Former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins has described feeling “trapped, not human” while her colleague Bruce Lehrmann was allegedly raping her on the couch in former Coalition minister Linda Reynolds’ parliamentary office.
Higgins also told police that as soon as she told her chief of staff, Fiona Brown, four days later, “that’s when the gears shifted, and it became less about me and more political”.
Brittany Higgins (centre) arrives at the ACT Supreme Court in Canberra on Wednesday.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
On the second day of the six-week criminal trial, the jury heard a recorded police interview almost two years after the alleged incident in which she described waking to Lehrmann “grunting” on top of her after a drunken night out in the early hours of March 23, 2019.
“It felt like he was in the throes of it … it felt like he was almost finished, and I was coming late to the party,” Higgins told police during a February 2021 interview. “It felt me saying ‘no’ was a strange afterthought … it wasn’t acknowledged, he just kept going.”
Asked by a detective how she felt, Higgins replied, “trapped, not human”, adding, “it didn’t feel like it was about me at all”.
Lehrmann a former policy adviser to Reynolds, has pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual intercourse without consent and denies ever having sex with Higgins, who sparked a media storm when she went public with her claims at the beginning of last year.
The court previously heard Lehrmann and Higgins had shared a cab after a night out with colleagues, in which Higgins had said she was the most intoxicated she had ever been. The pair ended up in Reynolds’ office after Lehrmann said he had to stop by parliament to pick up documents, arriving at the building at 1.41am.
Higgins told police that after gaining entry to the office, she remembered sitting on the window sill overlooking the prime minister’s courtyard, an area inside parliament. She said her next memory was of being raped by Lehrmann.
“He was hovering above me … he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking over me,” she said. “He was making noise, he was grunting.”
She recalled that after Lehrmann got up, he looked at Higgins, “and it was a strange moment of just eye contact” before Lehrmann departed.
Bruce Lehrmann arrives at the court on WednesdayCredit:Alex Ellinghausen
She described the atmosphere in the office on Monday as “very tense”, and that Lehrmann, who occupied a position senior to her, bought her coffee while she was trying to overcompensate by being overly nice to him.
“He didn’t seem ashamed, he didn’t seem upset, it just didn’t feel like something he wanted to address,” Higgins told police.
“I didn’t know how to navigate it given who he was and who I was. I just figured his word carried more weight than mine.”
She said both she and Lehrmann were called into Brown’s office on Tuesday to address the security breach that their entry to the building after-hours prompted. She said she had a “full and frank” conversation with Brown in which she identified the incident as rape for the first time.
“I started to cry, and that’s when the gears shifted, and it became less about me and more political,” she said.
“I knew what had happened was wrong, I knew I hadn’t consented, but I still had this whole self blame … that I’d done something wrong.”
She said she was told to go home, and later handed a brochure for counselling support.
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