For years, the Australian public has been fascinated by a rape allegation in Parliament House that embroiled government ministers, media personalities and political staff in multiple complicated legal and civil battles.
The saga reached a climax on Monday when Justice Michael Lee declared he was satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that Bruce Lehrmann raped his then colleague Brittany Higgins in 2019.
Higgins alleged that she was raped in the ministerial suite of the then defence minister, Linda Reynolds, a Liberal party MP, whom Higgins and Lehrmann worked for. Those accusations spawned more than a dozen legal cases.
In a criminal trial in 2022, Lehrmann pleaded not guilty to one charge of sexual intercourse without consent, denying that any sexual activity occurred. The trial was aborted after a juror obtained information outside the evidence presented in court and, in December of that year, prosecutors dropped charges against him for the alleged rape of Higgins, saying a retrial would pose an “unacceptable risk” to her health.
In Monday’s verdict, Lee noted that Lehrmann had instigated the defamation trial against Australia’s Channel Ten that has now led to him being labelled a rapist.
“Having escaped the lion’s den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of going back for his hat,” Lee said.
Higgins alleged that, after a “boozy” night out in Canberra, she and Lehrmann went to Reynolds’ ministerial suite. She woke to Lehrmann raping her on a couch, she said, then passed out again. Lehrmann left alone.
In his summary, Lee said he considered it “more likely than not in those early hours, after a long night of conviviality and drinking and having successfully brought Ms Higgins back to a secluded place, Mr Lehrmann was hellbent on having sex with a woman he found attractive”, and that he knew she was inebriated.
That was enough for him to make the finding in favour of Ten on a defence of truth. Defamation cases require judges to make findings only on the balance of probabilities, rather than the “beyond reasonable doubt” demanded by a criminal case.
Higgins’ claims were dramatically reported on the Channel Ten show The Project in February 2021 – without naming Lehrmann.
Higgins had resigned her Liberal party position – by that stage she was working for the then employment minister, Michaelia Cash.
The prime minister at the time, Scott Morrison, and other senior ministers denied there was any sort of political cover-up of the allegation or pressure on Higgins to keep it quiet.
On Monday, Lee said allegations of a cover-up were “objectively short on facts but long on speculation”.
The Ten trial began in November. More than 46,000 people tuned in to a live broadcast as Lee read a summary of his 324 pages of findings.
Lee called the trial a “Rorschach test”, where people projected their “visceral responses” on to the scenario. He said the complexity of the case rendered it an “omnishambles”.
“Only one man and one woman know the truth, with certitude, of what happened,” he said, adding that those two people were “both, in different ways, unreliable historians”.
He said Lehrmann told “deliberate lies”. “To remark that Mr Lehrmann is a poor witness is an exercise in understatement … his attachment to the truth was a tenuous one.”
Higgins was “also an unsatisfactory witness” who made allegations about politicians’ behaviour that were not backed up, and whose evidence about a bruise on her leg, potentially from the alleged rape, was “vexing”. She “curated” pictures and messages on her phone, Lee said.
He described the two as “young and relatively immature staffers”.
The allegations inevitably got entwined with the #MeToo movement, and Lee said it was further complicated by stereotypes about victims, “rape myths” and the suggestion of a “conspiracy to suppress a rape for political purposes”.
“For more than a few, this dispute has become a proxy for broader cultural and political conflicts,” he said.
Lee was 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 its 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.”
