Brittany Higgins says former defence industry minister Linda Reynolds told her she did not think her accused rapist was “capable of something like that”. 

A jury is hearing evidence from Ms Higgins in the ACT Supreme Court criminal trial of Bruce Lehrmann. 

Lehrmann has pleaded not guilty to sexual intercourse without consent. 

The pair were working in Senator Reynold’s office as staffers at the time of the alleged assault. 

Ms Higgins told the court she had a meeting with Senator Reynolds and her chief of staff Fiona Brown after the alleged rape.

She described being panicked because she was in the same office with the couch where Lehrmann had allegedly assaulted her. 

“The words were a little lost … she (Reynolds) said something to the effect of ‘I didn’t think he was capable of something like that’,” Ms Higgins told the court on Thursday. 

She said Senator Reynolds apologised to her, but the conversation then turned to the upcoming 2019 federal election. 

After dreaming of becoming a political media adviser, Ms Higgins said she feared she would lose her job if she made a complaint to the police. 

“My interpretation of that was that if I raised it with police there were going to be problems,” she said. 

She said she wanted to keep working for the Liberal Party and assist during the election but also wanted to proceed with the complaint.

“It became really apparent it was my job on the line … I’d gone my entire life working towards this moment,” she said. 

She said she decided to “toe the party line” and not proceed further with the police complaint. 

Ms Higgins worked with Senator Reynolds during the election but told the court she felt as though the senator did not like her because of the problems she had caused with the allegations. 

“I felt like she (Reynolds) did not like being around me based on the fact of how little she would have me on the road with her as a media adviser,” Ms Higgins said. 

After the election, Ms Higgins began working with another Liberal senator Michaelia Cash. 

The jury was earlier shown footage from inside Parliament House on the night Ms Higgins was allegedly raped.

She cried in the witness box as the CCTV footage was played.

The jury was also shown pictures of Senator Reynolds’ office taken by police two years after the alleged assault.

They show various angles of the office as well as a photo of a grey couch directly in front of the minister’s desk. 

When a close-up of the couch was shown, Ms Higgins described how she was “jammed up in the corner” when she woke up to Lehrmann having sex with her.

“I felt like a prop,” she said. 

Visual footage showed the pair arriving at the building entrance in the early hours of Saturday, March 23, 2019 and being signed in by two security guards.

Footage also showed Lehrmann leaving Parliament House about an hour later and an Uber collecting him. 

Ms Higgins was seen leaving the building at 10am that morning, wearing a jacket she said she borrowed from a bag of clothes in the minister’s office.

Prosecutor Shane Drumgold will continue questioning Ms Higgins before she is cross-examined by Lehrmann’s defence lawyer Steven Whybrow.