I would not walk a mile in Brittany Higgins’ shoes

So here we are, earnestly debating whether Katy Gallagher misled Parliament and whether, if she did, that was worse than the acts and omissions of Linda Reynolds, Scott Morrison or Peter Dutton — a forensic analysis of who knew what and when, playing out daily for our prurient titillation in the nation’s media. 

And the weaponry being so freely deployed? Private text messages. Internal notes of rape crisis services. Leaks. Sources. Hansard. The stuff of the happiest days of the Canberra press corps, when they’re on the pack-hunt for a scalp.

The Brittany Higgins/Bruce Lehrmann “situation” plays on. I remember privately noting a long time ago that it would burn everyone it touched, and so it has, uncontrollable bonfire (or bin fire) that it has become. 

For the media, what choice? It’s as newsworthy as news ever gets, the biggest scandal in federal politics ever, tragedy and farce intertwining constantly as the soap opera unfolds, as the mindless quest to get to the bottom of the “truth” ploughs ever ahead, consuming everything in its path.

The truth. Two people know a truth, of what in their minds happened that night in Parliament House. It is an abstract truth, subjective like all human experience, arbitrary when judged through the legal lenses we apply to it. It isn’t the point, much as we’d prefer to believe it is.

The sole truth of relevance is that a young woman reported what she said had happened to her, something horrific and intolerable. She chose a course, as was her right, to forgo anonymity and pursue a criminal complaint. That course failed, with the resulting circus rendering the process unsafe except at unacceptable risk to the complainant herself.

The law having failed to help, various actors have chosen to carry on by different means, but means to what end? A day in court, asking a Federal Court judge to determine on the balance of probabilities whether or not a crime occurred, in the context of a defamation trial? If that’s our idea of good and sensible justice, I give up.

Or what? A continuation of this trial by media, the conflagration that will destroy reputations, maybe careers, but get us no closer to the much-demanded but unachievable reckoning of knowing, once and for all, who was telling the truth.

If, as I keep seeing, people think that the real question here is to ask who gains from the leaks, then no, they’re asking the wrong question. It is obvious that the case of Higgins/Lehrmann was compromised by agendas a long time before it became public property. Whose agendas, some are easy to guess, others far more obscure. The result is that nobody comes out of this shitshow unsmeared.

It will, like every public spectacle, eventually end, when there’s no new revelation to be unveiled, when the competing camps tire of the fight because even they realise it’s going nowhere.

The players will carry their burn scars forward, aware or not that they’ve been singed. The media will re-learn the important lesson that there’s no scandal like a sex scandal, and no sex scandal like a political one.

If it bleeds, it leads. What we don’t see, when the story is one of personal trauma, is that the bleeding is arterial. We don’t see that each front page, each leak, each speculation, judgement, analysis and picking over of the entrails, each and every word inflicts new wounds or breaks open old ones. Under all this is a person who, believe her or not, is suffering.

I was asked recently by a journalist, one who cares, what lessons I think there are in this debacle. For me, there’s one, notwithstanding the thousand ways in which so many individuals and institutions have failed during its disastrous course. It is that our starting point and our constant guide should be not judgment, not the insistent rush for truth, but empathy.

Empathy is not sympathy, nor is it uncritical belief. It is the essence of how we can navigate awfulness with humanity.

I would not walk a mile in Brittany Higgins’ shoes.