Journalist Lisa Wilkinson will take the witness stand today in Bruce Lehrmann's federal court defamation action against her and Network Ten, over an interview in which his former colleague Brittany Higgins alleged she'd been raped at Parliament House.
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00:00 I think the very first thing we'll see is a bit of a media scrum. We have seen a degree
00:06 of this every single day because Lisa Wilkinson has been able to sit in on this hearing from
00:12 the very beginning because she's a party in it, which is very unlike a criminal trial
00:18 where she would have had to wait till it was her turn to give evidence. But today I think
00:25 we can expect some fairly tough cross-examination along the lines that we saw over the last
00:30 couple of days with her producer, Angus Llewellyn. And the cross-examination will target whether
00:37 enough checks were made on the veracity of Ms Higgins' claims and whether enough effort
00:45 was made to contact Mr Lehrman about the allegations. I think there'll also be some questions about
00:53 what information Mr Llewellyn passed on to Ms Wilkinson in the preparation of this program.
01:02 Will Ms Wilkinson's case differ from Mr Llewellyn? It's a little bit hard to say at this stage,
01:12 but Lisa Wilkinson has a completely different legal team to Network 10. She's got Sue Krizanthu,
01:20 who's a well-known defamation lawyer in Sydney, representing her as her barrister. And it
01:28 will be interesting to see if she runs the case a little bit differently. One issue that's
01:32 likely to come up that hasn't been explored expansively yet is the qualified privilege
01:40 issue. And Lisa Wilkinson is likely to face a few questions about that to test her information
01:48 about why this story was so important, why she had an interest in it that meant that
01:52 she had to tell people about it. Liz, this case is likely to run into next week.
01:58 How many more people are there to hear from? There's possibly a few, although from time
02:05 to time witnesses have been dropped out in order to make the case a bit shorter. But
02:12 there is one more significant witness that we are yet to hear from, and that is Fiona
02:17 Brown, who is the Chief of Staff in the office where Brittany Higgins and Bruce Lehrman worked
02:23 for those four weeks in the lead up to the 2019 election. So her evidence will be crucial
02:30 because she and Brittany Higgins have differed over when Brittany Higgins told her that she'd
02:37 been sexually assaulted. So we're still waiting to hear when she might appear in the case.
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