The Western Australia Supreme Court has granted Linda Reynolds’ legal team’s request to subpoena all communications between Brittany Higgins and sexual assault survivor advocate, Saxon Miller, who is fundraising for Higgins’ legal fees.
Senator Linda Reynolds has launched defamation legal proceedings against Brittany Higgins for damage to reputation over social media posts in July 2023.
In court on Tuesday, Reynolds’ lawyer Martin Bennett accused a crowdfunding initiative to support Higgins financially of trying to “capture some public opinion” about the case.
The page was created by sexual assault survivor advocate Saxon Miller on Monday, the day Reynolds began presenting her evidence in court, which Bennett suggested presented a “timing issue”. Mullins’ fundraiser, #StandWithBrittanyHiggins, has raised more than $35,000 since Monday.
“Brittany Higgins has been through indescribable pain. After speaking out about her assault, Brittany has been the victim of an endless stream of attacks and is now being sued for defamation,” Mullins wrote on Instagram, urging her followers to donate.
“We can’t undo the pain and trauma, but we can try to help Brittany heal. If you are able to, please donate for ongoing medical, counselling and legal costs.”
Higgins’ lawyer, Rachael Young SC, said it was beyond the “stretch of the imagination” that the crowdfunding initiative was part of a conspiracy to damage the reputation of Reynolds. However, WA Supreme Court Judge Paul Tottle granted Reynolds’ legal team’s subpoena request. The documents are due before the court on Wednesday next week.
At the end of Tuesday’s hearing, Higgins’ lawyer made her own subpoena request to obtain a document that reportedly contains correspondence between Reynolds and Bruce Lehrmann’s then barrister, Steven Whybrow SC, prior to the criminal trial in 2022. Lehrmann was facing a criminal trial for charges of allegedly raping Brittany Higgins in Parliament House in March 2019. The trial was ultimately abandoned for juror misconduct and there was never a retrial.
In April this year, the Federal Court of Australia found, on the balance of probabilities, that Lehrmann raped Higgins. He has always denied the allegations.
Reynolds’ lawyer Bennett raised another issue in court on Tuesday in regards to a social media post Brittany Higgins made earlier this week. On Monday, Higgins reshared an Instagram post promoting the latest book authored by Julian Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, titled ‘How Many More Women? How the Law Silences Women’.
“Pertinent reading,” Higgins captioned the Instagram post on Monday.
Bennett suggested to the court this post was an attempt to “mischaracterise the nature of these proceedings” and an attempt to portray his client as someone “seeking to silence sexual assault survivors”.
Outside of court on Tuesday, Bennett told the media that he does not “believe in coincidences”.
“It (the social media post) was released yesterday when Senator Reynolds commenced her evidence, and it misrepresents entirely what this case is about,” Bennett said.
Reynolds’ evidence
Reynolds began presenting her evidence to the WA Supreme Court on Monday. Her evidence detailed how she was treated after Brittany Higgins went public with her rape allegations in February 2021.
Describing how she felt when Reynolds first read Brittany Higgins’ allegations in the news.com.au article, Reynolds told the court: “As angry and upset as I was going through, reading this, I also started to feel sorry for her because … I started thinking ‘what have we missed?’”
Reynolds said she felt “incredible pain” and once had to leave Question Time “sobbing uncontrollably”, as a result of the “media frenzy” that was sparked from the public allegations.
The accusations that there was an organised political cover up of Higgins’ alleged rape affected how her colleagues in Parliament House viewed Reynolds, the Senator said, going from doing her job one day, to “being nationally vilified as someone who would do something so despicable” the next. It became “overwhelming”, she said.
Reynolds told of an encounter she once had with the late Labor Senator Kimberly Kitching, who died of a suspected heart attack in 2022. She was 52 years old.
Reynolds said that Kitching told her that Labor had found out about the allegations and were intending to “rain hell” on Senator Reynolds and the Morrison government.
According to Reynolds’ evidence, Kitching, who was a “trusted colleague” to Reynolds, received an anonymous letter about Higgins’ rape allegations, which she passed on to the AFP instead of her colleagues.
Reynolds told the court she felt “a bit incredulous that [Labor] would even contemplate doing such a thing” and said Kitching’s decision to tell the AFP angered her Labor colleagues – before Justice Paul Tottle reminded Reynolds to refrain from interpreting the emotions of others and instead stick to exactly what they said.
Later, in her evidence, Reynolds told the court she could feel her blood pressure rising from recounting the “particularly emotional” memory. Court was adjourned.