The court heard that Higgins believed Lehrmann was territorial of his senior position in Reynolds’ office. Higgins said she invited him out that night in a collegial overture.
Bruce Lehrmann leaves court on Tuesday.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
They started at The Dock at the Kingston Foreshore. The Crown led evidence that Higgins consumed about 10 drinks there.
Later, a smaller group of four, including Lehrmann, Higgins and a staffer for now-Opposition leader Peter Dutton, kicked on to a bar in Civic called 88MPH.
Higgins had at least one shot of liquor there. She was so drunk she fell on her knees. Lehrmann helped her up. She knew then it was time to leave, the court heard.
The two caught a cab around 1.30am and the court heard Lehrmann told Higgins he needed to pick something up from work.
In the record of her first 2021 police interview, played to the court in the afternoon session, Higgins went along with him because she said she believed Parliament House, her workplace, to be a “safe space”.
The accused sat in court wearing the gold watch, R&M Williams boots and the clean side-part of the young Liberal staffer he used to be.
He watched as the prosecutor enumerated the “number of versions” he had given about why he wanted to take his drunken colleague back to Parliament House on a Friday night.
Lehrmann said, variously, he went to do some extra work, he had left his keys at work, and he wanted to drink some whisky in the ministerial suite.
Both the Crown and Justice McCallum instructed the jury that even if they discarded Lehrmann’s versions of events, that did not mean they should decide the prosecution’s case was proven.
The accused’s barrister spent much of his opening address telling the jury the trial was a case of the zeitgeist meeting an unreliable and non-credible complainant.
Once the story was reported in the media, he said, “this unstoppable snowball started to roll down the mountain … until it became an avalanche that could not be stopped”.
”The genie was out of the bottle and Bruce Lehrmann was going to be charged and face trial irrespective of the issues,” Lehrmann’s defence barrister Steven Whybrow told the court.
Higgins had hazy memories of what happened after the pair entered the ministerial suite that night, but the court heard she remembered waking up on the couch in Reynolds’ office, with Lehrmann raping her.
She said she was aware of a sharp pain in her thigh, where she says the accused’s knee was sticking into her.
“I was crying throughout the entire process … he was on top of me,” she said in the 2021 police interview played to the jury on Tuesday.
“I said ‘No’ at least half a dozen times. He did not stop.”
Higgins, who attended the court with her lawyers, watched proceedings via video-link from a private room on the premises.
After the evidence was played, it was clear that Higgins had cried throughout it, and she continued to weep softly as the judge dismissed the jury for the day.
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