Network Ten agrees to pay journalist more than $1.1m to cover legal costs of defending defamation case by Bruce LehrmannGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastA long-running dispute between Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson has ended with the network agreeing to pay $1.15m to cover her costs of defending Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case.On Monday afternoon, the federal court approved this amount after months of disagreement over exactly how much Ten should pay Wilkinson for retaining separate legal representation. Continue reading…Network Ten agrees to pay journalist more than $1.1m to cover legal costs of defending defamation case by Bruce LehrmannGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastA long-running dispute between Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson has ended with the network agreeing to pay $1.15m to cover her costs of defending Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case.On Monday afternoon, the federal court approved this amount after months of disagreement over exactly how much Ten should pay Wilkinson for retaining separate legal representation. Continue reading…
A long-running dispute between Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson has ended with the network agreeing to pay $1.15m to cover her costs of defending Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case.
On Monday afternoon, the federal court approved this amount after months of disagreement over exactly how much Ten should pay Wilkinson for retaining separate legal representation.
The figure was below the initial $1.8m Wilkinson said she had been forced to spend to successfully defend the case.
In 2023, Justice Michael Lee oversaw a hotly contested defamation trial brought by Lehrmann over a February 2021 report on The Project where Brittany Higgins claimed he had sexually assaulted her in Parliament House almost two years earlier.
In April 2024, the judge dismissed the case, finding Lehrmann had not been defamed and that, on the balance of probabilities, Higgins’ statements that he raped her in the office of their then boss, Linda Reynolds, were substantially true.
With Justice Lee ordering Lehrmann to pay $2m in legal costs to Ten in June, questions still remained about what Wilkinson was owed.
Ten previously told the court it had spent $3.7m defending Lehrmann’s lawsuit.
While an external referee was appointed to determine how much of Wilkinson’s legal bill was reasonable, Ten eventually agreed to the $1.15m figure before his report was hashed out at a contested hearing.
The network has already paid Wilkinson $558,000 and will have to pay the remainder of the $1.15m by 19 March.
How much of this will then be payable by a cash-strapped Lehrmann on the verge of bankruptcy has yet to be determined.
Ten and Wilkinson will come back before Justice Lee on 11 March to discuss who pays the expenses incurred by hiring the costs referee.
Lehrmann has appealed his defamation loss in the full federal court with a hearing yet to be scheduled.
The defamation suit came after a criminal case facing Lehrmann was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct with no findings made against him.