Bruce Lehrmann will seek a judge-only trial to defend himself against charges of rape, a Toowoomba court has heard.
The case against Lehrmann was briefly mentioned in the Toowoomba district court on Thursday after the 29-year-old former Liberal staffer was committed to stand trial on two charges of rape alleged to have occurred to the same woman in October 2021.
The allegations were first aired in the court in January 2023 at which time Lehrmann was referred to in the media as a “high profile” man due to since overturned laws that prevented the naming of accused sex offenders until they were committed to stand trial.
He has not yet entered any pleas to the charges but his legal team has indicated Lehrmann will defend them.
Lehrmann was revealed as the accused after his lawyers lost their judicial review of a Toowoomba magistrate’s ruling that he should not be granted a non-publication order to maintain his anonymity in October 2023.
He was committed to stand trial last July, after the failure of his defence team’s argument that there was no case to proceed to trial.
Prosecutors and Lehrmann’s defence have agreed that he and the complainant, who cannot legally be named, met at a strip club after both had been drinking alcohol and the complainant had taken cocaine, the court has been told.
The pair went on to take cocaine together and, in the early hours of the morning, took a taxi to a Toowoomba home, occupied by a schoolmate of Lehrmann, where the pair engaged in consensual sex.
But the complainant claims she awoke to find Lehrmann on top of and penetrating her without a condom, despite her having insisted upon contraception during their earlier consensual encounter.
She alleges she pulled her body away and told him to “stop what you are doing” but that he instead climbed back on top of her saying, “it’s OK, it’s OK”, continuing the unwanted sex before ejaculating inside her.
On Thursday, Judge Dennis Lynch KC, set a date of 27 March for the court to consider a number of pretrial applications, including that from Lehrmann’s defence that there be no jury determine his outcome.
Crown prosecutor Caroline Marco did not indicate whether she would seek to challenge that application.
