Brittany Higgins’ former boss takes legal action against the Commonwealth

Brittany Higgins’ former boss Fiona Brown, who was a key witness in the Bruce Lehrmann defamation case, is taking legal action against the Commonwealth for failing to protect her in the workplace.

The former Liberal chief-off-staff’s case is the latest of more than a dozen legal claims and investigations that have come from the fallout of Higgins’ allegation she was raped on a ministerial couch by her then-colleague Lehrmann in 2019.

Fiona Brown, the former chief of staff to then-defence industry minister Linda Reynolds, outside the Federal Court in Sydney in 2023.Credit: Steven Siewert

Brown was central to Higgins’s original claim on Network 10 that her alleged rape was subject to a political cover-up. Federal Court Justice Michael Lee later said Brown was a reliable witness who had been unfairly vilified as an “unfeeling apparatchik” seeking to cover up a crime.

In an application filed to the Federal Court on March 10, first reported by The Australian on Tuesday, Brown will argue the Commonwealth breached her general protections in a workplace. Brown will be represented by barrister Dominique Hogan-Doran, SC, who declined to comment.

The Federal Court said Brown’s legal team had indicated they may seek a suppression order over the case.

Brown, the former chief of staff to then-minister Linda Reynolds, was a key witness during Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network 10 and journalist Lisa Wilkinson in 2023.

Brown told the court she thought “something terrible” could have happened when she first heard Higgins had been found naked in Parliament House.

But Brown denied Higgins had told her in their first conversation after the alleged rape, from March 2019, that she had woken up in Reynolds’ office with Lehrmann “on top of me”. Instead, Brown’s evidence was that Higgins had told her she woke up and was semi-naked.

Brown told the court that she was “blindsided” when Higgins told her at a later meeting on March 28: “I remember him being on top of me.”

Asked about claims there was an attempt to stop Higgins from making a complaint, Brown said Higgins and Lehrmann were in their early 20s and “there was no cover-up”. She said the police, Department of Finance and the Department of Parliamentary Services knew about Higgins’ allegations.

Lee found Lehrmann had raped Higgins on the balance of probabilities, in his judgment delivered in April 2024. However, he said there was no evidence of a cover-up.

Lee said he “unhesitatingly” preferred Brown’s evidence to that of Lehrmann and Higgins on occasions when their accounts conflicted.

He also said Brown had appropriately responded to the incident when she was first made aware of it and acknowledged the former chief of staff had been vilified.

“To be later vilified as an unfeeling apparatchik willing to throw up roadblocks in covering up criminal conduct at the behest of one’s political overlords must be worse than galling,” Lee said.

Brown’s first case management hearing will be on April 2 before Justice Nye Perram.

Lehrmann has maintained his innocence and a separate 2022 criminal trial was aborted due to juror misconduct.

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