The accused rapist of Brittany Higgins gave three different excuses for being inside Parliament House on the night of the alleged rape

Former Liberal Party staffer Bruce Lehrmann gave three different excuses for being inside Parliament House the night Brittany Higgins was allegedly raped, a jury heard.

Lehrmann faces a trial in the ACT Supreme Court for having sexual intercourse without consent.

He has pleaded not guilty and denies that he and Higgins had any sexual interactions.

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Higgins claims that after they returned to Parliament House, she fell asleep on a couch in then Defense Secretary Linda Reynolds’ office and woke up to find Lehrmann having sex with her.

She said he continued even after she told him to stop.

In an April 2021 police interview played for the jury, Lehrmann said he returned to Parliament building to collect his house keys after a night of drinking with colleagues.

He said Higgins told him she also had to get something from the office, so they shared an Uber in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Earlier, in an audio played for the couple’s court arriving at the ministerial entrance to Parliament, Lehrmann can be heard telling security forces he is there to collect some working documents.

Lehrmann later told police that nothing about Higgins’ behavior indicated that he needed to look after her when the couple got to Parliament House.

He didn’t think Higgins was drunk and only felt moderately drunk himself.

The court has previously heard Higgins describe herself as “the drunkest in her life” that night.

Former Parliament House security officer Nikola Anderson, who escorted her to the office, told the court she thought Higgins was drunk because she struggled to put her shoes back on after going through security.

After the couple entered the office, Lehrmann told police he went to his desk and assumed Higgins went to hers.

“I went left to my desk and didn’t see her again,” he said.

Lehrmann told police he was in Parliament for about 45 minutes. He said he attended to some Question Time for Senator Reynolds and left without checking where Higgins was.

Meanwhile, the couple’s former chief of staff, Fiona Brown, told the court there was no work to be done that night.

She was informed that there had been a security breach at the office after the security forces at Parliament building reported the matter.

“The DPS[Department of Parliamentary Services]report said they were there for … urgent work purposes,” Brown told the court.

“There was no urgent work purpose.”

When Brown asked Lehrmann why he and Higgins had returned to Parliament House, he told her it was to drink whiskey.

When she asked why, he told her, “People do this all the time.”

Lehrmann told police he did not keep alcohol in the office and that if he wanted to continue drinking he would have stayed at the nightclub.

His former colleague Nicole Hamer, who worked with him in Senator Reynolds’ office when she was assistant secretary of the interior, told the court Lehrmann kept alcohol at his desk.

Hamer said Lehrmann has a wide range of alcohol, including spirits, whiskey and wine.

“It was quite a large amount of alcohol,” she said.

Hamer didn’t know if Lehrmann moved alcohol to the new office when Senator Reynolds became Secretary of Defense Industries.

Lehrmann’s employment contract was later terminated due to the security breach, which was his second strike, having previously failed to properly handle classified documents.

For six years he worked in the parliament building in various ministerial posts.

The process goes on.

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