One winner from a case that injured all others
Finally, the whole tawdry business of Bruce Lehrmann and Brittany Higgins seems to have been put to rest. And how’s this for a twist: The conclusion to this whole episode is only due to Lehrmann himself going back, as Justice Michael Lee suggested, to retrieve his hat from the lion’s den.
Had he not decided to take another swing and sue Ten and Lisa Wilkinson for defamation – resulting in his losing the case and being branded a rapist – the whole case would have hung around the body politic forever like a bad smell.
But while Lehrmann lost, virtually no one came out of Justice Lee’s courtroom unscathed.
Not the plaintiff, not Higgins and her boyfriend David Sharaz, not Wilkinson and her team at The Project.
About the only person who won deserved vindication was former defence minister Linda Reynolds’s chief of staff Fiona Brown, who suffered huge damage when in 2021 was portrayed as an unfeeling political goon who tried to silence Higgins to protect her bosses.
Instead, again thanks to Justice Lee’s diamond-sharp judgment, we now know she was stitched up.
As Lee wrote in his judgment, Brown “took … great care” to “deal properly with the employment aspect of what had occurred (and how it intersected with any ongoing criminal investigation)”.
On the way through, Lee slammed Ten for submitting that, far from doing her job, Brown was like a “religious institution” protecting a pedophile “on the eve of a federal election” and Wilkinson for doubling down on conspiracies when no evidence for them existed.
We also learnt how what should have been a relatively straightforward criminal case pitched a bunch of 20something Parliament House staffers into the front lines of a political and culture war battle that helped activate the Teals and put Labor in power.
Thus we now know all the intricate mechanics of how the Morrison government was made to wear responsibility for the case as soon as the news broke.
Sharaz made it clear in his contact with The Project that this was all about taking down the Liberals and branding the entire Coalition as neanderthals and misogynists.
The incident was made to be of an entire “culture” of the Liberals, and Parliament House in general, that sought to cover up a politically inconvenient sexual assault.
Yet as Justice Lee made clear, this simply wasn’t the case.
The supposed cover-up of rape never happened.
Higgins, despite the crux of her allegation being upheld, was deemed an unreliable witness.
She wiped messages off her phone, though a photo of a bruise on her leg that supposedly corroborated the attack survived – yet did not surface until 2021.
Justice Lee said that her untruths and inconsistencies were not due to the trauma of the assault, but something else.
When it came to the bruise picture, “in the witness box at this trial, she seemed irritated that the crossexaminer would challenge her on the photograph”, Lee said.
“But the evidence as to her inconsistencies on this topic are both important and vexing.”
Not only that, she and boyfriend Sharaz shopped the story to the media, crafting the supposed coverup of the rape by the Morrison government into a weapon with which to beat their political opponents on the eve of an election.
“Despite its logical and evidentiary flaws, Ms Higgins’ boyfriend selected and contacted two journalists and then Ms Higgins advanced her account to them, and through them, to others,” wrote Lee in a judgment that name-checked everyone from Hannah Arendt to the Algonquin Round Table to Canberra’s Kingston Hotel: “the Kingo”.
“From the first moment, the coverup component was promoted and recognised as the most important part of the narrative.”
This push, driven by Sharaz, to prosecute her claims through the media and not the courts turned what should have been a private legal matter into a spectacle that seemed to poison everything it touched.
Which is why Ten, despite winning a victory of sorts, copped a pasting for being prepared to help Higgins and Sharaz “to use the allegations for immediate political advantage”.
This created a “brume of confusion” which led to “collateral damage, including to the fair and orderly progress of the underlying allegation of sexual assault through the criminal justice system”. What an absolute mess.
At least Fiona Brown has come out of this with some delayed justice.
Everyone else should stop and think about how they let what should have been a criminal complaint by a young woman that should have been handled professionally by the police become a political football and a tool for their own self- aggrandisement.