A long-running dispute between Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson has ended with the network agreeing to pay $1.15 million to cover her costs of defending Bruce Lehrmann's defamation case.
On Monday afternoon, the Federal Court approved this amount after months of disagreement over exactly how much Ten should pay Wilkinson for retaining separate legal representation.
The figure was far below the initial $1.8 million Wilkinson said she had been forced to spend to successfully defend the case.
In 2023, Justice Michael Lee oversaw a hotly contested defamation trial brought by Lehrmann over a February 2021 report on The Project where Brittany Higgins claimed he had sexually assaulted her in Parliament House almost two years earlier.
In April, the judge dismissed the case, finding Lehrmann had not been defamed and that, on the balance of probabilities, Ms Higgins' statements that he raped her in the office of their then-boss Linda Reynolds were substantially true.
With Justice Lee ordering Lehrmann to pay $2 million in legal costs to Ten in June, questions still remained about what Wilkinson was owed.
Ten previously told the court it had spent $3.7 million defending Lehrmann's lawsuit.
While an external referee was appointed to determine how much of Wilkinson's legal bill was reasonable, Ten eventually agreed to the $1.15 million figure before his report was hashed out at a contested hearing.
The network has already paid Wilkinson $558,000 and will have to pay the remainder of the $1.15 million by March 19.
How much of this will then be payable by a cash-strapped Lehrmann on the verge of bankruptcy has yet to be determined.
Ten and Wilkinson will come back before Justice Lee on March 11 to discuss who pays the expenses thrown away by hiring the costs referee.
Lehrmann has appealed his defamation loss in the Full Federal Court with a hearing yet to be scheduled.
The defamation suit came after a criminal case facing Lehrmann was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct with no findings made against him.
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