A Defamation Trial Shows #MeToo Missed Its Mark in Australia
A rare win for victims of rape has laid bare how often criminal jurisdictions fail women. The lesson? Courts should focus on consent, not resistance.
Scales of justice.
Photographer: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
A high-profile defamation trial in Australia has scored a win for victims of sexual assault. But the outcome is cold comfort: It came at a high price and showed how women are still being let down when it comes to reporting rape.
The public interest was such that the final judgment was live streamed, which while not uncommon doesn’t happen all the time. More than 40,000 people tuned in Monday to hear Federal Court Justice Michael Lee read his findings for over 2 ½ hours. At the center of the case, two Canberra political staffers. Lee threw out Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation suit against a media outlet that aired the sexual assault allegations, and found that “on the balance of probabilities” he raped Brittany Higgins at Parliament House in 2019 after a night out drinking.