Russell Brand, 51, was jailed for 10 years and six months on Monday for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others between 2004 and 2009. Mr Justice Bennathan called him a “sexual predator” who showed “staggering arrogance.”
The offenses date from the years when Britain’s left-wing media and political establishment made Brand a star, and that establishment kept him there for the next decade. The BBC gave him two radio shows, Channel 4 gave him television, the New Statesman handed him an issue to edit, and in 2015 the leader of the Labour Party sat down with him to court his endorsement.
Sentencing him at Southwark Crown Court, the judge said Brand had told a “series of lies,” including that he had “never touched a woman without her consent.” “Your entourage indulged your dreadful behaviour,” he told Brand, adding that his fame had protected him until the 2023 Channel 4 Dispatches and Sunday Times investigation, the BBC reported.
A jury convicted Brand on Thursday, November 5, on four of the seven counts he faced. He was cleared of the other three.
The Offenses.
All four women have lifelong anonymity. The rape took place in 2009 at Brand’s then home in Hampstead, days after he met the victim at the Hammersmith Apollo. He removed a condom without her consent, which counted as an aggravating factor.
The sexual assaults were a groping in a Soho bar in 2004, an assault at the Choice FM studios in 2004 or 2005, and an assault during a Channel 4 project in 2009.
Prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC told the court the rape fell into category one, the most serious, with a 12-year starting point.
One woman addressed the court in person from behind a curtain: “A leopard may change its spots, but it’s still a leopard.” In a statement read by the prosecution, another said: “Russell Brand is a sexual predator who has no remorse.” The rape victim said she had feared she’d contracted HIV.
Brand’s barrister, Ian Winter KC, told the court his client was “a fundamentally different person today,” and called the rape a “momentary total failure to respect her consent.” He pointed to Brand’s charity and rehab work and put forward a character statement from Georgina Baillie, of the Sachsgate scandal.
Laura Brand sat in court looking at the floor. During the break, she mouthed “I love you.”
Made at the BBC.
Brand’s career was built on the public broadcasters. E4, Channel 4’s sister channel, ran his Big Brother’s Big Mouth from 2004 to 2007, the years of the Soho and Choice FM assaults. The BBC gave him a Sunday show on 6 Music in April 2006 and a Saturday show on Radio 2 that November, where controller Lesley Douglas hailed him as a “genuine radio talent.”
That Radio 2 show broadcast his and Jonathan Ross’s calls to actor Andrew Sachs in October 2008. Brand resigned, and Douglas went the next day, saying it “happened on my watch.” Ofcom fined the BBC £150,000. The next year, Brand committed the Hampstead rape and the Channel 4 assault.
The Revolutionary.
Sachsgate did not end his welcome on the left. In October 2013 the New Statesman gave him its “Revolution” issue to guest-edit, at Jemima Khan’s invitation. He said he accepted “because it was a beautiful woman asking me.”
The same week, he told Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight he had “never voted” and never would, railing against “the lies, treachery and deceit of the political class.” Paxman later wrote that “part of Russell Brand’s diagnosis is right.” The Guardian ran his columns.
In June 2014, he told the People’s Assembly march against austerity in London that he wanted a “peaceful, effortless, joyful revolution.” That December he joined residents of Hoxton’s New Era estate taking a petition to Downing Street, and the BBC booked him onto Question Time opposite Nigel Farage.
Labour’s Endorsement.
In April 2015, days before the general election, Labour leader Ed Miliband sat down with Brand for his show The Trews. On May 4, the self-declared non-voter told his audience to “vote Labour.” Then-Prime Minister David Cameron called him “a joke.”
That August, Brand backed Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership, calling him “a better kind of new Labour.”
Dropped.
Brand drifted from the left from around 2020. By September 2022, after COVID-related strikes on YouTube, he was hosting a daily show on Rumble with anti-establishment, vaccine-skeptic content.
The institutions that made him cut ties only after the Dispatches and Sunday Times investigation in September 2023. YouTube demonetized him three days later, and the Metropolitan Police charged him in April 2025.
Their own reviews then showed what they had missed. Channel 4 found that a 2009 allegation from staff had never been escalated. Endemol’s successor, Banijay, found the same of informal concerns. The BBC’s review in January 2025 logged eight complaints about Brand, two of them raised while he was on its airwaves, along with failings in its own compliance.
