Higgins loses defamation case

ABC reports:

Former WA senator Linda Reynolds has won her defamation case against former staffer Brittany Higgins over social media posts.

Justice Paul Tottle ruled the posts were defamatory and ordered Ms Higgins to pay $315,000 plus $26,000 interest, though one post was deemed as an honestly held opinion and fair comment.

Higgins was almost certainly raped by Bruce Lehrmann who made up an implausible story that he went back to Parliament House with her at 2 am not to have sex with her, but to do some work.

Sadly for Higgins, she didn’t make this an issue of a fellow staffer acting appallingly, but instead tried to make it a political issue with allegations that her Minister and the Government generally covered it up etc. She worked with Labour Party MPs and the media to run it as a political campaign. And a court has found she defamed her former Minister.

In his judgement, Justice Tottle wrote that “whatever the defendant may have felt in 2021 about the way she was treated by the plaintiff and (her chief of staff, Fiona Brown) in 2019, the allegation of a cover-up had no foundation in fact and the allegation of inadequate support was based on an incomplete and misleading account of the facts”.

In fact the Minister even suggested they take it to the Police, the exact opposite of a cover-up.

Supreme Court Justice Tottle found the disparity between Ms Higgins’ recollection in media interviews of how she was treated during the 2019 federal election campaign, and actuality “was so dramatic as to cast doubt on the reliability of her evidence generally”.

That is a polite way of saying she lied.