Two years after it apparently happened, during which time she was busy “internalising the trauma”, Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins has announced to the media, or world, that she was RAPED in 2019 in Parliament House by another staffer, an as yet to be named “rising star” in the party, and a rapist (alleged).
A group of them had gone out drinking, and the rapist man had bought “lots of rounds of drinks” and offered to take her home:
At that point I was very intoxicated. I thought, ‘Well, I am well and truly done [ed-“yamhammered“]. I need to go.’ And so there were only four of us left. We were going the same way.
He didn’t take her home though, but detoured to his rape chamber in Parliament House, Canberra. Being so drunk as she was, she passed out on a couch and awoke to him being on top of her, raping her.
I woke up mid-rape. I told him to stop. I was crying. He wasn’t even looking at me. It felt like I was sort of a body that was there. It didn’t feel like it was anything about me.
There are aspects to this which aren’t clear, in that what does “mid rape” mean exactly, had he already penetrated her and she was too sozzled to even notice? It is worth saying that ordinarily if a woman is determined that sex is not going to occur, then for physiological reasons it just won’t, without violence or threat of violence, and that doesn’t appear to be the case here. It depends somewhat on just how out of her skull she was, but it is possible to be shocked back into near sobriety very quickly.
There is another aspect to it, in the possibility that she was aware of what was going on the whole time, but being so sozzled, was ok with it, or just went along with it, but now regrets it all, or wants attention.
Afterwards the rapist man left her, and she slept overnight in Parliament, and the next day she passed him in a corridor but, she says, he would not look at her, which may have coloured the whole thing in a worse light for her.
Because she had spent a night in parliament without her security clearance card the next day she was hauled into a meeting, and:
I said that he was on top of me. I think for the longest time I was really weird about actually saying it was rape. I don’t know why. I was very delicate about it. I think from our exchange she understood the inference
Maybe she didn’t say it was a rape explicitly, because it wasn’t a rape explicitly, at least in formal beyond-reasonable-doubt legal terms. But now it’s officially a rape, two years later, because she said it is.
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