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Just a quick trigger warning. We'll be talking about sexual assault in today's episode. Help is available at one eight hundred respect that's one eight hundred seven three seven seven.
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Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Tuesday, the sixteenth of April. I'm Sam, I'm Lucy. Yesterday, Justice Michael Lee handed down his judgment in the defamation case Bruce Lehman brought against journalist Lisa Wilkinson and Network ten, finding that it was more likely than not that Lherman raped fellow liberal staffer Britney Higgins in twenty nineteen and therefore was not defamed.
Mister Lherman raped Mishiggins.
I sincerely hope that this judgment gives strength to women around the country.
Having escaped the lines dean, mister Lehman made the mistake of coming back for his head.
There is nothing simple or straightforward about this case. But today TDF fact checker Lucy Tassel and I will endeavor to unpack it. But first, Lucy what's making headlines.
The New South Wales Coroner has been granted extra funding for its inquest into the mass stabbing at Bondai Junction in Sydney's East last weekend. The Coroner's Court has been allocated an additional eighteen million dollars in funding, which covers trauma informed care for victims and families. Six people were killed and the attacker was shot by police. New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb said it's obvious to me, it's obvious to detectives that the offender focused on women
and avoided the men. The government has said its approach to this is similar to the Lint Cafe siege in twenty fourteen.
A church leader and several worshippers were stabbed at Christ the Good Shepherd church in Sydney's West last night. The event was live streamed now. According to New Southwales Police, the injured people suffered non life threatening injuries and were treated by New South Wales Ambulance paramedics before being sent to hospital. Following the incident, crowds gathered at the location
and police launched a wild scale public order operation. Two police officers were injured, including one who was hit with a brick and a number of police vehicles sustained damage.
A Victorian court has fined betting company Blue Bet fifty thousand dollars for breaching advertising rules by putting ads on public roads. The state's Gambling Commission took the company to court after an investigation found Blue Bet placed billboards across freeways in Victoria in quote the prime position to target man aged fifteen to fifty four. Magistrate Greg Thomas said the breach shows quote a high degree of negligence by Blue Bet, which had pleaded guilty to.
The charges, and today's good news. Over the weekends, the A League Women may history, setting a new Australian record for the most attended season of women's sport in the semi final between the Newcastle Jets and the Central Coast Mariners. Over the weekend, A League Women became the most attended season in Australian history. The cumulative number of spectators reached nearly three hundred thousand people that surpassed the previous record
held by the twenty twenty three AFL Women's regular season. So, just before we get started, I just wanted to make one quick note. Tda's editor in chief is Billye fitz Simon's, who is the daughter of Lisa Wilkinson. Billy had no editorial oversight or involvement with this story or any post we've made about this story's developments.
That's right.
Yesterday, Sam, we watched Federal Court Judge Michael Lee hand down a judgment in a case that has, I think it's safe to say, really captured the nation's attention. I mean, just looking at the numbers on the Federal Court live stream yesterday, forty four thousand people at its peak, and we can assume more watching on TVs as it was also broadcast in part on TV. I think it could be easy, certainly for me, it is kind of years and years down the track to lose sight of the
actual origin of this case. Why so many people took time out of their days.
To watch a very dry, very upsetting one camera.
For many hours to watch a judgment in a defamation case be handed down.
So can you take me back to the start.
So to do that, we have to go back to twenty nineteen and Brittany Higgins and Bruce Lehman were staffers for Defense Minister Linda Reynolds in Canberra and as Justice Lee outlined in court yesterday, his understanding of the facts is that the two went out for drinks after work with a big group of friends to several venues around Canberra. Then they returned to Parliament House, their workplace, and went into Reynolds' office and this was the early hours of
the next morning. Now Justice Lee f that it's more likely than not, and we're going to come back to what exactly that means that Bruce Lehmon raped Britney Higgins at that office.
So that's March twenty nineteen. That's a long way from April twenty twenty four. What has happened in those intervening years.
So then we fast forward two years to February of twenty twenty one, and that's when Brittany Higgins went to the media with these allegations that she had been raped in Parliament House by an unnamed at that point political staffer, which we now know is Bruce Lemon. And I just want to be really clear in a criminal court he has always denied this, and in fact he's always denied
any sexual contact happened between them. Higgins sat down with interviews with news dot Com today U Samantha Maiden was the journalist there and with journalist Lisa Wilkinson who was then working with the Network ten show the project, the interview with Wilkinson and the story in news dot com do U came out on the same day. That was February fifteenth, twenty twenty one.
That was a huge day. That was really it's.
Really a nation defining story.
It was an inflection point, you know, up until this point and then everything changes after that. So you've mentioned that this case that Luhrman's brought this case against Lisa wilkinsoner Network ten, but you have mentioned news dot com dot AU, So were they also being sued.
Yeah, they were also being sued, and so was the ABC for broadcasting a speech by Higgins, as well as Wilkinson and Network ten. But Lherman actually settled the cases with news dot com, to U and ABC on the first day of these exact proceedings last year.
So we've started with these very publicized allegations, but they're made against a person who we don't know who they are. It's an unnamed person. So how do we get to knowing who Bruce Lehman is? How do we get from anonymous person not named, not described to, or not specifically described to the person able to breed a defamation case.
Well, this is actually the first bit of what Justice Lee needed to establish in his judgment yesterday, because in order to sue someone for defamation, you need to make it clear that they're talking about you. And Justice Lee found that, Yeah, a reasonable person would ascertain that the person who was the subject of Britney Higgins's comments in that project interview was Bruce Lehman, even though Brittney Higgins didn't specify the name of who she alleged had raped her.
But you know, one of the first things that Justice Lee found was that he was identifiable. Justice Lee said he was quote amply satisfied that Lehman was identified, and this was based on evidence given by witnesses that he described as quote telltale.
So what was this telltale evidence?
Well, Justice Lee turned to the fact that Lehman and Higgins had been at drinks on the night in question, that he was at the time of the interview working in Sydney, which Lehman was, and some loose details about the job he'd had before working for Reynolds. And all of this, a few other points were enough for some witnesses with quote specific knowledge of the situation to know who Higgins was talking about. So picture somebody you know
watching this interview on television. These facts started to emerge in Britney Higgins's interview. That was enough to really say, yes, I think I know who they're talking about.
And we saw some of that evidence being tendered in the trial of like various group chats various people within Lehman's life kind of saying we think that he was probably the subject of this interview that we're all watching.
Yeah, but the public only really became aware of Bruce Lehman as the subject of this when the matter proceeded to a criminal trial in twenty twenty one.
Yeah, So what happened with that criminal.
Trial, Well, that trial was suspended due to DURA misconducts and a retrial was later abandoned. And I think that's what makes this defamation case really notable because there was never a criminal finding the way about what happened on that night in March twenty nineteen, and there still isn't and I think that's an important point. But now there is a civil finding. But this case, yeah, really moved into then the question of reputational damage.
So Lehman believes that he's been identified despite not being named in this original interview. That kind of gets the ball rolling on this. And now that there hasn't been a criminal trial, his name is just sort of out there associated with this unproven allegation. So is that what kind of brings him to this point of bringing a defamation case exactly?
And then this kind of forms then the second and third parts of what Justice Lee needed to establish to work out whether Lehman had been defamed. And so once we'd established that it was in fact Lehman who was the subject of the interview, we then move on to is the content of the interview the claims made against Lehman? Are they true or not? And if they were true, then Channel ten and Lisa Wilkinson could rely on what's
called the truth defense. So in order to kind of prove for the truth defense, it almost became a forensic trial in nature. There were witnesses being called who were on security at Parliament House that night, there were people who were at the drinks, there was ex partners of
both parties. Because what the court needed to ascertain is whether or not what Channel ten were claiming about Bruce Lehman was true, but they needed to do so not beyond the reasonable doubt, but on the balance of probabilities.
So I definitely have heard the phrase beyond a reasonable doubt used before in terms of criminal cases.
So what's the balance of probabilities? How's that different?
So in the criminal system and the civil system, there's two different burdens of proof, and a burden of proof is the words used to describe what a party needs to prove in order to prosecute the case. Now, in the criminal system, the burden of proof is beyond the reasonable doubt, and what that essentially means is in the mind of the judge or a jury, there needs to be no doubt in their mind that what is being claimed did indeed happen. So think about something like speeding
in your car. It's beyond a reasonable doubt because you were either going one hundred klumeter this hour or you weren't going one hundred klometers an hour, And so it's the job of a prosecutor to really prove that there's absolutely no doubt that this happened. In a civil system, we use a burden of proof called the balance of probabilities. And the question that needs to be answered here is is it more likely than not that something happened. So
think about it almost as like fifty one percent. Is it fifty one percent likely that this happened, And there's more chance that it did happen than it didn't happen. And so that was the level of proof that Justice Lee was looking at when making his determination yesterday. And Justice Lee did find that it is more likely than not that Lehmann did rape Higgins in Minister Reynolds's office in March twenty nineteen.
I consider it more likely than not in those early hours mister Lehman was held bent on having sex with a woman he found sixtually attracted. He's pursuit of Grantiford cushion. He did not here one way or the other, whether miss Higgins understood or agreed to what was going on. Mister Lhermann raped mis Higgins.
So it really has come down to it's a lower kind of burden of proof than a criminal finding. Bruce Lemon's not going to jail.
Over this, no, So these have no relevance in the kind of criminal world in terms of the criminal justice system. Bruce Lemon has neither been found guilty or not guilty. The trial was never finished.
So there's obviously a lot to this case.
That being said, though, so Justice Michael Lee has handed down a three hundred page plus decision. So what else was kind of in that judgment?
Well, look, there was a lot and you know, we have this three hundred page decision that when printed would look and feel like a novel. We also had yesterday I think it was two and a half hours of judgment delivered felt like more. Yeah, it was very long, and so there's lots of an analysis by Justice Lee.
He goes through systematically every witness, almost to us called discusses the reliability of everybody from Britney Higgins, Bruce Lehman, Lisa Wilkinson, everybody involved in the case really and what he found, notably was that Bruce Lehman was found to have told quote deliberate lies about quote important issues in the case.
Yeah.
Now, he also said that Higgins, who testified in the case to support ten and Wilkinson's case, had said quote
untruths or distortions herself throughout giving evidence. But something really important to note here, and I was quite impressed that Justice Lee went into this was he said that lawyers on both sides had agreed that quote, trauma has a severe impact on memory by splintering and fragmenting memories, inconsistencies often observed in reliable reports of sexual assault, and is not in and of itself a measure of deception.
That's amazing because that's something that we certainly have read about in scientific articles, but it feels rare for that to have come up in a high profile case like.
This, definitely, and I think it will be used by other courts throughout Australia as a model for how to incorporate a trauma based response to these types of cases totally.
And that also includes he found on the balance of probabilities that there was a trauma that informed this.
Case exactly, and so then you know, putting all those parts together, Whilst he found that Ten and Wilkinson did identify Lehman in the broadcast, he found that Ten and Wilkinson could rely on this truth defense and therefore Ten and Wilkinson were not held liable for defamation from Lehman. So that leaves us in a very interesting position.
Yeah, so what happens.
Now, Well, we have another court date, and that's the twenty second of April, so we don't have to wait too long for that, and that's when parties submit what's called costs, and costs is essentially think of it as a receipt of how much it had cost for the legal representation that the parties have had to have to present their case at this trial. And what typically happens. And we don't know whether this is going to happen for sure, but it's reasonably likely there I am sounding
like a civil lawyer. It's reasonably likely that it is going to happen is that Lhman will be ordered to either partially or fully cover the legal costs of ten and Wilkinson. And this is almost a recognition from the court that in failing to convince the court of his argument, somebody has to foot the bill, right And so I mean that could be in the millions of dollars and we're not going to know exactly how much that is
until the twenty second of April. That's when the parties have to submit their cost to the court and then Justice League will go back and review them and work out how much Bruce Lehman has to pay. Now It's really important that we also acknowledge that Bruce Lehmon has the option to appeal this civil case. So whilst it might feel like a conclusion in the end of the road, it's not exactly the end of this story, I.
See, And certainly there are we won't touch on them today, but certainly there are other legal actions from other parties in this case. We have not heard the last of it, but at least for today we have a finding sam Justice Michael Lee has developed a reputation for having little one liners throughout this very dark case that have really been kind of a silver lining. Can you I think my favorite was when he said that mister Lhman had quote escaped the lions den but gone back for his hat.
Can you explain what that means?
Yeah, he certainly was entertaining during the judgment, and it did make watching the two and a half hour broadcast with you a little more enjoyable. But I think this phrase really does hit an important point and one important for us to end on. And by saying that he escaped the line and went back to get his hat
or whatever exactly, the phrase was. What the Justice is saying is Bruce Lehem and brought this case on himself, and he was the one who brought to the court the claim of defamation that triggered this long, detail oriented exposure of what happened that night in Parliament House and indeed a huge judgment yesterday that essentially degraded Lehman's character from the Federal Court of Australia. I thought it was
a really apt expression. There's now been a couple of these defamation cases in Australia where people have brought an action, bringing their particular case back into the center of the media spotlight and then lost. And yeah, he certainly did, you know, escape the lion, but went back to get his hat and got bidden.
Yeah, was the hat really worth it?
That's an interesting question. So, as I said, Lehman can still appeal this case. He has still maintained his innocence in a criminal court. But a big moment in defamation law and in media law here in Australia.
If these episodes brought anything up for you, you can call one eight hundred respect which is one eight hundred seven three seven seven three two and at their website they've got online chats and video calls.
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