Russell Brand was remanded in custody in London on 5 November after a jury convicted him of raping a 21-year-old fan and sexually assaulting three other women.

The jury of eight men and four women cleared Brand, 51, of two other rape charges and one count of attempted indecent assault. Judge Joel Bennathan had directed that each verdict on the seven counts, which concerned six women between 1999 and 2009, had to be unanimous. Jurors were sent out on 3 November and deliberated for about eight and a half hours.

Bennathan revoked Brand’s bail once the verdicts were read. “The consequence of that is inevitably a significant custodial term,” he told Brand. The Sentencing Council’s guideline for the rape of an adult sets a range of four to 19 years in custody, and the statutory maximum is life imprisonment.

Brand stood in the dock as the verdicts were read and closed his eyes when he heard the rape verdict. Before entering the dock he told his wife, Laura Gallacher, who attended every day of the trial, that he loved her. He denied all seven charges. Giving evidence in late October, he told the jury that consent in sex was fundamental and that the allegations had left him without a single friend or colleague willing to testify on his behalf. When police charged him in April 2025 he said in a video posted on X: “But what I never was, was a rapist.”

The Hammersmith Apollo fan

The rape conviction concerns a woman, referred to in court as Ms E, who went with a friend to see Brand’s stand-up show Scandalous at the Hammersmith Apollo in west London in 2009. She was 21 and he was 33. Her 2025 police interview was played to the jury. She said she consented to sex with Brand at his home when they met for the second time and that he then anally raped her and ignored her pleas to stop.

Jurors convicted Brand of groping a woman who worked for MTV at a party in a Soho bar in the summer of 2004, and acquitted him of then orally raping her in a toilet. They convicted him of sexually assaulting a woman who worked at a London radio station while he presented a Big Brother spin-off in 2004 or 2005. She said he grabbed her face with both hands, pushed her against a wall and kissed her before groping her breasts and buttocks. A Channel 4 worker was the fourth woman he was convicted of assaulting, in 2009, when he forced her to give him a massage.

A woman who met Brand at a cabaret show on the fringes of the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth in 1999 had accused him of raping her in a hotel room, and the jury acquitted him of that count. Another woman who worked at MTV said he grabbed her forearm in 2001 and tried to drag her into a men’s toilet. On 27 October Bennathan directed jurors to return a not guilty verdict on the original indecent assault charge over that incident, finding the evidence insufficient, and substituted a count of attempted indecent assault. The jury acquitted Brand of that count too.

Riel Karmy-Jones KC, who led the prosecution, told jurors in her opening speech on 14 October that Brand treated women as “simply a means to an end”. In her closing speech on 30 October she said he had pursued a goal of sleeping with 5,000 women. In the witness box Brand denied having any such goal. He said he had been obsessed with sex when he was younger but disputed how far it had shaped his life, and answered no each time he was asked whether he had raped or sexually assaulted the complainants.

Ian Winter KC, Brand’s barrister, told the jury it was “not criminal to treat women unkindly before, during or after sex” if they consented. He argued that the 2023 Channel 4 documentary about Brand had influenced each complainant, so their accounts were not independent of one another. Brand’s ordinary behaviour after each encounter showed he believed the women had consented, Winter said. Gallacher gave evidence for the defence and described her husband as devoted to his family. Karmy-Jones told the jury that the six women did not know one another, had not sought publicity and stood to gain nothing beyond some closure.

Dispatches, The Sunday Times and the Met

Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, The Sunday Times and The Times published allegations from several women against Brand in September 2023. The Metropolitan Police opened an investigation that month after receiving reports from women who did not know one another. Detectives interviewed more than 100 witnesses and took hundreds of statements, the force said after the verdict.

The Crown Prosecution Service authorised five charges involving four women on 4 April 2025, and Brand pleaded not guilty at Southwark Crown Court on 30 May 2025. Two further charges, one of rape and one of sexual assault, concerning two more women in 2009 followed in December 2025. He denied those on 24 February 2026. Bennathan joined the two sets of charges and moved the trial from June to 12 October 2026, when jury selection began.

David Roberts of the CPS said outside court that the evidence showed Brand to be “a calculated sexual predator, using his growing fame and power”. Detective Superintendent Andy Furphy of the Metropolitan Police said Brand had “used his influence, status and fame to exploit and sexually offend against women”.

Carlson’s appeal to the Trump administration

Brand moved his family to the U.S. in the autumn of 2024, months after he was baptised in the River Thames. He presents a daily show, Stay Free, on the video platform Rumble. In September 2024 he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s live tour in Phoenix, Arizona, where he said he was encouraged that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had joined Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

Elon Musk posted “I support Russell Brand” on X in September 2023, days after Brand called the newspaper and television allegations a coordinated media attack. On 2 May 2025, the day Westminster Magistrates’ Court granted Brand bail, Carlson wrote on X that the prosecution was political and urged the Trump administration to “rescue” him. Brand reposted the message the same day.