She said no, but he didn’t stop, she said. When it was finished, “he looked at me, then he left,” she added in the video recording. “I cried the whole process,” she said.
Although she met with police to describe what happened, she did not file a formal complaint out of fear for her job, the prosecution said. Mr Drumgold read aloud a text message Ms Higgins sent to a friend which read: ‘If I want to keep my job, I can’t talk about it.
Ms Higgins, in the police interview, detailed a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in Parliament. “Already it was so ingrained in me, this culture of silence,” she said.
Ms Reynolds maintained that her office had not pressured Ms Higgins to drop her case, but she apologized for Ms Higgins having “felt unsupported”. Mr Morrison also apologized to Ms Higgins for the ‘terrible experiences’ she had endured.
Last year Ms Higgins decided to reopen her case with the police and resigned from her job. Simultaneously, she made her allegations public.
Mr Lehrmann, 27, was charged in August 2021 with one count of sex without consent. The maximum sentence for the charge is 12 years in prison.
On Tuesday, her defense urged the jury to consider Ms Higgins’ credibility and reliability. In interviews with police, she described the events in general terms because, “actually, as she told the police, she doesn’t really remember what happened,” Ms. .Whybrow.