Russell Brand has been convicted of rape and multiple sexual assaults after a London jury delivered its verdict.
Brand, 49, was found guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault following a trial at Southwark Crown Court. The comedian and former Hollywood star was acquitted on three other charges, including one rape count, one attempted indecent assault, and a further sexual assault. The offences spanned a decade at the height of his fame, from 1999 to 2009.
The jury cleared Brand of raping a woman he met at a cabaret show on the fringes of the 1999 Labour Party conference in Bournemouth. He was also found not guilty of trying to drag an MTV worker into a toilet to indecently assault her at the broadcaster’s central London offices in 2001.
However, jurors convicted him of groping another MTV worker during a party at a Soho bar in 2004, though they acquitted him of orally raping her in a toilet afterwards. Brand was also found guilty of sexually assaulting a Capital Radio worker after encountering her in a corridor in 2005. The jury convicted him of raping a 21-year-old fan after meeting her at his 2009 stand-up show at the Hammersmith Apollo in west London. Finally, he was found guilty of sexually assaulting a Channel 4 worker during a forced massage in 2009.
Shortly before the verdict was read out, Brand turned to his wife Laura Gallacher and told her: “Laura, I love you.” The pair married in August 2017 and share three children together.
Justice Bennathan remanded Brand into custody immediately after the verdicts, telling him: “You’ve been convicted of a number of offences including rape. The consequence of that is inevitably a significant custodial term.” The judge added that his “current view” was that he had no choice but to hold Brand in custody pending sentence.
Brand had denied all seven charges throughout the proceedings, insisting that any sexual encounters were consensual. His barrister, Ian Winter KC, mounted a vigorous defence attacking the credibility of each complainant and suggesting their memories had been distorted by media coverage.
Of the 1999 Labour Party conference accuser, Winter told jurors she “fancied him” and “invited him back to her tiny bedsit, and she consented to the sex that took place there.” He dismissed her evidence about Brand wearing “budgie smugglers” and jumping “around like an ostrich” as “entirely false,” noting there were no photos of him “prancing around in his underpants.” Winter pointed to her keeping a photograph of Brand blowing her a kiss as conduct “completely inconsistent with the allegation she has made for the first time 24 years later.”
Regarding the 2001 MTV worker, Winter said Brand “accepted” her “no” and therefore “didn’t attempt to assault her into the bathroom.” He argued prosecutors could not “even put to Brand anything about what he was intending to do,” adding: “They had no idea.” He suggested “the well has been poisoned and she now generally believes she could have been assaulted in the bathroom.”
Winter argued that the Soho bar complainant’s decision to get into Brand’s car after the alleged incident made her account implausible. “How remotely possible is it that if you had just been raped on the mouth you would get into your assailant’s car?” he asked jurors. He noted she had not told anyone about the alleged groping or oral rape until September 2023, after the Channel 4 Dispatches programme aired.
Of the Capital Radio worker, Winter said her allegations were “akin to a maniac jumping on you as you come out of a place or workplace.” He asked: “How is it remotely possible that in all the years of this incredible fame, his marriage to Katy Perry, that you never mentioned he jumped on you like a maniac behind the bins?”
Regarding the 21-year-old fan, Winter said she “completely understood what sort of sex would happen or what he would want to happen when she went to his house.” He described her “fan obsession” with Brand as having “totally clouded her judgment and caused her to behave in a way that was completely out of character,” He told jurors she went to his house, consented, and “wished and wished and wished she hadn’t done.”
On the Channel 4 massage incident, Winter argued that “unless the sexual breathing element of this offence” could be proved, “it’s just a massage.” He acknowledged it was a “thoroughly inappropriate one, one that shouldn’t happen in the workplace, but not a sexual one.”
Winter had told the jury that public opinion against Brand had been “perverted and corrupted” after The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches published their investigations. Multiple women had testified that Brand initially appeared charming before suddenly forcing them into sexual activity in toilets, hotel rooms, workplace corridors and his bedroom, then acting as if nothing had happened.
Brand is expected to be sentenced on Monday.