Prosecutor concerned police tried to undermine Lehrmann trial

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The silk who prosecuted former Coalition staffer Bruce Lehrmann over an allegation he raped his colleague Brittany Higgins said he became concerned senior police investigating her complaint were actively trying to undermine the trial.

ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold SC told an inquiry into the handling of the high-profile case he felt pressured against pursuing the case, that investigators told him Higgins was known to lie, and that if there was truth to her claims, she wouldn’t have gone to the media first.

Shane Drumgold arrives at the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal on Monday, where he accused police of trying to undermine the Bruce Lehrmann trial.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In an explosive statement and testimony before a public hearing in Canberra on Monday, the territory’s top lawyer said there had been an instance of police behaving abusively towards his staff, and likened a detective’s summary of Higgins’ evidence to “biased, stereotype opinion”.

“It’s really like, if a police officer says X complainant was wearing a mini-skirt and thinks that that’s relevant to whether or not she consented,” Drumgold told the inquiry from the witness box at the ACT’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

He said investigative review documents compiled by police “involved a significant degree of confirmation bias that Ms Higgins was not truthful, that appeared to infect their case analysis”.

Lehrmann, who briefly worked with Higgins under former Coalition minister Linda Reynolds, stood trial last year on a count of sexual intercourse without consent, a charge to which he pleaded not guilty and has always maintained his innocence. The trial was aborted due to juror misconduct, and a retrial was abandoned due to Drumgold’s fears over Higgins’ mental health.

The ACT government inquiry is designed not to revisit the central allegations of the trial, but rather the conduct and competence of the authorities who investigated and prosecuted the allegations after Drumgold complained to the ACT’s chief police officer of a campaign to pressure him against prosecuting Lehrmann, and Lehrmann accused Drumgold of “pursuing the matter through the media” despite discontinuing the prosecution.

The inquiry also released an advice brief from AFP Detective Superintendent Scott Moller, dated June 18, 2021, in which he described Higgins as “evasive, uncooperative and manipulative” and raised inconsistent evidence about her scheduling a doctor’s visit following the alleged incident as an example of weak credibility.

In a lengthy signed statement submitted to the inquiry led by former Queensland Supreme Court judge Walter Sofronoff, Drumgold said that during the trial he saw on at least three occasions the defence team stand in a circle with police involved in the investigation.

“Defence appeared openly conversing with a senior police officer, DS [Detective Superintendent Scott] Moller, who had previously described the complainant, in writing, as ‘manipulative’,” Drumgold said.

“This, together with the other AFP conduct I have described above, caused me concern that the police were actively seeking to undermine the successful prosecution of the case.”

Drumgold said in his statement he believed that police in the ACT had long been applying the wrong legal test in relation to charging people with sexual assault, and that his DPP colleague Skye Jerome had told him that during one legal training session with police they had been “confrontational and occasionally abusive towards my staff”.

“Skye Jerome informed me that she felt the interaction was traumatic,” Drumgold said.

He alleged in the statement that during a March 2021 briefing between prosecutors and police, police suggested certain SMS messages “indicated Ms Higgins had fabricated her complaint”, and made “further vague references to Ms Higgins not being able to be trusted at her word, because she was known to tell lies”.

Higgins went public with her claim of being raped in early 2021, participating in interviews with News Corp and Ten’s The Project. She had initially gone to police in the months after the alleged assault, however, told investigators she would discontinue it due to the circumstances of her job.

Drumgold said the Australian Federal Police were “scathing” of Higgins going to the media before re-engaging with investigators.

“It seemed to me that they felt disrespected and were offended that she would go to the media before the police,” he said, adding they said words to the effect “if there was truth to her allegations, Ms Higgins would have come first to the police, not the media”.

“I have never experienced police attempting to actively persuade me that charges should not follow in the manner in which they were doing in the Lehrmann case,” Drumgold said in the statement.

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