I began Mandi Gray’s book while waiting for the judgment to be handed down in Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson. I had tuned into the live-streamed trial months earlier, along with 124,444 others, to hear Brittany Higgins being interrogated about her recollections of that fateful night in Parliament House. Gray’s argument – that some men were using defamation law to inflict further abuse and punishment on their victims, to cow them into silence, to chill public discussion of sexual violence – seemed apt indeed.
...
(read more)