As Justice Michael Lee said last year when rejecting as false Higgins’s claim that Linda Reynolds and Fiona Brown tried to cover up an alleged rape, this was “the only alleged cover-up of which I am aware where those said to be responsible for the covering up were almost insisting the complainant go to the police”.
In keeping with this inverted moral universe, writer Julia Baird thinks Higgins should not be held to account for damage she may have done to others when she made untrue claims of a political cover-up more than two years after the alleged rape.
Last weekend, under the headline “What I wish Linda Reynolds would say, instead of suing Brittany Higgins”, Baird wrote this in Nine papers: “Why would Reynolds not say: ‘Look, I think, and Justice Lee found, that Brittany Higgins and The Project promoted regretful, baseless claims of a political conspiracy that I was falsely alleged to be part of. This has been damaging to my health and reputation. But I accept that a great wrong was found to have occurred to a young woman in my employ and I will avoid further litigation in the hope she can put this awful episode behind her. I wish her well.”
Baird’s feelings for Higgins are clear enough. Her logic is harder to locate. Does Baird mean that if a woman is found, on the balance of probabilities, to have been raped in 2019, the woman will get a leave pass more than two years later for making false allegations against other people, allegations that damage their physical and mental health, their careers and reputations, their lives?
Justice Lee found that Higgins’s claims of a political cover-up were false. He found that claims that Reynolds and Brown “were active participants in a systemic cover-up of alleged criminal conduct” lacked “any solid, verifiable material” in support.
The Federal Court judge drew a sharp distinction between the character of Higgins’s evidence in 2019 with the character of her claims in 2021. He acknowledged that “any inconsistent or untrue representations in 2019 are not inconsistent with the conduct of a genuine victim of sexual assault struggling to process what happened, seeking to cope, and working through her options”.
Equally important with his findings about rape trauma, the judge definitively rejected rape trauma as an explanation or excuse for Higgins’s untrue statements made some two years later when she alleged that Reynolds and Brown had treated her badly as part of her larger story of a political cover-up.
Yet, like Baird last weekend, fellow writer Margaret Simons suggested soon after Lee’s judgment that someone raped in 2019 should have some kind of general exemption from sanctions for actions in 2021 and 2022. Even after Lee found Higgins had made nine false statements in her claim against the commonwealth, Simons suggested it would be terrible for the National Anti-Corruption Commission to investigate a payment by the commonwealth to “a victim of a traumatising crime” by way of “compensation”.
Simons’s proposition was absurd. Compensation was not paid to Higgins for a rape. Money was paid for her claims that she was treated badly by senior ministers and by Brown. Lee found that Higgins made untrue statements in her claim.
Baird’s suggestion that Reynolds spare Higgins by walking away from the defamation claim under way in the West Australian Supreme Court is equally absurd. The double standards from the host of a podcast called Not Stupid are, well, stupid. Baird treats Reynolds as collateral damage, as a woman whose claims apparently need not be taken too seriously because she was Higgins’s older boss.
Baird failed to address the reasons Reynolds is now in court. The WA senator has never had the chance to fully defend herself in court against Higgins’s false allegations of a political cover-up. Not in the criminal trial in October 2022, nor when the commonwealth decided to pay Higgins $2.4m in December 2022 as compensation for claims that she was mistreated by Reynolds and others. Not during the Sofronoff inquiry in July last year as it concerned the criminal trial.
Put simply, Reynolds is in court right now because Higgins refused to apologise for social media posts that Reynolds says form a long and well-orchestrated plan by Higgins and David Sharaz to damage Reynolds with false allegations of a political cover-up.
There is one sound reason Reynolds might have chosen not to sue Higgins – though Baird didn’t mention this. Reynolds may lose. Notwithstanding Lee’s findings, it is entirely possible that Justice Paul Tottle finds, for any number of reasons, against Reynolds. That is a different matter entirely from Baird’s absurd suggestion that Higgins should not have to account for her behaviour more than two years later.
A small measure of reason might prevail among some of Higgins’s supporters if one proposes the same scenario – with no names. Or is Baird’s suggested leave pass suitable only for a woman named Brittany Higgins? Is there an expiry date on this leave pass?
The most logical way this ghastly saga could have ended long ago is the same one Higgins’s enablers will not countenance. I wish Higgins could have said sorry. Sorry to Reynolds and so sorry to Brown for making allegations against them that Lee found to be false.
Alas, sorry is the hardest word for Higgins. Admitting to the false claims with an apology would surely mean the Albanese government would have to revisit its $2.4m payment to Higgins. It would ensnare senior ministers Katy Gallagher and Penny Wong who, like Wilkinson, were willing to destroy Reynolds and Brown over a claim that lacked any solid, verifiable evidence.
And Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’s efforts to ensure that Higgins’s claims were not tested should attract fierce scrutiny from, at minimum, the National Audit Office but more appropriately by the National Anti-Corruption Commission.
This dilemma may have more tragic consequences for Higgins than financial ones. Even if Justice Tottle finds against Reynolds, short of him finding there was indeed a political cover-up, Higgins risks being defined forever by her untrue claims of a political cover-up in Parliament House.
A genuine apology from Higgins long ago, but certainly after Lee’s judgment, could have headed off all this future calamity.
I wish Higgins could have said sorry to Reynolds and to Brown for another reason. It could have been cathartic for her. And I wish Baird and other “supporters” like her would say sorry for, effectively, encouraging Higgins to think that she didn’t have to say sorry.
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