David Sharaz: the witness who never appeared
Where was Sharaz when Lisa Wilkinson was fighting for her professional life in court? The evidence of the man dubbed ‘puppet master’ by Bruce Lehrmann would have been relevant.
As we take stock of the Lehrmann defamation trial, it’s worth casting an eye over the performance of the key players whose role will be central to Justice Michael Lee’s decision – with sharpest focus on the witness who never appeared.
Where was David Sharaz when Lisa Wilkinson was fighting for her professional life these past few weeks? Not in court, that’s for sure. Outside, yes: arriving every morning with his fiancee, Brittany Higgins, when she was giving evidence, deferentially a step behind but always in shot for the waiting photographers.
Then, gone from the building. But not from the narrative that slowly emerged in Lee’s courtroom: of a man who wasn’t in Higgins’s life when she allegedly was raped by Bruce Lehrmann in 2019 but who quickly become a central character in the events that followed.
Perhaps gone for good now, jetted off with Higgins on Monday to start a new life in the house she has bought in the south of France, just a year after her $2.4m payout from the Albanese government.
Lee, now considering his verdict in the defamation case Lehrmann brought against Wilkinson and Network Ten, clearly was irked that Sharaz – whose shadow loomed ever larger over the trial as it progressed – would not be giving evidence.
Ten told Lee it wouldn’t be calling Sharaz because he and Higgins met more than a year after the alleged rape. That might have been fair enough if the defamation case had been entirely about the events of that night, and not about Higgins’s much later claims to have been mistreated by her Liberal Party bosses. But those allegations – which seemed to coincide with Sharaz’s arrival on the scene – are central to the case.
The evidence of the man Lehrmann calls “the puppet master” would have been particularly relevant because he is the nexus between two very different alleged political conspiracies that have swirled in the undercurrent of the trial.
One was the claim aggressively pushed by Sharaz, that Higgins’s alleged rape was covered up by Liberal minister Linda Reynolds and her chief of staff Fiona Brown for their own political convenience, in the run-up to a tight federal election.
That was also the clear suggestion made in The Project interview and by Wilkinson and her producer Angus Llewellyn giving evidence in the defamation case – despite furious attempts by both their counsel to backtrack from it late in the proceedings.
The conspiracy theory was completely debunked by the Sofronoff inquiry, queried by Lee himself in a series of acerbic questions to Wilkinson and Llewellyn, and finally withdrawn by Wilkinson’s counsel, Sue Chrysanthou SC, from submission in the defamation trial.
The other allegation of political interference that has hovered on the edges of the defamation trial involves evidence that it was Sharaz himself who introduced Higgins to the then Labor opposition in a bid to weaponise her rape allegations against the Morrison government.
There’s hard proof of that, some of it revealed by The Australian in leaked text exchanges that show Sharaz’s close involvement in negotiating the public airing of Higgins’s story on The Project.
Sharaz was there when Higgins decided to tell her story in the media before telling it to the police, offering the scoop to Wilkinson, whom he’d met as the work experience kid at the Today show.
Sharaz was there when Higgins gave her first recorded police interview in March 2021, entering the room during a rest break according to senior Australian Federal Police constable Emma Frizzell in the Sofronoff inquiry. Sharaz then “without concern for Ms Higgins’ welfare, commenced showing and discussing media coverage to Ms Higgins”.
“I believe the level of media involvement did affect the conduct of the investigation of Ms Higgins’ complaint,” Frizzell said. “I believe it was a tool driven by Ms Higgins and Mr Sharaz, which is evident by the first engagement I had with them, whereby Ms Higgins advised she wished to see how the media played out prior to providing a statement.”
Sharaz was on the phone to the AFP again later to let them know if they didn’t charge Lehrmann soon, Higgins would be going straight back to the media. That worked a charm – Lehrmann was charged within hours.
Sharaz was there at a five-hour meeting between Higgins, Wilkinson and Llewellyn in 2021 workshopping which “friendly” Labor politicians would push the story and put the Morrison government under pressure.
Sharaz was there in the vast tranche of previously unseen text messages, revealed by The Australian, boasting of his close relationship with Labor senator Katy Gallagher, now Finance Minister, as well as his moves to set up meetings between Higgins and Anthony Albanese, Tanya Plibersek and Malcolm Turnbull as well as other “Brittany Higgins fans” in Canberra.
But Sharaz was nowhere to be seen at the defamation trial after each morning’s photo op.
“You’re not calling him?” Lee asked sharply, with no attempt to hide his annoyance about the absence of the man whose fingerprints could be found on almost every suggestion of a cover-up of the alleged rape.
Now that those claims have been discredited or withdrawn – some of them thanks to well-aimed questions by Lee himself – the judge is entitled to be disappointed he didn’t get the chance to elicit an explanation from the man himself. And he is entitled to draw inferences about how Sharaz’s evidence might have affected the case. Not to mention the influence Sharaz exerted over Higgins.
“Would you accept that you have to be especially careful that people in a state of vulnerability are not being manipulated?” Lee asked Wilkinson.
When the TV presenter agreed, Lee reminded her that her producer, Llewellyn, had been using Sharaz as a conduit to communicate with Higgins.
“Do you think it was a good idea to use someone like Mr Sharaz as a conduit rather than deal with Ms Higgins directly?” he asked.
“My preference was for Ms Higgins to be the main conduit,” Wilkinson replied.
Lee asked Wilkinson if she considered herself a good friend of Sharaz, noting he had signed off an email with “much love, David”. Wilkinson said she hadn’t noticed at the time but indeed thought it was “odd” – and wouldn’t describe Sharaz as “a good friend”.
By the end of her two days in the witness box Wilkinson appeared so keen to disassociate herself from Sharaz she ignored orders from her own counsel to be quiet.
Wilkinson: Can I just add a significant fact?
Chrysanthou: No.
Wilkinson: Yes.
Chrysanthou: No. Thank you, your honour.
Wilkinson: You will be happy with this.
Chrysanthou: No.
Lee: Thank you … ?
Wilkinson: … I had only ever met him …
Chrysanthou: No, no, no. No, no, no, Ms … no.
Lee: Ms Wilkinson … ?
Wilkinson: … once in my life.
Now Ten has hit full reverse-thrust on any suggestion that The Project alleged a cover-up, despite its multiple claims that Reynolds and Brown had failed to help a young staffer who had just told them she’d been raped in the minister’s office, a remarkable back-flip that raised Lee’s eyebrows.
“(Llewellyn) is receiving information on background which is highly material to a serious allegation made against a minister of the crown … that on any view would amount to a criminal cover-up of a rape allegation, wouldn’t it?” Lee asked.
“I know Ms Wilkinson gave evidence that it was her subjective belief but the program says nothing of the sort,” replied Ten’s counsel, Matthew Collins SC.
Lee pointed out that The Project had claimed Reynolds and Brown “were engaged in requiring a woman to choose between her career and the pursuit of justice”, which “means that they were putting up, to use the words of the program, putting up a roadblock between someone seeking to vindicate their proper ability to seek justice”.
Collins argued that neither Brown nor Reynolds were mentioned in that opening sequence. Lee will make of that response what he will. He spent much time with Higgins trying to separate her “feelings” about her interactions with Brown and Reynolds from what they actually said that might have constituted untoward pressure or a threat.
He did the same with Wilkinson, trying to understand where her “intuition” finished and actual evidence of roadblocks began.
This week, Chrysanthou conceded that despite the oft-repeated claims of her client during the trial, she would not be making any submission that Brown was “a knowing partipant in a systemic cover-up of rape”. She argued that Wilkinson had a “very limited” role as a decision-maker in The Project interview.
Lee pointed out that it was Wilkinson who had “immediately characterised” the story “through the prism of the obstruction allegation”.
Chrysanthou: “My client had very strong views and beliefs as to what should be included. And she had strong beliefs about the conduct of certain players in the affair. But ultimately it looks at what was actually published, not what was said in text messages.
“The word cover-up is not there. Systemic cover-up is not there,” she added.
Lee: “I just really do find that a very difficult construction of what went to air … when it’s introduced in the way it’s introduced, the reference to roadblocks, the whole piece is pregnant with the notion that there were people … who engaged in a course of conduct to prevent her from reporting this allegation to police.”
Lee made it clear during closing submissions this week that he thought both Higgins and Lehrmann had “real credit issues” and that parts of their evidence could not be accepted. That won’t come as a surprise to any of the tens of thousands of people who’ve watched the case unfold on the court’s live stream of the case.
Whatever conclusion Lee comes to over the truth or otherwise of the claim that Lehrmann raped Higgins, this trial could mark a significant step in the path back to rational thinking by government, the courts and the media.
The arc of stupidity that is the Higgins-Lehrmann saga reached its zenith early in the piece when Scott Morrison rose to his feet in parliament and issued an apology – on behalf of us all – to Higgins for a crime that had not yet been proven. We can quibble about this, of course. The saga could equally be argued to have hit peak lunacy late last year with the decision of the Albanese government to award Higgins $2.4m in compensation for a crime that had still not been proven – on evidence provided solely by the complainant.
However, in either case it was the nation’s leaders who through cowardice or connivance allowed a serious allegation that required a level-headed investigation to be sacrificed to base political considerations.
Morrison, under intense pressure from Labor and the nascent #MeToo movement to act on Higgins’s rape claims, lamented “the terrible things that took place here” – throwing his own ministerial colleagues and staff under the bus and instantly fanning the flames of the wildfire he hoped to extinguish.
We don’t yet know the circumstance in which the Labor government – the same crowd that weaponised Higgins’s claims for its own benefit in opposition – threw such a huge amount of taxpayer money at her.
An investigation of the payout by the National Anti-Corruption Commission – if a referral by Reynolds is accepted – might shed light on the one-day mediation that preceded the payout, excluding all contrary evidence. It would signal a return to the kind of clear-eyed decision-making about matters of public importance that we once expected of all our institutions of state. And, ideally, it would hear from all the key witnesses – especially the ones in the shadows.
