When the System Meant To Protect You Becomes the Weapon
By Geoffrey Clow | A Twinkling of the Soul Article
In December 2025, after years of legal proceedings, Brittany Higgins posted a single statement on social media. A defamation appeal had just been dismissed, closing the book on a case that had wound through Australian courts long after the night that changed her life.
She didn’t talk about victory. She didn’t talk about justice.
She said:
“Finally, it feels like I can breathe again.”
And then she wrote the line that landed like a body blow:
“While on the face of it this was a defamation case against a media outlet, in reality this was once again a rape trial. I cannot begin to tell you how re-traumatising it is to have your rapist weaponise the legal system against you for daring to speak out.”
This article isn’t about the legal facts of her case. It isn’t a retelling of who said what in which courtroom. You can find that anywhere.
This is about that whole sentence.
Not the polite half. The real half.
The reitraumatising.
The weaponising.
The system being used like a blunt instrument against the person already carrying the wound.
The way a survivor can claw their way toward daylight only to be dragged back into the dark because someone with more power, more money, or more rage decided they could.
You can’t begin to tell something like that.
But you can try to show it.
What it feels like when the wound that was finally starting to close gets ripped open again.
And again.
What the system does to a body that’s already paid once and has to pay again — not because she chose to, but because he found a way to force her back in.
Re-traumatising.
The “re” is everything.
It wasn’t the first time.
That’s the point.
That’s the cost.
What You'll Find In This Article
Part One: "In reality this was once again a rape trial"
The Message
The phone buzzes on the kitchen bench. You feel it through the counter before you hear it.
Saturday morning. Bread in the toaster. Butter softening on the bench. Radio chattering something about weather. The smell of burnt crumbs from the heating element.
Your lawyer’s name on the screen. Lawyers don’t text on Saturdays with good news.
You pick up. The phone slips slightly, your palms have gone slick. The taste in your mouth turns sour, morning breath mixing with something metallic. Adrenaline. You know this taste.
He’s suing.
Not you. The network. The journalist. The people who believed you.
He didn’t sue you. He sued the people who gave you a platform. But you’re the one who has to prove what you lived through. You’re the one who bleeds.
Defamation. Damages. Federal Court. Your lawyer is still talking. The toast pops. You don’t move. The toaster ticks as it cools. Butter softens. Saturday sunlight comes through the window like an insult.
Of course it’s Saturday. Bad news has impeccable timing.
You’re not even a party to this lawsuit. You’re just the woman whose account has to be proved again to defend someone else’s broadcast.
The man you reported is now claiming he was hurt. Not by you directly, by the people who aired your story. The network. The journalist. The broadcast.
But you’re the one who’ll have to prove it all over again.
The criminal trial, the one that was supposed to be yours, collapsed. Didn’t make it to a verdict. You never got to hear a court say what happened to you.
Now there’s going to be a hearing that feels, in your body, like being put on trial for what you reported. But it’s not your trial. It’s not for you. You’re a witness in his case against the people who believed you.
The trial you were denied becomes the trial you have to endure anyway. Except this time it’s not even yours.
You thought speaking was the end of something.
It wasn’t. It was an invitation. Come back. Do it again. Let’s see how much you can take.
The phone is still at your ear. Your lawyer stopped talking a while ago. The toast sits in the toaster, cold now. Butter pooling at the edges of the dish. Knife untouched. Radio still going.
Nothing will be Saturday morning things again.
The Disguise
The courtroom carpet is that industrial blue that hides stains but never shame. You learn it well – the pattern, the worn patches near the witness box, the way it muffles footsteps so everyone moves like ghosts.
You sit beneath a fluorescent light that hums and flickers like it can’t decide whether to stay. A security guard by the door stifles a yawn. In front of you, a plastic cup of water you won’t drink. You picked it up once and it bent in your hand, the thin plastic buckling, so now you don’t touch it. It just sits there. Witness to the witness.
They call this a defamation case. That’s the legal term. That’s what the documents say, what the judge says, what the news will report. A man suing a television network. A dispute about broadcast journalism.
Call it what you want. Your body knows which kind of trial this is.
What it is: you, back in a witness chair, fluorescent lights buzzing above you like something dying slowly. Being asked to prove what you reported. Again. Not for the first time – you did this in the criminal trial. You’ve already sat in a chair like this one. Already answered these questions. Already described the worst night of your life to strangers with notepads.
Your body remembers. Your body is already bracing before you sit down, because it knows what’s coming. It’s been here before.
And now you’re here again. Not because you’re seeking justice. Not because you filed a complaint. Because he sued the people who aired your story, and the only way they can defend themselves is to prove you told the truth.
Again. You have to prove it again.
You’re not even a party to the case. You’re not the defendant. You’re a witness. A piece of evidence. Your trauma is someone else’s legal strategy now.
Defamation. Déjà vu with better paperwork.
The judge flips pages – paper, not justice. The rustle and settle of it. Someone coughs. The air conditioning hums its one flat note. The stenographer’s fingers tap like small rain. Everything is ordinary. Everything is unbearable.
The Inversion
He sits at the other table. You see the back of his head, the collar of his shirt, the way he leans toward his lawyer like they’re old friends. He doesn’t look at you. He doesn’t have to. He knows you’re looking at him.
He’s the victim now. That’s his position. That’s what his lawyers argue in voices that sound reasonable, measured, like they’re discussing a contract dispute.
The network damaged him. The journalist damaged him. By broadcasting your account. By believing what you told them.
The room smells like old paper and other people’s cologne and the particular staleness of buildings where nothing living grows. You sit very still. Your fingernails press small crescents into your palms – something to focus on, something that’s yours, something that hurts in a way you chose.
The man at the centre of your story is asking the court to rule that airing your account caused him harm.
And you’re not even the one he’s suing. You’re just the woman in the middle. The one who has to take the stand, again, to defend people who aren’t you.
The system doesn’t care who’s lying. It cares who can keep paying.
What You Have to Do Again
The witness box is smaller than it looks on television. Wooden. Scuffed at the edges where hands have gripped it before yours, leaving behind traces of sweat and fear you can almost feel. You grip it now. The wood is cool, then warm, then slick under your palms.
What were you wearing. How much did you drink. Why didn’t you leave. Why didn’t you scream. Why didn’t you report it immediately. Why did you keep working there. Why why why.
You’ve answered these questions before. You’ve answered them to police. To prosecutors. To the first court, before it collapsed. Different rooms, same questions. Your mouth forms the words automatically now. Your voice comes out flat – you’ve learned to keep it flat, to not give them anything they can call “emotional” or “hysterical” or “unreliable.”
The first time you told this story, it tore something open. The second time, you thought it might get easier. It didn’t. The third time, you learned to leave your body while your mouth kept talking. Now – the fourth time, the fifth, you’ve lost count – you stare at a point on the back wall – a scuff mark, a shadow, something to anchor to – and recite the worst night of your life like you’re reading a recipe. Like it happened to someone else. Like you’re already dead and this is just the paperwork.
Each telling is a reliving. Each time you describe what position your body was in, your body remembers. Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between testimony and experience. It just knows: this again. Him again. That night again.
The barrister’s shoes squeak on the floor when he pivots. Expensive shoes. Polished to a shine that feels like aggression. He asks you to describe, again, what position your body was in. For the court record. For clarity. His voice is patient, like a teacher with a slow student. You can smell his cologne from here – something sharp and confident, the scent of someone who has never had to answer questions like this about the worst night of his life.
This time it’s worse. What you reported isn’t even the point of the case – it’s the evidence. The success of their defence depends on you proving, in public, what you carry in your body.
The clock on the wall ticks. It’s the old kind, with hands, and you watch the second hand move and think: that’s another second of my life in this room. The stenographer’s fingers tap. Your knuckles are white on the wooden rail. Someone in the gallery shifts and their seat creaks and you flinch – you flinch at a chair creaking – and the barrister pauses, notes it, writes something down. His pen is expensive. Silver. It catches the light when he moves.
Part Two: "I cannot begin to tell you how re-traumatising it is"
The Body Knows
Your shoulders had finally stopped living up near your ears. For a few months there, you’d noticed them dropping. Softening. Your jaw had unclenched. You’d slept through the night twice in one week and it felt like a miracle.
The criminal trial was over. Collapsed, yes. No verdict, yes. But over. You’d started to imagine a life where you didn’t have to tell that story again. Where your body might slowly forget the shape of a witness box. Where the worst night of your life could start to become the past instead of an endless present.
Now they’re climbing again. Your shoulders. Your jaw. Everything.
Because it’s not over. It’s never over. He found a way to drag you back in.
Not because he’s in the room. Because he’s in your inbox. Because your phone buzzes on the kitchen bench and your whole system clenches before you even look at it. A new email. You already know it’s bad because the air changes before you swipe.
It’s from your lawyer. Another document bundle. Another thing to read and sign and prepare for. Another piece of him landing in your life.
You learn what it feels like to be hunted by paperwork. To hear the email notification sound and feel your heart stutter. To see his name in a subject line and taste metal at the back of your tongue.
The document is 47 pages. It has that particular weight of things designed to exhaust you. Someone has highlighted a paragraph in yellow – your lawyer, preparing you – and the yellow feels like a bruise, marking the place where it will hurt most. You read it at 11pm because you couldn’t face it earlier. The kitchen light is too bright. Your tea goes cold beside you – you notice the skin forming on its surface and think, absurdly, that you should drink it before it gets worse, but you don’t move. Page 23 quotes something you said three years ago and calls it a lie. The yellow highlighter glows under the kitchen light. You read that paragraph six times. Your hands won’t stop shaking. The paper rattles faintly, giving you away to the empty room.
Your body doesn’t care about categories. Legal. Physical. Emotional. It reacts the same way: like it’s about to die. Him again. Still. Not over.
The Theft of Time
Your calendar has two colours now. Blue for life. Red for him.
There’s a lot of red. It spreads across the pages like something bleeding.
Court dates that get scheduled, then rescheduled, then adjourned. Each one circled, then crossed out, then circled again somewhere else. The pen you use for red marks has started to run dry. You keep using it anyway. Pressing harder.
Your best friend is getting married in April. You say you’ll be there. You don’t know if you’ll be there. There’s a hearing that might be that week, or might be moved, or might be cancelled, or might not. You can’t buy the plane ticket. You can’t commit. You exist in permanent conditional tense – might, possibly, depending.
Three years pass like this. You’re not sure where they went. You were here the whole time – emptying your pockets at the security scanner, belt off, watch off, dignity off, walking through the beep like a criminal entering a building where you’re supposed to be the wronged party. Sitting in waiting rooms with plastic chairs that stick to your thighs in summer, water coolers that gurgle like drowning, magazines from six months ago that no one reads – you know because you’ve checked, you’ve memorised the covers, you could recite the headlines in your sleep. Reading documents on your phone while you wait to be called. Learning the particular exhaustion of being both bored and terrified for hours at a time. The vending machine coffee tastes like burnt regret but you drink it anyway because it gives you something to hold.
Your friends are having children. Getting promotions. Moving to new cities.
You’re living in legal time. Which is not human time. Which has nothing to do with seasons or birthdays or the things that make a life feel like it’s moving forward.
You’re not living. You’re being stored. Kept on a shelf until the next hearing date.
The Loneliness of It
Your sister calls. She wants to help. You can hear her trying.
“Don’t let him win,” she says. You’re sitting on the floor of your hallway because that’s where you were when the phone rang and you don’t have the energy to move anywhere else. The carpet is rough under your palms. There’s a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling you keep meaning to clean. A single shoe lies on its side near the door – you kicked it off days ago and haven’t picked it up. The small surrenders accumulate.
“Just ignore it,” she says. “Don’t give him the satisfaction.”
You want to laugh. Or cry. Or both. You can’t ignore a court summons. You can’t ignore a lawsuit. You can’t ignore the fact that failing to respond means losing by default. But she doesn’t know that. How would she know that? She’s never been here.
“Focus on healing,” she says.
The cobweb moves slightly in a draft you can’t feel. You don’t say: I would love to focus on healing. I would love nothing more. But I can’t heal while preparing witness statements. I can’t heal while my account is being cross-examined. I can’t heal while he keeps taking up space in my life, my time, my head.
You say: “Thanks. I know.”
You hang up. You stay on the floor. The carpet is rough under your palms. The cobweb sways in a draft from somewhere. The shoe stays on its side.
After a while, you stop telling people how it’s going. You stop trying to explain. Because explaining takes energy you don’t have, and even when you spend it, they still don’t really understand. They can’t. You couldn’t either, before.
So you carry it alone. You learn the particular loneliness of suffering something that doesn’t fit in conversation. Something that makes people’s eyes glaze over. Something that sounds, even to you, like a story that’s gone on too long.
Watching Them Protect Him
You’re folding laundry when you see his face on the television.
Sympathetic lighting. Soft focus. He’s sitting in someone’s tasteful living room – leather armchairs, art on the walls, the kind of setting that says reasonable person – and he’s talking about how hard this has been. For him. How his life has been destroyed. His voice cracks at exactly the right moment. The interviewer nods, tilts her head, makes a sound of sympathy.
The towel in your hands is blue. You’re gripping it so hard your fingers hurt, knuckles white against the terry cloth. On screen, he looks tired. Wounded. Human. The lighting makes his eyes soft.
The segment runs for eight minutes. Nobody asks him the questions you were asked. Nobody asks him to describe, for the record, what position his body was in.
Your credibility is dissected in headlines. Your mental health questioned. Your motives scrutinised.
He gets soft lightly. You get cross-examined in public.
The system doesn’t just fail you. It recruits him. Gives him forms to fill out. Lawyers to hire. A whole machinery designed for people with money and time and spite.
The machine isn’t neutral. It never was.
The People Who Should Have Protected You
There were people who knew. Before. During. After.
People whose job it was to make things safe. People with titles, offices, duty of care. People who could have stepped in. Could have said something. Could have done something.
They didn’t.
Maybe they calculated the cost. Maybe they protected something else – a reputation, an institution, a career. Maybe they told themselves it wasn’t their place, wasn’t their problem, wasn’t as bad as it looked.
You’ll never know what they told themselves. You only know what they did. Which was nothing. Or worse than nothing – because silence, when you have power, isn’t neutral. It’s a choice.
And now, when you look back, you see all the places where someone could have made it different. All the moments where a door could have opened instead of closed.
They didn’t open.
You walked through this alone. You’re still walking through it alone. The people who should have helped are somewhere else now, living their lives, maybe not even thinking about you.
You think about them, though. You think about them a lot.
What It Costs
Your bathroom cabinet tells the story. The mirror is spotted with age, the shelf slightly crooked, and behind it: the archaeology of your survival.
The pills for sleep that stopped working so you got different pills. The pills for anxiety that made you foggy so you take them only before hearings now, sitting in your car in the courthouse parking lot, swallowing them dry because you forgot water again. The supplements someone said might help – magnesium, ashwagandha, something with a name you can’t pronounce – lined up like small soldiers, like hope in capsule form. Half-empty bottles you can’t remember buying. Prescriptions with your name on labels that curl at the edges.
Your accountant tells another story. The legal fees itemised in spreadsheets that make your vision blur. The income lost to sick days, mental health days, days when you simply couldn’t function. The career opportunities you couldn’t take because you couldn’t commit, couldn’t move, couldn’t plan.
Your phone tells another. The friends who stopped calling – not because they don’t care – because you couldn’t be present, couldn’t be fun, couldn’t talk about anything else. The message threads that went from daily to weekly to nothing. The last text from your best friend, still unanswered, still sitting there with its little grey bubble: thinking of you x. Six weeks ago. You keep meaning to reply.
The lover who tried and tried and finally said I can’t do this anymore and you couldn’t even blame them. Their toothbrush is still in the bathroom. You haven’t moved it. You don’t know why.
Your body tells the rest. The weight you lost or gained – you’re not sure which is worse, the way people comment either way. The hair that fell out in clumps that one bad month, clogging the shower drain, evidence of something you couldn’t name. The way your heart races at nothing, at everything, at the sound of the post arriving. The sex you can’t have. The sleep that won’t come. The crying jags that ambush you in supermarket aisles for no reason you can explain.
And something harder to see, harder to name. The version of yourself that existed before. The lightness you used to have. The future you imagined.
All of it. Gone. Not dramatically. Just… worn away. Like a bar of soap used down to a sliver. You’re still here. There’s just less of you.
The Calculation He Made
He doesn’t need to win. He just needs to keep you here.
Every hearing is another blow. Every document, another weight. Every adjournment, another month of your life frozen while his keeps moving.
The calculation is simple: you have less. Less money. Less energy. Less stubborn willingness to bleed forever. If he can outlast you, he wins – even if he loses every motion, every hearing, every appeal.
You dared to speak. This is the invoice.
This isn’t justice. This is a man using the courts like a crowbar.
Perpetrators are learning this. Using it. Passing on the playbook. They have a name for it now – legal systems abuse, litigation abuse – but the name doesn’t matter. What matters is it works.
He didn’t exploit a flaw. He used a feature.
Part Three: "Finally, it feels like I can breathe again"
It Ends
Your phone buzzes. You’re making coffee – the machine is hissing and spitting, the kitchen smells like burnt beans because you forgot to clean the filter again – and for a second you don’t look. You’re so tired of looking.
But you look.
The appeal has been dismissed. The case is over. The court accepted your evidence. The judge found you credible. The finding supported your account.
The verdict you never got. The one the criminal trial was supposed to give you before it collapsed. Here it is, finally – as a by-product of his failed lawsuit.
This is the closest thing to justice you get. A finding in someone else’s case. Your account, accepted sideways.
The coffee machine finishes with a final gurgle. The kitchen is quiet. Steam rises from the cup you’re not going to drink. You read the message again. The words don’t change. Your breathing does.
Your hands don’t know what to do. You put down the phone. Pick it up. Put it down. The coffee sits there, cooling, a skin starting to form on the surface. Outside, a bird is singing something complicated and oblivious. The light through the window is ordinary. The day is ordinary. Something has ended and the world looks exactly the same.
You wait to feel something. Relief. Triumph. Vindication.
What comes is strange. A kind of emptiness. A door you’ve been pushing against for years suddenly swinging open, and you stumble through, not sure how to stand without the resistance.
You’ve been clenched so long you don’t know what unclenched feels like. It doesn’t feel like winning. It feels like being dropped.
What Breathing Feels Like
“Finally, it feels like I can breathe again.”
Not victory. She doesn’t say victory. Not justice. Not celebration.
Breath. Air. The simple animal act of inhaling without bracing for the next blow.
That night, you sleep differently. Not well, exactly – your body doesn’t remember how to sleep well – but differently. Something has unlocked. Some part of you that’s been clenched for years begins, slowly, to loosen.
You wake up and there’s no hearing to prepare for. No documents to review. No red marks on the calendar.
You make coffee. Drink it while it’s hot. Sit at the kitchen table with nothing to do except sit at the kitchen table.
Your shoulders are somewhere near your ears – old habit, they’ll take time to come down – but they’re not as high as yesterday. Something in your chest has more room than it used to.
You breathe in. Hold it. Let it go.
That’s what he took. Not just the years. The ability to exhale fully. When it ends, you don’t dance. You don’t pop champagne. You just learn, slowly, how to let your breath out all the way.
Strange. How unfamiliar that feels. How your body forgot what it was like to not brace.
What's Left
The case is over. The appeals exhausted. His name now attached, finally and legally, to the court’s findings about your account.
The calendar goes back to one colour. The red is gone. You throw away the old diaries and buy a new one. Fresh pages. Nothing circled yet.
But the years don’t come back. The relationships that broke don’t mend. The sleep you lost, the money you spent, the career you couldn’t build because you were too busy surviving – none of it returns.
You won.
You lost years of your life to a man you hoped you’d never have to see again.
Both are true. They sit in your chest, side by side, heavy and strange. No one tells you that winning can feel like this. Like grief and relief had a child and it’s yours now.
The new diary is blank. No red. You write something in it – a coffee date with a friend, a doctor’s appointment, something ordinary – and your hand doesn’t shake. The pen moves across the page and leaves blue ink, only blue, and the sight of it makes your eyes sting.
That’s something. That’s not nothing.
For the Ones Still In It
Somewhere right now, someone is opening a letter. An email. A legal document that makes their chest tighten and their palms go cold.
You’re reading this from inside it. From the hallway floor after a phone call. From a parked car with fogging windows. From a kitchen at midnight with documents spread across the table and cold tea beside you.
If that’s you:
This is not your fault. The system wasn’t built with you in mind. He’s using features, not exploiting flaws. That’s not your failure. That’s a machine doing what machines do.
You’re not weak for finding it unbearable. It is unbearable. The breaking isn’t weakness. It’s physics.
And you’re not alone. Even though it feels like you are. Even though no one in your life gets it. There are others who’ve stood where you’re standing. Some made it through. Some are still in it, right now, tonight.
You’re allowed to be exhausted. You’re allowed to grieve. You’re allowed to rage at the injustice of having to defend yourself against someone who should be answering to you.
The small wins count. Getting through the day counts. Being here counts.
Some days that won’t feel like enough. Some days you’ll wonder why you bother. That’s the exhaustion talking. It’s also allowed.
For Everyone Else
If this isn’t you. If you’ve never sat in a parked car reading a legal letter while your windows fogged. If you’ve never gripped a witness box rail until your knuckles went white. If “defamation case” is just a headline, distant and abstract.
Now you know a little more.
Now you know what it feels like when the person you reported turns the system onto you. When speaking about harm becomes the thing you get punished for.
To spend years inside a machine that moves at its own pace while your life stays frozen. To watch him be humanised on television while your credibility is dissected. To hear people say “just ignore it” when ignoring it was never an option.
When you see a headline about a case like this – a survivor being dragged back into court, a perpetrator using the legal system as a weapon – remember there’s a body underneath the story. A nervous system that can’t calm down. A calendar colonised with red. A bathroom cabinet full of small soldiers.
Believe them. Support them. Their silence isn’t closure – it’s exhaustion. It’s survival in a system that makes speaking cost more than staying quiet.
The system doesn’t have to work this way. But it does. For now, it does.
And somewhere right now, someone is learning what re- traumatising really means. The “re.” The again. The wound reopened.
Maybe now you see it.
If you’re navigating legal systems and need someone in your corner, Twinkling of the Soul offers trauma-informed support that understands what you’re carrying. Because sometimes surviving the system is as hard as surviving what brought you there. Feel free to get in touch here.
