Taylor Auerbach: One-man wrecking ball bent on revenge leaves reputations bruised, battered

Taylor Auerbach outside the Federal Court in Sydney on Friday, left; and Bruce Lehrmann moving house. Pictures: AAP / KHAPBM/Backgrid

By Friday lunchtime, Taylor Auerbach’s dirty work was done.

The former Seven producer and current one-man wrecking ball walked out of the witness box leaving behind him a trail of destruction that will likely have little effect on the defamation case but will leave lasting scars on those he has smeared.

Auerbach has used the court to settle scores with his enemies, some of them recently his close friends and colleagues.

That was eminently predictable from the moment Ten decided Auerbach’s private war was the perfect opportunity to reopen the case and slide in a bit more evidence it thought would damage Bruce Lehrmann’s credibility.

But it should also have been patently obvious to the network that the unguided Auerbach missile would wreak vast collateral damage on many others – including at least one Ten was honour-bound to protect.

Did the network really not know when it unleashed this monster that it would humiliate its own principal witness, Brittany Higgins, smear the reputation of one of Sydney’s most respected media lawyers and leave several Seven Network journalists eviscerated without the right to challenge uncorroborated evidence?

All this was in Auerbach’s affidavits when he launched his bid to insert himself into the case.

Ten knew Justice Michael Lee would have no choice but to allow the new evidence in. The judge has made it abundantly clear from day one that his courtroom would be a model of open justice, lest there be any suggestion in this most controversial of cases there had been any kind of cover-up.

But on Friday Lee left no doubt about his view of the network’s new star witness.

“One could rationally form a view that this is a man who desperately wanted to do as much damage to his previous employer as he could conceivably do,” Lee said.  But it wasn’t Seven that suffered the biggest hits in Auerbach’s spray.

Let’s start with Higgins, who has repeatedly called out the leaking of her private messages, which she had supplied to police in the lead-up to the criminal trial of the man she accuses of raping her – Bruce Lehrmann. Only a small part of the material was ever tabled in court.

Lehrmann’s criminal trial was later abandoned.

But Higgins agreed to give evidence on behalf of Ten and Lisa Wilkinson when Lehrmann sued them for defamation, trusting them to vindicate her claims and protect her interests.

Yet a large slab of that private material ended up on the public record.

Sitting in the Auerbach affidavits was precisely the personal information Ten claimed was passed to Seven’s Spotlight program by Lehrmann.

While Auerbach was still on the stand on Friday morning, wads of that material were being uploaded to the Federal Court website, including the manuscript of Higgins’ unpublished book.

By the time the court broke for lunch, headlines such as “Higgins’ Wolf of Wall Street party” and “The last of the big swinging dicks”, extracted from the book manuscript, were appearing online around the country.

So much for Higgins’ privacy.

Ten had tendered the documents without any redactions.

You might have thought the network bosses had learned their lesson.

It’s the second time in these proceedings the network has shot itself in the foot.

The first was when Ten tried to avoid paying Wilkinson’s legal fees. The TV presenter sued her employer and hundreds of new documents were entered into evidence revealing, as Lee pointed out at the time, how the sausage was made. It wasn’t pretty.

Wilkinson’s cross-claim revealed she was acting on Ten’s legal advice when she gave her infamous Logies speech. Not only had Ten failed to make that advice public, it had ­refused to waive legal privilege earlier in the defamation case, so Lee couldn’t see it either.

The clumsy attempt to avoid paying for Wilkinson’s barrister played right into Lehrmann’s hands and may yet have an impact on any damages awarded.

And what was Ten thinking when it gave Auerbach a public platform to slur the reputation of highly respected Addisons lawyer Richard Keegan, whose name is now unfairly tarnished by the ex-Seven producer’s uncorroborated testimony of what would be gross professional misconduct – if there was a shred of evidence to back it up.

In the days after the Spotlight episode went to air, Auerbach claims he received a phone call from Keegan, from Seven’s regular external law firm.

The affidavit states Auerbach alleges Keegan said to him: “I’ve heard that Ten and Lisa are not very happy about the broadcast and might come after us. It might be a good idea to have a look at everything, especially the raw interview tapes.’’

Auerbach claims he “understood this meant that I should delete any materials that could be damaging for Seven” and that he then deleted anything he could find on his computer and phone.

In court on Thursday it was left to Lehrmann’s barrister, Matthew Richardson SC, to challenge Auerbach on these allegations, suggesting he’d never spoken to the lawyer at all during that time period, let alone to be told to delete anything.

“Completely incorrect,” Auerbach said.

By Friday Ten was doing its best to wash its hands of the whole thing.

Lee had already made it clear he was deeply concerned the case was “starting to stray into a series of allegations made against people who are not parties to these proceedings”.

After being pulled up by Lee again, Ten’s barrister, Matt Collins KC, declared he made “no submission whatsoever about the propriety of the solicitor who was named in Mr Auerbach’s affidavit”. Too late. The beast was already out of the cage.

The descent into farce may have reached its nadir with an argument over whether a photo of a shoe on Spotlight executive producer Mark Llewellyn’s balcony should be tendered in evidence. An exasperated Lee ruled not.

By late morning a distinctly unhappy Lee stepped in to warn about the “Gatling gun allegations” that had been thrown around in his court.

When Wilkinson’s barrister, Barry Dean, began to argue that Auerbach was “a very impressive witness”, Lee had had enough.

“Don’t put him up as some sort of noble public interested person who was coming along to assist His Majesty’s justices,” Lee warned. “He’s a man who wanted to make a range of allegations against people under absolute privilege.”