Almost a year after the five-week defamation trial between Linda Reynolds and her former staffer Brittany Higgins wrapped up, a Western Australian supreme court judge is due to hand down his verdict.
The judge will weigh up the five weeks of evidence presented over August and September 2024, to determine whether Higgins defamed Reynolds, formerly a federal WA Liberal senator, in a series of social media posts in 2023.
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The court heard evidence spanning the five-year period from when Higgins was allegedly raped by Bruce Lehrmann in 2019 in Reynolds’ ministerial office to the week of the trial in Perth.
Lehrmann pleased not guilty before his criminal trial collapsed due to juror misconduct. Then in April 2024, justice Michael Lee found in a separate defamation trial – launched by Lehrmann – that on the balance of probabilities he had raped Higgins. Lehrmann is awaiting the ruling on his appeal of that decision.
Here’s a refresher on the Reynolds v Higgins case to bring you back up to speed.
Why is Linda Reynolds suing Brittany Higgins?
In July 2023, Higgins wrote “It is time to stop” in an Instagram story that featured a news story on Reynolds’ intention to refer Higgins’s $2.445m compensation for personal injury from the federal government to the National Anti-Corruption Commission (Nacc).
Higgins’s story continued accusing Reynolds of harassing her in the media and in parliament.
Two days later, Higgins tweeted: “I’ve just received a concerns notice from [Linda Reynolds] threatening defamation over an Instagram story. I’m considering my legal options.”
Reynolds then threatened to take Higgins to court over the social media posts, saying she had “had enough”. In August, she followed through on that threat, filing a writ.
Court documents show that Reynolds alleged Higgins’s posts were in breach of a settlement and release signed in March 2021. That settlement allegedly contained a non-disparagement clause.
The two parties were unable to resolve the conflict through mediation and the case ultimately went to court in August 2024.
What did we hear in court?
The majority of it came from Reynolds herself, or witnesses she called. Higgins, on the other hand, did not appear, and her defence was provided solely through her lawyer, Rachael Young SC.
Higgins, Young told the court, had tried effect change in Parliament House by publicly sharing her alleged rape in stories on news.com.au and The Project in 2021.
In those interviews, Higgins alleged her alleged sexual assault became a political “problem” for Reynolds, her then-boss, as well as the wider Morrison government.
Reynolds, however, disputed that claim, saying she had been supportive of Higgins, and that Higgins’s claim of a political cover-up was a lie that damaged Reynolds’s physical and mental health.
Both parties claimed the other harassed them through the media and via their political opponents over a three-to-four-year period after Higgins’s allegations against Lehrmann first became public, along with secondary allegations against Reynolds, that she did not take adequate care of Higgins.
Reynolds told the court the continued criticisms from Higgins and her now-husband, David Sharaz, made her feel like a “punching clown”. She claimed the couple’s social media posts worked like a press release machine, generating critical headlines about her.
In the trial, Young countered that Higgins felt she was the victim of continued harassment by Reynolds, and offered three examples: when Reynolds called Higgins a “lying cow”, which was later leaked to the media; Reynolds’s texts with Lehrmann’s then-barrister Steven Whybrow, which gave an “impression” she was biased against Higgins; and Reynolds’ decision to leak confidential documents to Janet Albrechtsen, a columnist critical of Higgins at The Australian.
How much is at stake?
That’s for the judge to decide, but the court heard last September how much Reynolds’ team is hoping for.
The former senator’s lawyer, Martin Bennett, said Reynolds should receive a “substantial” payout along with a permanent injunction to prevent Higgins from making any further disparaging remarks.
Bennett argued that without awards “in excess” of the statutory maximum – which in WA is $500,000 as of 1 July – Higgins would continue to pursue “her truth” through a book deal, and possible movie or television deals.
Higgins’s lawyer, on the other hand, said any damages awarded to Reynolds if she won should be assessed by “how far her reputation has fallen” since mid-2023 when the tweets were posted, not since the allegations against Lehrmann and Reynolds first publicly aired in February 2021.
Young referred to defamation cases with far smaller payouts, such as when Peter Dutton sued a refugee advocate for calling him a “rape apologist” and was awarded $35,000 before the case was overturned on appeal.
Bennett, however, referred to other cases with payouts at the half-million-dollar mark.
Is this Reynolds’ final case connected to the rape?
In a word, no.
The Nacc found “no corruption” in June 2025 after investigating Reynolds’ referral of the personal injury settlement. It concluded the former attorney general Mark Dreyfus had “no inappropriate intervention” when he approved Higgins’s settlement in December 2022 without the involvement of Reynolds and her legal team.
Reynolds has separately taken the issue to the federal court, alleging Dreyfus had a conflict of interest when he signed the settlement.
Documents released to the WA supreme court last year showed Reynolds was asked by government solicitors not to attend the mediation with Higgins in December 2022 or make any public commentary about Higgins. The documents said this was to maintain the confidentiality of information related to the settlement and civil claims in order to give the commonwealth the “best position to achieve a resolution at the mediation”.
Reynolds is suing the commonwealth and its lawyers for damages and legal costs in an effort to “vindicate and restore her reputation”, the statement of claim said.
