Brittany Higgins at Sundance for premiere of Australian doco about post #MeToo era

Brittany Higgins has made an appearance at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday (Utah time) for the world premiere of the new Australian documentary Silenced, which looks at the weaponisation of defamation laws in the post #MeToo era.

Higgins was at the US film festival, founded by the late Robert Redford and held annually in Utah (although it is moving to Boulder from next year), with the film’s director Selina Miles, producer Blayke Hoffman and human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson.

Higgins gives her first interview for five years in the film which follows the court battles endured by Higgins, Colombian journalist Catalina Ruiz-Navarro and actress Amber Heard as they sought to air their experiences of sexual assault and gender-based violence.

Robinson represented Amber Heard during the court case brought against UK newspaper The Sun by her former husband Johnny Depp in 2020 after the paper referred to him as a wife beater. Depp lost the action. Depp later won a US defamation against Heard in 2022 after he sued her over a Washington Post opinion piece and was awarded $US15 million ($20) million.

After a blockbuster celebrity trial lasting six weeks, Hollywood star Johnny Depp has won his defamation case against ex-wife Amber Heard.

In a verdict delivered after only 13 hours of deliberations, the seven-member jury sided with the Pirates of the Caribbean star, who had claimed his reputation had been damaged by allegations that he was a domestic abuser.

Ruiz-Navarro was sued by film director Ciro Guerra after publishing serial allegations of misconduct against him following an investigation in the online feminist magazine Volcánica, while Higgins was embroiled in a number of court actions after she went public with a rape allegation in 2021.

That allegation was found to be true on the balance of probabilities following a 2024 defamation action against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson over an interview with Higgins.

Speaking at theVariety Studio at Sundance, Robinson, whose 2023 book Silenced Women: Why The Law Fails Women and How to Fight Back looks at the way the legal system is used to intimidate women who come forward with allegations, said such laws had a “chilling effect”.

“In the post-#MeToo world, we saw women break the cultural silence, speaking out publicly about gender-based violence. What we then saw, is their alleged perpetrator bringing a defamation claim saying, “‘This is not true, it’s defamatory, and I’m going to sue you for a lot of money’.” Robinson told Variety.

Director Selina Miles told The Hollywood Reporter that despite the #MeToo movement, the legal system was still used to shut down women.

“There’s a lot of fatigue around #MeToo. For some people, there’s a sense of ‘That’s done. We dealt with that back in 2017.’ We wanted to try and connect the dots in a way that acknowledges that it’s a continuum,” she said.

In an Instagram post, the Sundance festival described the documentary as igniting an “energising anger born not of helplessness, but of clarity”.

“From Amber Heard’s public scrutiny, to Catalina Ruiz-Navarro’s fight for press freedom in Colombia, to Brittany Higgins’ struggle within Australia’s political establishment, Silenced reveals a global pattern: When women speak out, powerful systems move to discredit and punish them,” the post said.

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