Judicial findings have significantly undermined the credibility of Walter Sofronoff’s inquiry into the Lehrmann trial, raising serious questions about bias, process and the influence of media on judicial conduct.

One must excuse a jot of sympathy for Walter Sofronoff, KC, whose review of the Bruce Lehrmann rape trial is now confirmed to have been seriously corrupt under ACT anti-corruption laws. The original corruption finding was made by the ACT Integrity Commissioner, Michael Adams, was challenged in the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, and now, on further appeal, in the Federal Court.

Not a single judge has found him to be an innocent victim, who should get a medal instead. Nor have any found any significant defects in the reasoning for such devastating findings.

Each step up the appeals system adds to the gravity, and the credibility of the findings against Sofronoff, and places a slur on his reputation as a top Queensland judge prior to his retirement. He could further appeal to the High Court, but he would need special leave to appeal, and his legal and evidentiary arguments have so far failed to garner judicial support at any point. They begin by assuming his bona fides – as they must – before slipping into a tone of disbelief and coming to a different conclusion.

The finding that he was seriously corrupt does not mean that he accepted bribes, robbed passers-by or stole nappies from clotheslines. It does not even necessarily mean that he committed any crime, or did something that, had he been a public servant, might have had him disciplined. Essentially the allegation is that he did not conduct an important investigation in a fair-minded and balanced way, and that, in effect, he knew or ought to have known this. And that once he had arrived at a report, he put it so immediately into the public domain so that the Chief Minister would have no discretion or freedom of action to consider it. This “first sight” principle was put explicitly and stressed in the Inquiries Act, to the point of creating an offence if it were done otherwise.

It would be nice to be able to smirk and say I told you so, because I did when it seemed to me that Sofronoff was being unfair from very early in his inquiry. He seemed to have formed an opinion about the facts almost before he began to take evidence, and the way that most of the evidence was called and presented suggested to me that the inquiry team was already drafting the report for him. His fall guy seemed to be the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions, Shane Drumgold, who was cross-examined into a cocked hat by counsel assisting the commission until Drumgold hardly seemed to know whether he was up or down.

Senior counsel assisting then left the inquiry, soon to take up a position on the Federal Court. Her functions were taken over by junior barristers. That seemed to suit Sofronoff, because his interest in most of the other evidence, particularly about the actual police investigation and its adequacy, was perfunctory at best, and held ultimately to be deserving of little criticism. Those who suggested otherwise soon learnt of limits in testing his patience.

The fundamental problem, it seemed, was that a “woke” ACT system, and particularly a woke ACT prosecutor had been determined to push forward the prosecution even though most, perhaps all the investigating detectives had thought the case very weak.

Just where or how it occurred to Sofronoff that the fundamental problem was Drumgold and his determination to use the system to vindicate the victim is not quite clear. Some of Australia’s most conservative judges, and not a few defence barristers, have been complaining that woke prosecutors, pushed by feminists, were running cases so weak they should not have been prosecuted, and that their zeal for convictions was stronger than their instinct for protection of the rights of defendants. Running such stories – right now, for example, between some NSW District Court judges and the NSW DPP – is a particular specialty of The Australian, which tends to lean to the Australia Club view of feminists.

As it happened this was exactly the opinion of Janet Albrechtsen, a controversialist journalist working for The Australian. It’s one of those rare cases in which a polemicist for the newspaper agrees exactly with the view promulgated by her publication, which, in turn, editorially agrees entirely with her.

She already had views about the Lehrmann case, not least because it had led to attacks on the Morrison government. And because some ACT barristers were critical of the ACT Chief Justice, Lucy McCallum, who, as it happened, had been the trial judge. McCallum had given a speech critical of sexual assault laws and procedures, pushing for a rebalancing of victim rights.

Albrechtsen arranged to meet Sofronoff, already a friend of some journalists at The Australian because of a previous inquiry he had done in Queensland. They lunched and soon began a correspondence and regular meetings which saw the judge pass over to her statements of witnesses, including confidential materials. Sometimes he emailed them at her request or sometimes of his own initiative. There were hundreds of exchanges.

Sofronoff was not the only person giving information to Albrechtsen. She was regularly reporting information which had been provided by police to the defence, particularly transcripts of phone messages from the alleged victim over a long period before and after the alleged rape. Some of this was used at trial to undermine the victim’s evidence, but more emerged, in clear contempt of court, which had never been used at trial. Members of defence teams (there had been several) denied handing Albrechtsen the materials; a police investigation seemed unable to find the leaker. Monstering the victim and standing up for the rights of the alleged perpetrator.

The character and history of the victim were being regularly reported in The Australian in a manner not much different from the harrowing old cross-examinations of sexual history and experience. At no stage did Sofronoff do anything to protect the alleged victim or, it seems, do anything to reprove or stop the continuous public disclosures by his confidante.

Lehrmann, the original defendant, was not on trial. He can’t be tried again. Nor, strictly, was the victim in the frame. The Sofronoff inquiry was not into her credibility but police investigative actions, and what the prosecution had done with the evidence gathered. And about the role of some players, including Linda Reynolds and some police witnesses, in talking to defence counsel, something which had raised the suspicions of the DPP.

But Sofronoff did not seem very interested in any investigative deficiencies, or mistakes in handling sensitive materials. Nor, indeed, in some of the senior police witnesses who were not served up for cross-examination, even when they would have had fresh material to volunteer.

Nor did the inquiry bother much, before or after the writing of the report, with possible ways of reforming law or practice, apart from expressing reservations about the role of the Victims of Crime Commissioner. He ultimately was to minimise police deficiencies as relatively unimportant (which police greeted as triumphantly as a vindication, promptly suing the DPP). But he also endorsed the DPP’s view that the case should have been prosecuted, something police had campaigned against.

Lawyers brought out materials showing that deep mistrust and suspicious police actions had led to misunderstandings. It also showed that police had never understood the evidentiary standard they were meant to prove. Police also provided information suggesting that the DPP had sought to conceal evidence under a false claim of legal privilege and had misled the trial judge about warnings given to Lisa Wilkinson.

The report was a shocker for the DPP. He might have predicted it. After all, Janet Albrechtsen had published a remarkably well-informed article the day before the report was issued, suggesting the alleged inadequacies of his conduct. In fact, she had already had the completed report for several days and had earlier been the only person other than the inquiry team to see submissions and confidential materials, and any number of email comments about parties and witnesses. Sofronoff and Albrechtsen seemed to share the privilege – even when apart – given the access to video, transcripts and email – of having four eyes and ears on the witnesses and parties, and impressions to synthesise.

Sofronoff gave Albrechtsen the materials – he said under embargo – because he trusted her. Several days later, perhaps as an afterthought to guard against suggestions of partiality, he gave an embargoed copy to an ABC reporter. Other journalists were not apparently worthy of his trust. He would not even directly speak to them, other than by written questions to a staff member. He argued that giving embargoed copies to journalists was normal practice, even though the Inquiries Act had specifically created an offence of giving it to anyone other than the Chief Minister first. (Albrechtsen broke the embargo in any event, asserting she had another unembargoed copy).

The widespread resentment of Albrechtsen’s “scoop” did not come from jealousy about her having access to Sofronoff or her getting an advance copy of the report. It came instead from the sense that she was always a player with an agenda. She was not a party but was paid more attention than any advocate at the bar table. She may, as she saw it, have been standing up for important public interests, but no one else was given the power of speaking directly into Sofronoff’s ear, and so unaccountably or without any power to contradict.

Most observers quickly concluded that putting the report into the public domain was to prevent the (presumably woke) Chief Minister, sitting on the report or censoring or suppressing the stringent criticisms of Drumgold. If this was the intention, as it appears, it was a conscious piece of political bastardry designed to force the government’s hand, and intended, by virtue of the report’s being put in the public domain, to stampede it into action. An alternative theory could be that Sofronoff was simply naïve about the impact of a report he had said was to calm public fears. Or, perhaps, that he did not understand the devious ways and stratagems of senior journalists with agendas, and in active service.

But Sofronoff himself did not come down in the last shower of rain. Apart from extensive experience as a judge and advocate, he is a former Solicitor-General, well familiar with the political hurley burley. It was not merely a matter of making a mistake by trusting a journalist to honour an embargo. Or, given Sofronoff’s enlistment in Albrechtsen’s crusade – one hostile to the ACT Government’s view of the world – of thinking the error inadvertent.

It is hardly surprising that neither Sofronoff nor senior counsel arguing on his behalf has been able to persuade judges, and former judges such as Michael Adams, that his motives were pure and innocent. The reaction has been rather more “Pull the other one.” If Sofronoff was being unwittingly used by Albrechtsen, and merely wanting to get the information to the public, why would he have ignored the media most likely to report the news – and in a non-contentious manner? There were many reporters, from many mediums, reporting the inquiry, but perhaps a risk that some might be critical of how he was doing his job. The Canberra Times had reporters on the scene, reporting comprehensively and with explanation and context. Their reports were not overlaid with comments or criticism, positive or negative, of Sofronoff. None of them could be accused, sight unseen, of being inexperienced, incompetent, or not up to the task of outlining the facts. Perhaps, however, not many went into the job with a preconceived view, whether about feminism, about the reliability of alleged rape victims, or the supreme importance of giving alleged perpetrators every chance or raising a reasonable doubt.

Whatever happened, Andrew Barr was not amused. He made that clear. The only slightly apologetic explanations from Sofronoff were not convincing and compromised his freedom of action. In my opinion, Barr and his then Attorney-General, Shane Rattenbury made early mistakes in adopting the report in principle virtually unread, because some of its deficiencies soon became obvious. But that’s partly a consequence of how Sofronoff, consciously, stiffed them.

It was not the first time that the received view of what had occurred in the Lehrmann case tended to outshout everything else. Or everything else except material damaging to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Shane Drummond, and the alleged victim.

Initially, the inquiry was very effective in providing journalists with copies of statements by witnesses. That was particularly when the investigation was focused on what the DPP said or did or didn’t do.

But there was an early slip-up in which a police statement recording gossip about the victim’s sexual relationships, volunteered by some “friends” emerged. Then it was decided that statements should not be issued until they had been vetted by a committee of lawyers, including lawyers for parties with a deep interest in concealing rather than putting material on the record. And, after the inquiry, police would not release attachments to statements they had freely volunteered to the inquiry – insisting that they were now subject to line-by-line excisions under the AFP’s expansive, and accountability-shy interpretation of the FOI Act.

The ultimate report might have satisfied Ms Albrechtsen’s every dream and justified every risk she took. Whether Walter Sofronoff can now be so impressed by his own work, or its impact on the ACT system of justice, is not so clear. Though some of his report still stands, a Federal Court judge sitting as a Supreme Court judge in the ACT opened the batting by finding that the hundreds of hours of contact and email exchanges between Sofronoff and Albrechtsen gave rise to an apprehension of bias. The Integrity Commissioner cut off another leg. Other judges have sliced other limbs from the black knight. His career, and his reputation, is in tatters.

To change the metaphor, mid-way across the river, the scorpion bit the frog, even after having promised not to do so. Biting frogs, after all, is what scorpions do.

Republished from _The Canberra Times_, 13 December 2025