‘A mother’s worst nightmare’: Brittany Higgins’ parents speak
Brittany Higgins’ parents have taken the stand, as it’s revealed David Sharaz met his fiancee’s solicitor Leon Zwier to discuss her testimony the night before her appearance.
Kelly Higgins told the Federal Court it was “a mother’s worst nightmare” to hear daughter Brittany finally reveal she was raped in Parliament House, after months of watching her once “extremely happy” daughter become “extremely detached”.
Ms Higgins’ mother relayed the first conversation she had with her daughter about her alleged rape eight months after it is said to have occurred, during a family dinner at home in Queensland in November 2019.
Ms Higgins’ father, Matthew Higgins, who appeared emotional and scattered on the stand, also recalled his first conversation with Brittany about the incident a year later, saying he “pretty well shut down” after he heard the word “rape”.
Bruce Lehrmann is suing Network Ten and presenter Lisa Wilkinson over her interview with Ms Higgins on The Project in 2021, detailing accusations that Mr Lehrmann raped Ms Higgins on March 23, 2019, but not naming him as the alleged attacker.
He has consistently denied raping Ms Higgins.
It comes as Sky News revealed on Monday how on December 4, as Ms Higgins was testifying, her solicitor Leon Zwier met with her fiance David Sharaz the night before her appearance the following day, and discussed her testimony and what she should tell the judge under oath when questioned about her commonwealth payout and inconsistencies in her story.
“She should say, privilege, your honour, I’m told by my lawyer I don’t have to discuss legal advice, that’s what she should say,” Mr Zwier told Mr Sharaz on the evening of December 4 at Sydney’s Park Hyatt hotel, which was caught on tape by eyewitnesses.
“All she has to say is I was so enraged … I didn’t know if I’d be well enough or not well enough, it was just a gut reaction.”
Ms Higgins was not present but her constant courtroom companion, Emma Webster, was there, as well as Mr Sharaz.
If Mr Zwier’s advice were communicated to Ms Higgins, it would be a potential contempt of court, in defiance of a federal court judge.
The Australian does not suggest that Mr Zwier intended his advice to be passed onto Ms Higgins and there is no evidence that Mr Sharaz did so.
Mr Zwier told Sky News his comments were made on the common understanding that no one would speak to Ms Higgins about her testimony.
“All my private conversations with David Sharaz and Emma Webster were on the common understanding that Brittany was under cross examination and no one was to talk with her about the substance of her evidence or the manner in which she was giving it,” Mr Zwier told Sky News.
Witnesses should not receive coaching during their period of cross-examination; a rule reiterated by Justice Michael Lee during the trial.
On November 21, 2019, the court heard Brittany visited her mother and her mother’s partner on the Gold Coast, when she decided to disclose “what had actually taken place”.
She would not name Mr Lehrmann, telling her mother his name was “irrelevant”.
Kelly recalled to the court what Ms Higgins told her. “She was extremely intoxicated and felt unwell. The next thing she remembered she was on the lounge, and she believes she passed out. She was awoken with pressure and pain on her leg to identify that, when she was coherent, Bruce Lehrmann was on top of her, raping her,” she said.
“She was telling him ‘no, to stop’ … he looked at her blankly and stared, (and) was ignoring her. He continued to rape her and ignored her. He finished doing that to her. And then he left.”
She said her daughter was “emotional” while recalling what had happened, but was relieved they had spoken, saying “I’m glad you know”. “She said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I, of course, had just been told a mother’s worst nightmare, and I wanted to learn more. And she said ‘the person works with me in my job’,” Kelly Higgins said.
Mr Lehrmann’s barrister, Steven Whybrow SC, suggested in cross-examination that Kelly had made up that conversation with Ms Higgins, claiming her evidence was “consistent with what went to air on The Project”.
Kelly Higgins denied that.
Twenty-four to 48 hours after the airing of The Project interview in February 2021, Kelly said her daughter “arrived at my house and basically didn’t leave”.
“I didn’t recognise her … Her joy was gone, her desire was gone, her personal happiness was gone. She didn’t want to do anything for herself. The woman that I knew was a totally different woman than the woman that turned up at my house,” she said.
“And that has been that way, and it’s continued to get worse and worse for the last three years.
“I understand everybody sees her when she does step out in public but that’s a very different woman from the woman that is at home. She’s a broken soul.”
Ms Higgins’ father recalled visiting his daughter the week after the alleged rape in 2019, but she had only told him there was an “incident with someone at work being inappropriate”.
“I couldn’t recognise my daughter. She was like, usually, she’s like (a) really positive, happy, vivacious sort of a young girl, always trying to do stuff and was smart. She was absolutely quiet and withdrawn … the whole time she was with us,” he said.
Ms Higgins didn’t tell him the whole story until February 2020, when she called him and said “the inappropriate thing that happened in Parliament House” was “that she’d been raped”.
“She told me to keep my cool, so that was pretty hard, I think. I just heard that (she’d been raped), and I pretty well shut down.”
“She was probably looking out for me a bit, just trying to reassure me that … I should be strong, but you know … it’s not a good thing to hear about anybody or anything.”
Earlier, the Defence Department’s then liaison officer, Christopher Payne, repeated evidence he had told the ACT Supreme Court, that when he asked Ms Higgins straight out “if she was raped” a few days after it allegedly occurred, her response was “I could not have consented, it would have been like f..king a log”.
“A 20-something-year-old female in tears saying those words to me was extremely confronting. So they stuck with me,” he said.
Mr Payne, did however, disclose new evidence about the fact that when Linda Reynolds’ then chief of staff, Fiona Brown, took him aside to tell him Ms Higgins had been found “in a state of undress on the couch in the minister’s office”, she started the conversation with: “You’re never going to believe what happened.”
His evidence was that Ms Brown was “frustrated” throughout the conversation because “this was one more thing to deal with in a busy office”.
The trial continues on Tuesday.
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