The Russell Brand Verdict Convicted Him Where the Women Had Witnesses and Freed Him Where They Did Not

The jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted Russell Brand on four of seven counts and acquitted him on three, and the line it drew can be read in the evidence that stood beside each count.

Guilty: one count of rape, from 2009, and three counts of sexual assault, from 2004, 2004 or 2005, and 2009. Not guilty: two counts of rape, from 1999 and 2004, and one count of attempted indecent assault, from 2001. Six women, seven charges, alleged incidents spanning a decade, and a jury of eight men and four women that took eight and a half hours over three days to decide each count on its own. Mr Justice Bennathan told Brand what the four guilty verdicts meant before he remanded him into custody: “You’ve been convicted of a number of offences including rape. The consequence of that is inevitably a significant custodial term.” Sentencing is on Monday. Brand will spend the days until then in custody. He stood straight in the dock as the verdicts were read, and closed his eyes when the rape verdict came. Two prison guards led him away.

In 2004 an MTV worker was at a party in a Soho bar, and the jury believed her when she said Brand grabbed her breasts while he was talking about Big Brother. The same woman said he then dragged her into a toilet and orally raped her, and the jury did not believe that. One woman, one night, two verdicts. It believed the half that happened in a room full of people and disbelieved the half that happened behind a closed door. The same division runs through the other six counts.

The rape, count six, was a 21-year-old fan who met Brand after a stand-up show at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2009. She went back to his Hampstead townhouse, where she said he raped her after a prior consensual encounter, kept going when she repeatedly asked him to stop, and then told her to clean up after herself. Six months later Brand messaged her himself. “Because you’re dirty and I want to push you further,” he wrote. She answered, “I think you’ve pushed me far enough, you treated me like an animal.” He replied, “I’m sorry.” A reader on Reddit picked that exchange out within hours of the verdict, guessing that count six was “the rape where they had the text message evidence where he sent a text apologising to the victim” and that “that particular piece of evidence might persuade a jury to convict.” Twenty-four people connected to her gave evidence. She had told her mother, a colleague, her parents, her friends, her boyfriend, and a sexual health nurse.

In a radio station corridor in 2004 or 2005, Brand kissed and groped a woman who worked there, and the court heard it happened in front of his entourage. At Channel 4 in 2009, a woman said she was forced to give him a massage and that he put his head between her legs in front of two of his colleagues. In the Soho bar, the groping happened at a party. Every guilty count has somebody else in the room, or a trail of people the woman told, or his own words in a message.

The 1999 rape was a hotel room in Bournemouth, on the fringes of the Labour Party conference, with nobody else there. The defence put the woman’s own photographs against her account. They showed Brand in trousers, not in the “budgie smugglers” she described him jumping in “like an ostrich”, and one of them showed him blowing her a kiss, which his barrister called “completely inconsistent” with rape. The 2004 toilet allegation had nobody else there either, and it came from the same woman the jury had just believed about the bar. The 2001 charge had already been cut down before the jury ever saw it. On October 27 the judge directed a not guilty verdict on the original indecent assault count for insufficient evidence and substituted the attempted indecent assault, and the jury acquitted on that too. A woman said Brand grabbed her arm and tried to pull her into a men’s toilet after she complimented his shirt. She called him a “wild-eyed maniac”. The charge she brought was one the judge had already cut down for insufficient evidence.

Ian Winter KC told the court the case was “thoroughly contaminated” by the 2023 Dispatches programme. The women, he said, “have all come forward because they have been brought at the invitation of that program”, and “the very existence of them as complainants is fundamentally corrupted by that program and publicity”. On November 3, before the jury retired, Mr Justice Bennathan told them to put out of mind everything they had seen, read or heard outside the courtroom, the documentary included, and that they must consider each count and each woman separately. A delay in reporting, he said, is not itself a sign a complaint is false. “Do not think that a few women making anonymous complaints in a TV show adds any support at all to the prosecution.” A jury that had simply absorbed the documentary would have had no reason to divide one woman’s night in two, or to acquit on the two oldest charges while convicting on the newest. Riel Karmy-Jones KC, for the prosecution, asked the jury to see the six women as strangers to each other who spoke out when they “realized they are not alone”. They were, she said, “six women who have nothing to gain, who have not sought the limelight, who have not looked out for some form of publicity, who have not taken part in a documentary, not made claims for compensation”, with “no benefit to them, apart from perhaps some closure by coming before you and telling you their accounts of what happened to them so long ago”.

Brand took the witness box on October 28 and denied every charge, saying the incidents were “consensual, reinvented or re-imagined”, that he had “misused” his fame “very, very selfishly”, and that “consent is fundamental, essential, necessary, and in many ways, more important than sex itself”. He told the court the Dispatches investigation had been “devastating”, that Great Ormond Street Hospital had barred him from staying with his baby son during open-heart surgery because of “the material published”, and that he had not persuaded anybody with relevant evidence to speak for him, because nobody would “touch you with a bargepole”. His wife Laura told the court he was “caring, kind, a wonderful father… an amazing attentive husband”. The prosecution cross-examined him with his own memoir. A former flatmate, Mark Pinheiro, told the jury Brand had boasted of aiming to “sleep with” 5,000 women.

Rape carries a maximum of life imprisonment and an offence range of four to nineteen years, with starting points running from five years at the lowest category to fifteen at the highest. Sexual assault carries a maximum of ten years and a range from a community order to seven years, with the top category starting at four years. Monday’s sentence will be built only from those four counts, with the three assaults folded into the rape sentence under the totality principle, and there will be no reduction for a guilty plea, because Brand pleaded not guilty. Previous good character, which his wife’s evidence went to, carries little weight for offences this serious. The guideline says so in terms: where good character was used to facilitate the offence, the mitigation should not normally be allowed at all. The judge has already said the consequence is “a significant custodial term”. One reader on the same Reddit thread put the public’s expectation at “10 years minimum you’d think”, and ten years sits inside the frame. It is the starting point for a mid-category rape. The three assaults are added under totality. Another was less sure the sentence would match the verdict, writing that “whatever the sentence is it probably won’t be half as long as it ought to be”, and hoping for “a lot of reflecting within the showbiz world in the UK about what they probably knew and chose to overlook”.

The BBC commissioned the Peter Johnston inquiry into Brand’s 2006–2008 tenure on Radio 2 and 6 Music. The report came out in January 2025, cost £662,060, and examined eight misconduct claims. Channel 4’s own internal review, in March 2024, went through 111,984 emails and 333 archived files and found no prior knowledge of the serious allegations. The institutions that employed him at the height of his fame have now, between them, spent a six-figure sum and read a hundred thousand emails to establish what they knew, and the trial has established what a jury would convict on. YouTube suspended his monetisation in September 2023, days after the investigation aired, when he had 6.6 million subscribers.

After the verdicts it was revealed that Brand has been accused of raping two more women, including a 16-year-old schoolgirl, and could face further criminal charges. The Metropolitan Police said the suspect “has previously been interviewed under caution in connection with the allegations” and that detectives “remain in close contact with prosecutors as enquiries continue and further investigative work is carried out”. Three further allegations of sexual violence were already reported to the police after the initial charges. And the case the jury decided was not quite the case as first charged. The rape he was convicted of, count six, was one of two additional charges the Crown Prosecution Service authorised on December 23, 2025. That was eight months after the first five charges against four women. The documentary that started it all named five women and incidents from 2006 to 2013. The trial charged six women and incidents from 1999 to 2009. They are different sets, and the judge told the jury to treat them that way.

The thread grew past three hundred comments in hours, most of them welcoming a verdict they said they had expected and pressing for a long sentence. The Russell Brand verdict reached Reddit the same afternoon, in a thread that linked the BBC’s report. One of the commenters, u/Oomeegoolies, had been saying for weeks that he would be found guilty of one rape, that “the others were poorly done cases and probably shouldn’t have been charged”, and was “glad to see the victims get some form of justice”.

He still has more than 10 million followers on X and 2.2 million on his “Stay Free” Rumble channel, where he mainly discusses American politics and conspiracy theories about the media, governments and large corporations. His YouTube channel stands at 6.62 million subscribers with 1.68 billion views.