Bruce Lehrmann has made a last-ditch effort to clear his name of findings that, on the balance of probabilities, he raped Brittany Higgins in Parliament House in 2019.<\/p>\n
The alleged incident has spawned more than a dozen legal cases<\/a>.<\/p>\n In documents filed to the high court, Lehrmann\u2019s legal team argued that initial findings against him were \u201ccompromised\u201d, and that a finding by the full bench of the federal court upholding that decision was therefore also compromised.<\/p>\n The application for special leave to appeal claims the federal court judge Michael Lee, in initial findings against Lehrmann, \u201cinappropriately\u201d did his own research, meaning both findings should be set aside.<\/p>\n Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n In 2021, former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins told Network Ten\u2019s The Project and news.com.au that she had been raped in 2019 on a couch in Parliament House.<\/p>\n The alleged rapist was not named, but Higgins\u2019s Liberal colleague at the time, Bruce Lehrmann, claimed he was identifiable.<\/p>\n In 2022, Lehrmann pleaded not guilty to a charge of sexual intercourse without consent. That criminal trial was aborted <\/a>because of juror misconduct and the charges were dropped with prosecutors saying a retrial would pose an \u201cunacceptable risk\u201d to Higgins\u2019s health.<\/p>\n In 2023, Lehrmann sued Ten and presenter Lisa Wilkinson for defamation.<\/p>\n Justice Lee dismissed that claim<\/a>, and found, on the balance of probabilities, that Lehrmann raped Higgins.<\/p>\n Lee\u2019s colourful 2.5 hour summary of the case described it as an \u201comnishambles<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n Lee had reasoned that Lehrmann did not have at the relevant time \u201ca state of mind of actual cognitive awareness that Higgins did not consent to having sex\u201d.<\/p>\n Lehrmann sought to overturn that 2024 defamation judgement.<\/p>\n But in December last year, the full bench of the federal court dismissed Lehrmann\u2019s appeal and argued that Lee should have found that Lehrmann knew Higgins did not consent to sexual intercourse.<\/p>\n The bench said Lehrmann was not inebriated at the time and would have known that a \u201cvery drunk, passive and silent\u201d Higgins was not consenting.<\/p>\n Lehrmann\u2019s new application argues that the full court erred by depending on findings made by Lee that \u201cwere compromised by his having conducted his own research and having obtained extraneous non-legal material, such that there was not an impartial exercise of judicial power by the primary judge in some aspects of the case\u201d.<\/p>\n It claims Lee should have been limited to expert material included in the agreed facts of the case, but that he also researched other academic literature on sexual assault victims.<\/p>\n It highlights Lee referring to Higgins\u2019s \u201ccounterintuitive behaviour\u201d saying it was \u201cnot inconsistent with the conduct of a genuine victim of sexual assault struggling to process what happened, seeking to cope and working through her options\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIrrespective of the fact that the primary judge had made compromised findings, the Full Court went further than even the primary judge himself was prepared to go: it made a finding that the applicant had actual knowledge that Ms Higgins did not consent to sexual intercourse,\u201d the application claims, adding that high court intervention is therefore warranted, that both cases should be thrown out and costs awarded.<\/p>\n The application also argues about the meaning of the term \u201crape\u201d and that defendants must prove the substantial proof of what they \u201cactually published\u201d.<\/p>\n It says that, in the publication context, \u201cthe ordinary reasonable viewer would have understood \u2018rape\u2019 in this context to mean \u2018the rape and injury of an unconscious and then protesting woman\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIn other words, it was rape of a certain kind,\u201d it says, arguing that the judgements against him \u201cwrongly cast the relevant rape conveyed by the programme as a rape of any kind\u201d.<\/p>\n Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse is available from the following organisations. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect<\/a> (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis<\/a> offers support on 0808 500 2222. In the US, Rainn<\/a> offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org\/rcip\/internl.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bruce Lehrmann has made a last-ditch effort to clear his name of findings that, on the balance of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394658,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-394657","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}