Lisa Wilkinson uttered five defiant words as she took her seat in the witness box at the Bruce Lehrmann trial

Sue Chrysanthou rose in Court 22A of the Federal Court at 10.29am on Thursday and uttered the words eager observers had been waiting to hear since late November.

'Your Honour, I call Lisa Wilkinson,' the barrister said as her client got up from the same front row seat she had occupied since the start of Bruce Lehrmann's defamation trial. 

Wilkinson was wearing a peach-coloured pants suit and had her Member of the Order of Australia stud pinned to the left lapel of her double-breasted jacket. 

She chose to take an affirmation, rather than swearing on the Bible, and stressed the last parts of the familiar old promise to tell the whole truth 'and nothing, but, the truth.'

As Wilkinson sat down in the witness box she poured a glass of water from a jug. She may have immediately regretted that decision when Justice Michal Lee said he would take a morning tea break at 11.45am.

'I'll just try not to drink too much water,' she joked. 

As it happened, the first break came five minutes early and Wilkinson quickly left to go to the toilet. 'I think there's going to be a line-up,' she said leaving the court.

That presented a problem for Chrysanthou, who cannot talk to her client during cross-examination and the senior counsel did not wish to be confined with Wilkinson in the only female facilities on the floor.

This was the 16th day of hearing in Lehrmann's defamation action, in which he is suing Wilkinson and Network Ten over a February 2021 interview on The Project.

In that interview, former political staffer Brittany Higgins claimed she had been raped by a colleague in March 2019 on Senator Linda Reynolds' office couch.

Higgins and Wilkinson did not name Lehrmann - who has always denied having had any sexual contact with her - but he alleges he was easily identifiable. 

Lehrmann was later charged with raping Higgins but his trial in the ACT Supreme Court was aborted in October last year due to juror misconduct.

That trial had been delayed for three months after Wilkinson gave a controversial speech at the 2022 Logies where she won a statuette for Most Outstanding News Coverage or Public Affairs in recognition of the Higgins interview.

Wilkinson cannot prove whether or not a rape occurred but is giving evidence to show she did all she could to establish Higgins was telling the truth before The Project interview was broadcast.

She was required to do no more than state her full name of Lisa Clare Wilkinson and occupation for Chrysanthou before Lehrmann's barrister Matthew Richardson SC took over.

Richardson began taking Wilkinson through an affidavit in which she wrote that after her first meeting with Higgins in January 2021 she had tried to corroborate everything the young woman told her. 

Wilkinson remained composed and confident during most of her testimony as Richardson suggested there were contradictions in Higgins's version of what had happened in Parliament House. 

The witness accepted she had 'developed, conducted and delivered' the story that was eventually broadcast on The Project. 

Wilkinson told the court that despite commencing her media career in 1978 she had never had any real training about the laws of contempt or the concept of sub judice.

Richardson then played Wilkinson's Logies acceptance speech, which was delivered eight days before Lehrmann's trial was due to start. 

'Brittany Higgins was a political problem,' Wilkinson had said. 'And governments tend to like political problems to go away. But Brittany never did. 

'And the truth is, this honour belongs to Brittany. It belongs to a 26-year-old woman's unwavering courage.

'It belongs to a woman who said "enough". It belongs to a woman who inspired more than 100,000 thousand similarly p***ed exhausted women and men to take to the streets across this country to roar in numbers too big to ignore.

'Brittany, thank you for trusting me.

'Thank you for helping to change the national conversation. And on behalf of all of the generations of women to come, thank you, Brittany, for never giving up.'

Richardson wanted to know if Wilkinson believed that speech was telling the hundreds of thousands of viewers watching it that Higgins's claims were all true.

Wilkinson answered that was not what she'd said in her speech and she did not have a 'superpower' to get inside the minds of the audience. 

Thursday's audience for Wilkinson's testimony was the largest she'd faced for more than a year. She quit The Project in November 2022, blaming 'targeted toxicity' from sections of the media. 

Shortly before lunchtime, almost 20,000 members of the public were watching her evidence on the Federal Court's YouTube channel.

At one point Wilkinson apologised to anyone listening in for a graphic description she gave of what Higgins had told her about the alleged rape in Senator Reynolds' office. 

She also expressed regret when Richardson read a transcript of a recording in which she referred to Reynolds as 'this f***ing woman'.  

'I apologise for my language,' Wilkinson told the court and those viewers watching at home. 

Richardson put to Wilkinson she had been more concerned with ratings than investigating the truth of Higgins' claims when her interview was aired on The Project.

Wilkinson agreed with Richardson she was 'completely committed to supporting Ms Higgins' but denied she had no interest in properly scrutinising her story.

Richardson: 'You were thrilled by the riveting commercial story she told'.

Wilkinson did not like that line at all and took a moment to pause before she raised her voice to respond.

'Please don't make me sound like a cheap tabloid journalist, Mr Richardson,' said the former Today host and editor of Dolly and Cleo.

Wilkinson denied her Logies speech had been 'reckless and ill-advised' or that she had put her 'pride and ego' ahead of Lehrmann's right to a fair trial. 

In other evidence, Wilkinson was asked why The Project had not shown the full content of a text Reynolds' chief of staff Fiona Brown sent to Higgins in the days after the alleged sexual assault. 

Missing from the text about a meeting to discuss what had happened was Brown telling Higgins she could bring her father for support. 

'The vagaries of primetime television remains that viewers have short attention spans,' Wilkinson said, explaining it was easier to show shorter messages.

On occasion Wilkinson ventured into delivering mini lectures or sermons. At least twice Justice Michael Lee had to tell Wilkinson to confine herself to answering the questions. 

Several times Wilkinson seemed to take umbrage when Richardson questioned her professionalism as a journalist. 

Asked whether inconsistencies in Higgins's statements meant her account might be unreliable, Wilkinson told Richardson, 'Maybe I'm just attuned to reading between the lines more than you are'.

'I'm reading between the lines,' she said at another point. 'That's what we tend to do as journalists.'

Several times Wilkinson told the barrister, whose father is onetime Labor powerbroker and Keating government minister Graham Richardson, that she also understood the 'vagaries' of politics.

'I know how politics works Mr Richardson,' she told her questioner.

After lunch, Lehrmann moved from his usual seat in the front row of the gallery to take a position next to his legal team at the bar table.  

In the day's last session Richardson quoted the opening lines of The Project episode which contained the Higgins interview: 'A young woman forced to choose between her career and the pursuit of justice'. 

Wilkinson was able to quote those words back perfectly without referring to notes, almost three years after the program was screened. 

Throughout her evidence Wilkinson consistently denied overlooking perceived problems with Higgins's tale and said she had done all she could to get to the truth of the matter.

'I feel we investigated this story extremely well Mr Richardson,' she said. 

Wilkinson will return to the witness box on Friday.