Linda Reynolds win over Higgins latest chapter in ugly public fight

The Australian tells the story in headlines: “Reynolds wins Higgins defamation case, awarded massive damages”; “Albanese must ‘accept responsibility for Higgins’ lies’: Reynolds”; and “The 26 lies Higgins told in media interviews”. The rape that launched a thousand lawsuits has claimed another victim.

Former senator and minister Linda Reynolds has won her defamation case against Brittany Higgins, Justice Paul Tottle of the WA Supreme Court awarding her $315,000 in damages for one tweet and an Instagram story. Not massive, certainly big, and presumably devastating for Higgins.

Surely at this point nobody wants another recital of the sorry history, so let’s focus.

You’ll recall that Reynolds was Higgins’ (and Bruce Lehrmann’s) boss at the time of the rape in March 2019. Two years later, Higgins went public with her story, and Canberra exploded.

Higgins’ narrative, as told in her interviews with news.com.au’s Samantha Maiden and The Project’s Lisa Wilkinson, was that the then-government’s priority after she reported her rape had been to control the political damage and she’d been effectively kicked to the kerb. She believed that she had been the victim of a major attempted cover-up and that Reynolds’ treatment of her had been callous (to say the least).

What had once been a happy working relationship between Reynolds and Higgins descended into something like a vendetta, played out very publicly. Higgins sued Reynolds for calling her a “lying cow” (Reynolds settled and apologised), while Reynolds sued quite a few different defendants for allegedly defaming her before eventually going after Higgins — and her husband David Sharaz — over three social media posts that labelled her, in very broad summary, a whingeing, malicious hypocrite.

The judgment is 360 pages long. Justice Tottle found that all three posts had defamed Reynolds, but Higgins had a good defence to one of them. On the other two, she went down.

The keys to the judgment are its findings regarding the credibility of the three main witness: Reynolds, Higgins and Fiona Brown, Reynolds’ chief of staff who had had most of the critical contact with Higgins in the days following the rape.

Brown had the advantage of notes she had made at the time, which the judge accepted as a more reliable record of what happened than anyone’s reconstruction from memory. Where there were conflicts over what had been said, Brown’s notes won.

Reynolds, he found to be a “frustrating” but “honest” witness, albeit “one determined to ensure her account of events was heard”. In short, she had an agenda, but he didn’t think she was lying.

Assessing Higgins as a witness was tricky, since she didn’t give evidence in this case at all, the judge having found her medically unfit to attend. Transcripts of her police interview and testimony at Lehrmann’s criminal trial and defamation hearing were let in, and the judge had to do his best with these. Allowing for the impact of trauma, he was nevertheless unimpressed.

Basically, while the judge casts no doubt on Higgins’ account of having been raped by Lehrmann, he found much of her evidence about what happened afterwards to be “dishonest”. Consequently, he didn’t accept any of what she said without corroboration.

Tottle’s assessment shatters the narrative Higgins has maintained since 2021: by then, he said, she “had persuaded herself she had been the victim of a cover up and … treated poorly” by Reynolds. “In critical respects [her] view of what had occurred did not accord with the reality of what occurred … [her] account of events was distorted by her need for events to conform to her view about how she was treated by the Liberal Party … The existence of a cover up was a vital part of [her] story”.

To underline this, the judge sets out what he says are 26 false or misleading statements made by Higgins in her 2021 media interviews. He describes her as a “media savvy, strategic thinker” and concludes that she was including lies and omitting inconvenient truths to support the story she wanted told.

Consequently, all the major factual controversies in the saga are resolved in Reynolds’ favour. She didn’t know about the rape until much later than Higgins claimed, and not when she sat Higgins on the same couch in her office a few days later; there was no attempt to hinder Higgins or the police in accessing the CCTV footage; nobody tried to talk her down; she wasn’t frozen out, treated with hostility, or sidelined; and so on.

By the time we come to the posts, the outcome isn’t a surprise. Higgins, the judge found, imputed that Reynolds had pressured her not to pursue a police complaint, is a hypocrite in her advocacy of gender equality, had engaged in a campaign of harassment of Higgins, had mishandled the rape allegation, and had engaged in questionable conduct during Lehrmann’s criminal trial (by being cosy with the defence counsel and having her husband sit through the whole thing).

Since all these allegations were untrue (the judge found), Higgins had no defence, and the damage to Reynolds — reputation and very hurt feelings — was profound. Thus, the big slug of damages. With legal costs, Higgins is looking at seven figures easily.

Fair? I have no idea. Only the antagonists know what really went on in the days and months after the rape. They all chose, for reasons good or bad, to have the fight in public, and it’s burned them all to varying degrees. Literally nothing good has come from any of it.

If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.