‘Shattered person’: Higgins’ loved ones detail toll of alleged rape
Brittany Higgins “looked broken” and it seemed “a light had turned off” in her after alleged rape, her mum, former boyfriend and flatmate have told a jury.
Police & Courts
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Those closest to Brittany Higgins, including her mother and her former boyfriend, told a jury she “looked broken” and it appeared “a light had turned off” in the staffer after she was allegedly raped by colleague Bruce Lehrmann.
The evidence about the toll on Ms Higgins came as lawyers in the case tried to pin down specific dates and time frames three years after the alleged attack.
Lehrmann, 27, has pleaded not guilty to sexual intercourse without Ms Higgins’ consent, and being reckless to her consent, at Parliament House on 23 March 2019.
Ms Higgins told the court she woke up drunk to find Lehrmann sexually assaulting her on the couch in the office of then-Minister Linda Reynolds after a night out drinking.
Lehrmann’s barrister has told the jury his client never had sex with Ms Higgins.
Ms Higgins’ mother, Kelly, gave evidence in the trial this week and told the jury her daughter changed at around the time of the alleged rape.
“Brittany became very distant. Brittany became very quiet,” Kelly Higgins told the court.
“Physically I noticed from her photos … She’d lost a lot of weight. She got quite thin. She just looked quite broken.”
It wasn’t until a dinner in Brisbane, in November 2019, that Kelly Higgins said her daughter told her about the allegations, including the moments before when she sat in Minister Reynolds’ office reflecting on her life.
“This was her dream,” Kelly Higgins told the court.
“This is everything she wanted and she just remembers feeling kind of proud and happy and then she passed out.
Kelly Higgins told the court her daughter then told her she woke up from a pain in her leg with Lehrmann having sex with her.
“He was looking coldly at her. He was non-responsive to her. She was telling him no,” Kelly Higgins told the court her daughter told her.
Kelly Higgins told the court her daughter became an “unfamiliar” person in the wake of her alleged assault.
“She was just so frozen in what had happened to her,” she said.
Brittany Higgins’ told the court one of the first people she told about her alleged assault was her former boyfriend, Ben Dillaway.
Mr Dillaway told the court, on Wednesday, he spoke to Ms Higgins on the phone the morning after the alleged rape but she did not want to talk about the night before — and hung up.
In the days that followed, text and call logs shown to the jury reveal, the pair communicated in text and phone calls.
“I really don’t feel it was consensual at all,” she texted him.
Mr Dillaway told the court he spoke with Ms Higgins after those messages and asked if she had been raped — he said Ms Higgins “broke down and the conversation ended”.
‘LIKE A LIGHT HAD TURNED OFF IN HER’
Two days later, he told the court, she disclosed the alleged rape in person after he arrived in Canberra to support her.
“I kind of just had her in my arms and she was very much what I would say would be a broken person,” he told the court.
“From the date forward when she made the revelation … that’s like a light had turned off in her. She was a broken, shattered person I would say.”
Lehrmann’s barrister, Steve Whybrow, suggested Ms Higgins had not disclosed any rape before she expressed fears over losing her job in a text.
Mr Dillaway agreed.
Ms Higgins’ housemate, Alexandra Humphries, told the court the staffer was “bubbly” when she first arrived in Canberra – but that changed around the time of the WA election campaign.
Ms Humphries told the court Ms Higgins began staying in her room and pulling out of social events.
“There were a few times I went and knocked on her door to see how she was going, but she’d normally be asleep quite early at night, all curled up, and she just never seemed to want to come,” Ms Humphries told the court.
Ms Humphries said Ms Higgins, by the time she moved out later that year, had gone from tidy to messy, eating frozen meals and emerging from her room once a week with piles of dishes.
“When she moved out there were bowls and plates and things in the rubbish bin, I don’t think she could clean them or got around to cleaning them,” Ms Humphries said.
‘COULD NOT CONSENT’: HIGGINS MADE RAPE ALLEGATION WITHIN DAYS, COLLEAGUES TELL COURT
Brittany Higgins’ bosses and colleagues in Parliament House have given evidence about the moments Ms Higgins first claimed she had been sexually assaulted by her colleague, Bruce Lehrmann, in their workplace.
The exact timeline of her disclosures to her colleagues have become the subject of much questioning in the case.
Senior bureaucrat, Chris Payne, told the court an upset Ms Higgins walked into his office on either Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday following the alleged assault over the weekend.
Mr Payne told the jury Ms Higgins claimed she had woken up with Lehrmann on top of her.
When Ms Higgins regained her composure, Mr Payne said, he asked if Lehrmann had “raped” her.
‘WOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE F*****G A LOG’
“She said, ‘I could not have consented. It would have been like f***ing a log,’ and at that point she was very upset again,” Mr Payne told the court on Tuesday.
The office’s aide-de-camp, Nikita Irvine, said she asked a “very down” Ms Higgins if she wanted to go for a walk after Mr Payne told her Lehrmann had been fired after an “incident”.
Ms Irvine told the court, on Wednesday, that Ms Higgins claimed she had been “very drunk” when Lehrmann and her went to Parliament House.
“They were going to go back to Parliament House because Bruce had something he wanted to show her. It was some whiskey or something,” Ms Irvine told the court on Wednesday.
“When she woke up he was on top of her … I said, ‘Okay. Do you think?’, and she said, ‘Yes, definitely’,” Ms Irvine said, or her conversation with Higgins.
“I was alluding to the fact there had been an alleged assault.”
Ms Higgins’ boss, chief of staff Fiona Brown, also told the jury about the first moment the allegation emerged in the days after the alleged rape.
LEHRMANN’S ‘SECOND STRIKE’
Ms Brown gave evidence she learned Ms Higgins and Lehrmann had breached security by attending Parliament House after hours and had separate meetings with them as a result.
She told the court she effectively dismissed Lehrmann because it was his second strike, after he allegedly mishandled a document earlier in March.
Ms Brown said Ms Higgins, in their meeting on the Tuesday after the alleged assault, told her she had been discovered naked in the office by security but did not disclose an alleged rape.
She was not fired for the security breach.
It was in a second meeting, five days after the alleged assault, that Ms Brown said Ms Higgins raised the accusation.
“As (Ms Higgins) got up and walked out, she turned around and she said … ‘I remember him on top of me’,” Ms Brown told the court on Tuesday.
“And I said ‘oh my god’ … ‘Has something happened you didn’t want to have happen?’.”
Ms Brown said Ms Higgins just shook her head, declined to make a complaint, and left.
DNA TEST ON DRESS ‘IMPACTED’ BY WASHING: EXPERT
The forensic biologist who tested Brittany Higgins’ white dress for the DNA of Bruce Lehrmann, her alleged rapist, has told a court washing may have destroyed any potential evidence.
Jennifer Stone appeared in the ACT Supreme Court on Wednesday after she was asked to examine Ms Higgins’ dress for police.
The accomplished scientist told the court the entire dress, front to back and inside out, was examined with the blue light “you might see in some crime shows”, among other tests, but returned negative results for semen.
Ms Stone told the court she had been instructed the dress had been washed – and that made it very difficult to obtain DNA if any was ever present.
“It is very difficult to screen for semen after something’s been washed, however it is possible and that’s why (the test) was conducted in this case,” she told the jury.
Ms Stone told the court washing would remove trace DNA and DNA found in body fluids like semen.
“If that body fluid, that trace DNA, had have been on the item it would negatively impact in the sense that that would remove it,” she said.
“So, therefore, I can’t detect it in the tests or the sampling methods that I use to obtain a DNA profile.”
Ms Higgins told the court she initially kept the white cocktail dress, which she was wearing when she was allegedly assaulted, in a bag under her bed for six months.
Under cross-examination she conceded it may have just been for a few weeks – but either way she wore the dress only once more and washed it.
“The worst thing in the world happened to me in this dress, I never wore it beyond this time, this one time,” she told the court last week.
“But it felt like, in this moment, I wanted to reclaim agency in the dress.”
By the time Ms Higgins washed the dress she had decided not to continue her police complaint against Lehrmann, Ms Higgins told the court.
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