‘A virus of madness and shadowy Sharaz’, say Bruce Lehrmann’s lawyers

Brittany Higgins spread a ‘virus of madness’ that infected journalists and politicians when she claimed on TV she was raped by Bruce Lehrmann, his lawyers have claimed in their final submissions.

Brittany Higgins and David Sharaz with their cavoodle Kingston at Bordeaux-Merignac airport after their cat and dog cleared quarantine. Picture: Jacquelin Magnay

Brittany Higgins spread a “virus of madness” that infected the ­nation’s political and media class when she publicly alleged she was raped by Bruce Lehrmann in Parliament House, his lawyers have claimed in their final submissions to the Federal Court.

In the last day of hearings in Mr Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and its star interviewer Lisa Wilkinson, his barrister Steven Whybrow SC ­accused Ms Higgins of “laying a false trail” in the days following the alleged incident to make it appear that something had happened between her and Mr Lehrmann.

Mr Whybrow launched into a scathing attack on Ms Higgins’ credit, listing everyone he said she had lied to, and claiming she was “not an accurate, nor a reliable ­historian”.

“Ms Higgins has lied to her ­employer (Fiona Brown) … she’s lied to her intimate partner Ben Dillaway … she’s lied to federal agents (Katie) Thelning and (Rebecca) Cleaves, she’s lied to (Detective Senior Constable) Sarah Harman, she’s lied to Angus Llewellyn and Lisa Wilkinson, she’s lied in her statutory declaration,” Mr Whybrow said.

On the day Ms Higgins’ credibility came under attack, she and her fiance David Sharaz collected their pets from quarantine to take back to their new home in the French village of Lunas.

At Friday’s court, hearing Mr Sharaz, was accused of using The Project interview with Ms Higgins to carry out a “political hit job”, as Mr Whybrow questioned Network Ten’s motives for not calling him as a witness.

On Thursday, Mr Sharaz, who played a central role in organising his partner’s bombshell interview with Wilkinson, was described by Justice Michael Lee as the Prophet Elijah – “there’s always a place for him at the table but he never turns up” – and on Friday, the analogy turned to children’s book character “Where’s Wally?”

Bruce Lehrmann at the Federal Court in Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Monique Harmer

“He’s everywhere in this but you can’t find him,” Mr Whybrow said.

Towards the end of Friday’s hearing, Justice Lee said Mr Lehrmann was “a bit caddish” for not checking on Ms Higgins, when he left Parliament House without her on the morning of March 23, 2019.

“From general experience, if you had been with a single woman all night and gone back to ­Parliament House, she’s gone off somewhere, it’s a strange thing to leave her on her own, and not wonder how she will get home and just wander off into the night … At the very best, it’s a bit caddish,” the judge said.

Mr Lehrmann is suing Ten and Wilkinson over her interview with Ms Higgins on The Project in 2021, detailing accu­sations that Mr Lehrmann raped Ms Higgins in March, 2019, but not naming him as the ­alleged attacker. Mr Lehrmann has consistently denied raping Ms Higgins.

Mr Lehrmann’s other barrister Matthew Richardson SC rejected claims from Wilkinson’s lawyers that she had “no decision-making power as to the final content of the broadcast”.

“She stood on a stage and ­accepted a Logie award for the program and now we see her ­instructing her counsel to say, ‘well I don’t really have that much to do with the program, particularly near the end’,” Mr Richardson said.

On Thursday, Ten’s barrister Matthew Collins KC said they did not put Mr Sharaz on the stand because there was “no forensic advantage” to it. He said Ms Higgins and Mr Sharaz met more than a year after the central argument of the case: whether Ms Higgins fabricated the rape in March and April 2019.

On Friday, Mr Whybrow argued Mr Sharaz was the one person, other than Ms Higgins’ ex-partner, Mr Dillaway, who “might be expected to be able to give powerful, detailed, in-depth evidence of complaints made to him” and questioned why he did not appear.

He said Mr Sharaz could have given evidence on why Ms Higgins backflipped on the evidence of Queensland MP Sam O’Connor, that she did not want the ­allegation “to ever come anywherenear the light of day”.

“He’s at the meeting, he’s making all of these inputs … This was a political hit job, if you look at the communications ­emanating from him,” Mr Whybrow said.

Justice Lee asked, assuming that was true, how that “rationally bears upon the truth of the allegations in 2019?”

Lisa Wilkinson and her lawyer Sue Chrysanthou SC in Sydney on Friday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Monique Harmer

Mr Whybrow said: “It bears in this way, your honour: what was it that he was told, that makes him somebody they didn’t want to call as a complaint witness … when they call other people.”

In trying to persuade the judge that Ms Higgins was “not sexually assaulted, and that no sex occurred”, Mr Whybrow said she was “putting out breadcrumbs” following the night at Parliament House to give “verisimilitude” to an alternative ­narrative that “something happened” between her and Mr Lerhmann.

This included telling her boss Ms Brown in their second meeting on March 26, 2019, that she “remembered him (Mr Lehrmann) being on top of me”.

He said the claim that Ms Higgins had fabricated the allegation was only “monstrous”, as Ten’s and Wilkinson’s lawyers put it on Thursday, if she had pursued the allegation with the police in 2019.

Mr Whybrow said being found naked “might reasonably be described as a potential career-limiting or career-ending moment for somebody who has ambitions to be a politician”.

He said Ms Higgins’ decision to tell her story in the media, before she reactivated her police complaint in February 2021, was a “sliding doors moment”.

“If only they (the people around her) had said ‘this is an important story, but you should go to the police first … If that had happened, we wouldn’t be here … We would not have had what appears to have been a virus of madness that spread amongst everybody from politicians to journalists, where sub-judice just went out the window, where the rights of the individual ceased to exist,” Mr Whybrow said.

He said The Project interview was “like a large stone in a pond and ripples spread out” and that a month later, on March 15, 2021, Ms Higgins was “standing outside Parliament House giving a speech at a March for Justice rally in which she says amongst other things ‘I was raped in that building’”.

“And since then, people have been hiding behind throwaway phrases like due process and the presumption of innocence,” Mr Whybrow added.

Ms Wilkinson’s barrister, Sue Chrysanthou SC, responded on Friday afternoon, saying Mr Lehrmann could not blame her client for “all his woes”.

She said even if The Project interview had never aired, ­reporter Samantha Maiden’s ­article on the same topic would have been published at 8am on February 15, 2021, on news.com.au, and Ms Higgins would have still given a speech at the March 4 Justice rally in 2021, and “done everything else she went on to do”.

“It is a revision of history, with respect, to lay it, at our feet, the respondents, all of the woes that Mr Lehrmann suffered … It’s just not correct,” she said.

Mr Whybrow told the court his client would forever be “the person who raped Brittany Higgins”.

Justice Lee reserved his decision for a later date.