Bruce Lehrmann loses defamation declare in opposition to broadcaster and journalist over 2021 interview together with his accuser.
A former authorities staffer in Australia raped a colleague within the nation’s Parliament, a decide has discovered, rejecting his defamation declare in opposition to a broadcaster that aired his accuser’s allegations.
Justice Michael Lee dominated that Bruce Lehrmann, an adviser to the earlier conservative authorities, was not defamed within the tv interview with Brittany Higgins and that he had raped her in a minister’s workplace in 2019.
Lee made his discovering on the steadiness of chances, a decrease commonplace than that utilized in felony trials to determine guilt past an affordable doubt.
Lee stated it was “extra possible than not” that the previous authorities staffer was “hellbent” on having intercourse with a girl he discovered enticing and knew to be inebriated.
“In his pursuit of gratification he didn’t care a method or one other whether or not Ms Higgins understood or agreed,” Lee stated.
“Mr Lehrmann raped Ms Higgins,” the decide stated.
“I hasten to emphasize this can be a discovering on the steadiness of chances.”
Lee additionally criticised Community 10 for airing the allegations in opposition to Lehrmann, discovering that doing so “fell wanting the usual of reasonableness”, and stated Higgins had been a “complicated, and in a number of respects, unsatisfactory witness”.
Lehrmann didn’t make any remark to the assembled media scrum as he left the courtroom.
Lehrmann, who has at all times maintained his innocence, sued Community 10 and journalist Lisa Wilkinson over the 2021 interview with Higgins that didn’t establish him by title.
Lehrmann went on trial for the alleged rape in 2022, however the proceedings collapsed with none findings in opposition to him after a juror was discovered to have carried out analysis into the case in violation of courtroom guidelines.
Prosecutors deserted a proposed retrial after figuring out it might severely hurt Higgins’s psychological well being.
Higgins’s allegations convulsed Australia’s political panorama once they have been first made public in 2021, prompting a flurry of dialogue about sexual violence and the remedy of girls in politics.
