Russell Brand was convicted of rape and sexual assault Thursday at his trial in London.
A jury found Brand guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, the BBC reports; Brand initially faced three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault, and one count of attempted indecent assault.
Following the verdict, Brand — who was out on bail throughout the trial — was remanded into custody until Monday, when he will have his sentencing hearing. “Obviously a custodial sentence of some length will result,” the judge told the court after the verdict was read.
The comedian, actor, and YouTuber spent three weeks on trial at Southwark Crown Court in London. He faced seven charges related to alleged interactions with six women between 1999 and 2009. They included one count of attempted indecent assault, three counts of rape, and three counts of sexual assault. Brand pleaded not guilty and, prior to the trial, publicly denied the allegations.
Police began investigating Brand in 2023 after multiple women came forward with allegations of assault and abuse in a Channel 4 documentary and a Sunday Times report. Prosecutors first filed five charges against Brand in April 2025, while two additional charges were brought in December.
During her opening statement, lead prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones described Brand as “a flirt with a huge sexual appetite — childlike in his expectation that his every desire should be met.” This, she argued, meant that to Brand “women were simply a means to an end — that end being groping them, sexually or indecently assaulting them, or vaginally, orally, or anally raping them.”
She continued: “The circumstances of the offending were as wide and as varied as the defendant’s career. His strong desire for some form of sexual contact was indiscriminate and voracious.” (Brand’s defence team did not deliver a formal opening statement.)
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Before the trial began, few details were known about the allegations that led to the criminal charges against Brand. As Karmy-Jones noted, the six women all came forward independently of each other, and each took the stand to testify during the trial. (All remained anonymous due to protections afforded people who come forward with sexual assault allegations in the U.K.)
One woman, for instance, accused Brand of grabbing her breasts within minutes of meeting him at a bar in 2004. She then said he dragged her into the bathroom and orally raped her. “I pushed him away, and he said: ‘Come on, come on, don’t be a spoilsport,’” the woman testified. “He kept pushing my head down and wouldn’t let me go. I just froze. I didn’t know what to do.”
Another woman testified that Brand’s demeanour changed from “camp, friendly, and effeminate to monsterlike” before he allegedly raped her in 1999. Another woman said she was a fan of Brand’s and had a sexual encounter with him after one of his stand-up performances in early 2009. While the woman acknowledged that she consented to having vaginal sex with Brand, she claimed he then anally raped her. When she reported the alleged incident to police, she recalled, “I felt completely degraded and fucking treated like an animal, like a piece of meat.”
This woman’s testimony led to a tense exchange with Brand’s defence attorney, Ian Winter. Winter pressed the woman that she knew Brand was “extremely sexually active with multiple women,” and that the stand-up show she’d seen was “extremely sexually explicit.” He then suggested the woman “went along with what [Brand] wanted because you were young and impressionable and obsessed with him.”
The woman countered that she “didn’t agree to do that.” She also acknowledged that she felt a lot of guilt and shame about what happened because she’d gone to Brand’s house “willingly” and “engaged in a consensual type of sex.” But, she continued, “I felt lots of things but particularly for exactly the reason that you are doing right here, making me feel like I brought it on myself. That just because you go somewhere willingly and the outcome in the end is not consensual — it’s a different scenario.”
While questioning the victims, and during his closing arguments, Winter worked to cast doubt on the veracity of the claims. He argued that all the encounters were consensual and that none of the women “resisted or screamed or even tried to leave,” as he put it during his close.
Arguably, the biggest part of the defense’s case was Brand taking the stand himself. While testifying, Brand said he remembered sleeping with some of the claimants, but others he didn’t remember at all. While Brand acknowledged that he had “misused” his fame “very, very selfishly,” he insisted that all of his sexual encounters were consensual. He told the court that he believed “consent is fundamental, essential, necessary,” and “in many ways more important than sex itself.”
And while Brand said that he chose to take the stand after being unable to find a “single person” who would testify on his behalf, the court did hear from his wife, Laura, as well. Essentially serving as a character witness, Laura called Brand “caring and kind, a wonderful father to our children, and an amazing, attentive husband.”
During his close, Winter put forward the argument that the allegations against Brand were “thoroughly contaminated” by the 2023 reporting on his alleged misconduct. He suggested the six women did not come forward randomly, nor did they act independently of each other. “The very existence of them as complainants is fundamentally corrupted by that program and publicity, and [that] renders it fundamentally unfair,” he claimed.
In her own close, Karmy-Jones defended the women and their independence and rejected the suggestion that the reporting on Brand had “such a subliminal hold on the minds of six perfectly rational women” that it caused them to “invent, reimagine, recharacterize, recast” their encounters with the comedian.
And of Brand, she claimed: “Women as a whole were disposable to him; they didn’t matter, he didn’t even need to know their names. When you take the time to properly analyse the evidence, [I believe] you will be satisfied that the six complainants are telling the truth.”
From Rolling Stone US
