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Yet again, Brittany Higgins is chucking a sickie rather than face a lawyer’s grilling. In the failed criminal trial against Bruce Lehrmann, in which she accused her former co-worker of rape, Higgins dropped out of giving evidence after just one week in the witness box. In that short time, barrister Steven Whybrow revealed a litany of contradictions and evasions by Higgins, including refusing to hand over her phone to police – eventually only doing so after deleting texts, photos and audio files.
She’s pulling the sickie card again.
Brittany Higgins has pulled out of giving evidence in the defamation action brought against her by Liberal senator Linda Reynolds in a bombshell that could bring an early end to the proceedings.
Ms Higgins’ barrister, Rachael Young SC, made the surprise announcement in the WA Supreme Court on Monday afternoon, indicating Ms Higgins was suffering from poor health […]
The exact medical reasons for the withdrawal were not specified in open court, and Ms Young applied for an order to protect the details of the reports from being published.
The odd thing about all this is that, for all her claims about being “silenced”, the only times Higgins shuts her yap are when it suits her. The rest of the time, she’s bellowing from the rooftops about how “silenced” she is.
Higgins has not been silenced, by the law or by anyone else […]
It is difficult to think of any complainant in any criminal or civil matter who has been more outspoken about their own case – or who has been more indulged by the legal system in flouting basic rules of fairness regularly enforced on others […]
The truth is, Higgins has been snubbing her nose at the legal system for years and getting away with it.
From the moment she decided to use the media instead of the police and the courts to tell her story, Higgins has been given extraordinary latitude to say whatever she wishes, whenever she wishes – all the while claiming she’s being gagged.
Remember that Higgins avoided co-operating with police – not just withholding her phone, but holding out on making a formal statement – at the very same time she and now-husband David Sharaz were colluding with journalists and Labor politicians to weaponise her story against the Morrison government.
Television and online news interviews. The National Press Club. The Women’s March. The #MeToo movement. A $325,000 book deal. An unending stream of social media posts. Higgins wasn’t just given a voice – she was handed a megaphone.
When senior police officer Scott Moller asked that Higgins stop doing media that could prejudice Bruce Lehrmann’s criminal rape trial, Victims of Crime Commissioner Heidi Yates told him: “She can’t, Scott – she’s the face of the movement now.”
Silenced? Higgins has more platforms than Grand Central Terminal.
Higgins’ claims of being silenced by a political conspiracy to ‘cover up’ her accusations are so obviously ludicrous that even Justice Michael Lee (who, while acknowledging Higgins’ frequent lies, decided to accept her claim of rape, because, well… he just reckoned) scoffed at the idea.
The claims were an invention by Higgins, Lee said, calling it “the only alleged cover-up of which I am aware where those said to be responsible for the covering up were almost insisting the complainant go to the police”.
Higgins hadn’t been silenced. She’d just been found out.
One of the only people genuinely silenced in this whole sorry saga was Senator Linda Reynolds, Higgins boss at the time of the alleged rape. When Higgins trousered millions of taxpayer dollars in a compensation hearing lasting less than an afternoon, the person she was accusing, Reynolds, was gagged from speaking in her own defence.
Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus refused to allow Reynolds to speak in her own defence in the one-day “mediation” that awarded Higgins $2.4m.
Dreyfus barred Reynolds from providing evidence in the case, threatening to tear up an agreement to pay her legal fees and any costs awarded if she tried to attend the mediation.
Rather than a brave spokesperson for women, Higgins has repeatedly victimised and silenced other women. Not just Reynolds, but also former senior public servant, Fiona Brown.
In her interview with The Project, Higgins gave Brown a starring role as chief villain – second only to the alleged rapist. But Lehrmann wasn’t named in the program. Brown was.
“It was like standing in front of a firing squad,” the former public servant told The Australian earlier this year. “It was the day that my life ended, as I knew it” […]
The Project’s brutal portrayal of Brown ended her career and left her so traumatised that at one point not long after, she walked into the sea in a bid to end it all, saved by a caring young surfer who took her by the hand and pulled her back to shore.
Meanwhile Queen Brittany, sitting on her taxpayer-funded throne in her French villa, can’t stop telling everyone who doesn’t want to listen, how “silenced” she is.
