The second day of Russell Brand‘s criminal trial is underway in London, with the first complainant detailing an alleged rape at the 1999 Labour Party conference in Bournemouth.
Arriving to Southwark Crown Court on Thursday, Brand sported a grey suit, white shirt and black-and-white polka dot tie, with his hair tied back in a half-up bun. His wife Laura Gallacher, who has been by his side for the first two days of the trial, was not present.
On Wednesday, the prosecution laid out its opening statement, alleging that Brand was “ruthless and calculated” and a “sexual predator.” The actor and comedian has been charged with three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault relating to incidents with six women spanning from 1999 to 2009. He has pleaded not guilty and denied all allegations against him.
Thursday morning, the jury — consisting of eight men and four women— was shown video of the first complainant’s police interview, according to Sky News. She alleges that Brand raped her in her hotel room at the Labour Party conference in 1999. “I second-guessed myself if it was rape because it was so normal,” she said in the video. “Sorry… he raped me basically — I know that happened.”
The woman said Channel 4’s 2023 “Dispatches” documentary, in which allegations against Brand were first brought to light, “triggered” her to go to the police. At the start of the proceedings on Thursday, Sky News reported judge Mr Justice Bennathan told the jury that the allegations in the documentary have “never been tested in any court,” but it is relevant to the case since it spurred many of the alleged victims to come forward. He said the defence may suggest that the documentary caused the complainants to “twist” their memory of events, and said he thinks the doc is “one-sided and dramatic in manner,” so it will not be shown to the jury.
In the police interview video, the woman said that she met Brand at a cabaret event he was performing in at the Labour Party conference. Brand was “gentlemanly” at first and she thought he was gay, saying: “It didn’t feel like he was trying it on with me.” She suggested that they go back to her hotel room to continue their conversation. Once there, she went to the toilet and emerged to find Brand half-naked and “prancing” around the room “like an ostrich,” she said. He forced her to take photos of him, she alleged — at which point she became “frightened” — and then pushed her onto the bed and took off her clothes. She tried to push him off, she said, but he was “really heavy.” She then “drifted out of her head … but I know I said no,” the woman said.
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“I was frightened. I remember feeling ‘what on earth have I got myself into’ — and then he did rape me,” the woman alleged as she became tearful, according to Sky News.
Afterwards, she claimed that Brand behaved like nothing was wrong and left her his email address. She didn’t tell anyone about the alleged rape out of shame, she said, until she told a friend in 2023. It was her friend who first reported the incident before the alleged victim came forward to the police herself.
In the afternoon, the alleged victim then took the stand to be cross-examined by the defense. In order to protect her identity — the U.K. grants complainants in sexual assault cases lifelong anonymity if they choose — she sat behind a blue screen.
Brand’s lawyer, Ian Winter KC, tried to establish that the woman welcomed Brand’s company. She responded that she did at first, reiterating that she thought he was gay and initially “felt sexually safe with him,” as Sky News reported.
“He was very intelligent and that appealed to me. Not sexually, but to work with,” she said, adding: “I didn’t think he was a predator; I thought he was a nice person.”
When asked by Winter why she did not try to leave the hotel room once she found Brand partially undressed, she said: “Of course I wanted to distance myself, but I had nowhere to run.He’s a big guy, I didn’t think I could run as fast as him, or get away… I’d actually been on a self-defence course, and that didn’t do me any good, did it?”
The complainant then became emotional, saying, “I blame myself for inviting him back to the room. That was my office. That was my workspace. Simple as.”
The judge offered her a short break, but the woman refused and said, “It’s not going to get any better, is it?”
Winter continued with his questioning and told the woman, “You didn’t struggle, and you didn’t say no,” to which she responded: “I did say no. I did say no.”
The judge then interrupted to point out that the alleged victim did say that she said no in her police interview video that was played earlier.
“I did say no,” she repeated. “I didn’t want his dirty penis inside me. I value my body.”
Looking back, the woman said she believes Brand “groomed her” and knew she would not report the alleged offense. “It is a grooming process; it’s very fast… he very quickly did this to me,” she said, as reported by Sky News. “I look back, and I know what he was doing.”
In his final comment, Winter said to the woman: “He persuaded you to have sex and you regret it.”
She replied, “I regret… to this day the error in judgement in thinking that this man could not rape me.”
On Wednesday, prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones summarized the other five claims against Brand in her opening statement. The second alleged incident involves a woman who was working at MTV in 2001, where she claims Brand grabbed her and tried to pull her into a toilet. The third woman alleges that Brand squeezed her breasts at a party in Soho in 2004 and then orally raped her in a toilet. The fourth allegation occurred at Capital Radio in 2004/2005, where Brand allegedly pushed a woman against a wall and “aggressively” kissed her while grabbing “her body, at her breasts, sides and buttocks,” the prosecution said. The fifth woman alleges that Brand anally raped her in 2009 after they had consensual vaginal sex. The sixth claim comes from a woman who alleges Brand demanded a massage from her while she was on a work assignment in 2009.
Several of the allegations received the same response from Brand when he was questioned about them by the police, the prosecution claimed. “He set out that he has never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity, and that any accounts had been reinvented or imagined after a defamatory documentary and subsequent press reporting,” Karmy-Jones said.
In 2023, Brand was the subject of a joint investigation by The Sunday Times of London and Channel 4 documentary “Dispatches,” which published allegations against him of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. Brand strongly denied the allegations. The Metropolitan Police then began their own investigation into him, with the Crown Prosecution Service formally bringing charges against him in April and December of last year.
Brand’s trial is expected to last six weeks.
From Variety US