If Bruce won, his payout was tiny
Even if Bruce Lehrmann had won his defamation battle with Channel 10 and Lisa Wilkinson, he would have only been awarded $20,000.
In a scathing judgment delivered in the Federal Court on Monday, Justice Michael Lee found, to the civil standard of the balance of probabilities, that Lehrmann had raped Brittany Higgins in 2019.
Justice Lee found Lehrmann had been so “hellbent on having sex” with Ms Higgins that he “did not care one way or another whether Ms Higgins understood or agreed to what was going on”.
He also found that Lehrmann had told “deliberate lies” on the witness stand and remarked that to call him “a poor witness is an exercise in understatement”. Justice Lee dismissed the lawsuit because he upheld Ten and Ms Wilkinson’s truth defence, after finding that the allegations made by Ms Higgins during her The Project interview in February 2021 were substantially true.
However, he did find that the broadcaster’s conduct in respect of the Logies speech given by Ms Wilkinson, which delayed Lehrmann’s ACT Supreme Court criminal trial, was “egregious”. Justice Lee said that had Lehrmann won the lawsuit, he would have been awarded more than “nominal damages”.
“If it had been necessary to assess damages in favour of Mr Lehrmann, the appropriate and rational relationship between the actual harm sustained and the damages awarded would lead to total damages of $20,000,” Justice Lee said.
The matter will return to court at a later date to decide whether Lehrmann will be required to pay Ten and Ms Wilkinson’s legal costs.