Lisa Wilkinson will not attend this year’s Logies, putting her TV career on hold and calls for her to be stripped of her award
Lisa Wilkinson will skip the Logies this year after she won a Silver Logie for her coverage of Brittany Higgins.
Lisa Wilkinson will be absent from this year’s Logies just twelve months after receiving the industry’s highest accolade for her Brittany Higgins interview.
The Australian reports that Wilkinson will not attend The Logies in Sydney on Sunday night.
It comes after a leaked pre-interview lunch with Brittany Higgins and others revealed the project’s host sought to politicize her rape allegations.
There have been growing calls in recent months for Wilkinson to hand over her gong for Most Outstanding News Coverage or Public Affairs Report, which she was awarded in June last year for her explosive interview with former Liberal staffers.
The calls came after the emergence of a recording of a five-hour meeting between Wilkinson, her Channel Ten producer Angus Llewellyn, Ms Higgins and her boyfriend David Sharaz in a Sydney hotel room in January 2021.
The Australian reports that Wilkinson will not attend The Logies in Sydney on Sunday night (the journalist is pictured with his silver logie at last year’s event).
Allegations that emerged from the recorded lunch meeting were that Wilkinson coached and persuaded Ms Higgins about the rape allegations before her interview.
The group also spoke out about Labor politicians claiming they could rely on ‘fire’ questions in Question Time and the Liberal Party’s apparent mockery of preselection of Aboriginal candidates.
Wilkinson was later forced to apologize to candidate Jacinta Nampizinpa Price after she compared her preselection to a white family ‘hiring a black cleaner’.
Wilkinson famously raved about her victory at last year’s awards ceremony.
‘After 40 years in journalism, this interview and this story is the most important work I’ve ever done,’ he told the audience at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre.
‘And I knew it from my first phone call last year from a young woman whose name she told me was Britney Higgins.
‘Brittany warned me before we went on air that her story would be seen by many powerful people in this country as a political issue, not a humanitarian one.’
Mr Lehrman went on trial in the ACT Supreme Court last year to plead not guilty to sexually assaulting Ms Higgins, but the trial was abandoned due to juror misconduct.
The charges were later dropped by the Director of Public Prosecutions and Mr Lehrmann continues to deny the allegations.
He is suing the ABC for live broadcast of Ms Higgins’ speech at the National Press Club on February 9, 2022.
He claimed that the broadcast of the address implied that he had raped Mrs Higgins although she was not named in the speech.