Linda Reynolds has won her defamation case against Brittany Higgins in the Western Australian supreme court, marking the end of a protracted legal battle with her former staffer.
The state supreme court judge Paul Tottle ruled on Wednesday that the former defence minister’s reputation was damaged by a 2022 social media post from David Sharaz, which Higgins responded to, and an Instagram story published by Higgins in July 2023.
Tottle found Higgins had defamed Reynolds in an Instagram story on 4 July 2023, which shared a screenshot of headlines publicising Reynolds’ intentions to refer Higgins’ $2.445m personal injury settlement to the federal anti-corruption body and accused her of mishandling her alleged rape and waging a campaign of harassment.
However, Tottle found Higgins had successfully defended against Reynolds’ defamation allegations in another post accusing the former senator of “silencing” sexual assault victim-survivors. Tottle said Higgins’ legal team had successfully established the defence of honest opinion, fair comment and qualified privilege.
Reynolds failed to prove Higgins and Sharaz had concocted a conspiracy to publicly release the details of Higgins’s alleged rape with the “sole or predominant purpose” of destroying the former senator’s reputation, Tottle ruled.
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The court also found Higgins had breached a deed of settlement she and Reynolds had reached in a March 2021 settlement after Reynolds was reported to have called her a “lying cow”. Tottle said Reynolds was entitled to relief as Higgins had broken the agreement not to make “adverse, critical or disparaging comments”.
Higgins was ordered to pay Reynolds $315,000 in damages with an additional $26,109.25 in interest. She will also need to pay for Reynolds’s court and legal fees, an amount which will be determined at a later date.
Outside the court, Reynolds said the ruling had “definitively established the truth” and had “finally and fully vindicated” her reputation. She described the allegations made against her as a “‘me too’ political hit job”.
“This lie was so shocking, it was so despicable and so devastating, that I had no choice but to stand up tall and keep fighting no matter how many times I was knocked down. This lie devastated me. It devastated my staff, it devastated my family and so many friends,” she said.
Higgins said she was “grateful” the matter had finally concluded.
“I was 24 years old when I was sexually assaulted in Parliament House. Six years have passed – years marked by challenge, scrutiny, and change,” she said in a statement distributed by her lawyer.
“I accept that Linda Reynolds feelings were hurt by these events and I am sorry for that. I wish her well for the future. Thank-you to the Australian public for their compassion and understanding throughout this journey. My family and I now look forward to healing and rebuilding our lives.”
Reynolds’ legal team argued during the trial that the senior Liberal senator had been cast as a “villain” in Higgins’ fairytale after her staffer alleged in February 2021 that she had been sexually assaulted by a colleague in Reynolds’ ministerial office in March 2019 and then had been left unsupported by her boss.
Higgins told news.com.au and The Project that her alleged sexual assault had become a political “problem” for Reynolds and the wider Morrison government in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election.
The junior Liberal staffer alleged she had been made to choose between her future, either by working on the looming federal election in Perth for Reynolds, or by pausing her career aspirations to work remotely from the Gold Coast, where her support network was.
During the trial in August and September, the court heard that Higgins had gone to the media to effect change in Parliament House after her alleged rape. Higgins’ lawyer, Rachael Young SC, said Higgins had felt professionally and personally isolated, and believed she had to stay quiet because her allegation was politically inconvenient.
Reynolds’ lawyer, Martin Bennett, disputed the claim, saying Higgins “wouldn’t have a bar” of any offers of support. This was shown, he said, by her rejection of 20 attempts to offer phone counselling support in the months after her alleged rape.
The senator’s case centred around social media posts published in July 2023 and a comment Higgins left on Sharaz’s post in January 2022 that she claimed damaged her reputation.
Higgins posted a screenshot of headlines in July 2023 to her Instagram story publicising Reynolds’ intentions to refer Higgins’ $2.445m personal injury settlement to the federal anti-corruption body.
“These are just headlines from today,” she wrote on the post. “This is from a current Australian senator who continues to harass me through the media and in the parliament. My former boss who has publicly apologised for mishandling my rape allegation. Who has had to publicly apologise to me after defaming me in the workplace … This has been going on for years now. It is time to stop.”
Bennett said Higgins’ actions after going public with her allegations in 2021 had been driven by a “visceral hatred” of Reynolds and she had conspired with her now husband, David Sharaz, to harm the senator’s reputation and bring down the Morrison government.
He told the court Higgins and Sharaz had felt “untouchable” and that Higgins believed “no one would sue a rape victim” so she could “say whatever [she] like[s]”.
During his closing remarks, Bennett said the senator should receive a “substantial” payout if the verdict landed in his client’s favour and a permanent injunction should be placed on Higgins to prevent her from making further disparaging remarks.
Bennett asked the judge to consider political defamation payouts where the damages awarded had exceeded more than half a million dollars.
The verdict comes more than a year after a federal court judge ruled against Bruce Lehrmann in his defamation case against Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson for airing Higgins’ sexual assault allegations against him.
Lehrmann denied the rape allegations and pleaded not guilty at his criminal trial in the Australian Capital Territory supreme court, which was aborted. Prosecutors did not seek a retrial due to concerns about Higgins’ mental health.
Justice Michael Lee found that Lehrmann had raped Higgins, on the balance of probabilities, on the minister’s couch in Parliament House in 2019.
Lehrmann is appealing against the verdict.
• This article was amended on 27 August 2025 to clarify that the social media posts that defamed Linda Reynolds were published in 2022 and 2023. Initially the article stated the posts were published in 2023.
