Brittany Higgins Takes the Stand

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/world/australia/brittany-higgins-takes-the-stand.html

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On Friday, Brittany Higgins’ frustration seemed to peak when the lawyer for the defense suggested to her that the reason she had not gone to see a doctor soon after her alleged rape despite telling others that she was planning to was because there had been, in fact, no sexual intercourse.

“You are so incorrect,” Ms. Higgins replied. “I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through a trauma before but confronting it with professionals is a really difficult thing to do.”

Then the lawyer, Steven Whybrow, asked her again why she had told defense minister Linda Reynolds’s chief of staff that she needed a day off to go to the doctor, and not attended an appointment.

“It didn’t happen because I had to be bed bound because I wasn’t coping with the fact I had been raped in my workplace,” she said, visibly distressed. By then, he had already asked her several questions in a similar vein, to which she had provided similar responses. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

This week, I’ve been in Canberra covering the trial of Bruce Lehrmann, accused of raping Ms. Higgins in Parliament House in 2019, which started on Tuesday.

One of the most high profile trials in Australia in recent years, it’s been attended by dozens of journalists and members of the public — mostly local retirees. Every day, a handful of police officers have been stationed outside the Canberra Supreme Court.

The judge, prosecution and defense have all told the jury to disregard anything that they may know about the case, and to not read any media coverage of the trial. But some wondered if it would be possible for the jurors to completely ignore their own biases and preconceptions.

“We’re not all saints,” remarked Don Witheford, a retiree who had come to observe the trial out of curiosity. “Just because the judge tells us to be saints doesn’t mean we will be.”

The first week has centered on Ms. Higgins’s testimony, and highlighted some of the difficulties in prosecuting rape cases that center on two competing versions of events.

Ms. Higgins sometimes struggled to recall specific details from 2019. She was upfront about the fact that didn’t remember certain aspects of the night in question, when, she said, she had been extremely drunk.

The harsh scrutiny complainants can be put under in sexual assault cases was also something Mr. Whybrow, the defense lawyer, acknowledged in his opening statement, when he said, “Complainants’ allegations should be treated seriously and they should be provided mechanism and procedures to give evidence in a safe environment.”

But, he added, “if we elevate that too highly and assume because someone has made an allegation that it must be right, then we no longer have the presumption of innocence.” So when it was time for cross-examination, he pulled no punches, grilling Ms. Higgins about inconsistencies in accounts she has given to the police, the media and in court.

But her lawyer argued that small inconsistencies, like differing accounts of the color of a car, should not make or break the case.

Some discrepancies are not just cosmetic, but instead “fundamental and essential” to the case, Mr. Whybrow said in his opening statement, giving the example of whether Ms. Higgins had her dress scrunched up around her waist, like she says, or was naked, as a security guard says. They “carry different inferences,” Mr. Whybrow said.

He hasn’t gotten to that issue yet during cross-examination. But so far, he has canvassed inconsistencies including: that Ms. Higgins testified to keeping the dress she wore under her bed for six months, when photos revealed that she had actually worn it less than two months later; that she told journalists that Linda Reynolds’s chief of staff had seen the CCTV footage from the night in question, when in fact she may have just made reference to that CCTV footage existing; and that she told journalists she had to wait two months to get a psychologist appointment using Parliament’s employee assistance program, but was actually give an appointment within a month.

By the end of the first week of the trial, two pictures had been painted.

The one put forward by Ms. Higgins was of a young woman struggling to cope in the aftermath of a significant trauma, whose actions reflect that she was scared and took a significant amount of time to come to terms with what had happened to her, and whose memories have blurred because of how overwhelming everything was.

The other, posited by Mr. Whybrow, was that she had made the whole thing up, and deliberately misled others and withheld information, and that the inconsistencies in her account means that it cannot be trusted.

It’s now up to the jury to decide how much weight they put in those inconsistencies, and which version they believe in.

Now for this week’s stories:

Australia Aims to Cut Its High Rate of Species Extinctions to Zero. The country plans to focus on 110 endangered species and 20 habitats, but experts said the initiative was only a start.

She Says She Was Raped in Parliament. Now Her Case Is at Court. The trial of the Australian man accused of sexually assaulting Brittany Higgins will be viewed against the backdrop of the global #MeToo movement.

Thailand Turns to Mourning Dozens Killed in Day-Care Massacre. The attack in Nong Bua Lamphu Province, one of the country’s poorest, was the worst mass shooting by a sole perpetrator in Thailand’s history.

Fat Bear Week Is in Full Swing. What began as a way for a former park ranger to engage with visitors in Alaska has grown into something much bigger. Bear-sized, one might say.

Justice Dept. Is Said to Believe Trump Has More Documents. Conversations between department officials and the former president’s representatives have underscored investigators’ skepticism about his cooperation and exposed a rift among his lawyers.

How to Recycle a 14-Story Office Tower. Buildings are responsible for nearly 40 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. In Amsterdam, they are trying to create a blueprint to do something about it.

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