The final witnesses of fact in the Lehrmann v Network Ten defamation gave evidence today in the Federal Court of Australia.
Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers, departmental liaison officer (DLO) for Minister Reynolds in 2019 Chris Payne, and family members of Brittany Higgins gave evidence and were cross examined today. Expert witnesses, as well as Lisa Wilkinson and Angus Llewellyn from The Project, are expected to give evidence in the coming days.
The trial is predicted to conclude by the end of the week, however, Justice Michael Lee has indicated the court will sit on Monday should the trial extend any longer.
Women’s Agenda is covering the Lehrmann v Network Ten defamation trial as it happens, with former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann accusing Lisa Wilkinson and The Project of defamation. The case is in reference to an interview between Wilkinson and Brittany Higgins, who accused Lehrmann of raping her inside Parliament House in March 2019.
Here’s what we learned in today’s proceedings.
Content warning: This article contains references to rape and sexual assault.
AFP and Chris Payne
Rebecca Cleaves and Katie Thelning are AFP officers and were the first authorities who spoke with Brittany Higgins about the alleged rape.
The officers met with Higgins in the basement of Parliament House, where the AFP office is, on 1 April 2019.
Reading from the notes she made at the first informal meeting Higgins had with police, Cleaves said at the time, Higgins was speaking quickly and was visibly very nervous.
Higgins told the officers, according to Cleaves, that she was heavily intoxicated and “couldn’t sign her name”.
Cleaves: “The next thing she remembers is being in ministerial suite. She doesn’t really didn’t recall the walk there. And from there, she remembers waking up on the ministerial suite on the couch. And literally Bruce was on top of her participating in non-consensual sex.”
Thelning said the following day, 2 April 2019, she consulted with the sexual assault and child abuse team at the AFP to discuss support services that they could refer Higgins on to. She noted that there was an extremely long wait for access those services.
Cleaves told the court that the officers requested a copy of the CCTV footage from Parliament house, but “weren’t provided with a copy”.
Cleaves: “They were hesitant to give us a copy of the footage without an investigative purpose.”
Chris Payne was next to take the stand. He was a DLO in Minister Linda Reynolds’ office at the time of the alleged rape in 2019.
Payne recalled first hearing of the alleged rape in a conversation with Fiona Brown, Minister Reynolds’ chief-of-staff. According to his evidence, she opened the conversation by saying: “You’re never going to believe this.”
In this conversation, Brown told Payne that Higgins was found in Minister Reynolds’ ministerial suite in the early hours of the morning on Saturday 23 March 2019 in a “state of undress”.
In a separate conversation that week after the alleged rape, Payne, with Fiona Brown, spoke with Higgins about the incident. This is his recollection of how one part of that conversation went.
Payne: “May I ask you a very direct question?”
Higgins: “Sure, go for it.”
Payne: “Did he rape you?”
Higgins: “I could not have consented. It would have been like fucking a log.”
Payne was sure of the words used in this conversation, as he told the court the words were very “confronting” to hear from a young woman in Parliament House. He said the words “stuck”.
The family
Three members of Higgins’ family were next to speak in the witness box.
The first was her mother, Kelly Higgins. She described Higgins as a young woman with a “vivacious personality” who “was loving her life”.
Kelly Higgins: “She was thoroughly enjoying every single thing she was doing. She was embracing every opportunity, she was working long hours, she was loving learning about the culture in Parliament House… she was very happy.”
Around the end of March 2019, Kelly Higgins recalled that she noticed Brittany started to become more “withdrawn” and “detached”.
When she went to the media in 2021 about the alleged rape, Brittany Higgins went to the Gold Coast to live with Kelly Higgins for a period of time. Kelly said that Brittany’s “joy”, “desire” and “personal happiness” was gone, and the woman she once knew “was a completely different person”.
Kelly Higgins: “I understand that people only see her (in public)… (but) she is a broken soul.”
The other family members that took the stand were Brittany Higgins’ father, Matthew Higgina, and his partner, Kellie Jago.
Both recalled when they visited Brittany Higgins the week after the alleged rape, and both said she seemed different and “not herself”.
“I couldn’t recognise my daughter,” he said. “She was absolutely quiet and withdrawn.”
Court will resume tomorrow at 10:15am.
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