Lehrmann had a penchant for sex workers and cocaine,we heard,and Seven had paid for him to enjoy them as it courted him to appear on itsSpotlight program. Why,here was the invoice! The $750 spent on call girls and cocaine had been written down as “pre-production expenses”,Auerbach said.
And senior producers were aware of this;they had offered Auerbach a promotion after he told them,but no there was no written record of that,and he knew that Seven had denied it had occurred. The denials by Seven were wrong,he insisted.
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Once he knew the interview was in the bag,he sent a message to his boss:“I’ve got the yarn,I’ve just been out on the piss with Bruce”.
Reminded of this message in court,he could not but help share the court’s undoubted disapproval.
“It was a rather inelegant way of saying I’d had a social encounter with Mr Lehrmann and I felt confident we were going to get the story,” he translated for Justice Michael Lee.
With zingers like this,it was easy to forget that Brittany Higgins sat at the same stand last year,gulping back tears,as she described waking up to Lehrmann sweating on top of her in the ministerial suite of their then boss Linda Reynolds in March 2019.