Lehrmann judgment will bring some comfort to sexual assault victims everywhere

For everyone who found her account of the events of that March 2019 evening more plausible than Lehrmann’s, it will be enough.

None of this would have happened without Lehrmann bringing the defamation case himself. Once he did, he opened himself up to precisely the kinds of character assessments and credibility judgments that have been heaped on sexual assault complainants for centuries.

Lee found holes in the evidence of Higgins, too – he said he had “considerable doubts about the authenticity” of a photograph she produced of a bruise on her leg that she said she had sustained during the sexual assault.

He found that Higgins, ex post facto, massaged her account of the sexual assault to craft a narrative of political cover-up that was “long on speculation and internal inconsistencies” and was so vague it was like “trying to grab a column of smoke”.

But, in remarks that will comfort sexual assault complainants everywhere, Lee found Higgins’ inconsistencies and even possible falsehoods did not affect the persuasive truth of her central account.

Higgins gave evidence in court that she was drunk, passed out on the couch of the ministerial office of Liberal senator Linda Reynolds and woke up to find “Mr Lehrmann on top of her, at which time he was performing the sexual act”.

That account, Lee said, “struck me forcefully as being credible and as having the ring of truth”.

The judgment was a masterpiece of common sense and cut-through.

Contemporaneous accounts and objective evidence such as CCTV footage of the drunken evening were given more weight than vague or self-serving witness accounts.

Lee found that Lehrmann and Higgins were very drunk that night, and had kissed each other consensually. They agreed to go back to Parliament House together, probably on the pretext of drinking whisky Lehrmann said he had back in his office.

But Lehrmann’s version of what happened next, in the ministerial suite in the early hours, didn’t pass what a non-legal mind would call the “pub test”.

“Put bluntly, he was a 23-year-old male cheating on his girlfriend, having just ‘hooked up’ with a woman he found sexually attractive,” Lee said.

“Human experience suggests what he then wanted to happen is not exactly shrouded in mystery.”

As well as the trauma at the centre of this judgment, there were some lighter moments in the ruling.

Lee knocked cleanly through myths and misconceptions about the way a sexual assault victim should behave, or would behave, if she had really been assaulted.

Lee poked light fun at the expense of the “Bumble date” Higgins abandoned in favour of hanging out with Lehrmann and colleagues on the night. He mocked the notion Lehrmann was such a workaholic he returned to Parliament House to revise question-time briefs at 1am on a Saturday after a drunken evening out.

But silence fell in court when Lee came to the desolation of the end scene, the wretched reason why we were all there: Higgins being found by a security guard after the assault, in a state of undress on the couch in the ministerial office, her private parts exposed.

She was, Lee said, “sufficiently discombobulated that, when seen by a uniformed stranger, did not interact verbally and did not move immediately to recover her modesty by putting on her dress or covering herself”.

Lee knocked cleanly through myths and misconceptions about the way a sexual assault victim should behave, or would behave, if she had really been assaulted.

He said it was not unusual that Higgins had maintained civility and friendliness with Lehrmann in the days after the incident, even accepting a cup of coffee from him.

He said these things could “be readily characterised as the actions of a woman who had not yet come to terms with what had happened to her, but needed to confront the reality that she had to work out a way of being in the same professional office as a male colleague who had assaulted her”.

Higgins’ struggle over how to respond would “no doubt … resonate with many women working in any type of workplace who have had to find some way of coping with such a predicament”.

Lee gave a perspicacious insight into the mind of a sexual assault victim when he described Higgins’ “conflicting emotions” after the event, of “self-doubt, concern that she would be humiliated by word leaking out to her colleagues, and questioning the prudence of her own behaviour”.

He said Higgins’ communications after the incident “show a woman working through a traumatic event and providing further information notwithstanding she did not, at that time, feel able to say … that she had been ‘raped’.”

He also found that Higgins probably didn’t protest “no” during the assault, which was the evidence she gave during the criminal trial.

Lee said Higgins was probably more passive throughout, but that passivity did not amount to consent.

These are findings that will comfort sexual assault victims, and which are particularly meaningful coming from a senior member of the bench.

Lehrmann was found to have been recklessly indifferent as to Higgins’ consent.

In other words, he didn’t care what she wanted because he was “hell-bent” on having sex with her anyway.

He was hell-bent on bringing this defamation suit, too – the latest chapter in a saga so drawn-out and ghastly that Lee labelled it in his opening remarks as an “omnishambles”.

There are less polite ways to put it – phrases that will never make it into a 324-page Federal Court judgment but will be deployed by the hordes of onlookers who have watched the case and projected onto it their own ideas, beliefs and traumas.

Lives have been destroyed and careers decimated.

None of it was worth it. It probably told us something about how fit-for-purpose the criminal justice system is when it comes to dealing with sexual assault allegations.

But if justice is related to truth, then Lee got as close to it as anyone could.

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