Higgins’ ex: She was a 'broken person' after alleged rape

Ben Dillaway told the courtroom something didn't seem 'quite right' with Higgins after she was allegedly sexually assaulted by Bruce Lehrmann.

Ben Dillaway, the former boyfriend of Brittany Higgins. Picture: Supplied

Ben Dillaway told the courtroom something didn't seem 'quite right' with Higgins after she was allegedly sexually assaulted by Bruce Lehrmann.

Brittany Higgins’ ex-boyfriend, Ben Dillaway, says the young woman was a “broken person” whose “light had gone out” after she revealed her alleged rape to him. 

Dillaway also told Bruce Lehrmann’s rape trial this week that he personally informed the Prime Minister’s office of the alleged sexual assault within a fortnight of it allegedly occurring. 

The former ministerial staffer told the court on Wednesday that despite their constant communication, Ms Higgins only shared her alleged sexual assault with him three days after the incident.

Brittany Higgins’ ex-boyfriend, Ben Dillaway.

At 8am on the morning of the alleged rape Dillaway texted Higgins asking if she was awake because he had a missed call from her at 10.40pm the night before. 

At 8.17am she replied, ‘Haha, all good. I truly have zero recall on what I was calling about’. 

He told police that he had also called her mid-morning and she seemed “cagey”.

“It was, I’d say, a kind of strange conversation,” he told the court. 

“She seemed – I just sensed something was off straight away. 

“I could just tell something didn’t seem quite right.”

Higgins told him they had gone back to former minister Reynolds’ office drinking.

“It sounded strange because I’d worked in Parliament eight years and I knew you just couldn’t bring people back to a minister’s office to carry on having drinks or have a party as Brittany described,” he said.

“I kind of kept asking some kind of probing questions about that because it didn’t make any sense to me, and she kind of cut the conversation off abruptly and said ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ and hung up.”

The court also heard texts exchanged between the pair throughout March 23 in which Higgins tells him that her night out had involved “just the standard shenanigans”. 

On March 25 they spoke on the phone for about 10 minutes but Higgins didn’t mention the alleged incident with Lehrmann. 

“No, there was nothing, from the best of my knowledge, in those text messages until the message where she said her employment was at risk or she may no longer have a job, that was the first time that the issue was raised,” he said. 

A conversation between Brittany Higgins and Ben Dillaway tendered as evidence.

It wasn’t until after Higgins met with Linda Reynolds’ chief of staff, Fiona Brown, on Tuesday, March 26, 2019, that she alluded to something bad having happened with Lehrmann. 

“She revealed that she had been attacked and what happened wasn’t consensual,” he said.

“So I rang her asking her questions about that and during the course of that she kind of, you know, broke down crying and didn’t want to chat about it further.

“From that date forward, from when she made the revelation, a light had turned off in her,” he said.

“She was a broken, shattered person I would say.”

Lehrmann has pleaded not guilty to sexual intercourse without consent and denies any sexual contact occurred. 

On March 28, Dillaway travelled to Canberra and supported Higgins throughout the aftermath of the alleged incident.

“I recall at the time Brittany being somewhat distressed, so I made plans to come up to Canberra to see her and I guess try and help her out,” he said. 

“The purpose of the trip was to basically see Brittany.”

Higgins went to his hotel where they discussed the alleged incident and he bluntly asked her if she had been raped. 

“I just remember her, you know, crying and, you know, really breaking down and I kind of just had her in my arms and she was very much, what I would say would be, a broken person,” he said.

Dillaway said Higgins was desperate for the incident not to become public due to fear of losing her “dream job”. 

“So her main thing it seemed afterwards, she didn’t want anyone to know about this and she was very fearful of losing her job,” he said. 

“She was extremely focused on her, I guess, job and her career. 

“The job she had was the dream job for her and she was worried any reporting of it and following through that process would result in losing her job.”

Dillaway said that in the following weeks Higgins was “struggling significantly” and “wasn’t coping” so he sought to speak to someone in the Prime Minister’s office about what had happened. 

Former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins at the Magistrates Court in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

“She’d tried to see a psychiatrist and the wait was two months or three months or something and I said, ‘Let me discreetly go speak to someone in the Prime Minister’s office because surely this can move things along, or surely this will get you the help you need’,” he said.

“I checked multiple times, got her okay before I went out and met with them to kind of get – seek assistance for her.”

Dillaway told the court he spoke to Scott Morrison’s media adviser, Julian Leembruggen, about the alleged rape on April 3, 2019.