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Australian civil court judge on Monday he thought credible is the testimony of Brittany Higgins, a former Australian parliamentary assistant who in 2021 accused her colleague Bruce Lehrmann of raping her in an office of the Australian parliament in 2019. It is the first time that a judge has expressed his opinion on the case, which in Australia was was particularly followed and had provoked widespread protests against gender violence.
The story began in February 2021, when Higgins told the television program The Projectbroadcast by the network Network 10, that she was raped in 2019 inside the House of Representatives of Parliament, in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Higgins had said that on March 22 she returned with a colleague to Parliament House after a work party at which she had drunk heavily. According to her account, the rape had taken place in the office of the then Defense Minister, Linda Reynolds, and had been carried out by another collaborator of the party then in government.
Higgins said she began to feel unwell and lay down on a sofa to sleep; shortly after, however, she woke up without clothes, with the man on top of her and raping her. After raping her, the man left, leaving her half naked on the sofa. The identity of the collaborator involved was not initially made public, but he was later identified as Lehrmann.
Higgins’ interview had provoked demonstrations and protests in many Australian cities against the sexual violence suffered by women and the sexist culture that many believe there is in the country. The case had also put in big difficulty the government: the then prime minister Scott Morrison, leader of the Liberal Party, had publicly apologized to Higgins saying “something like this should never have happened”.
However, Lehrmann has always said he is innocent, and so far he has not suffered any criminal consequences: the criminal trial on the alleged rape was in fact canceled in 2022, due to a violation of the rules by the jury. It was then decided to dismiss the charges altogether, for fear that a new trial might be too risky for the mental health of Higgins, who had meanwhile been hospitalized due to the trauma caused by the violence.
The sentence issued on Monday therefore does not concern a criminal trial for rape, but a civil one for defamation brought by Lehrmann against Network 10, the television network that broadcast the interview in 2021 in which Higgins accused him of raping her. For this reason Lehrmann sued claiming that he had been defamed.
In Australia, the standards for determining the facts in a civil trial are less stringent than in a criminal trial. The judge ruled that, based on the evidence presented by the parties, the account provided by Higgins was more likely to be true than false, and that therefore Lehrmann was not defamed by the contents of the interview, given that they described actual events. As a result, the court ruled that Lehrmann is not entitled to receive payment for any damages, but rather will likely be required to pay the defendants’ legal fees.
The judge in the defamation trial, Michael Lee, commented on the story by saying that Lehrmann had “escaped the lion’s den” by avoiding the rape trial, only to return “to pick up his hat” by bringing the defamation trial.