Brittany Higgins changes her story on leg bruise photo: ‘Maybe I tripped’
Brittany Higgins told Bruce Lehrmann’s rape trial that a photo of bruise on her leg was sustained during his brutal alleged assault. Under cross examination in his defamation trial, she’s not so sure.
It was the photo Brittany Higgins thought might confirm her claim of a brutal rape: a picture of a bruise she claimed was an imprint of Bruce Lehrmann’s knee, pinning her leg to the couch in Parliament House as he allegedly assaulted her.
Higgins gave the image to Lisa Wilkinson and it became a chief exhibit in her story about the alleged rape before being tendered in evidence at Lehrmann’s criminal trial last year.
At the criminal trial, Higgins swore on oath she believed the injury was sustained “during the course of the assault”.
But in another day of high drama at the defamation trial brought by Lehrmann against Wilkinson and Network Ten, Higgins said the bruise could have occurred “tripping up the stairs”.
Higgins made other corrections on Thursday under cross-examination by Lehrmann’s barrister, Steven Whybrow SC: that she’d been wrong in claiming to have had a three-hour panic attack; that she was wrong in claiming she was half-dressed when found by a security guard; that she was wrong in claims she’d made in a draft chapter of her book.
But it was her startling revision of her previous evidence about the bruise on which Whybrow zeroed in.
The bruise photo captured the attention of the media when Higgins first made public her claims of a vicious rape in the office of then-defence industries minister Linda Reynolds.
It also caught the attention of police.
Higgins hadn’t mentioned the bruise when she first spoke to them on April 1, 2019, about the alleged assault. Higgins claimed at the criminal trial that she’d told a detective, Elizabeth Harman, about the bruise when they spoke a week later but Harman told the court that Higgins hadn’t said anything about it.
Harman said she had, however, told Higgins explicitly: “If you’ve got any photos, don’t delete them.”
That plea was ignored, but when forensics experts went through Higgins’ phone later, they extracted 8000 images.
They couldn’t find any photos of the bruise, or any reference to a bruise until 2021.
At the criminal trial, Higgins told chief prosecutor Shane Drumgold that she took the photo “a week after the assault”.
She remembered this, she said, because it was “the day before budget and I took a photo because it was still there”.
She first said the photo was of her “outside left leg” but then accepted it showed her right leg.
After dramatically requesting Higgins stand in the witness box to show where on her leg the bruise was inflicted, Drumgold asked her: “Do you know when you sustained that bruise?”
“I assume during the course of the assault,” Higgins replied.
On Wednesday, Higgins told Ten’s barrister, Matt Collins, that she had turned up the contrast on the photo “so you can see the bruise more”.
Asked how she sustained the injury, Higgins told Collins: “I wasn’t sure about what it was.
“I thought it could have been either the assault or tripping up the stairs, but I wasn’t exactly sure, but I thought at least it helped.”
On Thursday, Higgins rejected a suggestion by Whybrow that the photo was “an invention”.
“At the time, I believed (the bruise) was caused by the assault but with hindsight I’ve now had to accept that it may not have necessarily come from the assault itself – it may have come from falling up the stairs,” Higgins said.
“What I want to suggest to you, Ms Higgins, is that as you find out further information, you adapt and evolve your narrative to fit the new information,” Whybrow put to her.
“Do you agree with that?”
“No,” Higgins replied, “but I accept where I’m wrong and try to apply it in every weird circumstance I end up in, to give the most honest answer I can.”
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