The ex-Liberal staffer’s counsel Steven Whybrow SC told a Federal Court defamation trial that serious criminal allegations should be litigated in a court of law rather than the “court of public opinion”.

He questioned what would have happened if media organisations had told Brittany Higgins to go to the police first and to wait before speaking publicly about her claim she was raped by Lehrmann in Parliament House in March 2019.

“If that had happened, we would not have had what appears to have been a virus of madness that spread amongst everybody,” he told Justice Michael Lee on Friday.

Lehrmann is suing Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson for defamation over a February 2021 report on The Project in which Ms Higgins was interviewed about the rape claim and alleged political interference to stay silent about the incident.

“How dare we have due process or the presumption of innocence,” Whybrow said.

Public broadcasts about Higgins’ rape allegation were made without question or pushback, the barrister argued.

“To a degree, anybody trying to provide a counter-narrative to that story is shouted down as some sort of rape apologist or anti-woman or misogynist.”

Whybrow criticised Higgins as someone who had no qualms in obfuscating or telling complete falsehoods.

“We say fundamentally, Ms Higgins is not a person whose evidence can be relied on at all,” he said.

“She’s not an accurate nor a reliable historian.”

There was plausibility in Lehrmann’s claims he had returned to Parliament House that night to retrieve his keys and had annotated Question Time briefs with notes about French submarine contracts while he was there, the barrister said.

Justice Lee said if the independent evidence was accepted, the 23-year-old Lehrmann was seen kissing Higgins, a woman he found attractive, before he returned to Parliament House while his girlfriend waited at home.

“Now does a man in a situation like that have French submarine contracts on his mind or does he have something else on his mind?” he asked.

In his defamation case, Lehrmann will first need to prove he was identified through The Project report despite not actually being named.

If he succeeds in that bid, Ten and Wilkinson argue that they can prove the rape occurred in Parliament House.

Ten is also running a qualified privilege defence where it has to prove that even if the material was defamatory, it acted reasonably in publishing something in the public interest.

Lehrmann’s trial in the ACT Supreme Court on a charge of raping Higgins was derailed by juror misconduct.

Prosecutors did not seek a second trial, citing concerns for Higgins’ mental health.

He has been charged with allegedly raping another woman twice in Toowoomba in October 2021 and remains before Queensland courts.

He has not yet entered a plea but lawyers have indicated he denies that allegation.