Justice Michael Lee spent two-and-a-half hours delivering an oral summary of his 324-page judgment in the defamation case brought by Bruce Lehrmann against Channel Ten and Lisa Wilkinson.
The judgment was incredibly nuanced, with Lee seeking to draw “fine distinctions based upon the subtleties of the evidence”. But it was also characterised by Lee’s penchant for a creatively turned phrase, drawing laughter from the gallery at a number of points.
The full judgment is online here – or read some of the judge’s finest rhetorical flourishes below.
Omnishambles
“It is a singular case,” said Lee in his opening. “Indeed, given its unexpected detours and the collateral damage it has occasioned, it might be more fitting to describe it as an omnishambles.”
About a minute later, the audio from the courtroom cut out, meaning that the roughly 25,000 people watching the livestream of the judgment at that point had no clue what was going on. When the audio was fixed about half an hour later, Lee resumed the bench.
“I think I got up to the point where I said ‘omnishambles’,” he said wryly.
On Lehrmann’s credibility
Almost as soon as he began his judgment, Lee made it clear what he thought about Lehrmann’s truthfulness.
To remark that Mr Lehrmann was a poor witness is an exercise in understatement.
Later, in recounting comments that Lehrmann made to Lauren Gain, who had been at the Dock bar with Lehrmann and Brittany Higgins on the night Lehrmann allegedly raped Higgins, Lee said:
Ms Gain had not previously met Mr Lehrmann and she asked him where he worked. Mr Lehrmann told her that he was in Senator Reynolds’ office and, at some point in the conversation, Mr Lehrmann spun the tall tale he was waiting on a clearance to come through so that he could go and work at Asis. Ms Gain, politely, kept her well-founded incredulity to herself …
All these falsehoods, together with his Walter Mitty-like imaginings in skiting to Ms Gain about the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (Asis), demonstrate that Mr Lehrmann had no compunction about departing from the truth if he thought it expedient.
On Lehrmann finding the whole courtroom attractive
The first of Lee’s comments to get an outright laugh from the public gallery was when he was discussing Lehrmann’s evidence about whether he found Higgins attractive. In his 2023 Spotlight interview, Lehrmann denied thinking Higgins was attractive, despite other comments he had made about Higgins in 2019. Lee said, with a raised eyebrow:
When confronted by this inconsistency, his attempt to explain it away by suggesting the attraction he felt for Ms Higgins was ‘just like [the attraction] I can find [in] anybody else in this [court]room, irrespective of gender’ was as disconcerting as it was unconvincing.
There was a loud chuckle from the room that was promptly shushed.
On Higgins’ autobiography
Lee addressed Lehrmann’s submission that the draft manuscript of Higgins’ book “was full of inaccuracies and inconsistencies with her evidence”, by saying: “As to the book, as the saying goes, an autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.”
On Higgins’ ‘hapless’ Bumble date
Lee sought to restore some dignity to the man Higgins met on the dating app Bumble and who she invited to come to the bar on the night of the alleged rape.
Ms Higgins extended the invitation to a number of others, including Mr Wenke … Mr Lehrmann and a man she was in contact with on the dating application Bumble, who also worked in politics. Ms Higgins’ hapless date was referred to initially as ‘Bumble guy’, but … later was given the dignity of being described by his Christian name, ‘Nick’.
He later said:
Nick, alas, was left chatting to a man in a blue shirt. After being forsaken like a shag on a rock for an extended period and despite then making successful attempts to interact with some of the group on the larger table, Nick understandably left The Dock, no doubt ruing swiping right.
On the chat at the Dock Bar between the staffers
With the exception of Mr Lehrmann, no one who gave evidence as to their time at The Dock could recall discussing Australia’s submarine contracts with France at either table. The lack of recollection of any discussion of this topic is intuitively unsurprising. Declaiming on the topics of who was building submarines and where they were being built was not quite the repartee one would usually expect to hear over a convivial drink on a Friday night between 20-year-olds out for a good time – even if (with respect) one would not expect the badinage of the Algonquin Round Table.
On distractions in the background of the CCTV from The Dock
Ms Higgins seems by this stage to be ebullient, putting her hands in the air and is evidently in high spirits; although it is easy to be distracted at this point in the video by two happy middle-aged ladies re-enacting what might be a scene out of Mamma Mia in the background.
On whether Lehrmann continued drinking in the ministerial suite
Intuitively, given what had been happening, one would think it likely the drinking continued given what we know about Mr Lehrmann encouraging Ms Higgins to imbibe and the rationale given by him for them both to come back to the Suite. After all, Mr Lehrmann said he was going to show Ms Higgins whisky – not Qing Dynasty ceramics.
And more on the topic of whisky:
Demonstrating his forensic difficulty with his representations concerning the Scottish libation, his evidence on this topic at trial was all over the shop.”’
Some fatherly advice
At one point Lee cited the wisdom that “‘nothing good happens after two o’clock in the morning’ … Here too there was a combination of drink and the wee hours, and it led, on any view of it, to trouble.”
On Lehrmann’s keys
Lee roasted Lehrmann over his claim that he went back to Parliament House after being out drinking with Higgins and others in order to retrieve his keys.
If the reason Mr Lehrmann needed to return to Parliament House was to collect his keys, he could have texted his girlfriend to have her meet him at the door or called her. Mr Lehrmann asks me to accept the proposition that it was ‘a process to get in’ to his shared flat and that to avoid this complication, he preferred to: (a) go out of his way to go back to work in the early hours; (b) lie to Parliament House security; (c) sign the necessary register; (d) be issued with a pass; (e) go through a metal detector; (f) be escorted by a security guard to his office; (g) obtain his keys from his office; (h) book another Uber; (i) go back through a Parliamentary exit; (j) meet the ride-share car; and then (k) ride home.
Even if he was in the doghouse because he had stayed out late, I think it is safe to conclude that the process of getting into a flat he shared with his girlfriend would have been a significantly less elaborate exercise.
On Lehrmann’s work habits
Among Lehrmann’s other claims about what he was doing in the minister’s office at around 2am was that he needed to “note up briefs” for the minister. Lee rejected this claim with savagery:
As I have already noted, put in stark terms, it is fanciful a somewhat lubricated male staffer accompanied by a woman he found attractive, who he had just been ‘pashing’ in a nightclub despite having a girlfriend, would then be interested, after coming to a private place very late, to just say ‘cheerio’, and then soberly proceed to note up briefs for a Question Time that was not to occur for one and a half weeks, a fortiori when the staffer had already resigned; had no outstanding tasks; was not ordinarily involved in work concerning the Defence portfolio; and hitherto had demonstrated no outward signs of being a workaholic.
On the security guard’s assessment of Lehrmann’s and Higgins’ drunkenness
[Mark] Fairweather recalled a general smell of alcohol but did not think that the visitors were overly affected (by which he meant slurring, falling over, vomiting level drunk) so as to be refused entry …. Mr Fairweather, although an experienced security guard, was not a breathalyser in human form.
On Lehrmann’s decision to bring the defamation case, after his criminal trial was aborted
Having escaped the lions’ den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of going back for his hat.