Brittany Higgins to sensationally return to court after being ‘unavailable’ for four days

Brittany Higgins will return to the witness box today to complete her testimony in the high-profile trial of her alleged rapist – after being absent for four days.

Bruce Lehrmann has been accused of consensual sex with Mrs Higgins in Parliament House after a night out in Canberra in March 2019.

He pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual intercourse without consent in the ACT Supreme Court.

Ms Higgins was on the witness stand last week and was due to be questioned further Monday by Lehrmann’s lawyer Steven Whybrow.

However, the prosecutor told the court that she was “unavailable” until Friday this week.

The trial continued with other witnesses, but the court banned the publication of their evidence until Ms. Higgins has completed her evidence.

The court previously heard Ms Higgins and Lehrmann returned to Parliament House after a night of drinking with Defense Department colleagues.

The former Liberal Party staffer claims she fell asleep on the couch and woke up to Lehrmann having sex with her.

Former coalition defense secretary Linda Reynolds, Ms Higgins’ boss at the time of the alleged attack, will testify in court on Tuesday.

Senator Michaelia Cash is also expected to be on the witness stand early next week before the Crown closes his case.

However, the witness list has been cut significantly – TV host Lisa Wilkinson and News Corp journalist Samantha Maiden are no longer required to testify.

Last week Ms Higgins became visibly emotional at times when questioned by Mr Whybrow.

Texts she sent to her father and boyfriend were shared, as were reports of a potential $325,000 book deal with Lisa Wilkinson’s husband, Peter FitzSimons.

At one point, she objected to Mr Whybrow’s interrogation, accusing him of being “deeply abusive”.

“You’re so wrong,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced trauma before… It’s confrontational, it’s very hard to do. I was bedridden, I tried my best. I completely reject everything you say.’

Mr Whybrow also confronted Ms Higgins with a message she sent to her friend David Sharaz that read: ‘I’ll clean up my phone before the police come.’

Ms Higgins told the court she sent recordings from her phone to her partner because “I was terrified they didn’t exist.”

While grilled over a $325,000 book deal arranged for her, ex-Liberal staffer admitted to a jury that she planned chapters of a book about her life before being formally questioned by police about her rape allegations.

The court also found that Ms. Wilkinson was “quite angry” when her interview with Ms. Higgins aired on The Project on a Monday, because it’s not a day she normally appears on the show.

Higgins also told the court she was “clearly wrong” when she said she hid the dress in which she allegedly had been raped under her bed for six months.

About two months after the alleged incident, the former political employee was confronted with a photo of her wearing the white cocktail number at a birthday party.

Ms. Higgins told Lehrmann’s ACT Supreme Court rape lawsuit that she had put the dress she wore that night in a plastic bag under her bed for six months, “untouched and uncleaned.”

She told the jury that once she felt it was clear she couldn’t report the alleged attack without losing her job with Secretary of Defense Ms Reynolds, she “washed the dress very symbolically.”

“I wore it one more time, but then I never wore it again,” she said.

But during the cross-examination of Lehrmann’s lawyer, Mr Whybrow, Ms Higgins was shown a photo of her wearing the same dress in May 2019 at Ms Reynolds’ birthday party in Perth.

Cross-examined by Mr Whybrow, Ms Higgins denied lying, but admitted she had made a mistake in her timeline of events.

Mr Whybrow told her she had traveled to Perth on April 13, which would mean the dress was only under her bed for a few weeks, rather than six months as she initially claimed.

“It’s been under my bed for a while,” she told the court.

“I said six months, I was clearly wrong, but it stayed under my bed for a while.”

When asked if it would have been difficult for her to wear that dress again, Mrs. Higgins told the court, “I was reclaiming my desk when I brought it to Perth.”

“It was an empowering thing, saying the worst thing in the world happened to me in this dress and I never wore it again after that,” she said.

“It sounds stupid, but that’s just the truth.”