• 2 years ago
Bruce Lehrmann's defamation case took an unusual turn this morning, when the court called for an alleged recording of a conversation between Brittany Higgins' fiancé and her lawyer to be produced.

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00:00 Well, apparently from a member of the public, that's according to Sky News and News.com,
00:08 which ran the story, it was recorded in a restaurant where Brittany Higgins and her
00:14 fiancé David Shiraz and Leon Zwier, who has been Brittany Higgins' lawyer throughout
00:22 years, were celebrating his birthday. The recording is of David Shiraz and Mr Zwier
00:30 discussing evidence that Brittany, or ways in which evidence should be presented, or
00:36 could be presented by Brittany Higgins. There's no suggestion anyone did anything wrong. She
00:41 was under cross-examination at the time, and Mr Zwier has said in a statement to the two
00:47 news outlets that there was no plan to discuss this with Brittany Higgins at all. The discussion
00:55 was on the basis that it was between them and that nothing was said to her, so nothing
01:01 wrong was done. The judges ordered that the recording be produced by late this afternoon,
01:09 and that's just step one, though. Where this will take us is unknown, because producing
01:14 it is one thing, having it admitted into evidence is another entirely.
01:19 And the hearing itself, Elizabeth, has moved to a new phase.
01:22 Yes, we're now looking at qualified privilege. So, Network 10 has had a number of witnesses
01:30 to back up its defence of truth over the last week or so, and now we've moved to qualified
01:37 privilege as its defence, and the first witness is Angus Llewellyn, the producer who worked
01:44 on the project interview. He's faced some fairly tough questioning in cross-examination
01:52 from Matthew Richardson, who's representing Mr Lehrman, about Brittany Higgins' phone
01:59 dying and claims in the initial interview that there might have been a hack because
02:04 she lost a lot of her data. Mr Llewellyn said he always thought that was more of a stuff-up
02:11 than a hack, and he's also defended other material used in the program, saying that
02:22 they had a stat deck from Ms Higgins saying that the material was true and correct, and
02:29 that had given them some comfort.
02:31 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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