Bruce Lehrmann has applied to the High Court of Australia in a bid to overturn the judgments in his long-running defamation dispute with Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson.
Lehrmann’s application for special leave to appeal to the High Court marks his final legal avenue after previous challenges in the Federal Court and Full Court failed to alter the outcome of his defamation case.
At the centre of the dispute is an interview broadcast on The Project in 2021 in which Brittany Higgins first alleged she had been sexually assaulted at Parliament House in 2019. Lehrmann was not named during the interview, but his legal team argued the broadcast identified him and damaged his reputation.
In the original defamation trial, Federal Court Justice Michael Lee found that the network had successfully established a defence of justification, concluding on the balance of probabilities that the alleged assault did occur. That finding proved decisive in dismissing Lehrmann’s claim, leaving him ordered to pay significant legal costs reported to be in the millions — although enforcement was stayed pending appeals.
Lehrmann’s High Court application challenges both aspects of the prior rulings: the judgement itself and the decision by the Full Court of the Federal Court to uphold that judgement. His lawyers argue that Justice Lee’s original trial was tainted by what they describe as impartiality concerns, pointing to material they say was improperly relied on and extraneous to the evidence formally presented in court. The High Court documents assert that parts of the earlier judgments were therefore “compromised,” undermining fairness and justice.
Among the principal grounds for appeal is the contention that the judge conducted “independent research” and brought in academic or other non-evidentiary sources that were not subjected to cross-examination or included in the pleadings. Lehrmann’s legal team maintains that this influenced key factual findings, including those relating to what he knew about Higgins’s consent on the night in question.
In previous stages of the litigation, the Federal Court’s Full Court upheld the finding that Justice Lee did not err in his reasoning or his acceptance of the justification defence. That appellate decision effectively left Lehrmann’s defamation claim without legal remedy, a ruling he has sought to reverse through the current High Court bid.
Lehrmann has faced a complex legal history: a criminal trial in the ACT Supreme Court in 2022 was abandoned due to juror misconduct and no further prosecution was pursued, leaving no criminal conviction on record.
The High Court will first need to grant special leave for the matter to proceed. That step is uncertain, as the High Court accepts only a small proportion of applications each year. If leave is granted, the case could be heard on its merits before a full bench, potentially leading to an unprecedented legal review of how defamation and civil standards of proof intersect in high-profile cases.