Brittany Higgins tells court she did not want to be ‘complicit’ in cover-up

Higgins said that at a meeting on April 1, 2019, after the alleged rape on March 23, Reynolds asked her to keep the office informed if she ultimately decided to go to the police. “I wasn’t asked to recount the event,” she said.

She said Reynolds said she was sorry and “these are things that women go through”.

“She said, ‘I didn’t think he was capable of this’, and from that I inferred she was talking about Bruce.”

Higgins said she was “pretty traumatised” because the meeting took place in the same room as the alleged assault, and she was “completely disassociated; I was a mess”.

The alleged assault

Higgins told the court she was “very, very inebriated” in the early hours of Saturday, March 23, 2019, when she joined Lehrmann in an Uber after a Friday night out drinking with colleagues in Canberra.

“I thought I was going to go home,” Higgins said. She said Lehrmann told her he needed to stop in at Parliament House.

Bruce Lehrmann leaves court on Wednesday afternoon.Credit: James Brickwood

Higgins said she waited for Lehrmann in the office for what felt like a long time. Her next recollection was waking up in Reynolds’ ministerial suite, she said.

She said the first thing she remembered was “a pain in my leg” and realised “Bruce was on top of me” having sex with her.

“I told him no on a loop. I told him to stop. I couldn’t scream for some reason,” she said. She told the court her body felt “water-logged and heavy”.

Higgins said Lehrmann left after the alleged assault but she “couldn’t get up off the couch” and passed out.

She woke early in the morning in Reynolds’ office with light coming through the blinds, she told the court, and was sick in the toilet.

Asked at one stage if she needed to take a break after she started crying in the witness box, Higgins said: “Just give me a second. I’ll be fine.”

Higgins alleged during her evidence that Lehrmann attempted to kiss her days before she alleges he raped her in Parliament House and took her phone “in jest” when they first met on March 2, 2019, to stop her from leaving a Canberra pub. He has denied those incidents occurred.

‘Not here to destroy your life’

Higgins was taken by Ten’s barrister, Dr Matt Collins, KC, to an email she sent Lehrmann on Monday, March 26, 2019, asking him for help with a work task and writing that she was “phoning a friend”.

“I didn’t consider him a friend,” Higgins said.

She said she was attempting to “soften the situation” and show she was “not a threat” and “not here to destroy your life” because they still had to work together and he was more senior in the office.

Higgins said a work email Lehrmann sent her hours after the alleged rape with a smiley face “really freaked me out, and still does” because “we’d never had a friendly social relationship and then suddenly after he raped me there was this familiarity”.

Drinks at The Dock

Higgins gave evidence that from her observation of CCTV footage from The Dock hotel in Canberra on March 22, 2019, which captured her drinking with Lehrmann and other staffers hours before the alleged rape, she had 11 vodka-based drinks at that venue. Higgins said this was an “abnormality” and an “excessive” amount.

“I was very drunk,” Higgins said.

Lehrmann has denied during cross-examination that he encouraged Higgins to get drunk in the hours before the alleged assault.

A second bar

Higgins said she had some recollection that she went to a second bar in Canberra, 88mph, with Lehrmann and two other staffers, and that she was very inebriated by this stage. “I do remember taking a form of shot,” she said.

She remembered Lehrmann having his arm around her and touching her legs and thigh area, she told the court, and recalled a “thought process of discomfort”.

Email from Bruce Lehrmann to Brittany Higgins dated March 23, 2019, tendered in Lehrmann’s defamation case.Credit: Federal Court of Australia

“I felt him being handsy with me. I was in the field of tolerance. I didn’t push him away. I didn’t snap at him. I was dealing with him touching me. I didn’t want it, but I was tolerating it.”

Lehrmann has denied touching Higgins or putting his arm around her. Asked if he did anything else, Higgins said: “Not that I recall.”

Lawsuit ‘bound to fail’

Collins said on Tuesday that Ten’s interview was an “important exercise in public interest journalism” and it “stands behind its report”.

If the court finds Lehrmann was indirectly identified by the broadcast, which did not name him, Ten and Wilkinson admit the interview conveyed the central claim of rape and are seeking to rely in part on a truth defence. During his opening address, Collins said Lehrmann’s case was “misconceived” and “bound to fail”.

Lehrmann’s ACT criminal trial for sexual assault was aborted in October last year due to juror misconduct and the charge was later dropped altogether amid concerns about Higgins’ mental health.

Lehrmann has always denied he raped Higgins.

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