The Lehrmann show may hasten the demise of a hopelessly corrupted corporate media
When Taylor Auerbach gets revenge on Seven West Media, Bruce Lehrmann and his former close friend, Steve “Jacko” Jackson, producer of Seven’s 2023 Trial and Error, an exclusive interview with the alleged serial rapist, all hell breaks loose.
You can’t fault Taylor’s timing. Nor the dirt he’s about to dish. At the eleventh hour, Auerbach jets back from a NZ holiday, subsidised, no doubt, by Seven’s six-figure payout in a confidential settlement of an injury case against Jackson and Executive Producer Mark Llewellyn. His lawyer, Rebekah Giles, tells the court that Auerbach’s claim included allegations that her client suffered long term “bullying” and “anti-Semitism.”
A huge bonfire of the vanities is soon ablaze with police Cellebrite copies of personal text messages, amongst 2300 pages of documents, tendered in the Federal Court, in an affidavit from Auerbach. The fresh evidence helps Ten get Justice Michael Bryan Joshua Lee to reopen Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson. Lehrmann claims he was defamed by Wilkinson’s February 2021, interview with Brittany Higgins, when the young former Liberal staffer in former Defence Minister, Linda Reynold’s Office, says she was raped by a senior office colleague whom she does not name.
Everything is at stake – especially the colourful career of Seven’s Spotlight’s Executive Producer, Mark Llewellyn, an old school media veteran, who allegedly punched a colleague in 2014. Within a few hours, there are more bodies on stage than in the last act of Hamlet.
Self-styled conning-tower connoisseur, an underwater matters maven, bon viveur and a man who counts as a close pal, ASIO boss Paul “Up Periscope” O’Sullivan, Lehrmann is high maintenance. It’s not just the cocaine, masseuses or the beachfront penthouse near Balgowlah, Seven is said to have funded. Lehrmann is a one-man Bermuda Triangle.
“Thinking my next hustle is running brand rehabilitation for all the guys burned by the Lehrmann yarn by taking them to Gaza to feed starving kids,” writes former Liberal staffer, John Macgowan. “A safer alternative to being anywhere near that story”.
If Llewellyn is colourful, Macgowan is in inglorious Technicolor. He’s a contact Bruce has on speed dial for “baggies” when he has an insuperable urge to “get lit,” in anticipation of a fat defamation payout, on the night of the Higgins Interview. And a powerful figure.
In February 2019, Macgowan took the helm of the NSW Liberals’ Orwellian Accountability Unit, a self-parody of a name for its dirt unit. Did Mcgowan help Auerbach with his research? There’s no reason to disbelieve his story that it came from Lehrmann. But how did Bruce, a former defendant, come to have a copy of an AFP e-brief in electronic form?
Best stick to the facts. There are corpses everywhere. Murdoch agent, Walter Soffranof’s done his dash. Shane Drumgold’s all stitched up. ScoMo’s over and out, replaced in Cook by a McKinsey wonk, Simon Kennedy, a man who claims credit for Job-Keeper. Llewellyn’s in limbo. About to be TKO’d. Photos of Jacko with a naked NSW socialite have cost him a job as NSW Police’s top spin doctor. And Auerbach’s brilliant career is up the spout.
Tay may pick up again with the Daily Fail. Or run Programming at Kim’s ABC.
Once, fully paid-up members of Stokes’ Blokes; those hard-working, hard-playing, frat-boy party animals who make our news, shape our views, and undermine our democracy, create their own suicide-bomber. Auerbach is a kiss-and-tell-renegade on a deathly mission.
He holds a bizarre, manic presser outside his Elizabeth Bay home. His weirdly off-piste street theatre sets off a firestorm. He torches every reputation in reach. It’s a fatal attack on Lehrmann’s already, terminally impugned credibility. Seven allegedly paid $2940 for sex and drugs and wining and dining the Liberal staffer for his exclusive story. Auerbach also serves notice he may sue his scoop for defamation. He has his silk, Rebekah Giles, serve a notice of defamation concerns on Lehrmann. It’s a Ninja warrior soap opera.
Auerbach attracted him, Lehrmann tells him, in the days when he was tarting himself around Sydney media, less because of the $200,000 his agent promises but because he knows Seven’s crew to be sympatico, or as Auerbach helpfully explains, in the Lehrmann V Network Ten Pty Ltd, defamation case, his 2000-page affidavit helps him re-open,
“He appreciated … that I wasn’t sitting with the rest of the feminazis in the press pack.”
More of Lehrmann’s views may be obtained from the fabulous fifth columnist, rape culture apologist and fake psychologist, Men’s Right’s activist, Bettina Arndt, AO, who is holding a series of fund-raising events. You also get a cup of tea and a sandwich to help open your wallet. Keen legal student, Bruce will share his insights into the justice system. It’s a steal for a hundred dollars a pop. Arndt could open her show by explaining why she called Ms Higgins “a lying, scheming bimbo who destroyed a man’s life to save her career”.
Someone should ask Lehrmann where he got the AFP transcript of his trial, together with the texts from Brittany Higgins’ mobile phone. And why he saw fit to photocopy “about five hundred pages of documents” to give to Seven. Auerbach is a sworn witness to this.
Tay-Tay will be otherwise engaged. Possibly with his lawyer or just hangin’ with Macgowan.
Who named this assassin? Kudos. Taylor Auerbach could be a Paddington boutique, or a brand of cologne, or even a legal firm, if you were just looking at the name on the debit entry on a corporate Amex statement. Instead, he is a type of picture of Dorian Gray, the quintessence of our click-bait shop of a debauched, dog-eat-dog, corporate card, fourth estate turned fifth column – less Thomas Carlyle’s watchdog on the constitution than a lapdog; not scrutinizing our ruling elite but getting into bed with them.
At the heart of the drama, is the Morrison government’s bungled cover-up of an alleged rape of a naive, vulnerable, young woman whose ideals attracted her to serve as a junior Liberal staffer to one of the most underperforming ministers in Morrison’s paranoid, bullying, overweening government of corruption and underperformance. The ensuing debacle helped destroy his chances of re-election while Nine’s The Project 21 February interview with Brittany Higgins in which the former Liberal staffer claims she was raped by an un-named senior staffer, The Saturday Paper’s Rick Morton notes, sets off a concatenation of events,
“… civil suits, counter suits, an ACT inquiry into the criminal trial, and then an inquiry into the inquiry into the criminal trial, and more civil suits springing from the ACT inquiry.”
Chequebook journalism is not new. Nor is it new to see news as just another commodity. But a thirty-thousand-dollar Bangkok back-rub and blow bill is nothing to be sniffed at. Finger-wagging, fuddy-duddying and illicit Class A drugs aside, you get a fair picture of the lengths Seven is prepared to go to get an exclusive on an alleged serial rapist. Give him anything he wants. Chuck in another lazy hundred grand for a year’s rent in a beachside – near Balgowlah apartment with spa and pool and “with amazing water and coastal views.”
In an age of decadence and excess when too much is barely enough, there’s more. Auerbach adds a little shock value in his own funniest home video of himself snapping the shafts of former close pal, Steve Jackson’s $2000 golf clubs. Golf’s a blokes’ religion, before we delve into any Freudian layer of meaning. What a way to end a bromance.
Yet we are dealing with an industry whose stock in trade is sensation. Not only is there the horror of taboo violation, but Seven’s silks are also working desperately on the notion that Auerbach’s vendetta discredits his testimony, a fallacy, Lee is quick to dismiss.
“The shorter the iron, the more difficult it is to break.” Justice Lee is such a crack up.
But best straight man goes to Executive producer, Mark Llewellyn who tells news.com.au last May that the Seven Network did not pay Lehrmann for the exclusive interview.
“No one was paid,” Mr Llewellyn tells news.com.au.
Embellished with a paper trail of receipts and invoices, Tay-Tay’s hissy fit is spliced into the Thousand- and One-Nights narrative of how alleged rapist, former Liberal senior adviser to ex-Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, walking advertisement for Bolivian Marching Powder, Thai massage and Walter Mitty spook, Bruce Lehrmann, sued two TV channels for (not naming but still shaming) and defaming him. He thought he had it in the bag.
Now the cat is out. Taylor’s former close friend Jacko’s in the middle of just getting over being given the flick as NSW Police sultan of spin before he’s had time to update his bio on LinkedIn. It’s a sensational subplot but it’s a “rabbit hole”, as Lee puts it, that briefly illuminates the bond between corporate media and police. But not in a good light.
His honour is moved to curtail Taylor Auerbach’s performance on the second day. But not after he’s noted how he’s allowed the young cub to take his revenge strategically, in the privileged and protected (largely male) pulpit of federal court testimony. Of course, some of the testimony will discredit further Lehrmann. If that’s possible. If he’s used material from one court for another purpose, that’s potentially a criminal matter.
Expect Lehrmann’s defamation case to be upheld. But expect damages to be five cents, the lowest denomination coin of the realm. But still worth more than our corporate media which is revealed to be morally bankrupt, if not craven, in pursuit of tabloid sensationalism.
The Devil wears Prada. Auerbach turns out to be a freshly barbered, thirty-something man in dark suit, skinny black tie and fitted white shirt whose tie-pin flashes as he spins on his heel, jaunty as an AFL star fronting an acquittal. Or the picture of Dorian Gray.
In Courtroom 22A, Justice Michael Bryan Joshua Lee reopens and closes the Taylor Auerbach kamikaze attack on his enemies who are bit-players in the Bruce Lehrmann V Network Ten defamation saga, a sitting of The Federal Court in Sydney’s Queens Square.
All of Lehrmann’s bootleg testimony is now on file for public access, thanks to Auerbach.
“Let sunlight be the best disinfectant,” Justice Lee reflects. Yet some things cannot be unseen. Witness the sordid spectacle of two major media corporations in a race to the bottom, where tabloid sensationalism and ratings trump truth-telling; a race where illicit drugs, Thai massage services, fine dining, even golf are all part of the do-whatever-it- takes; pay-whateve-it-costs battle to capture our jaded attention. Monetize our attention spans.
It will take more than sunlight to reform our bounty-hunting, boys’ club that rules the roost in a corporate media captured by billionaires who care less about profit than ways their share of our attention can give themselves access to power. But it’s a good start. Ironically, our nation’s flawed defamation laws which so severely curtail speaking truth to power that our fourth estate is a tamed estate if not a fifth column – may have triggered an exposure of such rampant corruption, on such a wide scale, that the genie is now out of the bottle.
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