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Brittany Higgins has questioned whether she was allegedly drugged and raped in Parliament, new court documents reveal.
The revelations were made in a submission written by lawyer Leon Zwier on behalf of Higgins and submitted to the Federal Court on Tuesday in Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation trial.
In her submissions, Ms Higgins responded to questions raised about her controversial taxpayer-funded $2.4 million compensation package.
And he gave three key reasons why he says he didn’t lie when presenting evidence about her alleged rape.
Lehrmann sued Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson over an episode of The Project in 2021, during which Higgins first alleged that Lehrmann raped her in Parliament when they were both Liberal staffers in 2021.
Mr. Lehrmann strongly denies these accusations. He was not named in the broadcast, but he claims friends and family were able to identify him as the alleged rapist.
Judge Michael Lee invited Ms Higgins to make a submission to “avoid any suggestion that she was denied procedural fairness” before handing down her sentence, which is now scheduled for 10.15am on Monday.
Brittany Higgins (pictured) made submissions to the Federal Court on Thursday
“A number of allegations have been made from the pre-reopening evidence about Ms. Higgins’ behavior in particular,” Judge Lee said on Thursday.
“Certainly in relation to Ms Higgins you will need to come to conclusions.”
In her submission, Ms Higgins noted that she was only a witness in the December defamation trial and was not a party to the proceedings.
Higgins said he would have more rigorously explored some of the evidence presented to the court that could have called his credibility into question.
‘I was drugged?’
One example he used was a document called a “master chronology”, submitted last Tuesday by former Channel Seven employee Taylor Auerbach, which noted an entry by senior Australian Federal Police officer Leanne Cross.
According to the document, that entry was a record of a phone call Cross had with Higgins’ former bosses in April 2019, then-Defence Industry Minister Linda Reynolds and her chief of staff, Fiona Brown.
Presenting Ms Higgins, Ms Cross had said: “I am also concerned by information I have heard that this may have happened before or could happen again.” (She was referring to information that the alleged victim may have been drugged.)
‘[AFP officer Paul Sherring] – We need to talk to a variety of people. Security staff housekeeping staff may have information.
Higgins said in the document that she was not aware of any suggestion that she was drugged and said the issue had not been “raised or explored in these proceedings.”
“While there is now evidence that there was ‘information’ that Ms Higgins was drugged… the basis on which the concerns were based was not explored,” he said.
“In the context of a serious challenge to the honesty and accuracy of Ms. Higgins’ account of the events of the night in question, the possibility that her perceptual and remembering abilities may have been affected by causes other than alcohol and Trauma is an issue she believes she would have liked to explore.
Brittany Higgins appears dressed in white, alongside Bruce Lehrmann in a light blue shirt, in the pub before her alleged rape.
The compensation claim of 2.4 million dollars
Ms Higgins said in her submission that the court did not explore the nature and purpose of her $2.4 million settlement agreement with the Commonwealth and that it would therefore be “grossly unfair” to use it against her.
Her civil claim against the Commonwealth was settled in December 2022 after just one day of mediation and 10 days after the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions dropped the sexual assault charge against Lehrmann.
The claim was due to the alleged treatment she received following her sexual assault allegations in Parliament, even though the allegations have never been proven.
The settlement deed was published during the defamation trial in December. Ms Higgins had told the court the Albanese government admitted liability to her and “breached her duty of care and failed to follow appropriate processes”.
However, the deed specifically stated that all claims were resolved “without any admission of liability.”
She attracted criticism because there were key differences between the evidence she presented about her alleged rape in court and the evidence presented at the event.
In her submission, Ms Higgins said the matter was resolved shortly after the rape trial and that she had been hospitalized due to mental health issues in that time period.
Bruce Lehrmann is pictured outside court. He strongly denies raping Brittany Higgins
It is for that reason that he said in his submission that “any conclusion of dishonesty” could not be made in relation to the content of the writing.
“There is no adequate basis in the evidence in this proceeding on which to reach conclusions about Ms. Higgins’ subjective mental state on which a conclusion of dishonesty could be reached in relation to the content of the writing,” said.
Mrs Higgins was not questioned about the content of the writing and therefore had no opportunity to explain it or justify particular inclusions, he said.
His submission also said that Ms Higgins “is not a lawyer” and therefore is not familiar with a “complex formal document in the same way that a lawyer is or would be”, and used the example of the time she mistakenly told him to the court that the government accepted responsibility.
‘To suggest, for example, that his evidence that the Commonwealth ‘came to an agreement that a duty of care was breached’ is dishonest because the Scripture… says that no admission of liability was made… is irrelevant. absolutely nowhere,’ she said.
‘From a non-lawyer’s perspective, his claim in that regard had been resolved by the payment of a substantial amount of money. This attack is a very subtle point, which was never raised to Mrs Higgins in cross-examination.
‘There is simply no basis on which this can be said to indicate dishonesty.
Lisa Wilkinson (pictured outside court) is also being sued by Mr Lehrmann over her television interview with Ms Higgins.
‘I didn’t lie’: Brittany’s three reasons
Ms Higgins also rejected Mr Lehrmann’s claims that she is dishonest and provided three reasons for this.
Her first reason hinged on a submission from Mr. Lehrmann that asked why Ms. Higgins lied to Ms. Brown, her former boss, about going to the doctor in the days after her alleged assault.
Higgins argued that it provided “powerful” evidence to explain her “conflicted and traumatized response” in the period following her alleged rape, suggesting it was “entirely consistent with contemporary understandings of the reaction of victims of sexual assault.”
His second reason was based on the difference between making a dishonest statement and making an incorrect statement, and he referenced his own previous filings when he said that he “did not receive any emails from Mr. Lehrmann before work on the Monday after the weekend.” “. of the incident’.
“To suggest that a rape victim is dishonest because she does not remember such a minor matter immediately after her rape is to ignore both the trauma caused by the rape and the ordinary human experience of memory regarding minor details.”
“One thing that emerged very clearly from Ms Higgins’ evidence was her willingness to accept that something she genuinely thought had happened did not happen in light of objective evidence.”
In her submission, Ms Higgins said she was more intoxicated than ever on the night in question and had “done her best to piece together what happened to her”.
His third reason was that “Mr. Lehrmann’s claims alleging dishonesty rarely go beyond the observation of an inconsistency in the account given by Ms. Higgins.”
Judge Lee will hand down his sentence on Monday at 10.15am.