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The first time Brittany Higgins’s throat caught, she was recalling the drive from the nightclub 88mph to Parliament House in the early hours of March 23, 2019. She had been told to share a ride home with her senior colleague Bruce Lehrmann because they both lived in the same direction.

But they were not going home. They were not headed in the same direction at all.

Brittany Higgins told the court that she recalled Bruce Lehrmann lying on top of her.Credit: Louise Kennerley

The night would end in the ministerial suite of their boss, Senator Linda Reynolds, where Higgins would later allege that Lehrmann sexually assaulted her. He is currently suing Network Ten and its journalist Lisa Wilkinson for airing those claims, which he has always strenuously denied.

As Higgins gave evidence for the defence on Wednesday, the counsel for Network Ten unspooled her memories of the night from their starchy white beginnings to their tattered rag-tail end. Fuzzy recollections gave way to blank periods. She was at the pub. Cut to the nightclub. She recalled a shot. She remembered him telling her to “just be quiet” as they entered Parliament House, and sitting for a while on a ledge overlooking the prime minister’s courtyard.

Next thing she knew he was lying on top of her, pinning down one of her legs with his own.

“I told him ‘no’ on a loop. I don’t know how many times I said it,” she told the court. “I couldn’t scream for some reason, it was trapped in my throat. I felt really waterlogged and heavy.”

He finished and left wordlessly, she told the court. When she woke again, she threw up in the minister’s toilet and then ate a whole box of Roses chocolates. Afterwards, she fixed her hair and mascara. “Just trying to make myself not look like I’d been –” she sighed, and her voice became tight again “–trying to make myself look presentable”.

Former federal Liberal political staffer Bruce Lehrmann leaves the Federal Court on Wednesday. Credit: James Brickwood

Lehrmann listened to her recount of the night with a scholarly expression, bending his head periodically to take notes, tilting back his head and putting his pen to his cheek. He denies sexually assaulting her that night. He has told the court that he stopped by the office to do some work and did not see or speak to Higgins after they arrived.

Back at work the following Monday, Higgins told the court, Lehrmann placed a coffee on her desk and sent her a professional email that had a smiling emoji attached to it, which gave her the “heebie-jeebies”. She was relieved that he did not appear to have mentioned the incident to anyone else, and she focused on one task at a time.

“I was trying to soften the situation and make it as normal as possible,” she said. It was not until she started telling people what had happened that she began to come to terms with it, she said, and as she told the court what she had told others, she began to weep.

A large man in a maroon shirt sat behind Wilkinson, theatrically shaking his head throughout Higgins’ evidence. Lehrmann’s barrister had said in his opening address that there were those who would always believe Higgins and there were those who would always believe Lehrmann. This man considered Higgins’ every utterance to be preposterous. He simply could not relate.

“This whole thing is rubbish,” he fumed loudly into his phone when court broke for lunch. “If she said to Fiona Brown [Senator Reynolds’ former chief-of-staff] – which I don’t believe for one minute – that she had been criminally assaulted, it needed to get immediately reported to police.”

But Higgins was not finished.

Not in her evidence and not in May 2019, when to her surprise the Coalition retained government at the election and she got a new job in Michaelia Cash’s office. She liked Cash, she liked her new colleagues and she gained confidence. When Four Corners reported in 2021 allegations that another minister had committed a sexual assault and more women emerged from the woodwork, she decided to speak out.

“I felt like it wasn’t just me, there were so many people,” she said. “And when it became clear it was a pattern, at that point I couldn’t sit on it any more.”

Higgins was nowhere near crying now. When court broke for the end of the day, she almost smiled.

Back at the beginning of March 22, 2019 – before the nightclub 88mph, before the taxi to Parliament House, before speaking out – Higgins arrived at The Dock Hotel feeling that her time had come. She had invited Lehrmann, among other Liberal party staffers, to the pub that night. She felt that by making introductions, she was finally moving beyond her old position of receptionist and occupying the role of a media advisor. For the first time, Lehrmann was treating her as an equal.

“It was the nicest he’d ever been to me,” she said.

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