It took an intervention by the judge presiding over the trial, but Lisa Wilkinson finally accepted what anyone who watched her Logies speech might have thought obvious: that she believed Brittany Higgins’s claim that she was raped.
In her first day under cross-examination in the defamation case brought by Bruce Lehrmann, Wilkinson was confident and articulate, pausing to think about her answers, but often terse and sometimes combative. It was the 15th day of the trial and a crucial one for Wilkinson and the Ten Network, battling to convince judge Michael Lee that their investigation of Higgins’s rape allegation was reasonable and in the public interest.
In a series of tense exchanges with Lehrmann’s barrister, Matthew Richardson SC, Wilkinson defended her role in preparing the program. At one point, when Richardson accused her of being “thrilled by the riveting commercial appeal” of Higgins’s story, she shot back: “Don’t make me sound like a cheap tabloid journalist, Mr Richardson.”
Richardson opened by asking her about the Logies speech in which she lauded Higgins for her courage and “for never giving up” – prejudicial comments that caused a three-month delay to Lehrmann’s criminal trial.
Richardson was unsuccessful in extracting a concession from Wilkinson that the audience would understand her to have meant she believed what Higgins was saying.
“I was celebrating her courage,” Wilkinson insisted.
Just as Richardson was about to move on, Justice Lee moved in.
“Would you accept … that a woman would not be showing unwavering courage if she made a false allegation of rape … against an innocent man?” he asked.
Wilkinson: “Yes, I accept that.”
Justice Lee: “Does it not follow that if you say that someone’s showing unwavering courage, it means they’re making a true allegation of rape against a guilty man?”
“Yes,” Wilkinson agreed after a pause.
It became clear during Thursday’s proceedings why Wilkinson wanted her own legal team in the trial, after ditching Ten’s lawyers.
The former host of The Project was at pains to distinguish her role in the Higgins program from that of Ten’s producers, saying she was concerned by some of the claims made by Higgins but had relied on other members of the team to investigate them.
Richardson took her to a transcript of the five hour pre-interview meeting she and her producer, Angus Llewellyn, held with Higgins and her fiance, David Sharaz, during which Higgins claimed all the messages and data from her phone had been lost.
“I actually can’t follow what she’s saying here, Mr Richardson,” Wilkinson acknowledged.
“Did it concern you at this point that what she was saying seemed to be fairly incomprehensible?” he asked.
“Yes,” Wilkinson said.
Richardson pointed out that Higgins was purporting to have a photo on her phone of a bruise that was evidence of the alleged assault.
“Did it occur to you to ask how this particular photo had somehow survived the complete death of the phone?” Richardson asked.
Wilkinson: “Of course.”
Richardson: “Did you ever ask that question?”
Wilkinson: “I spoke to my producer (Llewellyn) about it.”
On Tuesday, Llewellyn gave evidence that it hadn’t occurred to him to ask how the photo had somehow survived when almost all other information on Higgins’s phone from that period had not. Llewellyn said he presumed it was the original photo and hadn’t asked to see the metadata.
“We had Ms Higgins sign a statutory declaration to say that this was contemporaneous so that is what we did.”
On Thursday, it was Wilkinson’s turn to plead she wasn’t tech-savvy.
She had expected Llewellyn to verify the image in whatever way he could, she said.
The presenter escalated her concerns “up the chain” with the program’s management, she repeated several times, as Richardson grilled her over inconsistencies in Higgins’s claims about the phone.
Justice Lee intervened again to ask if it would be fair to say that she would have expected somebody in the team to take steps to authenticate the photo.
Wilkinson agreed, saying senior management had decided that due to the sensitive nature of the story, all communication with Higgins should be limited to one person, and that was Llewellyn.
Richardson took her to an exchange of messages she had with Llewellyn in which she queried: how come she still has the bruise shot?
“It’s a crucial point,” she told her producer.
“I want to suggest to you that at this point, you believed that this issue presented a potential significant credibility problem for your source,” Richardson asked.
“Correct,” she answered.
Wilkinson said she had a phone conversation with Llewellyn and elevated her concerns to senior members of the team.
Justice Lee asked: “This issue had raised an alarm bell for you?”
“Yes,” Wilkinson agreed.
Justice Lee: “But did you give evidence about the fact you also escalated this to somebody else?”
Wilkinson: “I was a bit insistent we needed to do further investigation. And I was told it had been further investigated and it was now a non issue.”
For a day in which Wilkinson and Ten hoped to press claims of a responsible and reasonable report, it was an inauspicious start.
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