Bruce Lehrmann's appeal against federal court ruling to begin in Sydney

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Bruce Lehrmann was found to have raped Brittany Higgins on the balance of probabilities. Today, his appeal against that ruling begins in the Federal Court.

Transcript

00:00This is the response to the ruling last year about, on the balance of probabilities, that

00:09Bruce Lehman did rape Brittany Higgins at Parliament House in 2019.

00:15Now that was a defamation case which failed.

00:18He'd brought the case against Network 10 and Lisa Wilkinson over the interview on the project

00:24where Brittany Higgins first alleged that she'd been raped at Parliament House.

00:29Of course there was a criminal trial in between before we got to the defamation case.

00:36But Bruce Lehman has decided that he would appeal against that ruling and particularly

00:42against that devastating finding because of course truth is a defence in a defamation case.

00:49But of course it's only on the civil standard at this stage.

00:52And Liz what can we expect today?

00:54Well today I think we can expect some much more finely grained legal argument than we've

01:01seen before.

01:02In the Federal Court trial we saw a long list of characters coming through from the case,

01:09from Bruce Lehman and Brittany Higgins to Lisa Wilkinson.

01:13There was a lot of evidence given this will only be legal argument testing things that the judge

01:20has said in his judgment that found the case to be true on the balance of probabilities.

01:27So you can expect Bruce Lehman, his lawyers at least, to be zeroing in on some of the inconsistencies

01:37in Brittany Higgins' evidence and trying to find a way around the judge's finding but the

01:48main target will of course be this finding of truth on the balance of probabilities.

01:53.

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