Lisa Wilkinson, Shane Drumgold and the Logies speech lie

The Ten host’s now-infamous acceptance speech at the 2022 Logies ceremony has come back to bite prosecutor Shane Drumgold - hard.

Lisa Wilkinson accepts a 2022 Logie Award. Picture: Channel 9

TV host Lisa Wilkinson’s now-infamous Logies speech has come back to bite ACT chief prosecutor Shane Drumgold, after he was caught lying about it to a Supreme Court judge.

In his damning report into the ACT justice system, Board of Inquiry head Walter Sofronoff KC made serious adverse findings against Mr Drumgold over his use of a supposedly contemporaneous note made of a discussion he held with Wilkinson four days before her televised address.

Mr Drumgold said he warned the star — who first aired Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations on Ten’s The Project in 2021 — about the danger of prejudicing Bruce Lehrmann’s upcoming rape trial before she gave the speech accepting a Logie award for her reporting.

Wilkinson rejected that, saying Mr Drumgold “did not at any time” give her the warning he claimed.

ACT DPP Shane Drumgold outside the inquiry in May. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Dylan Robinson

Mr Drumgold presented a note of the conference to Chief Justice McCallum as if it had been written contemporaneously by a junior lawyer present at the meeting. It hadn’t.

That part of the note that was critical to the Chief Justice was effectively written by Mr Drumgold days later after Wilkinson gave her speech – and after it became clear the upcoming trial was in jeopardy because of it.

Mr Sofronoff found that Mr Drumgold “knowingly lied to the Chief Justice”.

“For the Chief Justice’s purposes, the note was not contemporaneous. (The junior DPP staffer) had not made the note. Mr Drumgold’s statements to the Chief Justice were false. The note was nothing more than a copy of an email which Mr Drumgold had written five days after the meeting and which purported only to record his ‘best recollection’.”

Mr Sofronoff dismissed a claim by Mr Drumgold’s counsel that those untruthful statements were just a mistake.

“I reject that a prudent and experienced barrister would behave in that way or make a mistake of this calibre,” Mr Sofronoff said. “This is a wholly untenable excuse for a barrister of the seniority and experience of Mr Drumgold.

“He could not have forgotten that the material words in the note were words that he had written himself (choosing to do so in the third person) on the day before.”

Mr Drumgold had “ample opportunity to correct his untruths at many points” but did not do so.

Brittany Higgins is interviewed by Wilkinson on The Project.

“He must have known that (Chief Justice) McCallum had found, as a matter of fact, that Ms Wilkinson had engaged in wilful defiance of his ‘appropriate’ warning and that her finding was based entirely on the proofing note.

“I do not accept that Mr Drumgold’s misstatements about the ­nature of the note were a mere mistake that he made.”

Mr Sofronoff said it was true that Wilkinson was a very experienced broadcaster who should have appreciated the likely effect of her intended words, but Mr Drumgold’s duty of care was not to her but to the court, “to do what is required to preserve the integrity of the administration of criminal justice”.

“Instead, he did nothing and thereby left alive a threat to the trial. A postponement might have endangered Ms Higgins’ health, which Mr Drumgold knew was fragile. It imperilled Mr Lehrmann’s right to the presumption of innocence. It left Ms Wilkinson under the false impression that she was at liberty to give the speech.”

Mr Sofronoff agreed with Mr Lehrmann’s barrister Steven Whybrow’s submission that after the Logies speech, an application for a temporary stay of the imminent trial “should be brought by the Director, not opposed by the Director”.

It was, however, no surprise that the DPP opposed the stay. After all, Mr Sofronoff found that while Wilkinson had been wrongly accused in court of causing the stay, in fact “a successful application for a stay had resulted from (Mr Drumgold’s) failure to warn” Wilkinson.

Read the full Sofronoff report here.