Linda Reynolds defamation judgment leaves Brittany Higgins facing a world of difficulties
Justice Tottle's devastating findings reveal Brittany Higgins made 26 false statements to the media, dismantling claims of a political cover-up.
Thanks to her own intransigence, Brittany Higgins now faces a world of difficulties.
Instead of apologising to her former boss, Linda Reynolds, and settling their defamation dispute out of court, Higgins held on to the end, blind to the warnings of what awaited her.
Even if she manages to avoid bankruptcy and pays damages and legal costs to Reynolds, she is still not out of the woods.
Her chosen career is public relations and she had planned to write a book. But whatever she now writes or says on behalf of clients will be assessed against this week’s devastating findings by Justice Paul Tottle of the Supreme Court of Western Australia.
He found that Higgins had exaggerated and embellished aspects of her story when speaking to the media, critical elements of her narrative did not correspond with reality, others were misleading, dishonest, speculative, driven by malice or simply untrue.
Higgins had plenty of warning about the potentially disastrous consequences of allowing her dispute with Reynolds, a former Liberal senator, to proceed to judgment.
By refusing to apologise, she opened the way for Tottle to make it crystal clear there had been no political cover-up of the sexual assault inflicted on Higgins by fellow staffer Bruce Lehrmann.
It’s astounding Higgins did not see that coming.
Tottle’s finding is in line with last year’s decision by Justice Michael Lee in Lehrmann’s equally disastrous defamation case in the Federal Court.
Lehrmann is now seeking to overturn Lee’s ruling that, on the civil standard of proof, he had raped Higgins and had not been defamed by journalist Lisa Wilkinson and Network Ten.
Because of her mental condition, Higgins was unfit to give evidence before Tottle in person.
So Tottle admitted into evidence her statements in the transcript of the Lehrmann defamation proceedings before Lee, as well as her statements at Lehrmann’s aborted criminal trial.
Lee, like Tottle, had found there was no cover-up. He also found Higgins had told nine untruths.
Tottle went further and found 26 instances in which Higgins had made false or misleading statements to the media.
Those false statements formed the basis for saturation media coverage which gave the public the false impression that Reynolds and the former Coalition government had covered up a sexual assault in Parliament House.
By retailing that false narrative, large parts of the media were simply led up the garden path by a young woman who, according to the judge, had convinced herself that this fictional cover-up actually took place.
How this happened is a tale in which the ABC played a critically important role.
One of the factors that launched Higgins on the path to self-delusion appears to be the broadcast by the ABC of a Four Corners program entitled The Canberra Bubble.
That program made accusations about Liberal Party politicians and female staffers. Tottle’s judgment says Higgins’ own evidence was that it had a “profound” impact on her.
He said there was no doubt Higgins had suffered an injury and experienced trauma.
“But her concern to draw parallels with the treatment the other women said they had received from the Liberal Party led her to colour her account of how she had been treated,” the judge said.
“Specifically, she emphasised the allegation she was silenced as part of a cover-up for the good of the Liberal Party. In truth, there was no such cover-up.”
Tottle’s analysis means the nation was fed a false narrative by the media after a young woman had been influenced by a television program to “colour” her account of what had happened after the rape.
It would be unfair to blame the ABC for that false narrative. But based on Tottle’s analysis, it does seem as though Four Corners fed a delusion in Higgins’s mind.
From there, other parts of the media amplified that delusion to the point where it influenced the conduct of the both sides of politics and, quite possibly, the outcome of the 2022 election.
One of the most significant parts of Tottle’s judgment is his refusal to accept that all inconsistencies in the story told by Higgins are due to the ongoing impact of the trauma she suffered at the hands of Lehrmann.
The judge believed it was entirely understandable that the evidence she gave in the immediate aftermath of the rape was unreliable.
But by 2021, long after the assault, Tottle found that her account of events was “distorted by her need for events to conform to her view about how she was treated by the Liberal Party”.
She made statements that had no foundation in fact, the judge found.
For the media, Tottle’s judgment should be a cause for immense introspection if not shame.
It means most parts of the fourth estate – the craft of journalism – failed in their duty to weed out delusions and present their audience with the truth.
Instead they presented the nation with a false narrative.
It is worth considering what course this affair might have taken had everyone involved adopted the principle that accusations of criminal wrongdoing should be prosecuted by the justice system, not the media.
By discarding that principle, significant parts of the mainstream media seemed utterly unaware of their limitations. They retailed falsehoods and presented it as news.
They punished the innocent, particularly Linda Reynolds, and inflicted irreparable damage without just cause. It was an appalling misuse of power.
The way back from this precipice is to recognise what went wrong so it can never happen again.
Chris Merritt is vice-president of the Rule of Law Institute of Australia
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