It took Justice Michael Lee 324 pages and 130,000 words to dissect the complexities of the story of what happened to Brittany Higgins in the early hours of March 23, 2019, but also what happened as a result of her decision to go to the media about the assault, rather than pursue a police complaint.
For Brittany Higgins, and the thousands of women who were galvanised by her story, the words that mattered most from Justice Lee were these ones at paragraph 620 of his judgment:
"Mr Lehrmann raped Ms Higgins."
They weren't just important because a judge, "on the balance of probabilities", had believed Higgins over the man she accused of raping her, Bruce Lehrmann.
They were important because they brought the Higgins story back to its central proposition after more than three years when it had become the subject of political and culture wars and of an unrelenting attack on Higgins in some sections of the media.
The finding came after what had come to be seen as a flawed criminal, and ultimately abandoned, trial where Lehrmann, as was his right, didn't have to testify but Higgins was subjected to the intense cross-examination that any woman making such a claim must face while an alleged perpetrator is not questioned.
That the rape took place in the office of a cabinet minister in Parliament House always meant this story would have political overtones and ramifications, even without what Justice Lee found was a flawed claim by Higgins that she had been forced to choose between making a complaint and her career.
The case tested — and largely found wanting — the political leaders of the day in their attitudes and grasp of the complex issues involved here, even at a time when then, as now, political leaders lament the horrendous levels of violence perpetrated against women by men in Australia.
A 'crisis of male violence'
It also exposed a continuing hostility to women in the broader Australian community which, in memorable historic moments of national controversy, has seen women too eagerly cast as liars, whatever the nature of the issue that has brought them to public attention.
Think Lindy Chamberlain, our first female prime minister Julia Gillard, and Higgins as three particular examples of this.
That such views continue — even amid a shocking level of domestic violence which is regularly lamented by our political leaders — is only highlighted by a "Presumption of Innocence" conference set down for June which, until this week, Lehrmann was due to address as the headline act.
Its promoters say it will "challenge the believe-all-women ideology which has meant men and women are treated very differently in our criminal law system".
On the day Higgins's allegations appeared in the media in 2021, the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, rose to say he wanted the parliament "to take a moment to remember Hannah Clarke and her three children, Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey" who had been murdered by Clarke's estranged husband a year earlier.
"The most important thing we can do in this place is, of course, do everything we can," he said. "As the leader of the opposition and I know, these issues are above politics, thankfully. We must do all we can to prevent family violence."
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Morrison's sentiments about family violence. And there have been countless reviews, inquiries and interventions in recent years to do something about it.
Yet more than one woman a week is being killed by someone close to her — to the point where many of these horrendous crimes aren't even a major story on the day. And not all the violence is family violence.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said on Friday that "there is a crisis of male violence in Australia".
Asked how men could take a bigger role in addressing this, Dreyfus said, "I think by men in positions of leadership, and you're starting to see that, calling it out, and by men everywhere in society, acknowledging that this is a problem for men".
"We have to talk to our sons, we have to talk to our colleagues. We've got to acknowledge it as a problem for men."
An uncomfortable truth
Which brings us back to the role of our political leaders.
Justice Lee criticised many aspects of Higgins's claims that there had been a cover up of her assault, particularly as they related to the actions of her then chief-of-staff, Fiona Brown, and minister Linda Reynolds.
These mainly emerged in the judgment in terms of what they said about Higgins's overall reliability on the witness stand. While he was critical of what she said about the cover up, he ultimately believed her evidence about the night of the assault.
Given the defamation case concerned the question of whether Lehrmann had been defamed, it did not go further into who knew what about what had happened.
The questions of who knew what in the prime minister's office and — critically — what was done about it, was not interrogated.
It remains the case that no one felt it necessary to tell the PM that a young woman working for his government had been assaulted in an office not far from his own.
There is an uncomfortable truth here though that, whatever the story was about who said what to who about Higgins within the Morrison government, what most Australians would have taken away from the whole affair was not those details, but the various public reflections of the prime minister of the day.
Morrison's comments — he said his wife had explained the significance of Higgins's claims to him, and later, that the women who marched in their thousands were lucky not to have been met with guns — would have to rank as some of the more tin-eared observations of recent times.
The fact that the government had not responded to the Sex Discrimination Commissioner's report on workplace harassment for more than year at the time of the Higgins revelations also sent a message to women from a workplace which should have been both our safest and a standard setter.
LoadingPoliticians' words give licence to attitudes
Jump forward to this week and the man who replaced Morrison as leader of the federal Coalition, Peter Dutton.
As journalist Samantha Maiden — who broke the original story in 2021 — observed this week of Dutton's response to Justice Lee's findings:
There were no words of support for the young woman who once worked for the Liberal Party, in response to such a grave and serious finding.
Instead, the Liberal leader had this to say. He didn't even mention Ms Higgins' name.
"Well, I think Linda Reynolds has absolutely been vindicated".
Reynolds, he went on, "a person of great honour and integrity", had seen her reputation "besmirched".
Can politicians and governments change social attitudes or even stop people doing horrendous things to each other?
Perhaps not. But their words give licence to attitudes and help frame debate. As do those of powerful voices in the media.
This week, sections of the media continue to pursue Higgins in search of a conspiracy theory as flawed as Justice Lee found Higgins's cover-up claims to be.
In doing so, they dismiss the true power of Lee's finding that Bruce Lehrmann raped Brittany Higgins in a week they also decried the brutal and senseless violence overwhelmingly targeting women that we all witnessed unfold at a Sydney shopping centre.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.