By Aaron Bunch in Perth

Brittany Higgins rejected 20 offers of support after her alleged rape in parliament house and mocked Linda Reynolds after the Liberal senator suffered a breakdown, a court has been told.

Ms Higgins is fighting a defamation lawsuit launched by her former boss, Senator Reynolds, over a series of social media posts that the ex-defence minister believes damaged her reputation.

Senator Reynolds’ lawyer Martin Bennett outlined a 2021 message exchange between Ms Higgins and her partner David Sharaz in which they discussed the senator’s political demise after she took three weeks’ leave.

“So Linda has delayed her return to work hahaha, three weeks,” said one of the messages read by Mr Bennett in the Western Australian Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Another said: “Wow, she’s done. You don’t take three weeks and come back”.

“So they mock the fact that the attack initiated on my client has caused her to go on sick leave,” Mr Bennett said during his closing submissions, as he reminded the court how Ms Higgins and Mr Sharaz had allegedly executed a plan to harm the senator.

Mr Bennett said that in another of Mr Sharaz’s messages to Ms Higgins, he said: “Suck sh*t Linda, you awful human”.

Mr Bennett told Justice Paul Tottle that Ms Higgins had 20 contacts from the Canberra Rape Crisis Centre in the month after she was allegedly raped in the senator’s ministerial suite and none of them resulted in a counselling session.

“She ignored the attempt,” he said, disputing Ms Higgins’ claims she wasn’t adequately supported in 2019.

“People were trying to support her, even when she was away (in Perth working on the senator’s re-election campaign) but she wouldn’t have a bar of it.”

Mr Bennett zeroed in on Ms Higgins’ version of events in the days after she was allegedly raped in the senator’s ministerial suite, describing it as “demonstrably false”, “a mishmash of errors” and “complete rubbish”.

He attacked Ms Higgins’ claim the senator harassed her when she called her a lying cow as she watched her former staffer’s interview on The Project.

“Something that happens in the privacy of one’s own office can’t constitute harassment, even if it’s then leaked to the media,” he said.

Mr Bennett targeted other elements of Ms Higgins’ harassment claim, including the senator’s dealings with News Corp columnist Janet Albrechtsen and the handling of Ms Higgins’ $2.4 million Commonwealth settlement, before saying “there remains something untoward” about the payment.

He also brought up claims Ms Higgins had stolen the senator’s Carla Zampatti jacket while discussing her participation in a Spotlight interview in August 2023, saying: “She probably did. That certainly was the view of Senator Reynolds and again, that can’t be harassing.”

Mr Bennett raised an email exchange between Ms Higgins and News Corp journalist Samantha Maiden, in which the former staffer is asked if Senator Reynolds should resign.

Ms Higgins responds: “Fully off the record, I don’t think so”.

The “off-the-record” request was evidence that Ms Higgins didn’t want the admission to detract from her statements against her former boss days earlier when she went public with her rape allegation, Mr Bennett said.

“It shows she didn’t have a genuine, honest belief in the allegations she was making,” he said.

“I think she was just following instructions.”

Mr Bennett highlighted a memoir draft for which Ms Higgins was paid $325,000 in which she wrote: “Honestly, I feel like a B-grade Grace Tame … here I am in the mud with the pigs fighting for control of the daily news cycle, throwing mud.

“We’ve become quite a twosome when it came to game-planning, my experience as a media advisor, David’s experience as a producer, together we understood how the gallery media sphere operated.”