Will it stop? The personal attacks against Brittany Higgins that the lead prosecutor in the now aborted Bruce Lehrmann trial said he had not witnessed before in his twenty-year career?
Will the attacks stop, after that same prosecutor highlighted the “unacceptable risks” to Higgins’ health, as being behind his decision to abandon the retrial, after the jury was discharged in the first trial following juror misconduct?
That director of public prosecutions, Shane Drumgold, said on Friday that during the investigation and trial, “Ms Higgins has faced a level of personal attack that I have not seen in over 20 years of doing this work. She’s done so with bravery, grace and dignity, and it is my hope that this will now stop.”
He added that there was a “significant and unacceptable risk to the life of the complainant”.
But the early signs are that the personal attacks have not and will not stop. If anything, the attacks appear to have hit an even higher level, possibly as individuals feel more emboldened than ever to give their own verdict on Brittany Higgins, despite the 27-year-old never being on trial.
And they come and continue despite confirmation on Friday that Higgins was in hospital receiving treatment and support. Her close friend Emma Webster shared that the past two years had been “difficult and unrelenting”. While disappointed to see the retrial aborted, she said that “Brittany’s health and safety must always come first.”
We saw such personal attacks in the 45 minutes this morning that we had comments open on the Facebook post sharing one of our latest news updates on the matter. Thankfully, we could quickly remove them and restrict future comments. But what we did see was a level of vitriol, from a group of individuals who have never previously engaged with Women’s Agenda or cared for anything we’ve previously written about. The comments, mostly from men, were from those discussing everything from women needing to take responsibility for how much they drink, to having their say on Higgins’ appearance, credibility, what she deserves, what she did to him, and so much more, and worse.
Now as more on the state of Higgins’ mental health emerges and it’s clear how difficult things has been for her as a complainant, we’re hearing even more voices with plenty to say on how and why Higgins “brought this on herself”, comments that will surely ramp up further with news today that Higgins’ lawyers are set to launch civil proceedings, and sue the former Liberal ministers she worked for, as well as the Commonwealth.
As always, we are reminded about how strongly and swiftly individuals will move to share their vitriolic comments on cases like this, despite often having little interest in commenting or feeling strongly about much else.
Further, we’ve also learned in the past couple of days that the prosecutor is also “greatly concerned” about potentially “unlawful” disclosures about Higgins. It came following News Corp reports published on Saturday morning – within 24 hours of the DPP releasing the statement on Higgins’ health and announcing that the retrial would not proceed – which delved into leaked police notes and briefing documents to claim that investigators held doubts about the case.
The above highlights the personal attacks we see publicly, and what we can assess from social media and comments on news stories that we may come across. But it all comes in addition to the more typical experience for a complainant in such a case, recounting what they suffered, while in the witness box, representing just a tiny sample of sexual assault victims who are ever able to come forward, and ever able to see charges actually laid against their alleged rapists. Higgins is a high-profile example of complainants going through this every day, if not in court, then when sharing their stories with investigators, finding the courage to open up to their supervisors, workplaces and to others whom they can recount their experiences in the hope of pursuing some justice or preventing what happened to them, from happening to someone else.
The legal system was not created for survivors. It was not created to believe survivors, to listen to survivors or to respect survivors. As Michael Bradley wrote on Crikey on Friday, from the dozens and dozens of survivors he has worked with, he can not name one who has come out of the criminal justice system in a better shape than when they went in. “To be clear, they all come out considerably worse. That is regardless of outcomes. And it is regardless of whether their names were known or not.”
And as Bradley continues, while there is more awareness of sexual assault and the options to come forward thanks to the courageous survivors who’ve done so in the past, the odds are not changing for the complainants in the still very, very few cases that do go forward.
As legal academic Julia Quilter writes today, having researched sexual assault trials for more than 20 years, Higgins received the worst of both worlds. She noted how Higgins’ cross-examination (already a highly difficult thing for complainants to go through) produced extensive news stories locally and across the world, opening Higgins up to be publicly scrutinised. But sadly, Quilter also noted that the personal attacks she saw Higgins had faced “inside” the trial were not unusual at all. If anything, this case gave outsiders the first insight into the “extreme pressure and scrutiny to which complainants are routinely subjected in the thousands of rape and other sexual offence trials conducted in Australia courts every year.” Overall, the core feature of sexual assault trials –to raise questions about the complainant’s credibility and reliably, or more crudely to ‘portray them as a liar” — has barely changed at all, Quilter wrote.
It’s clear the criminal justice system is deeply flawed in terms of what it puts complainants through.
But adding to all of this is a segment of the general public, who will use the complainant (particularly when not anonymous) as their own conversation starter and entertainment across social media. They are the not-always faceless social media users who will unpick what the complainant is wearing outside court, the tone of their voice, a certain line in their story, their opinions on whether they were “asking for it” or “deserved it”. When does it stop?