Just over a month since Brittany Higgins came out publicly about the night of her alleged 2019 rape in Parliament House, the security guard who found Higgins after her assault has spoken to ABC’s Four Corners.
An employee of Parliament House for a decade, Nikola Anderson said she’d signed Higgins and her alleged rapist– a young male advisor in Linda Reynolds’ office– into Parliament House at 2am.
“They basically walked in together,” Anderson explained. “She was wearing a white cocktail dress. I’d noticed that she’d had grass stains down one side of her body on this pure white dress. He seemed to be quite dressed up as well. And it was just strange to us that they were there at that time of night together, wanting to go into the office.”
Anderson’s colleague made a remark; “‘Jeez guys, couldn’t this have waited until Monday?’ to which the male advisor said ‘Oh, not really.’”
“As she’s gone to put her shoes back on after she’s walked through and cleared herself, she couldn’t get them on,” Anderson said. “That’s how I realised how intoxicated this girl was because she just could not get her shoes on for the life of her.”
At 3am, Anderson went to do a welfare check on Higgins who was still inside the office.
“As I opened the door, I noticed that the female was lying on her back, completely naked, on the lounge that was adjacent to the door, for which I’ve gone, ‘Oh’,” she told Four Corners.
“Oh God. And I mean, oh God, because I’ve never come across anything like that.”
“My [take] on it was that she’s conscious. She’s breathing. She doesn’t look like she’s in distress. She’s just sleeping off her night. And with that, I shut the door, and I exited the room. I made sure her dignity was intact by shutting this door … I was trying to do the right thing by keeping her dignity intact.”
Anderson told Four Corners that the Prime Minister’s claim that there was a security breach at Parliament House was surprising, since according to her, security guards had followed the correct procedures.
In February this year, Morrison said the male advisor’s employment was terminated over a “security breach”, though the nature of the security breach was never revealed. He has not been charged with any crime, and police continue to investigate the matter.
“What was the security breach? Because the night that we were on shift, there was no security breach,” Anderson said.
“Their pass enables them to be where they want to be within Parliament House. If they hadn’t worked for that minister, that would be a different story because we wouldn’t have allowed them entry because it’s not their office, they have no business being in there.”
When asked what she thought about why Morrison would publicly state that the male advisor had been terminated due to a breach of security, Anderson replied, “Because he’s been given false information.”
“I’m one of the only people who really knows what happened,” she said. “Nobody has asked me anything. Nobody has come to find me.”
Anderson was encouraged to keep what she saw to herself.
“What you need to do is pass it onto your relief,” she said. “Be very discreet about it. Don’t make a common knowledge.”
Anderson now fears she could be used as a scapegoat in any inquiry. And in recent history, we’ve seen women in this country being exploited this way. Reynolds herself has been used as a scapegoat by Morrison, according to political journalist Rachel Withers.
“[Morrison] publicly rebuked her for not informing him of the allegation, despite the fact that a number of other people in his inner circle clearly knew,” Withers wrote in The Saturday Paper last month. “At least five” of her fellow Liberal MPs have anonymously called for her to resign, saying she should have provided more support to Higgins.”
Withers believes that Reynolds herself will likely face resignation.
“It means a woman is probably going to take the fall for this,” Withers wrote. “An alleged crime committed by a man, enabled and protected by a patriarchal power structure, and known or mishandled or disregarded by so many men before it became public.”
Withers believes Reynolds “… might even be being forced to defend a course of action she didn’t actually take, in order to protect Morrison.”
“Reynolds’s public scapegoating… is a reminder of just how hostile a place the parliament is for women.”
“I want women to have the same voice and the same safety as the men in this country,” Morrison told the press this morning.
Let’s see how his government handles the storm in the coming weeks as this issue continues to unfold.
Photo Credit: ABC News