Everything that happened while the Lehrmann trial was suppressed
Brittany Higgins' mother, the security guard who found her in Linda Reynolds' office and 18 more witnesses have given their testimony to the court.
Brittany Higgins' mother, the security guard who found her in Linda Reynolds' office and 18 more witnesses have given their testimony to the court.
A suppression order banning the reporting of evidence in Bruce Lehrmann’s high-profile rape trial has finally been lifted.
Brittany Higgins has accused Lehrmann of raping her inside their boss’s ministerial suite at Parliament House in the early hours of March 23, 2019.
The former Liberal staffer alleged the assault occurred in the office of their boss at the time, then-defence industry minister Linda Reynolds, after a night out drinking with colleagues in Canberra shortly before the 2019 election.
Lehrmann has pleaded not guilty to sexual intercourse without consent and being reckless as to whether Higgins had consented.
The testimony of more than 20 witnesses called to give evidence at his trial in the ACT Supreme Court this week could not be published until Higgins completed her cross-examination.
These are the witnesses whose evidence we could not report until now.
Monday - Day 5
Lauren Gain
Former defence department communications adviser Lauren Gain said Higgins was highly intoxicated by the time they arrived at the 88mph bar in Canberra late on March 22, 2019.
Gain attended a gathering at The Dock with colleagues including Higgins and Bruce Lehrmann earlier that night.
At about 11pm she shared an Uber with Higgins, Lehrmann and Austen Wenke – an adviser for then home affairs minister Peter Dutton – to 88mph bar.
Gain said she was quite drunk by the time the group arrived at 88mph and remembers Higgins also being highly intoxicated.
“I remember her walking back towards us and I remember her falling down on the way back towards us,” she said.
Gain said Lehrmann helped Higgins onto the couch and she sat next to him.
Nikola Anderson
Parliament House security guard Nikola Anderson let Higgins and Lehrmann into Linda Reynolds’ ministerial suite in the early hours of Saturday March 23, 2019 after processing them through the security entrance at about 1.40am.
Anderson said Higgins’ high heels set off the security scanner and she suspected Higgins was intoxicated when she struggled to put her shoes back on.
Anderson said she told Higgins she could put her shoes back on in the office and she let the pair into Senator Reynolds' suite.
She said she hung around the ministerial wing before she returned to the security checkpoint to give her colleague Mark Fairweather a break.
At that point Fairweather told her “something strange” was going on and that Lehrmann had left “in a hurry” about 20 minutes after being let into the suite.
Anderson performed a welfare check on Higgins at about 4.15am but when she announced herself upon entering the suite she got no response and the door to the minister’s office was shut.
“As I’ve opened the door, Higgins was lying on her back, completely naked on that lounge,” she said.
She said Higgins opened her eyes, looked at her and then rolled into the “foetal position” facing Senator Reynolds' desk.
Tuesday - Day 6
Fiona Brown
Fiona Brown said she was shocked when the Finance Department informed her Higgins and Lehrmann had drunkenly accessed Senator Linda Reynolds’ suite in the early hours of March 23, 2019.
When Reynolds’ then acting chief-of-staff had a meeting with Higgins about the incident Higgins told her “she was responsible for what she drank and her actions” and she remembered waking up at some point “semi-naked”.
Brown told the court she had asked Higgins in their first meeting on March 26, 2019 if “something happened that you did not want to happen” to which Higgins “shook her head”.
At a second meeting on March 28, 2019 Higgins told Brown she remembered “him (Lehrmann) being on top of me”.
Brown said that at a meeting with Higgins and Senator Reynolds on April 1, 2019 Higgins was offered support and encouraged to speak with police.
At a separate meeting on March 26 Lehrmann told Brown he went to Senator Reynolds’ suite to drink whiskey but denied being drunk when he arrived at about 1.40am.
“He [Lehrmann] said ‘people do that all the time’,” she said.
Lehrmann said Higgins “was fine when he left”.
Nicole Hamer
Senator Linda Reynolds’ former staffer Nicola Hamer invited Higgins to the Kingston Hotel on March 2, 2019 — about three weeks before the alleged rape — for an informal job interview.
Hamer said that prior to this meeting Lehrmann had asked her to reach out to Higgins.
He had commented on her “being good-looking”.
Hamer said Lehrmann had kept a range of alcohol at his desk when they worked for Senator Reynolds.
“There was spirits, there was whisky, there was wine,” she said.
“So it was – yes, like, it was quite a substantial amount of alcohol.”
Austin Wenke
Austin Wenke, then media adviser to home affairs minister Peter Dutton, had dinner with Bruce Lehrmann on March 22, 2019 before the pair went to The Dock to meet Higgins, Gain and other colleagues.
Later that night the four of them then went to 88mph and drank more alcohol. Wenke said he didn’t remember his or anyone’s level of intoxication.
He said he left with Gain but said he didn’t know how Lehrmann or Higgins left the nightclub.
Alexandra Humphreys
Brittany Higgins housemate Alexandra Humphreys said Higgins was at first bubbly and lovely but changed around the time of the 2019 election, becoming withdrawn and barely leaving her room.
Humphreys said Higgins, who was quite tidy when they started living together, began collecting dirty dishes in her room.
“I know when she moved out she – there was, like, bowls and plates and things like that in the rubbish bin,” she said.
“I don’t think she could clean them or got around to cleaning them but her room got a lot messier.”
Christopher Payne
Brittany Higgins told Department of Defence liaison officer Christopher Payne that she had “effectively blacked out” before waking to find Bruce Lehrmann having sex with her in Linda Reynolds’ office on March 23, 2019.
Payne said Higgins was “very upset” when she told him – on about March 26, 2019 – about the alleged incident and he asked her directly if Lehrmann had raped her.
“She said ‘I could not have consented. It would have been like f..king a log,’ and at that point she was very upset again,” he told the court.
Payne said he advised Higgins to go to the police and a doctor. He said following the meeting he checked in on Higgins a couple of times.
Carlos Ramos
Cleaner Carlos Ramos said he was contacted on Saturday March 23, 2019 to complete an out-of-hours clean of Senator Linda Reynolds’ suite and asked to “look for condoms”.
He said he cleaned every room in the suite including wiping down the leather couch with chemicals and emptying all the bins.
Ramos told jurors he was instructed to look for signs of a party including “condoms or something like that”.
He said it took him about 30 minutes to clean the suite and said the bathroom did not appear to have been used recently.
Wednesday - Day 7
Kelly Higgins
Kelly Higgins says her daughter Brittany became “unfamiliar” to her and “frozen in what had happened to her” after she was allegedly raped.
Kelly Higgins said that her daughter Brittany is “not the same person” since the alleged incident in March 2019.
Higgins told the court that she had noticed changes in her daughter around March and April 2019.
“Brittany became very distant. Brittany became very quiet,” she said.
“Physically I noticed from her photos I noticed from her appearance she had changed also. “She’d lost a lot of weight. She got quite thin. She just looked quite broken.”
Higgins said that her daughter told her during a phone call from Western Australia, where Brittany was working on Linda Reynolds’ election campaign, that there had been a “work incident” but did not reveal the full details of her alleged sexual assault until November 2019.
Higgins became emotional as she recounted what her daughter had revealed over dinner at a Brisbane restaurant.
“She said she woke up with a pain in her leg and that a gentleman was on top of her having intercourse with her,” she said.
“He was looking coldly at her. He was non-responsive to her. She was telling him no. He then finished and left and she said she just lay there for a while.”
Higgins said her daughter’s revelation at that Brisbane dinner seemed like a relief.
“It was like a relief for her to get it out and to finally tell the truth.
“It was like a relief that she could finally share it all.”
Higgins said her daughter was “just not the same person” after the alleged assault.
“She was almost unfamiliar in her emotional state,” she said.
“She was almost unfamiliar in her character.
“Like, she was just so frozen in what had happened to her.”
Reg Chamberlain
Special Minister of State Alex Hawke’s chief of staff Reg Chamberlain was with Linda Reynolds’ chief of staff Fiona Brown during a phone call between her and Bruce Lehrmann On April 5, 2019.
They had called him for a full explanation of why he had entered Parliament House in the early hours of March 23, 2019.
“When we asked what his purpose was, he said it was to have whiskey, to drink whiskey,” Chamberlain said.
“He just said the purpose was to drink.”
Nikita Irvine
Brittany Higgins told Linda Reynolds aide-de-camp Nikita Irvine that after going to the 88mph club on March 22, 2019 she had caught an Uber with Lehrmann.
“When they were in the Uber they were going to go back to Parliament House because Bruce had something he wanted to show her,” Irvine said.
“It was some whiskey or something.”
Kristine Brenton
On Saturday March 23, 2019 Parliament House security guard Kristine Brenton located Brittany Higgins in Minister Linda Reynolds office.
Shortly after starting work at 9am Brenton was asked to perform a welfare check on Higgins who had been in the ministerial suite since 1.40am.
“So as I entered, I called out, ‘Security. Is anyone in here?’ I then have a response back saying, ‘Yes’ and then I proceed to continue into the suite towards the desk and I ask if everything is okay and the voice back said, ‘Everything is okay’.
“I proceeded to exit the suite.”
Mark Fairweather
Parliament House security manager Mark Fairweather said he could smell alcohol on both Lehrmann and Higgins when they passed through the security entrance of Parliament House at 1.40am on March 23, 2019.
“When they first came in … I said, ‘Geez, can’t this wait until Monday?’” he said.
“I think he (Lehrmann) said no.”
He said Higgins went “willingly” with Lehrmann.
“I could smell alcohol on both,” he said.
“From my experience, they were … not heavily intoxicated.
“They had been drinking but by body movements and things like that, Nikola and I both assessed them because if they were heavily intoxicated I would have refused entry, which I’m entitled to do.”
When shown footage of the pair at the security desk Fairweather confirmed to the court that Lehrmann signed both of them in.
CCTV footage showed Lehrmann passing back through the security scanner and leaving the building at 2.33am.
“I had my head down but I observed the gentleman when he got to the X-ray. You’re not meant to walk back through the X-ray machine, you’re meant to walk through the opening electronic doors,” he said.
“He was on the phone. He wasn’t paying attention.
“I wanted to ask him about the lady and I said, ‘Are you coming back?’ and he just replied hastily ‘no’ and flicked the pass onto the desk and before I could ask him anymore, he’d already walked out.”
Katie Thelning
Brittany Higgins reported her alleged sexual assault to Federal Agent Katie Thelning at Parliament House on April 1, 2019.
Thelning made contemporaneous notes throughout their meeting.
“Bruce was sitting with me and got quite handsy. I didn’t really mind,” Thelning wrote in her diary of Higgins’ statement to police.
“I felt like I got super inebriated.”
Higgins told police she got into a taxi with Lehrmann and gave him her address so she could be dropped home.
“The next thing I remember was being at the bottom of Parliament House,” the police officer recorded Higgins as saying in her notebook.
“I don’t remember getting up to the suite.
“I remember being on the minister’s couch. Remember him being on top of me. Bruce saying something about finishing. I said something like, ‘No, don’t’. He left.”
Higgins told police she had woken up later that morning.
“I remember thinking it’s almost 8 o’clock. I was thinking why am I here? Are people about to get in?” she told the police.
“I felt grossed out as I could smell what had happened on me. I went into the minister’s bathroom and used her deodorant and got sick.”
Higgins told police she borrowed a jacket from the goodwill box and ordered an Uber.
“I put what happened away so it wouldn’t be a narrative to my life story,” she told police.
“I am quite good at doing this.
“I had cordial dealings with Bruce on the Monday and the Tuesday.”
Higgins told police Lehrmann had been fired as a result of the security breach.
“I do not want to report this officially, just off the record,” she told police.
“Went to the Phillip Medical Centre to get tests done. No results yet.”
Thelning said Higgins “appeared very upset” while describing the alleged incident.
Rebecca Cleaves
On April 1, 2019 federal agent Rebecca Cleaves met with Brittany Higgins in the AFP office at Parliament House.
“She did say that she was feeling more intoxicated than she thought it should have been for the amount of alcohol that she’d drunk,” she said.
“And she recalls falling over twice.
“Her colleague took her to an Uber and she told him her address and she remembers coming via Parliament House, which caused her some surprise, and she remembers that her colleague, who was Bruce, saying to her to play along.”
Higgins told police she remembers coming in through Point 8 which is the ministerial entrance.
“She said she was struggling to sign her own name on the register when she came in and she had to take off her shoes when she came through the entrance,” Cleaves said.
“She didn’t recall how she’d got to the minister’s suite.
“When she woke up she remembers that Bruce was on top of her having vaginal – non-consensual vaginal penetration and she remembers saying ‘No’ and ‘Stop’.”
Higgins told police that the next thing she remembered was waking up later that morning.
“When she woke up she said she could smell the sex, so that was when she vomited,” Cleaves said.
“And she felt very confused about what had happened and why she was there.”
Police explained to her their process if she wanted to make a formal complaint.
“She was anxious, nervous, a little bit rattled,” she said.
Higgins decided not to proceed with a formal complaint at that time.
Jennifer Stone
Australian Federal Police senior forensic biologist Jennifer Stone failed to find any biological evidence of an alleged rape on Brittany Higgins’ white Kookai dress when she examined it almost two years later.
Stone was told, when she received the dress on February 26, 2021 and asked to look for semen on the item, that it had been washed since the alleged incident.
Stone said that washing an item makes it “substantially harder to locate any semen on an item if it had been there”.
“It is very difficult to screen for semen after something’s been washed however it is possible and that’s why it was conducted in this case,” she said.
“The screening tests that I performed are not (conclusive). It’s possible that semen was there and it’s been washed away.
“In this case I’ve conducted the screening tests for semen and I was not able to detect any semen on the item.”
Thursday - Day 8
Emma Frizzell
A police officer who examined Brittany Higgins’ mobile phone data said there was no corroborating evidence that a photo of her leg injury was taken in April 2019 as claimed.
On February 5, 2021 Brittany Higgins told police she wanted to reactivate a previous report to police about an alleged rape.
The next day Higgins and her boyfriend David Sharaz met with Senior Constable Emma Frizzell from the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Team.
On February 19, 2021 Higgins sent Frizzell a digital image of her leg which depicts an injury Lehrmann allegedly inflicted during the assault.
On 26 May 2021 Higgins consented to police examining her phone.
Frizzell said she then located the photographs of Higgins’ leg injury.
Higgins signed a statutory declaration confirming that she took the photograph of her leg injury on April 3, 2019.
The court heard that as a part of Frizzell’s investigation she was anxious to find evidence corroborating the date that that photo was taken.
“I did not locate the image of the injury in that time period (of March or April 2019),” she said.
She told the court that the photo had shown up in phone data as late as January 21, 2021.
Frizzell also said the 27-year-old had consented to police obtaining her medical records.
Higgins told police she had attended the Phillip Medical and Dental Centre after the alleged rape but Frizzell found Higgins had not attended any appointments there from March 2019 onwards.
Regina Camara
Brittany Higgins told Michaelia Cash’s senior policy advisor Regina Camara about her alleged rape at a Parliament House café around October or November 2019.
“I had noticed that Brittany was not very well, she was down … so I suggested we meet for coffee,” Camara said.
“As we were chatting she mentioned to me an incident that had happened to her earlier that year in Linda Reynolds’ office.”
Higgins told Camara that when she woke up in Minister Reynolds’ office “she knew something had happened to her”.
“Her clothes were in disarray,” she said.
Robert Bower
In December 2019, at a Coalition Senators and staff Christmas party, Brittany Higgins told colleague Robert Bower that she had been sexually assaulted in Linda Reynolds’ office.
Bower, who worked for Senator Michaelia Cash at the time, said he was chatting to Higgins at the party when “the issue of skeletons in the closet came up”.
“She asked me if I knew Bruce Lehrmann,” he said.
“It was then that Brittany told me that he had assaulted her when they worked together in Minister Reynolds’ office.”
Bower said the conversation took place in a crowded courtyard.
“She was uncomfortable and shaken but she wasn’t, you know, noticeably upset if you weren’t in that conversation,” he said.
“She was stressed, she was anxious and she was anxious that there – she mentioned that she was worried that there was a story that might come out about it.”
Steven Rukavina
Parliament House assistant director of security systems Steven Rukavina says reviewed the footage from March 23, 2019 two days after Brittany Higgins’ alleged rape.
He quarantined snippets of video that captured Higgins and Bruce Lehrmann inside and outside of Parliament House that morning.
Wayne Shields
Parliamentary Services system administrator Wayne Sheilds said he analysed the electronic doors of Linda Reynolds’ office to see when they were opened and closed on March 23, 2019.
Shields told the court that at 1.48am the operations room remotely unlocked the door into Reynolds office.
Records showed that at 2.31am the ministerial suite’s rear door was physically opened before closing a few seconds later.
At 9.58am the rear door was physically opened again before closing a few seconds later.
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