Russell Branded Without Doubt?

WARNING: This article contains graphic sexual details.

The British entertainment establishment spent years selling Russell Brand to the public as a gloriously shameless womaniser. Now we are supposed to forget who packaged him, promoted him and pocketed the proceeds.

On 5 November, a jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted Brand of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. He was acquitted of two other rape charges and one charge of attempted indecent assault. He remains in custody ahead of sentencing today, which could see him behind bars for ten years or more.

During his years as an establishment favourite, Brand was politically useful. He attacked austerity, the banks and the Tories. He wrote Revolution, supported Labour and interviewed Ed Miliband. Here was a celebrity who could deliver a left-wing sermon with enough swearing to make it sound rebellious.

His sex life was part of the attraction. The promiscuity, the filthy jokes and the endless pursuit of women were central to the product. Broadcasters booked him, and publishers sold his books. The industry knew perfectly well what sort of image it was promoting.

Then Brand built an audience of his own. He began challenging the official line on lockdowns, vaccines and war, reaching people without needing a television executive’s permission. He became right-wing. Then he became a Christian. The celebrity who once helped sell the establishment’s politics was now attacking them.

That is the history the same industry would now like forgotten.

The media and prosecution painted a picture of a man whose sexual behaviour followed a pattern. Yet three of the seven charges ended in acquittals: rape in 1999, attempted indecent assault in 2001 and oral rape in 2004. The indecent assault charge had already been reduced mid-trial to attempted indecent assault after the judge found insufficient evidence to support the original charge.

Those outcomes punch holes in the sweeping story the public was sold. Nothing before 2004 produced a conviction. Nothing after 2004 produced an acquittal. Allegations presented as parts of an established pattern did not survive the criminal standard of proof, and the three acquittals cannot now be repackaged as three more proven examples of criminal behaviour.

Anyone claiming the jury endorsed that entire portrait is claiming a verdict it never delivered.

Consider how the prosecution came about. In September 2023, Channel 4’s Dispatches, The Times and The Sunday Times published their allegations. Police began investigating in the aftermath. The initial charges were authorised in April 2025. Two further charges followed in December 2025, including the rape charge that produced a conviction. Both of those late additions resulted in convictions.

The influence of that coverage was central to Brand’s defence. His barrister, Ian Winter KC, argued that the publicity had prompted the complainants to come forward and contaminated their recollections. In his closing speech, he reminded jurors that the judge had described the programme as “very one-sided” and “produced in a dramatic manner”.

A television programme can establish a public narrative long before evidence reaches a courtroom. Once millions of people have been told what sort of man someone is, everything subsequently said about him lands in that atmosphere.

The question is whether old encounters are being recalled accurately or reconsidered through a story supplied years later. Brand was interviewed by police four times and said he could not recall any of the women. His later recollections became another battleground, with the prosecution accusing him of selective memory and the defence maintaining that the encounters had been consensual.

The passage of time made testing the allegations particularly difficult. The Met’s own statement concedes:

“There was no CCTV or forensic evidence available, while digital enquiries were limited by the passage of time.”

Investigators took more than 400 statements from over 100 people across the investigation. In the rape case, the supporting witnesses described what the woman had told them and how she appeared afterwards, rather than witnessing the disputed sexual act themselves. Their accounts also gave the defence grounds to challenge whether her story had remained consistent.

Take the encounter behind that conviction. The woman met Brand after a Hammersmith Apollo performance in 2009. She had a boyfriend, but went backstage and willingly participated in a threesome in his dressing room.

The broadcaster Megyn Kelly, who covered the trial in-depth, highlighted the explicit nature of that first encounter:

“She used her tongue on his anus (as another woman was fellating him). She hadn’t even been introduced.”

Under cross-examination, the woman acknowledged kissing and licking the area around his anus, while disputing that she had inserted her tongue.

Days later, she accepted another invitation. A driver collected her from a restaurant and took her to Brand’s home. Under cross-examination, she acknowledged that she went there intending to have sex with him and knowing his reputation.

At his home, they had vaginal intercourse with a condom, followed by anal intercourse without one.

The dispute concerned consent to that latter act. She said it happened without her agreement, caused severe pain, and continued despite her objections. Brand denied forcing her and denied that she told him to stop. His defence maintained that she had agreed to anal sex and to continuing without a condom.

The defence also identified differences between her account and the evidence of people she had spoken to afterwards. Her former boyfriend’s police statement said she had “come round to” anal sex. Another witness recalled being told that Brand had said he would be gentle. The defence contrasted those accounts with her statement to police that there had been no conversation about anal sex beforehand.

Those differences concern the very issue the jury had to decide: what was discussed and agreed before the act. They deserve more attention than another recital of Brand’s sexual reputation.

Kelly also drew attention to Brand’s account of what followed:

“RB testified they watched tv together after.”

It was part of the defence’s broader argument that his behaviour reflected his belief that the encounter had been consensual. And, really, what rape victim goes on to immediately cuddle up to her rapist on the couch, binge-watching NetFlix?

Then there was the woman’s own message when she was considering speaking to a Sunday Times journalist. The court heard that she wrote: “I’m not sure my story has much in it”. She described herself as young and stupid and said she was “probably as much to blame”.

Much of the case’s public presentation revolved around what an unpleasant, selfish and sexually voracious man Brand was. But that was hardly a revelation. He had built a career describing his appetites to paying audiences.

Winter’s essential argument was straightforward: a highly promiscuous life is lawful. He urged the jury to distinguish criminal conduct from behaviour it might find disgusting, disrespectful or immoral. He also pointed to Brand’s conduct around the alleged encounters, including leaving his email address, giving out photographs, kissing women goodbye and behaving as though nothing criminal had occurred, as support for the defence account.

A criminal court must decide whether particular offences have been proved. Disgust with the defendant cannot do the prosecution’s work.

Winter also challenged the timing. Why, he asked, had these allegations not emerged during the enormous publicity surrounding the #MeToo movement? Why did they follow the 2023 coverage instead?

After a trial lasting almost four weeks, the jury deliberated for eight and a half hours before returning its mixed verdicts.

And there is still the breathtaking hypocrisy of an industry that marketed Brand’s excesses and now presents itself as morally astonished by the man it helped create.

By the time Brand entered the courtroom, the public had already spent three years being told he was a sexual predator. His defence argued that this coverage had poisoned the case against him. The verdict itself leaves serious doubt about whether the central defence concerns received a fair hearing from the jury.

Those questions are likely to be pressed before the higher courts if Brand pursues an appeal. If true justice still plays any role in the British legal system, it deserves rigorous scrutiny there.

“It’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.”
– John Adams