Overview

• Western Australia’s Supreme Court ordered Higgins to cover 80% of Reynolds’s legal bill, with the total to be assessed, following last month’s damages award of $315,000 plus interest.
• Justice Paul Tottle found a pre-trial proposal from Higgins—$200,000 toward costs funded by her parents, a $10,000 charity payment, and a mutual statement of regret—did not provide reputational vindication.
• The costs percentage reflects a 20% reduction after the court rejected Reynolds’s separate claim that Higgins conspired to end her political career.
• Higgins sought caps and limits on recoverable fees and asked to delay the ruling pending Reynolds’s Federal Court action over Higgins’s 2022 compensation; the judge declined to postpone and left costs to formal assessment.
• Related litigation continues, including Reynolds’s case against the Commonwealth over the $2.4 million payout to Higgins and Bruce Lehrmann’s appeal of a civil finding that he raped Higgins on the balance of probabilities.