Brittany Higgins’ alleged rape in parliament house wasn’t workplace sexual harassment because it happened after hours, a lawyer has told a defamation trial.
Senator Linda Reynolds is suing her former staffer over social media posts last year the ex-minister believes damaged her reputation.
Reynolds’ lawyer, Martin Bennett, told a Perth court Higgins wasn’t in the minister’s suite in 2019 for an official purpose and her access late at night was unauthorised and she was there to drink whiskey and chat.
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“This is not a workplace event. This is an event happening out of hours in a workplace,” he told the Western Australian Supreme Court during his closing submissions today.
“It’s not workplace sexual harassment, as it has been described by Ms Higgins repeatedly.”
Bennett was critical of Higgins’ version of events, as he reminded Justice Paul Tottle of the evidence heard at the 18-day trial, describing it as an extensive litany of lies, a concoction, false and bunk.
He said Higgins had “arrogantly” claimed the status of the person most seriously affected by the events and trivialised the hurt to others.
“The attack by Ms Higgins, which was unwarranted and unprovoked, was the expression of a visceral hatred that was laid bare by the recording of the five-hour interview [with The Project, which] was the genuine, unguarded, unrehearsed, real, true expression of the motive for what then took place as part of the planning for a premeditated attack on Senator Reynolds,” he said.
Zeroing in on the senator’s meeting with Higgins in the days after the alleged rape that has been used to illustrate the senator’s mishandling of the incident, Bennett said it was “absolutely logical that the minister would have a meeting in her own office”.
“In that context, it was to be kept private and it was the only private space in a busy suite that was crammed with people,” he said.
“What could the minister have done? The minister is not simply an employer.
“She was the minister for defence industries in budget week … leave the budget, leave the duties of the ministerial portfolio and chase after [accused rapist Bruce] Lehrmann and cross-examine him with no authority to do so?”
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Higgins’ lawyer, Rachael Young, said the senator repeatedly said she wanted to protect Higgins’ agency in the days and weeks after the alleged rape.
“But Ms Higgins had no agency when she was raped in March 2019 on the couch in Senator Reynolds’ private office,” she said in her closing submissions.
“She had little agency when, as a 24-year-old recent employee … met with her boss and her chief of staff around a table near the couch where she was found undressed and where the rape occurred.
“She had no agency when she started to speak about her experience and was told by the senator she was not the right person to talk to.”
Young said Higgins also had no agency when she worked on the senator’s re-election campaign in the months after “absent [from] her support network and being in the awful position of feeling that if she wanted to keep her job she couldn’t talk about her rape”.
“She seized that agency, though, when she decided to speak up about her experience in 2021,” she said.
Young said in the spirit of recognising Higgins’ agency, she would quote her client as she concluded her remarks.
“The prime minister has repeatedly told the parliament that I should be given agency going forward,” Young said, reading a statement by Higgins’ in 2021 in which she said she had re-engaged with police over her alleged rape.
“From the outset, I have been driven by my desire to ensure that no other person would have to go through the trauma that I experienced during my time in parliament house.”
Young said that was Higgins’ motive for speaking up in 2021, when she went public with her accusations against Reynolds and the Morrison government about the mishandling of her alleged rape and a cover-up.
“That’s why she’s been sued and that’s why we say this action should be dismissed,” she said.
Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).
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