“We’ve been experiencing horrific parties,” says a neighbour, with the most disturbing thing being “screeching karaoke … You never hear a peep from anyone in our street.”

Throwing Karaoke surprise party marathons with stacks of mystery guests arriving at all hours, shrieking, slamming car doors, vaping, snorting lines of coke and parking all over the neighbours’ nature strips, can test the best of friendships, but you are guaranteed to get someone’s attention. Keeps your spirits up. Professional litigant, Bruce Lehrmann, is not letting a bum rap or two get him down. June’s committal hearing in a Queensland court on two counts of rape? All in the baggie. Sweet as, bro.

In the meantime he’s said not a word to contest the recent, damning indictment of Taylor Auerbach who testifies to Seven’s open chequebook journalism giving Lehrmann free-rent-sex and drugs and rock roll – and even a round of golf in Tasmania.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop can cast a shadow over even the most self-indulgent, morally defective, feckless, sexual predator’s attention. But suing Ten and Lisa Wilkinson for defamation is a bad miscalculation, a madly irrational form of risk-taking. The impending judgement of Justice Michael Bryan Joshua Lee in the federal court in Sydney, today, Monday 15 April at 10:15 am can’t miss his habitual lies and deceptions.

More reason to party like there’s no tomorrow. Besides, it’s Toowoomba. Lehrmann may be just an itinerant, millennial, narcissistic sociopath, but he acts as if he’s got the key to the Emerald City. What better way to repay your mate’s friendship in letting you doss down at his place than acting The Great Gatsby while he’s away from home?

It’s not that Bruce hasn’t read the neighbourhood. He never could. Like his mentor and protector, Scott John Morrison, who quietly blows half a billion on a bad AWM revamp, celebrating killing, he doesn’t give a toss for anyone else. But – imagine living with Dirty Dancing’s Time of My Life turned up to hearing loss level -all hours of the day and night.

Or try “If I should stay, I would only be in your way,” from young Dolly Parton’s, later Whitney Houston’s hit cover, I Will Always Love You. “Listen to Dolly when your heart is breaking; Whitney when it’s time to move on,” says a YouTuber. Bruce Lehrmann, party animal, ex-senior adviser and archetypal Liberal party rising star turned loser must move on.

“The noise has been going on for more than a month,” furious locals tell SMH’s Kate McClymont and Perry Duffin. “Shrieking the lyrics of Tina Turner” songs … But What’s Love Gotta Do With it? Lehrmann has just arrived. Easter.

Taking the high moral astroturf, putting the nay in neighbour, with Nine Entertainment’s selfless help, is a Woody Allen Greek Chorus of anonymous neighbours, straight off the set of “Tampa” Howard’s mean and tricky, “troubled by multiculturalism” fortress Australia. Bigotry? It’s a hot mess of curtain-twitching, back-stabbing, character assassination. You know you are in trouble when you get these neighbours offside.

Seven’s cokehead canary, professional blatteroon, Lehrmann, now a couch-surfing karaoke cuckoo, is quickly evicted from his North Sydney, “blue chip” address perch. At least he’s been amazingly upbeat since Seven dropped him like a sack of spuds.

Yet Bruce reckons he’s a type of celebrity who can trade on his notoriety. Anyone who expects repentance, contrition, or shame from Lehrmann for lives he ruined, will always be disappointed. That would presuppose principles and a sense of responsibility. In this and in his raging, all conquering narcissism, he is Scott Morrison’s mini-me.

His partying did it, says a “ropeable” Paul Farrell of Vaucluse, who identified Lehrmann in February 2023, from Ten’s The Project Lisa Wilkinson interview with Ms Brittany Higgins. Farrell returns to find his pal in full swing. “Hey, Big Bender”, Bruce, finds himself out the door at the three-storey pile in Edward St, a steal at $4.1m in 2021.

The annual rent would be more than an average worker could earn in a year. A homeless Bruce also helps the MSM myth that the former Liberal staffer is a destitute victim, instead of an alleged serial rapist and fabulist who can’t tell the truth to save himself. He’s pocketed half a million dollars in defamation settlements. He can’t have blown the lot on Bolivian marching power. That was all on Seven’s tab.

Was it a honey-trap? The editor of the Saturday Paper sees the duchessing of Lehrmann, where every carnal appetite was sated. as a type of glue trap, banned in many places but still deployed in NSW as a cruel way of exterminating rodents. Rats simply get stuck in it.

Some chew their feet off just to walk on their stumps into more glue.

A widow of a federal court judge, who is said to be incensed at the way the Lehrmann has been treated in the press, immediately steps in to offer the victim accommodation. Bruce is the type of man who has friends with houses with swimming pools in the best suburbs; and he is also a character people with wealth and status are keen to look after.

Lehrmann is not on the lam for long. He’s up before the beak in the federal court in Sydney, Monday at 10:15 am, to hear Lee’s adjudication in his defamation case V Network Ten. Then it’s back to his unnamed benefactor and her ample estate. If she’ll have him back. On the balance of probabilities, the civil standard of proof for rape, Lee finds that Lehrmann did rape Ms Brittany Higgins.

Lee finds Lehrmann was “hell-bent on having sex” with Ms Higgins, had encouraged her to drink (to excess), and did “not care one way or another whether Ms Higgins understood or agreed to what was going on”.

Ten’s silk describes the result as “an unmitigated disaster” for Lehrmann and a triumph for the truth, glossing over bits of Wilkinson’s case that mean that- even given legal advice-she chose to insert defamatory material into her Logie acceptance speech.

“Having escaped the lion’s den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of going back for his hat,” Lee quips in one of his typically off-the-wall, yet pithy, colourful flourishes.

In a nice distinction, in a judgement of fine distinctions, Lee rejects Ten’s case that Lehrmann is a “compulsive liar” because the bulk of his testimony was deliberately false. It’s a category hotly contested by Tony Abbott (whom you could believe- only if he put in writing) – to Morrison who took deception, duplicity and inveterate lying to Olympic level. Lee says he would not accept any of Lehrmann’s evidence provided to the court.

If Lehrmann’s not out house hunting, while dodging his creditors, he’ll discover the hard way that his life isn’t meant to be easy. But it doesn’t always have to be so unfair. At least we have the rule of law – and judges, like Justice Michael Bryan Joshua Lee who have a fine and independent cast of mind and the wit and the wisdom to apply it.