If at its heart wasn't an allegation so serious and its life-wrecking consequences so immense, you could easily imagine the Bruce Lehrmann-Brittany Higgins legal saga as a dark literary comedy.
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From an apparently benign starting point - work drinks at a Kingston pub - has spawned a series of damaging, expensive, bitter and at times bizarre court cases.
Ben Elton, Ian McEwen or their like would have been hard-pressed to come up with the settings and characters, villains and antiheroes we've been introduced to over the years.
The former tobacco lobbyist turned political staffer and alleged Parliament House rapist (an accusation he strenuously denies and no longer faces charges over). His accuser who became a #metoo icon and victim (and sometimes practitioner) of political chicanery. Her wannabe hotshot fiance, with whom she's escaped for the quiet life in a French village so small they buy baguettes from a vending machine (quelle horreur!).
There's the celebrity journalist power couple, drawn in by the sniff of a scoop and a book deal only to have it all go to custard. The self-destructing prosecutor who appeared to want a scalp just a little too much, and the celebrated judge brought in to inquire into the whole mess. His leaking and seven hours of cosy conversations with a zealot newspaper columnist gave modern meaning to being hoisted on one's own petard.
But yesterday, as 26,700 people watched on live stream, we were introduced in the Federal Court in Sydney to perhaps the most bizarre peripheral character of all, former Seven Network producer Taylor Auerbach.
Just as we sensed some possible conclusion to this sprawling shemozzle via an outcome in Lehrmann's defamation case against Channel 10 and Lisa Wilkinson, surprise witness Auerbach made a "Here's Johnny!" entrance (using a former boss's nine-iron, rather than an axe).
Mr Auerbach may be an embittered liar driven by hate or the exemplar for why "what goes on tour, stays on tour" is one of blokedom's stupidest creeds. But he brings the dirt, and the receipts.
On Thursday he recounted the sordid stories, already sworn in affidavits, of nights out with Lehrmann helping to woo him to give Seven's Spotlight program an exclusive interview.
He gave evidence about how Lehrmann googled sex workers and procured cocaine. How, on a golf trip in Tassie, he handed over documents, including thousands of pages of Ms Higgins' text messages to her ex-boyfriend. Auerbach described a man not so much cowed and humiliated by reporting of the alleged rape, but one on a party-boy "warpath".
Putting aside for one second whether anyone really cared that much about Bruce's side of the story, the extraordinary ends the media company went to in order to win him over are shocking to surely all but the most old-school of television executives. (Incidentally, has any media company ever shown such bad judgment in putting their chips behind Lehrmann and Ben Roberts-Smith?)
Seven fired some shots in its defence last night, with a statement to staff denying it all, including the claim Auerbach received a pay rise shortly after his "bender" with Bruce.
"Seven is appalled by the allegations made in court in recent days ... Seven has acted appropriately at all times," chief executive James Warburton said.
But today the Auerbach show is rolling on. With some understatement, court reporter Tim Piccione advised us this morning it's "difficult to know what will be on offer". Just this afternoon, we learned the ACT corruption watchdog is now assessing whether he has a case to answer.
The hearing is continuing this afternoon, but it's clear Lehrmann is having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week.
Like Roberts-Smith before him, his courtroom quest to defend his reputation has done it far more harm than good. While it is still possible he wins the case, by proving he was defamed by Channel 10 some time in the foggy past of this black hole of a story, how much is his reputation now worth?
More or less than a tomahawk steak?
