The beauty of the press is that it can’t be controlled. True, the supine, the stupid and the ideological end of the press can be manipulated, but eventually, in a free and open society with a competitive media, if a story is important enough, the press will usually ensure the truth comes out.
That beauty became a problem for Brittany Higgins and David Sharaz. They made a rookie’s error when they set out on a strategy to use the media, instead of the criminal justice system, to press their case.
They appear to have assumed they would always be able to control the narrative, to shape the headlines, to run their preferred lines without critical analysis – with the help of enough supporters in the media.
Perhaps they thought their experience with Lisa Wilkinson on The Project would be repeated over and over again.
Having tried to mould the media message, they cannot complain when some parts of the media – including this newspaper – decline to be shaped for their purposes. That was the gamble Higgins and Sharaz took.
Remember that the strategy of making this a media and political story instead of a criminal justice matter was a deliberate choice by Higgins and her advisers. There is no evidence that any of Higgins’s media supporters advised the young woman against this.
In a sign of how skewed this story became, the evidence to date suggests that two people, and only two people, encouraged Higgins to go to the police when there was an inkling of sexual activity: her old boss, senator Linda Reynolds, and former chief of staff Fiona Brown.
As Steven Whybrow SC, Bruce Lehrmann’s barrister, said to this newspaper: “Ms Higgins was asked by the police to not do media until she’d spoken to the police. Now if she’d listened to the police, if they had taken a statement from her and then gone and arrested Bruce, The Project wouldn’t have been able to play their interview because it would’ve been a breach of sub judice rules about outstanding criminal charges. But by doing it this way, he was out there, he was already the man who raped Brittany Higgins.”
Indeed, there are several extremely important protections available to complainants, such as the right to remain anonymous, that would have been available to Higgins had she followed the usual criminal justice process.
Tanya Plibersek spoke of a “rape”, not an “alleged rape”, in parliament. Prime minister Scott Morrison apologised to Higgins for the things that happened in Parliament House. It was nothing short of grotesque.
The effect of the Higgins-Sharaz media and political campaign was not merely to put themselves in the spotlight but to deprive Lehrmann of the presumption of innocence and the due process a normal criminal justice investigation would have given him.
The inference is open that they wanted to convict Lehrmann in the media, whatever a jury decided. This dreadful strategy drove Lehrmann, not surprisingly, to the edge of suicide. Not that the Higgins-Sharaz media cheer squad seemed to care one jot about this. Just another necessary victim of the movement, the hardheads of #MeToo no doubt would have thought.
This strategy caused terrible collateral damage to others, too. Reynolds’s health suffered terribly after Higgins made unfounded accusations against her. Similar claims led Brown to wade into the surf one day, planning to swim out to drown or be taken by a shark. She was saved by a nearby surfer who asked if she was OK, took her hand and led her back to the beach.
And never forget that Kimberley Kitching died of a suspected heart attack after being bullied by a group of Labor women she dubbed the “mean girls”.
Katy Gallagher was one of the trio of mean girls, along with Penny Wong and Kristina Keneally, who targeted Kitching reportedly because she was horrified that Labor women were planning to weaponise a rape allegation for ugly political purposes.
When is too much for these people? How they can live with any of these events that followed the deliberately chosen and carefully considered media and political strategy of Higgins and Sharaz is for them and their consciences.
Now the tide has turned. As would always happen, the media being free and all. Higgins, Sharaz and their media supporters cannot credibly complain that uncomfortable questions are being asked or that new information is being exposed by this newspaper.
Yet, incredibly, some are. Hearing Higgins’s support club in the media wail about privacy and leaked material rings hollow indeed given the role they played in upturning the presumption of innocence.
They continue to overlook the uncomfortable reality that Higgins deliberately chose, and was egged on by these same journalists, to make this affair a matter for the media and the political class.
They went against the advice of the police. They trashed Lehrmann’s right to the presumption of innocence. They targeted Reynolds and Brown, uninterested in describing their support for Higgins fairly and honestly.
Where is the gnashing of teeth about Wilkinson and producer Angus Llewellyn, caught in the five-hour audio discussing Higgins’s plan to tape a private conversation she had with senator Michaelia Cash?
This has a long way to run. Yet too many in the media are still unable to engage their critical faculties, let alone display professional journalism, in case it interferes with their #MeToo advocacy.
Remarkable features of the cosy and unquestioning relationship between The Project and the Higgins-Sharaz team have attracted insufficient attention to date.
Consider the emails exchanged between Wilkinson and Sharaz headed “#MeToo Liberal Party Project Pitch”. And consider this: in a text to Higgins, Sharaz reveals that The Project had given him an advance copy of the final Wilkinson-Higgins interview at least four days before it went to air, and that he had given it to Gallagher.
Was this for pre-vetting? Does this indicate the interview was more akin to a joint venture between this group at the Ten Network and Higgins and Sharaz rather than an arms-length interview? Since when does this deserve even a Logie?
Hypocrisy of Olympic level heights has abounded in this affair and no doubt there is much room for more. Will the Albanese government, which championed a new era of transparency and honesty at the election, condone what appears to be a clear case of Gallagher, at minimum, misleading parliament?
What about the teals? These apparent paragons of virtue appear to have gone missing in action on Gallagher’s dubious statements, not to mention the need for the new National Anti-Corruption Commission to examine the circumstances of Higgins’s multimillion-dollar, uncontested payout.
Given Labor’s relentless weaponisation of the rape allegation, Australians are entitled to ask: was Labor’s motive, in making this payment to Higgins, one of paying for services rendered?
Whatever happens, the more honest brokers will ask themselves: would any of this have happened if Higgins had taken police advice not to speak to the media?
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