Bruce Lehrmann’s ‘omnishambles’ defamation case triggered a cruel culture war and a sick kind of grief. Will we learn from this shameful episode?
After years of speculation, what a relief and peculiar pleasure it was to hear Justice Michael Lee deliver his judgment on Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation suit.
Finally, the case — springing from an alleged rape which had been politicised, weaponised, marked by bias, hysteria, partisanship and persistent nastiness — was being carefully, rationally, reasonably considered. Millions, gripped.
All major parties were found to have fallen short in some way; but crucially, fundamentally, Lerhmann was found to have raped Higgins, on the balance of probabilities.
As newsrooms heaved, social media lit up like a switchboard, shutters clicked, and reporters quickened their pace alongside a stony-faced, silent Lehrmann exiting the Federal Court in Sydney, peppering him with questions, you could not help but feel a sick kind of grief.
A woman was raped, and it amounted to… all of this. The “omnishambles”, as Lee neatly phrased it, which at various times put the police, the parliament, the law, the media into disrepute, wreaking havoc, wrecking reputations, public trust and the mental health of those closest to the case that became the stickiest of tar babies.
An “omnishambles” that summonsed the vociferous support of the #metoo movement, then the vituperative condemnation of sceptics, culture warriors and rape-deniers. And through it all, we saw a savaging of a rape victim that was unprecedented in recent Australian history.
How rape can be turned into a culture war
The attacks on Brittany Higgins have been ugly, cruel, and wildly disproportionate.
Which is why now might be a good time to reflect on how devotedly and brutally mastheads and prominent commentators seek to undermine, discredit and destroy women who allege sexual assault, or report on it. We have watched them monster Higgins with an almost maniacal obsession, day after day, for years, despite public knowledge of her fragile mental health — and her then untested claims. It’s not just individual commentators: entire media networks exploited and failed her, entire newspaper groups seemed devoted to derailing her, and we were too often complicit, clicking on stories, taking sides, digging in.
How rape can be turned into a culture war boggles the mind, although this case, extremely unfortunately, had been politicised at the starting gate.
My point here is not that faults do not exist, or that mistakes have not been made. It’s the emphasis they’re given, the volume of the condemnation, and the lack of sensitivity around rape claims, and understanding of the prevalence of rape myths.
We seem to have a creepy national predilection for tearing apart women in the public eye in the name of sport. It’s not only women, but it’s especially, most usually and spectacularly women. Add in a rape claim and fires get lit.
Les Murray wrote about this in his 1997 poem, A Deployment of Fashion. It begins:
In Australia, a lone woman
Is being crucified by the Press at any given moment.
With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out…
… she goes down, overwhelmed
In the feasting grins of pressmen, and Press women…
It is done for the millions.
For the millions. Murray was at the time ruing the treatment of the likes of Lindy Chamberlain, and Pauline Hanson, but his words remain prescient.
The ‘perfect’ victim
So, let’s remember what happened to Higgins here. A young woman was raped by a more senior colleague. Every single utterance or inconsistency of hers was blared on front pages as a sign of mendacity — for years — without recognition of what trauma can do to the body, mind and recollection.
Importantly, Justice Lee recognised trauma can impact the evidence of sexual assault victims. “Any inconsistent or untrue representations in 2019 are not inconsistent with the conduct of a genuine victim of sexual assault struggling to process what happened, seeking to cope, and working through her options,” he said.
Was any shred of understanding given to this in media coverage? Yes, she was a “complex and unsatisfactory witness”, but why do we pretend to understand what it is like to be raped? When will we drop the idea of the perfect victim? No person is perfect; no one who is harmed, assaulted or traumatised behaves in neatly predictable ways, and those of us without the same experience should not assume we understand.
Think of all of the mechanisms deployed to discredit her — the shaming, the leaking, the poring over her private text messages, the dismissal of her allegation as somehow part of a treacherous “woke” movement infecting our body politic, the omnipresence of the paparazzi who even recently pursued her in France, where she tried to get some respite.
Let’s compare this treatment to Ben Roberts-Smith, a man who, like Lehrmann, was hoist by his own petard when he sued media outlets for defamation. That civil trial found him to be a war criminal, a man who, a defamation judge found, on the balance of probabilities, had machine-gunned a man with a prosthetic leg, kicked an Afghan man off a cliff, murdered four unarmed Afghanis in total and broke rules of military engagement. (An appeal to the Federal Court is currently underway.)
So which is the greater sin? Not “perfectly” reporting a rape, or describing a rape, or killing a man or four?
Wined, dined and hailed as a hero
Where are the photos of the disgraced soldier leaving his house, going to the shops, having a coffee, talking on the phone? Stories about members of his family? Long dissections of leaked text messages? Any ongoing coverage, really, after the trumpet blasts of the trial? There are a couple of snaps of him with his girlfriend at the races, getting off a plane, but they are sporadic, limited.
It wasn’t a pap hiding in the bushes that found a photo of Roberts-Smith sitting in a spa with NT police officer Zachary Rolfe in Bali, but perusers of an Instagram page — on which Rolfe (who had been found not guilty of murdering Kumanjayi Walker) appeared to comment, “Just a couple of cops/murderers and war criminals Havin a lovely afternoon in the sun”.
And yet we’ve seen myriad images of Higgins walking her dog in France.
Powerful men are still pouring money into the Sisyphean task of restoring Roberts-Smith’s reputation, one even taking out full page ads just a couple of weeks ago praising his “courage, strength, commitment”.
Then there’s Lehrmann. We have discovered that in this country that a man who is accused of sexual assault can find himself wined, dined, allegedly supplied with sex workers and cocaine, accommodated in seaside apartments, and touted as a hero of the ‘anti-woke’ hard-right before his case is even determined.
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The figure at the centre of all this
The small figure at the centre of all of this is a woman who, a civil judge found, was raped and left exposed, her dress around her waist, on a couch in her boss’s office.
Justice Lee said he was satisfied that it was “more likely than not” that Lehrmann was “so intent upon gratification to be indifferent to Ms Higgins’s consent and hence went ahead with sexual intercourse without caring whether she consented”. He was “hell-bent on having sex” with Higgins.
So Lehrmann didn’t care about consent, about leaving her alone, undressed, and drunk.
But where is our cultural duty of care?
Have we forgotten what the long-term impacts of sexual assault are?
Research published in the International Journal of Public Health found that “sexual violence causes persistent suffering for women and girls”. In adulthood, the consequences include “widespread and chronic pain, sleeping problems, chronic back problems, and fibromyalgia, eating disorders, social anxiety, severe depression, and chronic fatigue”. PTSD is also common — and that’s without being exposed to the hate and heat of a national trial.
And have we forgotten the whole point of the #metoo movement? It was women saying, in their millions, Me too, that happened to me. Assaulted, unreported, left with the trauma.
Will we learn from this shameful episode? “After the feeding frenzy”, Les Murray finishes his poem, “sometimes a ruefully balanced last lick precedes the next selection.”
You can only hope the words “Mr Lehrmann raped Ms Higgins” might give pause for thought.
