D-Day looms for Bruce Lehrmann following high-stakes rapist finding appeal
Bruce Lehrmann will within days learn whether he has been successful in overturning a federal court finding that he raped Brittany Higgins.
Bruce Lehrmann will on Wednesday learn whether he has been successful in overturning his damaging defamation suit loss to Network 10 and Lisa Wilkinson.
Justice Michael Lee last year, in a landmark decision, dismissed Lehrmann’s defamation suit against the network and its high-profile journalist after he sued over a February 2021 The Project interview with Brittany Higgins.
Justice Lee found, on the balance of probabilities, that Lehrmann raped Higgins inside Parliament House in March 2019 following a night out drinking with colleagues.
During the broadcast, Higgins alleged she was raped by a male colleague inside a ministerial suite of their then-boss senator Linda Reynolds.
Justice Lee made his findings to the civil standard, which is below the criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.
Lehrmann was subsequently ordered to pay $2m for Ten and Wilkinson’s legal costs for the high-profile trial.
The former Liberal staffer appealed to the Full Court of the Federal Court on the basis that he was not afforded “procedural fairness” by Justice Lee.
Lehrmann’s solicitor Zali Burrows argued during his appeal that Justice Lee’s findings differed from the case put forward by Ten and Wilkinson and Higgins’ evidence.
“Generally, we say Mr Lehrmann could have conducted the case differently if the version that the judge had found against Mr Lehrmann had been put to him at the beginning,” Ms Burrows told the hearing earlier this year.
Justice Michael Wigney, one of the three justices who heard the appeal, replied: “How?”
Burrows argued that Lehrmann was not able to be cross-examined about the findings which were ultimately made by Justice Lee.
“It was asserted against Mr Lehrmann … that he violently raped, that it was done in a violent nature.
“Whereas His Honour found a totally different case as if it was, using the phrase, a soft rape.”
She further asserted that Justice Lee: “made a new case up”.
Ten’s legal team argued that the parties had agreed before trial that the “only relevant question in respect of the defence of justification was whether Mr Lehrmann had raped Ms Higgins in Parliament House in 2019”.
Ms Wilkinson’s high-profile barrister Sue Chrysanthou argued that Ms Higgins could not have consented given how drunk she was that night after visiting two bars with colleagues.
The court will on Wednesday at 10.15am hand down its judgment.
The judgement will be broadcast live on the Federal Court’s YouTube channel.
Originally published as D-Day looms for Bruce Lehrmann following high-stakes rapist finding appeal
