The withering forensic gaze that Justice Michael Lee has brought to bear on the fraught Bruce Lehrmann defamation case leaves none of the main characters walking away unscathed.

In a rigorously structured, exhaustively documented judgment delivered on Monday, Lee has ensured that the hard-partying, until-now cocksure Lehrmann will forever be branded a rapist, based on the civil test of the judge being so persuaded on the balance of probabilities (a lower threshold than would have applied in a criminal trial).

Lisa Wilkinson and Bruce Lehrmann on Monday; Brittany Higgins back in December last year.Credit: Getty Images, Dominic Lorrimer, Steven Siewert

But in other respects, there is little comfort for key players Lisa Wilkinson, her producer Angus Llewellyn, Network Ten lawyer Tasha Smithies, and Brittany Higgins herself, despite the stunning vindication the latter has now had on the rape allegation.

Lehrmann has been branded a liar in multiple respects, his overarching need, according to Lee, having been to “fashion his responses in what he perceived to be his forensic interests”.

“To remark that Mr Lehrmann was a poor witness is an exercise in understatement” the judge observed in one of his many cutting bon mots.

But he has branded Higgins, too, an “unreliable historian … a complex and in several respects unsatisfactory witness”.

And while he endorsed her core allegation she was raped on the couch of her then employer Senator Linda Reynolds in the early hours of March 23, 2019, he roundly rejected what might be characterised as the second leg of her claims.

That is her insistence, first publicly aired in the bombshell interview with then Ten star presenter Wilkinson in February 2021, that she was the cowed victim of senior political staffers and ministers who callously forced her to choose between the pursuit of justice and her job – a “cover-up” narrative, as Lee puts it, he has now comprehensively debunked.

QOSHE - Forensic gaze of Justice Lee left no-one unscathed in Lehrmann defamation case - Deborah Snow
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Forensic gaze of Justice Lee left no-one unscathed in Lehrmann defamation case

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15.04.2024

The withering forensic gaze that Justice Michael Lee has brought to bear on the fraught Bruce Lehrmann defamation case leaves none of the main characters walking away unscathed.

In a rigorously structured, exhaustively documented judgment delivered on Monday, Lee has ensured that the hard-partying, until-now cocksure Lehrmann will forever be branded a rapist, based on the civil test of the judge being so persuaded on the balance of probabilities (a lower threshold than would have applied in........

© The Sydney Morning Herald


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