Bruce Lehrmann defamation case LIVE updates: Justice Michael ...

The Federal Court is streaming Federal Court Justice Michael Lee’s decision in the Lehrmann case. Lee will read extracts of his written judgment from 10.15am in Sydney.

You can watch the livestream below:

Contrary to Lehrmann’s evidence, Federal Court Justice Michael Lee said that the former Liberal staffer spent the bulk of the evening at The Dock in Kingston with Brittany Higgins.

He said that Lehrmann was also “encouraging her to drink well beyond the grounds of sobriety”.

Justice Michael Lee has trained his sights first on Lehrmann and Higgins’ interactions in the evening at The Dock, a watering hole on the Kingston foreshore, on Friday, March 22, 2019.

Lee found Lehrmann had given untruthful evidence about his access to other sources of funds on the night in question, because the bank records shown in court did not accord with the number of drinks he bought.

“I do not accept that having access to another source of funds … is a minute detail,” Lee said.

He found Higgins had consumed 11 drinks.

Federal Court Justice Michael Lee said that by the time she went to the media Brittany Higgins’ “rape allegations were intertwined with the cover-up” allegation, namely that she encountered political roadblocks to making a police complaint.

He is now considering Ten and Lisa Wilkinson’s defence of qualified privilege, under which the media parties must prove they acted reasonably in airing Higgins’ sexual assault claim.

This is one of two defences that the media parties are seeking to rely upon. They only need to establish one defence to successfully fend off the litigation.

Lee said that Ten including Wilkinson started from the premise Higgins claims were “necessarily true” and did not act reasonably, meaning that the defence of qualified privilege has not been established.

Justice Michael Lee said that some aspects of the evidence of high-profile presenter Lisa Wilkinson, a former co-host of Ten’s The Project, “caused me concern”.

This included her evidence about an acceptance speech she delivered at the Logies in 2022 in the days before Bruce Lehrmann’s criminal trial was set to proceed. The speech, which the court has heard was reviewed by Ten’s lawyers before delivery, led to the trial date being delayed.

Lisa Wilkinson, centre, and her legal team outside the Federal Court in Sydney on Monday.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Wilkinson’s speech was “fraught with danger”, Lee said, and was part of a continued course of conduct in celebrating Higgins’ story and representing that it “must be believed”.

Federal Court Justice Michael Lee turns his attention to the evidence of Fiona Brown, who was chief of staff to then defence industry minister Linda Reynolds at the time that Higgins alleges Lehrmann raped her in Reynolds’ office.

Lee said that Brown had formed the view at a specific point in 2019 that “sex and something untoward may have happened” between Higgins and Lehrmann, but that Brown showed integrity in standing up to political pressure to report a sexual assault allegation without Higgins’ approval and before she was clear in her own mind about the precise nature of the allegation.

Fiona Brown outside the Federal Court in Sydney last year.Credit: Steven Siewert

Lee said it must have been worse than “galling” in those circumstances to have been accused effectively of being a roadblock to a complaint being made.

The judge said that Brown “no doubt” could have done some things differently but showed “commonsense and compassion”.

Justice Michael Lee said that a seemingly trivial but “revealing” untruth in Brittany Higgins’ evidence was that a man she met for a date on March 22, 2019, had been “bullied mercilessly” by other Canberra staffers before leaving a local watering hole.

He said that CCTV footage revealed that nobody did anything that could remotely be described as bullying and in fact Higgins “abandoned her date” because she preferred to go and sit at the same table as Lehrmann.

Brittany Higgins leaves the Federal Court in Sydney last year.Credit: James Brickwood

This interaction took place hours before the alleged sexual assault, the court has heard.

“Ms Higgins, after being taken to the video, had to accept, albeit in what at the time struck me as a curiously light-hearted tone, that … [she ignored her date and had been rude].

“Although, on one level minor in itself, this untrue representation is one example of a willingness to make of an accusation cut out of whole cloth because it suited Ms Higgins to make it.”

Lee made the following additional remarks about Higgins credibility:

Whatever the truth of the evidence she gave as to what occurred in the ministerial suite one night in 2019, the cogency of her evidence as to this central aspect of the case must be evaluated and closely scrutinised in the light of the fact that my findings establish that since 2021, Ms Higgins:

Made false representations as to what occurred following the incident to Ms [Samantha] Maiden [from news.com.au] and The Project team and more generally thereafter.

Asserted definitively that she retained contemporaneous evidence of the rape that she knew bolstered her credibility and rely upon it, when on the most generous view of it it ought to have been apparent to her as she recognised that this trial, there was an informed basis for doing so.

Selectively curated material on her phone prior to giving it to the AFP.

Sometimes told untruths when it suited her.

One of the pieces of evidence examined in the defamation case was a photo of a bruise on Brittany Higgins’ leg that she had said was taken shortly after the alleged sexual assault of her by Bruce Lehrmann in 2019.

Justice Michael Lee said that Higgins had “distanced herself from embracing it as evidence of the rape” in her evidence in court, and inconsistencies relating to the photograph were both “important and vexing”.

He also pointed to missing data on Higgins’ phone, including photos taken on the “fateful night” in question.

Turning to the credibility of Brittany Higgins, Justice Michael Lee said Lehrmann’s barrister made “several detailed attacks” on her evidence in the defamation case.

Lee said that there were “inconsistencies and untruths” in some of Higgins’ claims in 2019, “but they must be contextualised”. He said that there was a “lack of nuance” and superficiality in dismissing a witness as entirely unreliable because of problems with their evidence, he said.

Brittany Higgins outside the Perth Supreme Court in March.Credit: Trevor Collens

He said that inconsistencies in Higgins’ claims in the years after 2019 were “far more troubling”, including Higgins effectively accusing those involved in the political process of “putting up roadblocks” to her making a formal sexual harassment complaint.

Higgins has alleged Lehrmann sexually assaulted her in March 2019 in Parliament House. She first engaged with the media about that claim in February 2021.

Lee said it would be fair to describe Higgins “as a complex and, in several respects, unsatisfactory witness”.

“Nuance is required in evaluating her evidence, and any contentious and uncorroborated aspect needs to be scrutinised warily.”