By Charlotte Karp For Daily Mail Australia
14:06 07 Jun 2023, updated 14:06 07 Jun 2023
- Lisa Wilkinson furious over a tweet in 2019
- Read the full exchange with her and Linda Reynolds
Lisa Wilkinson launched into an extraordinary 15-minute rant about ex-defence minister Linda Reynolds during a recorded meeting with Brittany Higgins.
The TV personality raged over private exchanges she had with Senator Reynolds, with the apparent war of words between the high-profile women sparked by an old tweet.
Details of the secret feud were exposed in a five-hour conversation between Wilkinson, Channel 10 producer Angus Llewellyn, Ms Higgins and her boyfriend David Sharaz in a Sydney hotel room on January 27, 2021.
The purpose of the chat was to decide how best to approach Higgins’ forthcoming interview on The Project, in which she alleged she was raped by Bruce Lehrmann in Parliament House in 2019.
Mr Lehrmann has always denied the allegations.
Ms Higgins alleged the assault took place on a couch in Reynolds’ office. Reynolds was the defence industry minister at the time, which meant her name was invariably mentioned throughout the informal meeting.
During the first part of the conversation, Wilkinson made the occasional snarky comment about Senator Reynolds – at one stage, she said ‘so even at [Linda’s] own birthday, no one wanted to sit next to her?’
But it wasn’t until the last few hours that she appeared to really fire up – intermittently interrupting talks about Ms Higgins’ alleged assault to reiterate that she did not like Reynolds’s response to a tweet she wrote two years earlier, in 2019.
Throughout the spray, Wilkinson called the senator a ‘nobody’, an ‘idiot’, slammed her opinion as ‘cheap and uneducated’, and eventually said, ‘You genuinely leave me confused, Linda.’
Wilkinson’s tweet was posted in February 2019 as a pointed attack against the Coalition after Julie Bishop, the former deputy leader of the Liberal Party, quit politics.
It read: ‘Julie Bishop, Julia Banks, Kelly O’Dwyer, Ann Sudmalis…. Makes you wonder just how many (or few) women will be left in the LNP after the next election. Not that there were that many to begin with…’
Senator Reynolds replied in the comments: ‘So disappointed in your trite trivialisation of the significant contributions Julie Bishop has made over a brilliant 20 yr career – she deserves far better.’
The senator then said the Coalition had preselected ‘over 20 new & wonderfully diverse and strong female candidates’ and tagged Jacinta Price, who won a seat in the senate in 2022.
During the recorded meeting in 2021, Wilkinson could be heard encouraging Ms Higgins to ‘be kind’ to herself under the trying circumstances – before she suddenly said: ‘And if anybody wants to feel fired-up about zeroing in on Linda Reynolds, I’ve just found our private messages.
‘She went for me publicly, and then I tried to come back reasonably, and then I thought, “I’m not going to do this publicly.”
‘I’m trying to working out who this f**king woman is. Like, I’d never heard of her.’
She then called Senator Reynolds a ‘nobody’, before reiterating, ‘I’d never heard of her’.
Mr Sharaz joked: ‘Oh, here’s a big fan.’
Wilkinson’s producer, Llewellyn, then laughed, ‘Huge fan, huge fan, get the T-shirts.’
Wilkinson proceeded to read the private back-and-forth between them, often stopping to gauge reactions from the three other people in the room.
Her first message to Senator Reynolds, which Wilkinson read aloud during the recorded conversation, said: ‘Hi, Linda. Genuinely disappointed that after accusing me of something I didn’t do, and me politely responding, that you haven’t responded. Either defending your stance or apologising, I had hoped for better. Best regards, Lisa.’
She then read Reynolds’ reply aloud: ‘Hi, Lisa. Now, after reading your response on Twitter, if you would like me to respond, I will. I did not read it or respond yesterday for what I hope you will agree is a valid reason.
‘My priority yesterday was travelling from flood-devastated communities in Central Queensland to do private town hall meetings with small Victorian communities. I literally spent yesterday driving from Wodonga to Melbourne.
‘The reason I was deeply disappointed by your comments was because I felt that you had 364 other days to criticise the Liberal Party, without having a shot at the rest of us in a tweet about Julie [Bishop’s] retirement.
‘I felt she deserves so much better. That may not have been your intent, but that is how I perceived it.’
Wilkinson then paused and said, ‘This is actually gold for this,’ indicating the exchange could be used during Ms Higgins’ interview on The Project as a demonstration of Senator Reynolds’ character.
According to Wilkinson, the former minister then invited her to speak seriously about gender reform with her in a private setting.
Wilkinson appeared frustrated that the then-minister failed to respond to her message within a day – pointing out in her response to Senator Reynolds that she, too, had been at work the previous day but still kept an eye on her Twitter account.
‘Your media team have been very active on Twitter since you had your go at me on Thursday evening. So I find it very hard to believe that you didn’t see or weren’t informed of my immediate response,’ she said.
The Channel 10 host then said the senator’s response was ‘biased and unnecessarily nasty towards me… and now, you want to do it again by suggesting that I criticise the Liberal party 365 days a year. That’s just cheap and uneducated.’
She then urged Senator Reynolds to take another look at her original tweet with a ‘clear, unbiased head’.
The rest of Wilkinson’s response to the senator said: ‘I can only presume it is for that very reason that you’re working so hard to try and achieve gender reform in the party.’
Wilkinson stopped reading and said triumphantly, ‘Shot with her own petard, right there,’ before she continued reading: ‘So, if that is your passion, why would you take a swipe at me for desiring the same thing? You genuinely leave me confused, Linda.’
The spray was interrupted when room service rang the doorbell, but Wilkinson managed to squeeze Senator Reynolds back into conversation five minutes later – this time referring to when she was on the ABC’s Q+A program in 2019.
‘She’s an idiot,’ Wilkinson said.
Moments later, she said the Q&A episode was ‘literally about a week after I’d had the exchange with her. I just thought, “This idiot is everywhere.”‘
Two minutes after that, Wilkinson asked the group, rhetorically, what the issue with her tweet actually was.
Half an hour later, the conversation had shifted to whether Ms Higgins was friends with Mr Lehrmann, who she alleges raped her, when Wilkinson suddenly said: ‘I just realised, Linda Reynolds may delete that tweet.’
Ms Higgins encouraged her to take a screenshot.
The Project interview aired two weeks later, sparking an ongoing political, media and legal storm.
Mr Lehrmann’s criminal trial in the ACT Supreme was aborted in December last year. The same month, Ms Higgins was awarded a compensation claim of up to $3million.
On Wednesday, 2GB host Ben Fordham revealed Senator Reynolds has pledged to refer the payout to a federal anti-corruption commission ‘if no one else does’.