By Michaela Whitbourn and Olivia Ireland
The head of an inquiry into former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann’s sexual assault prosecution engaged in serious corrupt conduct by disclosing confidential information to journalists, an inquiry by the ACT’s corruption watchdog has found.
In damning findings released on Wednesday, the ACT Integrity Commission said former Queensland judge Walter Sofronoff, KC, “dishonestly concealed” the fact he had given a copy of his report to two journalists, including The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen, before it was publicly released. No findings were made against the journalists.
Journalist Janet Albrechtsen and Walter Sofronoff, KC.Credit: Edwina Pickles, Robert Shakespeare
Sofronoff will challenge the lawfulness of the report in the Federal Court, his lawyer said in a statement on Wednesday night.
The watchdog found Sofronoff’s conduct “significantly compromised the integrity of the inquiry”, and he had engaged in serious corrupt conduct.
“The overall chain of events in Mr Sofronoff’s communication with Ms Albrechtsen shows that over time he lost sight of the important public function he was discharging,” the commission said.
Parallel to the inquiry, Sofronoff was “engaging privately with Ms Albrechtsen … who was not a participant in the inquiry and who was known to have strong views about issues that would certainly be the subject of the report to government”.
The former judge’s “attempted justification” that he gave the journalists the report so that they could publish commentary immediately after the report was released by the ACT government without having to read it first was “not tenable”, the watchdog said. It concluded he had “not, in fact, acted in good faith”.
Sofronoff gave a raft of additional confidential material to Albrechtsen, the commission said, including witness statements, drafts of the report and proposed adverse findings against the then ACT director of public prosecutions, Shane Drumgold, SC.
The commission said Sofronoff “should at least have given fair notice of his intention to provide a copy of the report to journalists” – Albrechtsen and the ABC’s Elizabeth Byrne – before ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr made it public.
It was “exclusively for the government to consider what to do about publication”, the watchdog said.
Sofronoff gave the final report to Albrechtsen at about 2.12pm on July 31, 2023, shortly after giving it to Barr, and to Byrne at about 8pm on August 2.
Text messages between Walter Sofronoff, KC, and Janet Albrechtsen, in which the latter says she loved a section of his draft report in the inquiry into the Bruce Lehrmann prosecution.
The Australian published its first articles about the report online late on August 2, 2023. The ABC published a story the following afternoon. The government released the report on August 7.
The commission said Albrechtsen told Sofronoff in a phone call on August 2 that “she and a colleague had obtained a copy of the report from another source”.
Sofronoff told the commission he had given the report to the journalists on the basis its contents would not be published until after the report was released by the government. The watchdog said there was “no evidence” they did not comply with the embargo.
Lehrmann’s ACT Supreme Court criminal trial was aborted in 2022 owing to juror misconduct. The former Liberal staffer has always maintained his innocence. He did not face a second trial owing to concerns about the mental health of the complainant, his former colleague Brittany Higgins.
Emails between Walter Sofronoff, KC, and Janet Albrechtsen, released by the ACT Supreme Court.
Lehrmann last year lost a multimillion-dollar defamation case against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson after Federal Court Justice Michael Lee concluded to the civil standard – on the balance of probabilities – that Lehrmann raped Higgins in Parliament House in March 2019. He has launched an appeal against that finding.
Drumgold findings ‘legally invalid’
In his final report, Sofronoff found the Lehrmann prosecution was properly brought, but made damaging findings against Drumgold.
Drumgold, who quit his role, challenged the report’s findings in the ACT Supreme Court and won. The court found Sofronoff’s communications during the inquiry with Albrechtsen, who had authored a series of articles critical of Drumgold, gave rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias on Sofronoff’s part. This is not a finding of actual bias but of the appearance of it.
Former ACT director of public prosecutions Shane Drumgold, SC.Credit: Rhett Wyman
The integrity commission said the court’s judgment in the Drumgold litigation, delivered in March last year, “had the effect of rendering the findings against Mr Drumgold legally invalid”.
The report had “destroyed at least one professional and personal reputation by findings that were, in significant part, vitiated by jurisdictional error and, with the benefit of hindsight, ought never to have been published”, it said.
“However, release of the report could not effectively be prevented because it was already in the public domain as a result of the articles in The Australian.
“The failure to afford natural justice to Mr Drumgold was, therefore, productive of actual substantive injustice and not a mere technical error. This was predictable. And irreparable.”
Drumgold said in a statement: “I welcome the findings of the ACT Integrity Commission and thank the Commission for the thorough and professional manner in which this Inquiry was conducted.”
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