Time for legal tragics to grab the popcorn again – the circus is back in town. The scandal that just keeps on giving is into its newest round of courtroom drama and it’s already off to a flying start.
The courtroom showdown between Senator Linda Reynolds and her former staffer Brittany Higgins is finally here, despite the exhortations of multiple Supreme Court justices who repeatedly urged the pair to resolve their issues without a trial.
Fat chance of that. Reynolds was publicly vilified for months on end by Higgins and her peanut gallery of flappy-armed feminist harpies and creepy white knights. The entirely fake accusations of a ‘cover up’ effectively ended Reynolds’ career. Reynolds has had to mortgage her house to defend her reputation.
Of course she’s not backing down.
Senator Reynolds is arguing that her former staffer and her now-husband David Shiraz [sic] defamed her in a series of social media posts made in the months and years after Ms Higgins’ rape.
Senator Reynolds’ statement of claim argues that the posts were published as part of a plan by Ms Higgins and Mr Sharaz to use the allegations that Senator Reynolds had been involved in a political cover-up as a weapon to inflict immediate political damage on her.
Anthony Albanese’s closest confidantes, Katy Gallagher and Penny Wong, were drip-fed false information by Ms Higgins and Mr Sharaz as part of a larger plan to destroy Senator Reynolds’ career and take down the Morrison government, the senator alleged.
Mr Sharaz also organised meetings between Ms Higgins and Labor MPs to discuss her rape allegations, the documents say, including then opposition leader Mr Albanese and Tanya Plibersek, as well as former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd.
In her still-unpublished memoirs, Higgins bragged that she and Sharaz were “quite a twosome when it came to game planning… together we understood how the gallery media sphere operated”. Perhaps they should have boned up more on the law, while they were at it.
Brittany Higgins and her now-husband David Sharaz concocted a “fictional cover-up” that portrayed Senator Linda Reynolds as engaging in harassment and threatening conduct towards Ms Higgins, the senator’s lawyer has said.
Opening the senator’s case in the WA Supreme Court on Friday morning, Martin Bennett said “every fairytale needs a villain” and that Ms Higgins and Mr Sharaz had thrust Senator Reynolds into that role when they went public with rape allegations.
Mr Bennett said Senator Reynolds “was cast in the strongest critical light and none of it was true”.
Yet again, Higgins’ own contradictions are coming back to haunt her.
Text messages sent by Brittany Higgins to her then-boyfriend contradicted the claim made by the political staffer when she secured a $2.475m payout from the Commonwealth, Senator Linda Reynolds’ lawyer has said.
Martin Bennett has been reading out messages sent by Ms Higgins to her then-boyfriend Ben Dillaway when she was in Perth working on Senator Reynolds’ re-election campaign, in which Higgins describes having a “fun” and “cool” time in the city […] “It’s been pretty fun actually,” she wrote in one of several messages to Mr Dillaway read out in court by Mr Bennett.
“My day has been awesome, mostly spent poolside,” read another.
Which is not quite what she said when she was grubbing for a few million of the taxpayer’s money.
Ms Higgins told the Commonwealth that she had been “working alone in a hotel room for seven days a week, for six weeks” during her time in Perth […]
The Commonwealth’s swift $2.475m settlement with Brittany Higgins was based on a “bare-faced falsity,” Senator Linda Reynolds’ lawyer says.
There’s been no shortage of those, in this whole, sordid scandal.
