What you have is two parties who have fundamentally different...

What you have is two parties who have fundamentally different perspectives of what happened.

if reynolds genuinely believed that Higgins was defamatory and brought her into disrepute and Higgins refused to back down the public nature of the affair meant this course was inevitable. It’s reasonably normal for the losing party to be up with costs - particularly when mediation has failed

so yes reynolds is looking for someone to pay her costs. And information about the trust account is part of that.

You could look at a different perspective and ask why is it in a protective trust?

possibilities are that it means it is protected from and claims against Higgins. Or that Higgins is too immature to manage her own affairs. Or someone has given her bad advice. I’m inclined to the former. And that means she is as scheming (even if in advice) as people accuse her of being or she is being dragged along on someone else’s scheme