By Staff reporter
Former political staffer Brittany Higgins has married her partner David Sharaz on the Gold Coast in a tightly guarded ceremony surrounded by family and friends.
Higgins, who campaigned to change the treatment of women in Australian politics and society after she was raped by her former colleague Bruce Lehrmann in 2019, posted the news on Instagram on Saturday night.
Brittany Higgins and David Sharaz married on the Gold Coast on Saturday.Credit: Instagram
“Mr and Mrs Sharaz,” she wrote.
Higgins and Sharaz, a former journalist and media advisor, met in Canberra in 2020. “I loved you when I saw you for the first time,” Sharaz said in 2021.
The couple celebrated their wedding with 80 guests.Credit: Instagram
They married at The Valley Estate in the Currumbin Valley, with 80 guests cheering them down the aisle including former sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins.
Higgins wore a white long-sleeve, lace gown. Sharaz wore a black tuxedo. Media waiting outside to capture photos of the couple were largely shielded from the event by the venue’s security team.
The relationship between the pair was a focus of Lehrmann’s defamation suit against Network 10, which first broadcast Higgins’s allegations that she had been raped by Lehrmann in the office of former Coalition minister Linda Reynolds.
Higgins and Sharaz had discussed how she could go public with her claims, including timing and impact before she sat down with Ten presenter Lisa Wilkinson to tell her story.
Federal Court Justice Michael Lee later upheld Ten’s truth defence to Lehrmann’s defamation claim, arguing they had proved to the civil standard – on the balance of probabilities – that Lehrmann raped Higgins in Parliament House.
Lehrmann lodged his notice of appeal against Lee’s judgement on Friday.
Higgins and Sharaz are also the subject of a court action by Reynolds who is pursuing them for aggravated damages over several social media posts she claims defamed her after she was accused of being part of a political cover-up.
In his judgement, Lee criticised aspects of Higgins’s claims that there had been a cover-up of her assault.
Reynolds is pursuing freezing orders over Higgins and Sharaz’s assets, including a trust Higgins set up after she won $2.4 million in compensation from the federal government and a house in the south of France that the couple have lived in since January.
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