Lehrmann verdict: elite loser rapist walks free
Bruce Lehrmann is a rapist. That’s the conclusion, on the balance of probabilities, that Justice Michael Lee drew at the conclusion of Lehrmann’s defamation trial against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson. It has since been plastered on the front pages of the Sydney Morning Herald (“A Lying Rapist”) and Herald Sun (“Rapist and Loser”).
There has since been an outpouring of joy among the many people repulsed by the slimy, sleazy Lehrmann. His hubris was his own downfall. That he might now be forced to declare bankruptcy is another satisfying potential outcome of the trial.
The case is strikingly similar to that of Ben Roberts-Smith, war criminal and murderer. He brought a defamation case against three journalists and the publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Canberra Times, and lost in similarly spectacular fashion. In June last year, a court found that Roberts-Smith was, again on the balance of probabilities, involved in the murder of four unarmed Afghan men while deployed with Australian special forces.
Yet, apart from the outcomes of the defamation proceedings, there isn’t a whole lot to celebrate about the two cases. What they’ve both proved is that if you’re from the right school and have the right networks, you can get away with basically anything.
Neither Lehrmann nor Roberts-Smith have been charged and convicted for the crimes that they have been found to have committed. They were instead hoist with their own petards—victims of their own arrogance rather than the rigour of law enforcement. Both were allowed to walk out of the courtroom as free men, and neither is likely to spend a single day in prison for raping a coworker or murdering civilians.
In fact, they both received substantial perks for their behaviour.
Take Lehrmann. In the final weeks of the defamation proceedings, Taylor Auerbach, a former Channel Seven producer with an axe to grind, revealed the lengths the network went to secure an interview from this man who had been accused of raping a woman inside Parliament House in the early hours of a Saturday morning in 2019. According to Auerbach, Seven footed the bill for a couple of big nights out with Lehrmann that included cocaine, sex workers and $10,000 spent on Thai massages. The network also paid for a year’s rent of a beachside apartment, worth $100,000.
Channel Seven gave Roberts-Smith the plum job of general manager of Seven Queensland, and then bankrolled his legal fees during the defamation proceedings. There is still an entire display dedicated to him in the Hall of Valour at the Australian War Memorial. In September, instead of sitting inside a prison cell, Roberts-Smith was sitting alongside Zachary Rolfe, the ex-cop who killed a young Indigenous man in 2019, in an Instagram photo from Bali captioned “Just a couple of cops/murderers and war criminals Havin a lovely afternoon in the sun”.
The court proceedings highlight something else. Despite the victories in the Lehrmann and Roberts-Smith cases, the trials are nevertheless a loss for journalists trying to hold the rich and powerful to account. Australian defamation law is weighted in favour of plaintiffs because it assumes that a defamatory statement is false and then requires the defendant to establish that it is true—guilty until proven innocent.
But proving innocence is incredibly costly. Cases are expensive to defend (the Lehrmann case is predicted to have cost Network Ten at least $10 million) and time consuming (the Robert-Smith trial lasted for 110 days). This is all a huge deterrent to reporting on crimes committed by powerful people, particularly when anonymous whistleblowers are key sources.
All in all, the message from both these cases is that if you have the right connections or can make yourself a cause célèbre for the right-wing media, you can get off with a light touch. Just think twice before suing for defamation.
