Simple truth emerges as Brittany Higgins’ texts are leaked

Somewhere, lost in the vortex of thousands of Brittany Higgins’ text messages being leaked to media outlets, is one simple truth.

COMMENT

Somewhere, lost in the vortex of thousands of Brittany Higgins’ text messages being leaked to media outlets, is this simple truth.

Whatever you think of how Ms Higgins, in her own words, “weaponised” her own story, nobody deserves to have the private contents of their phone disgorged across the media.

It is a terrifying precedent if we are to accept that the price of ever speaking to the media is that your entire phone is “fair game”.

There has been a striking lack of curiosity about how Ms Higgins’ text messages have been finding their way into media outlets.

It extends all the way to the board of inquiry led by Walter Sofronoff KC, charged with investigating the trial and the aftermath.

Plenty of witnesses were called. None were asked why this keeps happening.

But how can it not be a threat to the administration of justice if complainants in sexual assault matters see what might happen to their phone when it is handed to police?

Brittany Higgins. Picture: Gary Ramage/NCA NewsWire

Some will argue Ms Higgins chose this path. That she could have remained cloaked in anonymity.

That is true. But does it mean she deserves this? Does it justify this?

These messages have never been tendered as evidence in proceedings. They were not provided under freedom of information.

Some of the messages do raise issues of legitimate public interest.

Senator Katy Gallagher told parliament she was not tipped off about the rape allegation. The leaked texts suggest she was aware of the issue at least four days before the Higgins allegations became publicly known in February 2021. That raises questions as to whether or not she may have misled parliament.

But how these text messages found their way from her phone into the news is also relevant.

Ms Higgins was forced to hand over her phone to police as part of the investigation. She resisted this. She feared what might happen if they were leaked. She told police she was frightened.

She knew that under sensitive investigation protocols that the government of the day was briefed on politically sensitive investigations.

What’s happening now shows that her fears may have been legitimate. What is happening to her is unimaginable.

Brittany Higgins outside court in October of 2022. Picture: Gary Ramage/NCA NewsWire

During the board of inquiry into the trial of Bruce Lehrmann - who was never convicted and maintains his innocence - much has been reported about what the police thought of Ms Higgins’ credibility.

Much of the bad blood between police and Ms Higgins can be traced back to her initial refusal to hand over her phone.

It is a Kafkaesque nightmare that just as police witnesses were tearing her apart at the inquiry for not handing over her phone, persons unknown were preparing to leak the phone’s contents to journalists.

Ms Higgins was legally unrepresented at the inquiry, a decision that looks in retrospect like a grotesque mistake.

She should have demanded the Sofonoff inquiry expand the terms of reference into the leaks of the personal and private contents of her phone.

Witness after witness has been given a platform to make strong criticisms of her.

She should have been legally represented at the inquiry as Bruce Lehrmann should have been.

At one stage the inquiry chair Walter Sofronoff KC complained about the media reporting that police included baseless sexual slurs about Ms Higgins in a brief of evidence.

In reality it underlined the DPP’s complaint that the brief included cherrypicked material designed to attack Ms Higgins’ credibility.

The DPP’s barrister Mark Tedeschi told the inquiry that this material would not have been admissible. But that is the point! Why was this inadmissible material in the police brief in the first place?

Bruce Lehrmann. Picture: Gary Ramage/NCA NewsWire

Separate to the inquiry, the old trope that Ms Higgins was a silly girl being bossed around by her boyfriend has reared its ugly head again, two years after it was peddled when the story first broke.

Ms Higgins had something to say about that too, at the Women’s March for Justice, which seems a lifetime ago now.

“I was dismayed by senior male journalists who routinely implied that my partner was pulling the strings behind the scenes,’’ she said.

“The subtle inference being that a traumatised woman wasn’t capable of weaponising her own story.”

Do the text messages suggest her fiancee David Sharaz was too involved and too invested politically? Most certainly. Does that mean Ms Higgins was being led by the nose? It does not. She made her own choices.

God knows, she must regret some of them now.

But she also achieved real things and legislative change that would not have happened if she didn’t come forward and shine a light on the way in which complaints are handled at Parliament House.

These important political reforms would not have occurred if she had remained silent, as many lawyers now primly insist she should have.

“By staying silent, I felt like it would have made me complicit,” she said at the women’s march for justice.

“ ... my ongoing silence would have inadvertently said to those people in charge that you can treat people in this way and it’s OK.”

Regardless of where you sit in this debate, what is happening to her now is not OK. How she is being treated is not OK.

The ends do not justify the means.