Brittany Higgins-Bruce Lehrmann case: Linda Reynolds’ office ‘steam clean’ myth disproved
In the Brittany Higgins saga, a sensational lie took hold early on, suggesting morally bankrupt and criminal behaviour at the most senior levels of politics. Now we know what the cleaner found.
There is a maxim that the first lie wins. None more so in the Brittany Higgins saga. At the centre of this long-running drama, amid the twists and turns, a sensational lie took hold early on.
Just as deadly bushfires can ignite when a tiny cigarette butt is thrown into dry grass, the political cover-up claims in the Higgins story were fuelled by an explosive spark: an anonymous lie that the office of then defence industry minister Linda Reynolds was “steam cleaned” to remove evidence after the alleged rape of Higgins by Bruce Lehrmann on March 23, 2019.
Lehrmann has always maintained his innocence.
The steam-cleaning allegation suggested morally bankrupt and criminal behaviour at the most senior levels of Australian politics. It turned an allegation of rape into a political scandal the likes of which the country had never seen before.
The claim was a lie. But it would stick, even after numerous investigations proved it was entirely false. Even today, many still believe a ministerial office was steam cleaned to cover up an alleged rape.
Labor pursued the political cover-up claim relentlessly in the lead-up to the federal election last year. Being in government hasn’t tempered it. As recently as a month ago, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek repeated the story during an interview on the Seven Network’s Sunrise, saying: “The central point here is that a young woman made an allegation that she had been sexually assaulted in her workplace and that it had been inappropriately investigated, even covered up by her employers.”
The lie spreads
Many journalists became unquestioning accomplices in prosecuting the cover-up conspiracy. Eventually, this myth reappeared in the ACT Supreme Court when ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold suggested to the jury during the trial of Lehrmann that Reynolds was motivated by “political forces” to conceal Higgins’s sexual assault allegation and to interfere in the investigation of that allegation.
Only after questioning by counsel assisting, Erin Longbottom KC, during the Sofronoff inquiry in May did Drumgold recant his extraordinary claim. On May 11, this exchange took place between Drumgold and inquiry chairman Walter Sofronoff KC:
Sofronoff: “So I take it that sitting here now, having had available to you material that you haven’t seen before, you would acknowledge that your suspicions about the existence of political interference to prevent the case properly going ahead were mistaken?”
Drumgold: “I do accept that.”
As this tawdry tale will soon, mercifully, draw to a close, it’s time to put to bed this deliberately emotive claim of a steam-cleaned office by revealing how the myth started, why it is phony and why it hung around, enabling people – ill-informed or brimming with wicked intent – to repeat it.
Here is how the lie started and soon spread. An anonymous letter received by senator Kimberley Kitching on March 6, 2020, alleged that at about 5am, following the alleged rape of a young female staff member, a senior bureaucrat in the Department of Parliamentary Services put in motion a request “to clean the Ministerial Suite where the incident (potential crime) occurred”.
“The cleaning company came immediately and completely cleaned the site, removing any and all potential evidence,” the anonymous letter stated.
The DPS oversees everything from library and research services to security services and building and grounds services at Parliament House. Within political and departmental circles, it was widely suspected that the anonymous allegations against a senior DPS bureaucrat came from a former employee of the same department who, along with a few others, left their roles in the DPS after a cultural review that found serious misconduct.
The name of that senior bureaucrat targeted in the anonymous letter is irrelevant. Far too many decent and highly professional people have been damaged by this saga through no fault of their own.
Inquirer will use “Jane Smith” as a pseudonym for this senior bureaucrat. The anonymous letter included further allegations against Jane Smith, including that she encouraged Higgins to shower before she got dressed and was then helped to leave the scene, that the AFP was not called and neither was an ambulance, even though the female was found “unescorted, nude and in obvious distress”.
The letter said Jane Smith “instructed staff … to amend the reports to show a less significant event and remove key statements” and hindered police attempts to obtain CCTV footage.
This anonymous letter was distributed to many press gallery journalists in the days after the interview on Network Ten’s The Project on February 15, 2021, where Higgins claimed she had been raped in Reynolds’s office. An exclusive story by Samantha Maiden for news.com.au that morning mentioned being “contacted by a whistleblower who claimed the office was ‘steam cleaned’ on the day of the incident”.
Was this the same whistleblower who wrote to Kitching or a different one? Such was the febrile atmosphere, there was no shortage of disgruntled former employees managed out of their role due to misconduct. But there was no steam clean. The office was given a quick clean at the direction of the Department of Finance because DPS staff suspected some kind of social gathering in the minister’s office in the early hours of March 23, 2019.
The Thom report
A simple exercise of looking for evidence, and following the facts, reveals the full extent of the “steam clean” lie. Start with the investigation by Vivienne Thom, the highly regarded former inspector-general of intelligence and security, in late 2020 into the claims made in the anonymous letter. Inquirer has seen the full 27-page Thom report that has never been made public, including attachments and transcripts of interviews by Thom that preceded her written report.
Thom found no evidence to support any of the allegations in the anonymous letter.
Jane Smith did not arrive at Parliament House until after Higgins departed, making claims she told Higgins to shower preposterous. Jane Smith did not request any cleaning of the ministerial suite. That was done by a Department of Finance official after being told by DPS staff that two young staff members entered the minister’s office in the early hours of March 23, 2019, with Higgins sleeping on a couch there overnight.
Thom found that Parliamentary Security Staff officers, who fall under the DPS structure, had checked on Higgins twice, at 4.15am and again at 9.15am. Higgins assured the “white shirts” – as they are called within Parliament House – that she was OK. From there, department staff assumed that some kind of party might have taken place.
Thom found “there was no reason to suspect that an assault or other criminal offence had taken place. I observe that the circumstances of the incident would not have led a reasonable person to conclude that there might be a reason to preserve the state of the suite. The decision to clean the suite does not seem to be unreasonable or improper in the circumstances.” All of the anonymous allegations against Jane Smith were rejected by Thom.
Labor senator Penny Wong has admitted that she was personally briefed about the findings of the Thom investigation in late 2020, before Higgins went public with her rape allegation. This begs the question of whether Wong knew the allegation of Reynolds’s office being cleaned to cover up a potential crime was false.
But still the conspiracy theory was hard to kill off. The “steam clean” phrase would appear in many media articles with no evidence. The Twittersphere, so untethered from reality, became a natural breeding ground for such a conspiracy.
Inquirer understands the first mention of “steam clean” appears in a diary note made by Australian Federal Police deputy commissioner of national security Leanne Close, recording a conversation she had with AFP assistant commissioner Lesa Gale. The note is dated April 3, 2019 – 11 months before the 2020 anonymous letter was sent to Kitching. Close records in the diary note that Gale told her that “staff in the office have had the lounge steam cleaned”. Who fed that to Gale is not recorded. The note was filled with other inaccuracies.
But this single reference to steam clean, untested at the time and later proven to be wrong, appears to be the genesis of what would become a full-blown conspiracy myth of a political cover-up.
What the cleaner found
The AFP would later find during its own review that no one had any reason to suspect a potential sexual assault had occurred in Reynolds’s office. Late-night drinks were not uncommon in parliamentary offices. Special cleans were ordered to ensure that an MP, let alone a minister, would not arrive to the leftover mess and dregs of an office party.
Except there was no mess in Reynolds’s office on March 23, 2019. The office was so clean that Carlos Ramos, the cleaner brought in to clean the office, called his boss that afternoon to check he was in the right office. His boss at the contract cleaning company then called a DPS staff member to check: “I just want to confirm with you, it’s M123 Senator Reynolds’ suite?” she says in audio evidence that formed part of the police brief of evidence. “It’s just that the room’s not exactly what we were expecting, so I want to make sure we’re in the right room.”
Ramos was in the right room.
Had a police investigation into the rape allegation proceeded in 2019, and Ramos been questioned back then, the steam-clean claim would have been quickly revealed as false. But Higgins chose not to proceed with the investigation until after The Project interview and Maiden’s news report.
The “steam clean” conspiracy would live on, sitting side-by-side with Higgins’s claim that there was an attempt to cover up the rape allegation. The phony story of a deep clean spread by “whistleblowers” in 2020 continued after the Senate estimates inquiry into the DPS that exposed the toxic environment within the department.
On June 18, 2021, Rob Stefanic, secretary of the DPS since 2015, put on the public record that there was a small cohort within the DFS responsible for misconduct “proven to be dishonest, disrespectful, bullying, threatening, and even unlawful”. “This cohort dishonestly recast themselves as victims and whistleblowers,” Stefanic told Senate estimates. Insiders understood that Stefanic’s reference alluded to the false claims made in the May 2020 letter to Kitching and the “steam clean” claims made by another suspected disgruntled employee and reported by Maiden when she broke the story of Higgins’s allegation.
Finally, on October 11 last year, it took less than 11 minutes to drive the final nail in the coffin of this bogus claim. At 2.58pm Ramos was sworn in as a witness in the ACT Supreme Court.
The Colombian-born cleaner, whose first language is Spanish, gave evidence on one of those days after Higgins failed to return to the witness box due to mental health issues. With Higgins’s cross-examination incomplete, ACT Chief Justice Lucy McCallum suppressed the media from reporting any of these witnesses and their evidence until Higgins resumed her cross-examination. When the suppression order was lifted, there was a logjam of material for the media to report. Ramos’s evidence about finding a very clean ministerial suite was largely ignored.
‘A routine clean’
Ramos gave evidence that his boss had called him to do a two to three-hour clean-up after what she called a “party” in the minister’s office. Ramos told the court he rang his supervisor from Reynolds’s office to say, “This look in my opinion normal cleaning.” He was there for 30 minutes. Asked by Drumgold if he cleaned the sofa where Higgins would later claim she was raped, Ramos said he used the normal product for cleaning leather.
Drumgold: “You put a chemical on a cloth and you wiped it (the couch) over?”
Ramos: “Yes, yes.”
During cross-examination, Ramos told defence barrister Katrina Musgrove: “It was totally just routine clean.”
Did he need to clean the minister’s bathroom where Higgins claimed she had vomited?
“Not really … like the bathroom wasn’t used recently.”
Ramos said he checked the bathroom, there were no odours, the towels had not been used, and neither the toilet bowl nor any part of the toilet seat needed cleaning.
Musgrove: “And the toilet seat underneath didn’t need to be cleaned?”
Ramos: “No.”
Ramos explained that because the offices were often empty when parliament was not sitting, cleaners were instructed to flush an unused toilet “because if you don’t flush and you don’t clean this is getting certain rust. So anyway, I did (flush) despite it wasn’t dirty,” he told the court.
The Higgins saga today is very different to what first appeared. The steam clean is one of many other claims that would prove to be entirely false but was stubbornly repeated by many people.
Some basic curiosity and objective journalism would have gone a long way to disproving many of the conspiracy claims that have damaged many innocent people.
To this day, it appears on the Walkey Foundation website, under Maiden’s name: “Parliament office ‘steam cleaned’ after alleged attack.” Perhaps it is time for some in the media to clean up their house.
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