Save articles for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.

For a defamation trial, this was beginning to look a hell of a lot like a rape trial. Here was the lawyer for a man accused of rape, and here was the woman who had accused him, and here was the moment – after her evidence had been stripped back, prodded and ridiculed – that she began to break.

The sobs, once they began, could not be held back.

Brittany Higgins leaving the Federal Court after her cross-examination on Thursday.Credit: Nikki Short

Bruce Lehrmann is suing Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson for airing claims by Brittany Higgins that he raped her in Parliament House on the couch of the ministerial suite of their boss, Senator Linda Reynolds, in March 2019. He denies sexually assaulting her. He says they never had sex at all.

But Network Ten and Wilkinson are partially defending their reporting on the basis that it was true, which means that the hearing has essentially become a sexual assault trial held to a civil standard of proof, and its livestream on YouTube has given the public a rare glimpse behind the curtain.

More than 16,000 viewers logged in to watch Higgins give her evidence on Wednesday, in what must be the closest that Australia has come to the OJ Simpson trial for a jurisdiction in which criminal proceedings are not livestreamed. On more than one occasion Justice Michael Lee has been forced to remind remote viewers not to post online commentary about the evidence, the witnesses and the legal counsel.

Lehrmann’s barrister, Steven Whybrow, SC, is a veteran in criminal trials and skilled in the art of coaxing complainants into taking a firm position, only to wrong-foot them with other evidence that undermines their credibility. But this was a dance that Whybrow and Higgins have performed before, and she was prepared this time for his questions. She had already answered them at Lehrmann’s criminal trial, which was later aborted due to juror misconduct.

This time Higgins accepted that her memory of the events was not perfect, and there were things she said previously that she knew now were wrong, including how she sustained a bruise on her leg (might have been where Lehrmann allegedly pinned her down but could also have been from when she drunkenly fell on the stairs), where she found a box of chocolates that she consumed to fix her hangover (the kitchen, not a colleague’s office) and the timing of a panic attack on a later date (might not have been the reason she missed the start of her old boss’s valedictory speech).

“Before, I wasn’t as clear in terms of the chronology because that’s not how memory works,” she said. “But I did do my homework and I’m much better prepared.”

Whybrow might have chosen to begin with his killer punch, but he chose instead to start with small and build towards more significant inconsistencies in Higgins’ version of events. Some time before lunch, he started to grill her on the position of her dress after the alleged rape. Higgins originally told journalists it was bunched around her waist, but a security guard testified at the criminal trial that she found Higgins naked.

Bruce Lehrmann leaves court on Thursday. Credit: Nikki Short

Higgins accepted upfront that the security guard’s account was more likely to be correct. But Whybrow needled up to the lunch break and again in the afternoon, why had she “reverse engineered” her evidence after hearing the security guard’s version of events? Was this not a significant matter?

Higgins finally snapped. “As I was being raped it wasn’t my primary concern … I was more deeply concerned about the penis in my vagina.”

And so he came to what appeared to be the key weakness in the account Higgins has given: her false claim in the days after she was allegedly assaulted that she had been to doctors and had a medical examination. This did not happen, she conceded. “It was a lie.”

But her concession came too readily and Whybrow was not finished. He needed to put to her the central thesis of his client’s case, that she had lied not just about that, but about everything, because she had been caught intoxicated and naked in parliament house after hours, and she wanted to keep her job. He put it to her, piece by piece, why didn’t she see a doctor if she had been sexually assaulted as she claimed?

She began to cry. “I didn’t have support around me, I was by myself in Canberra, I was so scared.”

Why did she lie to police? The tears were coming thicker and faster now. A barrister objected to the questions. The judge called a break. Nothing she said would be useful in this state.

Higgins gulped back a sob and hurried from the court.

Our Breaking News Alert will notify you of significant breaking news when it happens. Get it here.

Most Viewed in National

From our partners

Source: Read Full Article