Former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann has revealed that missed calls from his then girlfriend made him leave the parliamentary suite and not check on Brittany Higgins when he left without saying goodbye.
The man accused of raping Ms Higgins – who has always denied the allegation – was grilled on Seven’s Spotlight on Sunday night about why he returned to Parliament House.
He insists he left the suite 41 minutes later without checking on Ms Higgins again or speaking to her after they both entered the suite at 1:40am.
Lehrmann went back to ‘pick up keys’
During the program, Spotlight played audio from Mr Lehrmann’s own police interview about his reasons for returning to his workplace after a night of drinking.
“I had to go back to Parliament House to get my keys, to get back into my apartment, where I was living with my girlfriend,’’ Mr Lehrmann told police.
Agreed facts on missed calls at trial
During the trial, Justice Lucy McCallum read the agreed facts to the court, which stated that Mr Lehrmann missed six phone calls from his girlfriend Alexandra between 2.16am and 2.18am on March 23, 2019 – the night Ms Higgins claims she was raped.
Crown prosecutor Shane Drumgold told the jury that the prosecution would argue the alleged rape occurred during the missed phone calls and the relevance of Higgins’ intoxication was both the “absence of her consent and the accused’s recklessness towards it”.
The trial was later aborted as a result of juror misconduct without reaching a verdict and the charge dropped following concerns about the impact on the mental health of Ms Higgins if she was forced to give evidence in a second trial.
Mr Lehrmann was questioned by Seven reporter Liam Bartlett about his decision to leave without saying a word to Ms Higgins.
“My mind was focused on getting my keys, noting down what I needed to note down, and getting back to my girlfriend who had called a number of times. I’ve then seen those calls and I needed to get home,’’ he said.
“In the 41, 42 minutes that you were physically in the office. She called numerous times you never answered those calls,’’ Bartlett probed.
“No,’’ Mr Lehrmann responded.
“The phone was on silent probably much earlier in the evening. We miss calls. You are deep in work. That’s what happens.”
Bartlett quizzed him on why he didn’t check on Ms Higgins in the entire time he was in the ministerial suite.
“That doesn’t add up – you’re sitting in that office for something like 40 minutes working on material for a minister in the couple of days afterwards,” Bartlett said.
Mr Lehrmann shot back: “But it was her first question time that she was about to step into.”
Bartlett: ‘You’re kidding me’
Mr Bartlett then grilled Mr Lehrmann’s claim that Ms Higgins’ also came back to Parliament House at 1:40am to do work.
“From my recollection, she had told me that she also needed to go back to Parliament House,’’ Mr Lehrmann said.
“You’re kidding me?,’’ Bartlett responded.
“But she indicated she had to go back there. So who am I to question that?’’ Mr Lehrmann said.
But Bartlett said that sounded hard to believe.
“So let me get this right. All of a sudden, you jump up from the table. And you say ‘guys, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go back to parliament house to pick up some stuff on the way back’ and she says ‘Oh good. I’ve got to go too’. And you don’t think that’s a touch unusual?”
“Not one bit. She’s an adult. She’s an advisor with the same security clearance as me and she’s indicated that she had to go back there. And I thought I was being a gentleman in assisting her to do that in sharing an Uber,’’ Mr Lehrmann responded.
Bartlett said he had never heard “a decent explanation” about why Ms Higgins needed to go back to Parliament House?
“If you were being a real gentleman, when she got in the Uber you would have suggested ‘look what, why don’t you just keep going and use the Uber and go home?’,’’ he said.
“But she didn’t tell me she needed to go home. She told me she also had to go to Parliament,’’ Mr Lehrmann replied.
Lehrmann: CCTV shows Higgins ‘tipsy’ but not ‘blackout drunk’
Mr Lehrmann said Ms Higgins was “tipsy” but was not “heavily intoxicated whatsoever.”
“Tipsy but functioning aware of surroundings, able to make decisions. You know, not blackout drunk and I know that the CCTV footage shows that,’’ he said.
After they arrived at the office, Mr Lehrmann said there was no further conversation.
Lehrmann says he was ‘being a gentleman’
“But you’re telling me that you have been trying to be a gentleman this evening. So wouldn’t a gentleman say, ‘I’ve just got a quick thing to do. It’s gonna take me half an hour. Do you want a lift back?’,’’ Bartlett asked.
“She indicated she also had to go to Parliament. So I had assumed that she was also to do some work in her capacity as a media advisor,’’ Mr Lehrmann said.
“My mind was focused on getting my keys, noting down what I needed to note down and getting back to my girlfriend who had called a number of times, and I’ve then seen those calls and I needed to get home.”
Three different reasons
Mr Lehrmann conceded he gave three different reasons for returning to Parliament House with Ms Higgins.
He told police he needed to pick up the keys to his apartment and do some preparation for question time, he told security guards he was there to collect documents and he told Chief of Staff to former Minister Reynolds, Fiona Brown, he wanted to ‘to drink whisky’.
“You’ll admit then that doesn’t look good, does it, Bruce?’’ Bartlett asked Mr Lehrmann.
“Of course not,” Mr Lehrmann said.
“But the fact of the matter is, the version I told the federal police is the truth.”
He said the reason he told security guards a different reason was just to get into the building late at night without his pass.
“So, I needed to ensure that we could get in first to get my keys at that time, because it was a late time. In order to do that, to gain access, I had to say that to get in,’’ he said.
After the stories aired in February, 2021, Mr Lehrmann said he considered self-harm.
“Life as I knew it was over. There was no coming back,’’ Mr Lehrmann said
But he said he now wanted to speak out.
“Let’s look at the facts that sucked the breadcrumbs. It was mind blowing. We’ve had the trial and the charge has been dropped. We’ve had enough shit shoved down our throats,’’ he said.
“It’s a classic ‘beware the man to lose with nothing towards. I’ve got nothing to lose.
“I shut my mouth believing in the justice system and following the rules others in this saga haven’t done.”
At the beginning of the interview, Mr Bartlett had asked him if he was “ready.”
“Let’s light some fires,’’ Mr Lehrmann responds.