The Chaser Report - Bruce Lehrmann Achieves Goal of Losing Title of ‘Alleged Rapist’

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

Bruce fought the law and the law won. Dom and Charles take you through all the results from Bruce Lehrmann's defamation case against Channel 10, and what it means for defamation law in Australia -- and what it means for how Channel Seven journalists build rapport. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Now, Charles, I know we said we're on holidays and we will go on holidays for the next week and a half, along with our children who we adore and need to look after. But we had to come back. We had to cut our holidays short because the Bruce Lerman defamation finding was issued just a couple of hours ago. I spent several hours that I did not have spared.

listening to a lot of the judgment. And what you've got to realize is when you're in the media industry, you're a media professional like me or Dom, there is one opportunity that you get, which is straight after a judgment comes out. Yep. You're allowed to call whoever the judgment went against, whatever the judge has adjudged them to be.

Yeah, you might refer to the episode not long ago, Charles, where we mentioned Ben Roberts Smith, having been found in a court of law to be a war criminal. And when it's very contemporary, it's very safe to just say, for example, that Bruce Lohman is clearly a proven rape. Bruce Lerman raped Brittany Higgins is what the judge said in court today. She did not consent, and he was recklessly indifferent to whether she'd consented or not. That's what the judge found today.

Therefore, Bruce Lerman is a rapist. According to Justice Michael Lee of the Federal Court, there's so much in this judgment to get through. Before we do, Charles, can we just take a moment to establish rapport between you and me, Bruce Loman-style? And this is some of the most extraordinary evidence that was heard. Taylor Auerbach from the spotlight. Justice Lee pointed out that all of that lurid evidence

was not especially relevant to the overall decision. There was a few little factors to do with Channel 7, and it sort of made him further doubt, Bruce Lerman's credibility, which he'd already absolutely shredded by this point. But I've got a baggie of something here. Just... Oh, just...

Oh, right. Where did you get that from, Dom? I just called... I was at Franka restaurant. I just called my dealer. Can you just Google how to procure sex workers as we relax in this Meritan suite? Yeah.

Well, we're just establishing rapport here. I'm just ready to do some journalism. Can I buy the Chase a credit card, by the way? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, actually, let's not put it on the corporate credit card. We'll just pay it back in Pardians later on. Yeah, pay it back in Pardians later on. That's good.

That's good. Oh, I'm feeling relaxed. Yeah, look, a lot of things came out, including since we did that episode, just before we get to the judgment, the whole saga of Bruce Lerman being in a house in North Sydney, one street away from where I grew up, by the way. Oh, really? One of the most boring, lovely but boring neighborhoods.

And then shortly afterwards being evicted. for doing karaoke first thing in the morning. And I want to pay tribute to Chaser Report, podcast producer Lachlan Hodson, who was at the Federal Court today and asked Bruce Lerman right after the trial this important question. What's your favourite karaoke song, Bruce?

Well, that was what was going through everyone's mind. We wanted to know. I'm so glad he had the finger on the pulse of the nation in his journalism. It's been suggested that I fought the law and the law one might be the way to go. I tried to get Loughlin to offer him a baggie of white powder, but he didn't want to do that. I think there will be a lot of baggies tonight somehow.

On which side is the interesting question. Oh, I see. Anyway, look, it's a fascinating judgment. We'll get into it after this. So I think it's important at the beginning of this Charles to establish what defamation law is for. Because it's so easy, given these high-profile trials, to lose sight of the fact, yes. That people like, I don't know, Ben Roberts. Smith, Bruce Lerman.

They launched these actions to clear their names. Right. So I never studied law. No. So let me just understand this from a layman's perspective. A layman or a layman? A Lerman's perspective.

Yeah. Which is clearing your name means getting a lawyer to unequivocally destroy your reputation. That's what clearing your name obviously means. Because there's so many cases in the last. few years, Christian Porter, Ben Robert Smith, Bruce Lerman. I mean, there's other ones. There are many more. Yeah, you gave the Defoe Awards at your case last year.

There's so many of them. Part of the problem here is that defamation law is traditionally to vindicate your reputation, but some people, like it's so close to, so close to eviscerate your reputation. What goes wrong, Charles, is that if you sue for defamation, what people seem not to realize is that the other side is able to bring up whatever. evidence they can possibly find to prove that the claims are true, and it can be anything. So even if you win the case technically, the other side can bring up every sort of detail that can possibly cast doubt on what you've done.

Yeah. Like, you know, you might have a random Channel 7 producer just coming up and sharing the receipts of your wild partying with cocaine and sex workers. I'm not directly relevant to the trial. I mean, Channel 7 weren't even actually named. It was Channel 10, they were the ones being sued. but you can't have a defamation trial without Channel 7 coming to the park. Well, it wasn't Kerry Stokes helping Bruce out?

Yeah, he paid his rent for a year. Yeah, that's right. I must say, I think Kerry Stokes, I mean this in the nicest possible way, might need better advisers on which horses to back. I don't know if he's a racing man, Charles, but I don't think at race day I'd be signing on to any of Kerry Stokes's horses, to be honest. So my understanding is defamation is one of the oldest forms of law, right? Yeah, absolutely.

It was traditionally used by. rich white men to shut other people up. Oh, it's still used for that purpose. So what has gone wrong with defamation in the last few years? Like, is it that they've changed the law and suddenly it's thing? Or are our lawyers becoming more, like, because as a rich white man, you know, like, or I aspire to one day be a rich white man. I want to be able to sort of act with impunity.

So if you don't have any money, you want to know. To sue my way out of any sort of accountability in life. Well, yes, to answer a couple of the points of your questions, seriously, yes, they have changed the law. In the past few years, certainly since I studied law in the 1990s, they have changed the law such that truth is a complete defence, and that's what happened here. Truth didn't used to be. I remember we used to do media training in the early days of the chaser, and they'd say, it doesn't matter if it's true or not, you're not allowed to say it. So in New South Wales, it was truth plus public interest was their complete defence. So you didn't have to just be right.

He had to prove that it was in the public's interest to know this particular piece of detail. And that was how they got you a lot of the time. Yeah. So that's one aspect. But in terms of it being used as a tool by rich white men, I mean, Kerry Stokes would probably think that that was no longer the case. But if you heard, Justice Michael Lee, when he was being, despite being an elderly white man, very, very sensitive to the condition of Brittany Higgins. Yes.

And some of the things that she said he viewed as being the kinds of things you might say if you'd had a traumatic experience such as this. And he went into great sort of detail about what psychologists say happened. And so he's, for instance, found that without wanting to get too much into the sort of details, which people can do, he found that some of the things she said such as that she said no repeatedly in the ministerial suite were not credible, that she probably just said nothing, but that that didn't matter, that she probably shut down. And he was very sympathetic to the kinds of things we now happen in that situation. So what this means, Charles, is that being a

rapist is a lot harder these days. And he actually set out a whole framework to assess these sorts of trials. So we need to clarify as well, this was, as we said, it's not a criminal finding. The criminal trial was aborted in the ACT, so he's not going to go to jail for what the court found. It was a finding of the balance of probabilities. And the judge set it out in great detail that was much more likely that A sex occurred, that B, Brittany Higgins didn't consent to it, and that C, and this is the third element, Lerman had to sort of be aware of the lack of consent.

And this is where the law is changing, such that Justice Lee said that Lerman was recklessly indifferent to whether she consented or not. And there was a lot of evidence about how much she'd had to drink. She couldn't walk when she got into the apartment house. And I'm sorry to get out of the sort of gleeful nature of our intro to this, but it's really interesting to hear the reality of what happened, which is people go out and get drunk and can't consent and can't agree to this sort of thing. And it kind of didn't matter.

There was no need to prove that she knew what she was doing on. not. And Justice Lee painted this picture of a man who had been out partying all night was determined to have sex with a woman that he found sexually attractive and did not care. No. Went ahead Willie Neely was the term of use. It's strange term to use. But yes, saw she was drunk, bought her drinks and should have known better is essentially the finding. And look, this is a bit of a landmark decision, I think, in terms of looking at the reality of how people behave and saying actually there is a line and you're not meant to cross it. He said this isn't about the legal definition of rape. This is what's commonly understood by the

term because that's what was used in the media. They weren't looking at the kind of precise criminal definition which is changing as well in these directions. But saying, was there non-consensual sex? And did he proceed with knowledge of that or indifference. And so, yeah, this is a big moment in these kinds of cases. That is good news. So he found that Higgins did not consent to sex he found that Lerman was so intent on gratification that he was hell-bent on having sex with her

and he did not care one way or another but then at the end he makes this sort of wry comment that Lerman went and had that aborted trial in the ACT where very luckily for Lerman a juror

there was a breach of confidentiality or something but the trial had to be aborted A, because of whatever that issue was, I can't remember the details, but then the ACT public prosecutor or whatever, whoever it was, decided that it would be too damaging to Brittany Higgins's mental health to go through the whole thing again, to have to rerun the trial, even though she then had to go through all this again as a witness in this case in many ways. So she's had an unending nightmare since this moment of having her credibility questioned, and

she's been absolutely vindicated in terms of the core of what she said. And then, just as Michael Lee said, having escaped at Lion's Den, Mr. Lerman made the mistake of coming back, his hat, referring to the decision to launch defamation proceedings against Channel 10 and Higgins. Having made the decision to launch proceedings against Channel 10 and Lisa Wilkinson. Yes. Yes, and so this is the point. Everyone's quoting this quote about the Lions Dan and going back for your hat.

Look, it is practical advice. I don't know whether you've ever found yourself in a Lions den. Don't go back for your hat. It's not just lions dens, burning building, if you're having to evacuate a plane. Yes. Don't go back for your hat, in fact. Why wear a hat in the first place? They're very old-fashioned.

And I think we can broaden that lesson. We can say, if you've kicked an innocent civilian off a cliff, don't launch defamation proceedings. And if you've acted with indifference and sexually assaulted somebody in Parliament House, don't launch defamation proceedings against the reporting of that. I would say also don't kick people off cliffs is also. But if you did do that and you didn't get investigated for it and there's no sort of court martial for it, because what happens is, as we saw, yes, in the BRS case, because of the different standard of proof in civil trials such as this, it's the balance of probabilities, and that's a much easier bar to satisfy. So now you've got a judge, having looked at the evidence extensively for months and months and months, hours and hours, right, a 340 page judgment or something on this. comprehensively finding Bruce Lehman is correctly labeled a rapist

and they didn't even name him this is the amazing thing as we've been saying in the original report by Channel 10 in the project which by the way the judge said did identify Mr Lamman so that was interesting they said that he was identifiable from the details given yes that was really early on in the judgment everyone was sort of going oh no oh dear

because it was sort of like one of the first judgments he made was he found that one of Channel 10's whole defences were that oh well we didn't have name him. It was like, nah, nah. You don't get out of that. Yeah. More on this in a moment. The Chaser report, news a few days after it happens. And yeah, look, we're not cracking a whole bunch of jokes. It's just a fascinating story to think about. There were lots of other interesting details, too. He found some major issues with Brittany Higgins' credibility in certain areas, but he distinguished between what happened after she became a public figure

and started essentially, he said, curating the details of her story to make it more convincing. But he found that the evidence from immediately afterwards when she was not even thinking about pursuing a complaint, he found that compelling. She told people at the time that she'd been raped, including her dad, and he found that enormously convincing.

Whereas he was incredibly critical of Bruce Lerman's evidence, and basically said he was sort of a Walter Mitty-like character who just said whatever he needed to say for his own purposes, which I think is defamatory towards Walter Mitty, just quietly. Wow. Yeah. So we're now for Bruce Lerman.

I mean, I assume he gets an offer from Channel 7 to become a senior executive or something. To pay his rent. Yeah. What career path can you get as a proven rapist and liar?

Well, it's a very good question. I mean, the immediate question is where is he going to live, I guess, too? And I'm just wanting, just Ben Robert Smith have any spare rooms at his place? Yes, that's a good point.

perhaps get together. Yeah, look, where Bruce Lehman goes, I don't know how he affords all the partying he seems to do. Do you reckon maybe he should go into the dealing side of the Coke stuff? Oh, interesting. Because I can't see him picking up a corporate job anytime. I mean, except for Channel 7. You couldn't have said that yesterday,

but now what with him being, you know, someone who's been found in court to be a rapist, you can't really tarnish his reputation much. What sort of job can you do in that situation? Look. Yeah, like you've got to sort of go outside the Lord. You might have to. You might have to. Become a Coke dealer.

Mind you, it'd be a sort of step up reputational. Well, I mean, you're coming to contact. You're coming into contact with a lot of high profile figures, wouldn't you? I mean, yeah, yeah. Charles, one thing that's clear is that there are some vacancies coming up at Spotlight. We know Taylor Albuck's not there anymore. Yeah, Mark Llewellyn, step down. During the judgment.

Talk about trying to bury that story. So there's a whole bunch of people who've left the program. And we know that Lehman's very good at cutting deals. He's good at building rapport. He's very good at building rapport. Yeah, the next time this happens, the next time Kerry Stokes wants to pay... It's good at getting a gram of rapport. The next time Kerry Stokes wants to fund someone shredding their own reputation.

Yeah. I can see Lehman doing a wonderful job of whining and dining that person and saving all the receipts and then turning up at the trial. and sticking the knife in. Do you think we need to sort of set up some sort of island for all these misfits? I think Geoffrey Epstein tried. No, it's been more like a prison island.

Oh, prison island. You know what I mean? Like somewhere where, you know, ideally, definitely no men, ideally no civilians, certainly no cliffs. The thing is, Charles, that Bruce Lehman is now one of the most famous people in Australia after this trial. Everywhere he goes.

He's as famous as Rolf Harris. Any bar that Bruce Lerman goes to now he walk into one of these bars in Canber or in Sydney or wherever it might be every head in the room will turn. Those of them who belong to drug dealers will think,

hello, it's Christmas. Allegedly. But that imputation hasn't been tested yet. I can't see Bruce Lerman I can't see Bruce Lerman wanting to see anyone else to defamation anytime soon but it would be a brave person

who has bought drinks at this stage, wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah, by Bruce Lerman. So presumably he's got a bright future in the young libs. You'd just have to stick to the Liberal Bay. I mean, I think... It's the only place that will take him. You're being very harsh on the corporate sector.

Don't people, you know, wind up just sort of disappearing into anonymous corporate jobs? Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. There's always another mate, isn't there? Lockheed Martin or something. He can work on Orcus. He can work on Orcas. Yes.

Well, look, he had connections in the Liberal Party. I don't know how those connections are going. He certainly knows about explosive allegations. At the end of the day, Charles, If you were wanting to advise someone about whether, if they felt their reputation had been injured, would you say go to defamation court? That's the place to go to.

It's a good day for defamation, a bad day for defamation lawyers. I think so. Because no one's going to be launching defamation suits from now. Or do you reckon white men are arrogant enough to continue? Surely at some point they'll learn. But you'd think that. They'd never learn.

You'd have to shatter the bubble, Charles, that are these people going, well, I'm special, I'm different. It won't apply to me. That's unlikely to happen any time soon. So I think the defamation industry is probably safe. It's good news. But I do think, yeah, I mean, people like us. But this has been a good day for accountability in Australia.

There is a lesson for us in this Charles as well, which is not pleasant. You're not going to like it. We're not going to like it. It says that you've actually got to have journalistic ethics and that if someone comes to you with some explosive claims. Yes. You can't just print the claims. I mean, Justice Lee was quite critical of those who did not fact check and give Bruce

Lerman the right of reply and things like that. So it's a good day for the kind of crashing bores who whine on about journalistic ethics and integrity. So does that mean on tomorrow's podcast we've got to have Bruce Lerman on to give his right of reply? I think Justice Lee gave him his right of reply for more than enough cases. But yeah, unfortunately, this means that next time you have one of your theories, You'll have to check whether it's actually true. And, I mean, it doesn't apply to the submarine because they couldn't have had a right of reply.

Yeah. So that's annoying to have to worry about journalism, lectures and ethics and stuff. What a bore. What a terrible day. Okay, I've changed my mind on this old judgment thing. It's a disaster for the kind of quality work we do here at the Chaser. Oh, Charles, I must say my feelings of rapport

of just suddenly evaporated. Can you pass me that white? We need another bump. Yep. Our Gears from Road. We're part of the iconocles network, and we'll see you back here on the 29th of April. And in the meantime, here's to journalism. Oh, yeah.

Journalism's good. Charles, I've just realised it's in this frame of mind that you want to sue someone. I'm going to sue Channel 10. Oh, that explains it all. I don't care. I'm a super man. No one can stop me.