The once-adored comedian and Hollywood actor Russell Brand was today found guilty of rape and three sexual assaults in a sensational verdict that has left Britain reeling.
After a tense four-week trial at Southwark Crown Court, a jury of eight men and four women unanimously convicted the 51-year-old of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. He was cleared of two further rape charges and one count of attempted indecent assault.
The most shocking conviction related to the brutal anal rape of a 21-year-old fan in 2009. The young woman had met Brand after one of his stand-up shows at the Hammersmith Apollo. She later went to his Hampstead home, where what began as a consensual encounter turned into non-consensual anal penetration. She repeatedly told him to stop. Afterwards, the court heard that he ordered her to clean up the blood and mess while he watched television.
Brand closed his eyes as the guilty verdict on that count was delivered. He was also found guilty of:
Sexually assaulting a woman by grabbing her breasts at a Soho bar party in 2004 (he was cleared of the related charge of orally raping her in a toilet).
A “frenzied” sexual assault on a radio station worker in a corridor around 2005.
Sexually assaulting a Channel 4 worker in 2009 by placing his head in her lap during a forced massage while working on a project.
He was found not guilty of raping a woman he met at a cabaret on the fringes of the 1999 Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, and not guilty of attempting to drag an MTV employee into a toilet to indecently assault her in 2001.
Prosecutors had described Brand — the former husband of Katy Perry and star of films including Get Him to the Greek and Arthur — as a “ruthless, calculating and manipulative sexual predator” who used his rising fame between 1999 and 2009 to target women.
Brand denied every charge, insisting he had never forced anyone into non-consensual sex and claiming the women had “reimagined” encounters after a 2023 Channel 4 Dispatches documentary and newspaper reports. The judge, Mr Justice Bennathan, told him immediately after the verdicts: “You’ve been convicted of a number of offences including rape. The consequence of that is inevitably a significant custodial term.”
Brand was remanded in custody and will be sentenced on Monday. The Metropolitan Police praised the “extraordinary courage” of the women who came forward. Detectives had spoken to more than 100 witnesses and reviewed thousands of documents during the investigation.
The fall of the once-ubiquitous television and radio star is now complete. From the heights of British celebrity to a prison cell, Russell Brand’s carefully cultivated image of the witty, freewheeling comic has been shattered by the jury’s verdict.
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