British comedian and broadcaster Russell Brand was convicted at London’s Southwark Crown Court on Thursday of one count of rape and three sexual assaults, and told by the judge that he faces a lengthy prison sentence.
The 51-year-old was acquitted of two further rape charges and one count of attempted indecent assault. He had denied all seven charges, saying the incidents were either consensual or had been “reinvented or re-imagined”.
Judge Joel Bennathan said sentencing would take place on Monday and that a significant custodial term was inevitable. Brand was taken down to the cells, the Daily Mirror reported in a Reuters dispatch, ahead of a bail application later the same afternoon. He has been remanded in custody.
The jury of eight men and four women returned its verdicts after roughly eight and a half hours of deliberation, CNN reported.
The charges
Prosecutors described Brand — once one of Britain’s most prominent broadcasters, a Hollywood film actor and the former husband of US singer Katy Perry — as a ruthless sexual predator. The charges spanned 1999 to 2009, the years in which he rose from stand-up comedy in small venues to television presenting and films including Get Him to the Greek and Arthur.
The rape conviction relates to a 2009 incident involving a woman who had met him after a show in west London. The court heard she went to his home days later, where a consensual encounter became an assault.
The three sexual assault convictions concern an incident at a central London bar in 2004, in which he groped a woman working for MTV; an incident at a woman’s workplace in 2005; and a 2009 incident in which a woman was made to give him a massage while two of his colleagues were present, Al Jazeera reported.
The complainants
Six complainants gave evidence, all of them entitled to lifelong anonymity. None of the women knew one another. All came forward to police after a 2023 television documentary and press reports in which other women made anonymous allegations.
Hiru News reported the verdict in Sinhala on Thursday evening, giving the same case structure: seven charges relating to six women between 1999 and 2009, all denied, with convictions on one rape count and three of sexual assault.
Note on the accounts
The four filings agree on the verdict, the count split, the judge, the sentencing date and the date range of the offences. They differ in emphasis on the individual incidents rather than in substance. The age of the complainant in the 2009 rape — given as 21 in one account and unstated in others — is the only detail not carried consistently across all four.
