Lawyers for Network Ten are examining raw footage of Channel Seven’s recent interview with Bruce Lehrmann as they prepare to defend themselves against his defamation case.
Lehrmann is currently suing Network Ten, Lisa Wilkinson and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in the federal court, alleging they defamed him by wrongly suggesting he raped Brittany Higgins in Parliament House in 2019.
The case is still in its early stages and the parties are currently examining a significant volume of material obtained through subpoena.
On Monday, the federal court heard that lawyers for Network 10 have subpoenaed the raw footage of a recent Channel Seven Spotlight episode featuring an interview with Lehrmann.
That episode, broadcast last month, also featured CCTV footage from Parliament House on the night in question and leaked audio recordings from a pre-interview meeting between Wilkinson, her producer, Higgins and Higgins’ partner David Sharaz.
The broadcast prompted an angry response from Network Ten and Wilkinson’s lawyers, who said it may have amounted to contempt of court in the ACT.
Tim Senior, representing Network Ten, said his team were still reviewing the Spotlight material and are yet to determine whether the subpoena had been fully complied with.
“There have been two tranches of material produced – we are still reviewing the second tranche from the last occasion so I wanted to raise it with your honour just to flag that it might not be spent,” he said.
Earlier this month, lawyers for Wilkinson and Network Ten suggested they may want to question officials from the Department of Parliamentary Services over a failure to produce CCTV vision of the night of the alleged rape.
Sue Chrysanthou SC, acting for Wilkinson, said her team was “very concerned that the Department of Parliamentary Services says it does not have that CCTV footage”.
“It seems to us that CCTV footage of Parliament House on 23 March 2019, having regard to the fact that Ms Higgins complained shortly thereafter, and having regard to the fact that we saw some of that footage broadcast by Channel Seven a few weeks ago, it’s concerning to us that there isn’t full production by Parliament House in relation to that footage and we will be pursuing an application to analyse that response.
But on Monday, Senior signalled the defendants no longer wanted to question DPS officials.
He said it was satisfied DPS had undertaken searches for the material in response to the subpoena and that it couldn’t be found.
“We had some correspondence after the last hearing with the representatives of the Department of Parliamentary Services about the efforts that have been made to identify documents falling within the scope of that subpoena and the correspondence that we received indicated what those efforts have been, they searched various servers,” Senior said.
“It is apparent that the material that was the subject of that particular subpoena was not quarantined in any way and was automatically overwritten so that material doesn’t exist and searches have been carried out to see if that material was on a server somewhere, but it’s not.”
Snippets of the footage have been received from Channel Seven.
The court heard DPS had also provided documents in response to a second subpoena, which the defendants were yet to inspect.
Justice Michael Lee asked: “So it didn’t respond to the terms of the first subpoena, but now that a more targeted subpoena has been indicated the material in respect of which you make a complaint has now apparently been produced?”
Senior responded: “Well, subject to our inspection, I think that’s right your honour.”
The matter will return next month.
