Bruce Lehrmann has been committed to stand trial on rape charges.
The 29-year-old faces two counts of rape, alleged to have occurred in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, in October 2021.
Magistrate Marc Howden found sufficient grounds to commit the former Liberal Party staffer to trial on Thursday, rejecting his argument that he had “no case to answer”, two-and-a-half weeks after the complainant gave her evidence and was cross-examined in closed court.
“In my view, when considering the evidence as a whole, it is sufficient at this stage for me to reach a conclusion that a reasonable jury, properly instructed, could return a verdict of guilty,” Howden said.
The trial will now be heard at the Toowoomba district court at a date to be set.
Prior to Howden’s decision a packed courtroom heard facts agreed upon by Lehrmann’s barrister, Andrew Hoare KC, and prosecutor Nicole Friedewald, relating to the night and morning following 9 October 2021.
It was agreed Lehrmann and the complainant, who cannot legally be named, met at a strip club after both had been drinking alcohol and the complainant had taken cocaine. The pair went on to take cocaine together and in the early hours of the morning took a taxi to a Toowoomba home where they engaged in consensual sex.
However, the complainant then claims she awoke to find Lehrmann on top of and penetrating her without a condom, despite her having insisted upon contraception during their earlier consensual encounter.
She alleges she pulled her body away and told him to “stop what you are doing” but that he instead climbed back on top of her saying “it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok”, continuing the unwanted sex before ejaculating inside her.
After messaging her friends about the alleged assault on November 6, the complainant first went to police 20 days later.
Friedewald told the court the complainant, as was “not uncommon” in cases of sexual assault, took some time to “come to terms with what had happened to her”, citing a message to her friend in which she said was “starting to feel really shit” and “hadn’t really processed what had happened” or admitted it to herself.
“I just feel so shameful,” the complainant wrote to her friends. “Who is going to believe me?”