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January 27, 2026 — 4:37pm
One of the biggest risks in making a film about how the law is used to prevent women from speaking up about sexual abuse is that someone will try to use the law to prevent the film from being shown.
Predictably, a legal warning has already been sent to the makers of Silenced, which has just made its debut at Sundance Film Festival, where it is one of two Australian films in competition among 10 in the documentary showcase strand (the other is Sentient, in which former Q+A host Tony Jones examines the use of animals in laboratory testing).
Among the women interviewed in the film are Amber Heard, who was drawn into defamation suits in both the UK and the US after alleging she was violently abused by former husband Johnny Depp during their marriage, and Brittany Higgins, the former Liberal Party staffer who was raped in Canberra’s Parliament House in 2019.
On Monday, The Australian reported that lawyers for Linda Reynolds, the former Liberal senator and minister and Higgins’ former boss, had sent a letter to the film’s producers threatening defamation action should the documentary suggest their client in any way attempted to prevent Higgins from airing her complaint.
“If, as the synopsis suggests, the film contains any allegation that our client or her staff attempted to ‘silence’ Ms Higgins, or is in any other way defamatory of our client, our client will take legal action against [production company] Stranger Than Fiction Films Pty Ltd, [sales agent] Together Films and, if necessary, individuals such as the director and producers who have participated,” the letter from Bennett Law reportedly said.
The filmmakers confirmed to this masthead that they had received the legal warning from Reynolds. This masthead does not suggest that Reynolds sought to silence Higgins or to shut down the film.
Human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson – whose 2022 book How Many More Women? How the Law Silences Women inspired the film – says you could hardly ask for a better illustration of how fraught this terrain is.
“It’s legally difficult to tell these stories – the fact we’ve received a legal threat proves the point,” Australian-born, London-based Robinson says. “But it’s so important that we do tell these stories, and we have to make it easier to tell them.”
Robinson’s book (co-authored with Keio Yoshida) examines the myriad ways the legal system can be deployed to silence women, including NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), the favoured tool of Harvey Weinstein over years of alleged abuse. But the film, directed by Selina Miles, focuses on a handful of high-profile cases that reached court – largely because they are, by definition, visible and in the public domain.
Still, it was no small thing to convince the much-maligned Heard and the now-bankrupt Higgins (thanks to a successful defamation action brought by Reynolds) to once again recount their experiences on camera.
“I’m not here to tell my story. I don’t want to tell my story,” says Heard in the film. “In fact, I don’t even want to use my voice any more. That’s the problem.” Heard and Depp engaged in two major defamation cases: a libel case in the UK in 2020, which Depp lost, and a 2022 case in the US, in which the jury largely found in his favour.
Higgins, who attended the premiere in Sundance as a guest of the producers (as did Robinson and Colombian journalist Catalina Navarro Kirner, another case study and interviewee), cuts a wounded figure in Silenced.
She says that since making her complaint against Bruce Lehrmann in 2021, she has been through four government reviews, a criminal trial, a civil trial, a government inquiry into the police conduct in the case, and “countless civil suits that have flown around”. Federal Court Justice Michael Lee concluded to the civil standard – on the balance of probabilities – that Lehrmann raped Higgins in Parliament House in March 2019, as part of a multimillion-dollar defamation case that Lehrmann brought against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson and lost.
In addition to what one might term the formal side of the case, there is also the enormous burden of intense media scrutiny (much of it critical of her testimony) and social media abuse. Little wonder, then, that Higgins describes herself as “just really tired”, and says of bringing her complaint: “I don’t know if it was the right decision for me.”
The legal challenges in making the film – and ensuring it can be shown (a long series of end titles does its best to ensure no defamation suits can be brought against the film, by anyone who is mentioned) – are real. But, says Robinson, “it’s also emotionally very challenging for the women involved.
“I’m so grateful to them for using their voice in this project,” she says, “so we can use the film for a much bigger cultural conversation about how we treat women who speak out in the online space, in the media, in the courts, and what needs to change.”
Silenced will be released in Australia mid-year.
