to tell the nation his version of the events of 23 March 2019, the night he was accused of raping a colleague, Brittany Higgins. Lehrmann has always vehemently denied Higgins’ accusations, and charges were dropped in December 2022 after an earlier mistrial due to juror misconduct.
Six months later, as Lehrmann told the nation “everything needs to be out there”, his legal team was keeping a close watch on new laws working their way through Queensland’s parliament.
Eventually passed in September, the laws brought Queensland into line with most other states and territories by allowing the naming of accused sex offenders after they are charged.
This meant Lehrmann could be named as the “high-profile man” charged with raping a different woman in Toowoomba in October 2021.
Even before the new laws came into effect, Lehrmann’s legal team had begun asking about an exemption for their client.
When their bid for a non-publication order suppressing his name came to be heard, the most prominent argument was that in publicly identifying Lehrmann he would be at a heightened risk of self-harm – even suicide.
In making this argument, his defence relied upon the report of a clinical psychologist, Dr James Brown, who had diagnosed Lehrmann with adjustment disorder with depressed mood, symptoms which persisted since the “triggering event” when Higgins’ allegations of sexual assault aired in February 2021.
Brown said Lehrmann remained “a high risk to himself under the pressures he is facing, and to allow him to be identified in the current matter may result in dire consequences”.
But the legal team which fought against the suppression order on behalf of a number of media companies – including Guardian Australia – was able to successfully argue that the defence’s depiction of Lehrmann was “incongruent” with the man who lit fires before the nation.
Rob Anderson told a magistrate in Toowoomba of the “irony” of a man “with no filter”, who spoke to the media against the advice of his lawyers when it suited him, seeking to gag a court when it did not.
“He wants to be heard everywhere except here, it seems,” Anderson said.
The magistrate Clare Kelly agreed, and denied the non-publication order on 13 October. So too, on Thursday, did Justice Peter Applegarth as he dismissed a judicial review initiated by Lehrmann’s legal team in a last-ditch attempt to keep their client’s name secret.
Kelly had ruled Lehrmann’s appearances in media interviews with Seven and Sky News in June and August was “inconsistent with the contention that the media pursuit has been relentless”.
‘He felt well enough to engage with the media’
Applegarth said: “This was a relevant observation. Rather than lower his public profile and retreat from the media spotlight, [Lehrmann] chose for whatever reason to appear more than once on national television and revisit events that had triggered his mental illness in early 2021.
“He seemingly felt well enough to engage with sections of the national media, and to deal with any resulting further coverage he received from the media outlets he appeared on and other media that followed up on his high-profile appearances.”
Brown’s report to the court had argued that the interviews “should not be misconstrued as demonstrating his full recovery, or that his mental health is of no real concern”.
“To the contrary, these actions taken by Bruce to step forward and tell his story and to take legal action have taken significant effort and strength on his part, often costing him greatly in psychological terms, leading to periods of severe depression following particular stress points.”
But Applegarth concluded that there was no evidence provided by the defence to explain “the circumstances under which the applicant came to participate in television interviews between June and August 2023”.
“For instance, the applicant did not give any evidence that his mental health was precarious at the time he gave the interviews,” the judge found.
Perhaps his talk of lighting fires was “bravado” or, after giving the interviews, he had fallen off an emotional cliff. “But none of those things were said,” Applegarth said.
Absent “that kind of explanation” it was only reasonable to “place less weight” on the Brown report, he found, while dismissing Lehrmann’s application.
“A cynic might say: ‘I hope Channel 7 paid him, or his solicitors, a lot of money,’ for the consequences it had on his application, if nothing else,” the judge said.
That money may now also be under threat, as the media companies involved in the court fight to name Lehrmann (which did not include Seven) pursue him for legal costs.
