In the early 1990s, when he was a student at the Italia Conti theatre school, a teenage Russell Brand became so fixated on a classmate that he followed her for 200 miles, trailing her through the streets of London before sneaking, ticketless, on to her train to Wigan.
By his own admission, she did not want him to accompany her, far less come to her family home, but he did anyway, and got into bed with her. There, he “lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till she reluctantly removed her bra” before deploying “tears and emotional blackmail to secure the immolation of her knickers”.
This anecdote was not one laid before Southwark crown court by prosecutors seeking to bring Brand to justice this week; it was relayed by Brand himself in his memoir, published long before his arrest.
The supposedly comic entry exists in the public record as a harbinger of how he would go on to treat women as his star rose and he found fame as a comedian and actor. Many years later, Brand said, he saw his former classmate in the street and suspected she had “gone religious, for which I might be to blame”.
The book, which also describes how Brand spat in the face of a lap dancer and smashed the phone of a sex worker against a wall, makes for shocking reading in light of his conviction on one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault on Thursday – but it was not condemned at the time. Critics lavished it with praise, it reached No 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list and won biography of the year at the 2008 British Book Awards.
In plain sight
By the time the book was published in late 2007, Brand was a household name, catapulted into the mainstream by a brief relationship with the model Kate Moss and a stint presenting Channel 4’s Big Brother’s Big Mouth, a spin-off of the reality television show that became a cultural touchstone of the noughties.
Once in the spotlight, Brand’s shocking sexual revelations gave him currency. He was labelled “shagger of the year” three times in a row by the Sun newspaper and enjoyed a rock-star-like status that propelled him to a sellout standup tour and an eponymous show on BBC Radio 2.
Audiences laughed as he stripped on air and told jokes about how he liked to watch women choking during oral sex. Few questions were asked about why his management had enrolled him in a rehabilitation clinic in Philadelphia, regularly used as an alternative to jail for convicted sex offenders.
As part of this sex addiction treatment, Brand said, he was asked to compile a “victims’ list” – the names of women he had “wronged” as a result of his compulsions – and he complained he felt like the genocidal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein “trying to pick out individual Kurds”. His spell in “winky nick”, as he called it, did little but provide him with more material, although he later hinted that his treatment of women was even more egregious than described. “If this is what I’m telling you, can you imagine what’s being left out?” he said in a follow-up memoir published in 2010.
Over the last two months, in a packed courtroom, some of the stories Brand, now a 51-year-old father of three, chose not to recount in public have finally been told. The trial was the culmination of a three-year inquiry by the Metropolitan police, launched in September 2023, two days after Brand was accused of rape, sexual assault and controlling and emotionally abusive behaviour by five women in a joint investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches and the Times newspapers.
Before the trial, Brand claimed to have eschewed his promiscuous ways and found salvation in Christianity. He brought a Bible stuffed with post-it notes to some of his court appearances. After a jury deliberated for eight hours and 30 minutes, Brand closed his eyes as they delivered their verdicts, which also included not-guilty verdicts on two counts of rape and one count of attempted indecent assault. The judge said that he would inevitably face a significant custodial sentence.
Born in Grays, Essex, in June 1975, Brand was raised by his mother, Barbara, after his parents separated when he was six months old. His love of the spotlight began when he was cast as Fat Sam in a school production of Bugsy Malone. At 16, he won a place at Italia Conti, although he was expelled after a year for drug use and poor attendance.
In his 20s, he tried stand-up, but much of his early career was derailed by his addictions, first to alcohol and then heroin. He was sacked as an MTV presenter for arriving at work on 12 September 2001 dressed as Osama bin Laden.
In 2002, Brand was signed by the celebrity agent John Noel, who encouraged him to seek treatment for his drug problem. In 2004, a year after Brand emerged clean and sober from rehab, Noel negotiated his Big Brother contract. Junior staff on the production told Dispatches and the Times they quickly became alarmed by his behaviour.
One runner said Brand tasked her with procuring audience members for sex, many of whom would later call her in tears. She described feeling like a “pimp” leading “lambs to the slaughter”. Another said Brand exposed his penis to her in his dressing room, and that she felt he then abused his power to groom her for sex.
A 2024 review by the production company that made Big Brother for Channel 4 acknowledged that informal complaints from staff about Brand were not properly escalated or addressed. Brand said Noel enrolled him in the sex addiction programme during his first year on the show, fearing he would be sacked without intervention.
He returned from Philadelphia with a more voracious sexual appetite than ever, but, far from harming his career prospects, it boosted them. His fling with Moss installed him as a tabloid mainstay.
In 2006, aged 30, he had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old schoolgirl who told Dispatches and the Times he had forced his penis down her throat because he wanted to see if it would make her mascara run. Earlier this year, Brand admitted to having an “exploitative” relationship with a 16-year-old, but said it was consensual.
‘A predator, live on air’
His popularity snowballed so rapidly that his fledgling BBC Radio 6 Music show was hastily transferred to Radio 2, where it will be forever remembered for what became known as “Sachsgate”. In October 2008, he and his guest Jonathan Ross left a series of voicemail messages for the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs, boasting of how Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter.
They were broadcast in full and drew the condemnation of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and led to the BBC being fined £150,000 by Ofcom after the broadcaster received tens of thousands of complaints. Brand and the station’s controller, Lesley Douglas, resigned and Ross was suspended for three months.
Yet some remain astonished that Brand – “a predator, live on air on Radio 2” in the words of the former BBC executive Lorraine Heggessey – was able to keep his job for as long as he did. He regularly made sexual comments about the programme’s newsreader, telling her he planned to get underneath her desk and “unleash hell on her thighs”. When told by a producer that the newsreader was upset, he did not apologise but improvised a song about her reading the bulletins in her underwear.
In one episode, he joked about how he had just followed a woman into a toilet at a BBC studio and exposed his penis to her. Shortly before another, he urinated into a bottle in front of guests and production staff then laughed about it on air. When he secured an interview with one celebrity, he offered to send his female assistant to the man, naked, as a token of his appreciation. That celebrity was Jimmy Savile.
A review published in 2025 found complaints about Brand were not appropriately dealt with by the BBC and staff were scared to voice further concerns about him in the belief he was untouchable.
After Sachsgate, he relocated to Hollywood to concentrate on his film career, winning leading roles in the Judd Apatow film Get Him to the Greek and the widely panned remake of the 1981 romantic comedy Arthur. While in the US, he met his first wife, the pop singer Katy Perry, but their marriage in 2010 ended in divorce 14 months later, with Perry suggesting he struggled to accept her fame, which, on one side of the Atlantic at least, eclipsed his.
“At first, when I met him he wanted an equal, and I think a lot of times strong men do want an equal, but then they get that equal and they’re like, I can’t handle the equalness,” Perry recalled in a 2013 interview with Vogue. “He didn’t like the atmosphere of me being the boss on tour. So that was really hurtful, and it was very controlling, which was upsetting.”
‘Too close to the truth’
With all this behind him, it seems astonishing that when Brand returned to the UK in 2013, he was embraced as a serious social commentator. He had already written columns for the Guardian and appeared before a parliamentary select committee to share his views on drugs policies. He was invited on to Question Time and commissioned to write for the New Statesman. He sparred with Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman, who questioned why his views on politics should be taken seriously when he had never bothered to vote.
Brand reversed his position on the democratic process and backed Labour at the 2015 general election after interviewing its then leader, Ed Miliband, for a YouTube broadcast, telling his fans he wanted to “end the danger of the Conservative party”. Miliband, now the foreign secretary, welcomed the endorsement but later said he regretted his interactions with Brand.
Around this time, Brand rekindled his relationship with Laura Gallacher, the daughter of the golfer Bernard. They had dated briefly in 2007, when Gallacher was 19. She gave birth to their first child in 2016, and they married the following year.
Shortly afterwards, the entertainment industry was rocked by revelations about the film producer Harvey Weinstein, later convicted of a litany of sexual offences in the US. The fallout sparked the #MeToo movement and with it rumours that Brand’s crimes, which had been something of an open secret in comedy circles, might finally be exposed.
Queasy television executives who had once clamoured to book Brand started to distance themselves from him. Some comedians broke ranks and called him a sex offender on stage. By the time of the Covid pandemic in 2020, he had all but disappeared from the mainstream. His last notable television appearance came on Channel 4’s Celebrity Bake Off in 2019, where he made biscuits inspired by his wife’s genitals.
The media’s cooling interest in his act meant Brand’s star power had faded, but, characteristically, he was unwilling to relinquish the limelight. From his sprawling rural home in Buckinghamshire, he cultivated a new audience. He began discussing conspiracy theories on his podcast, amplifying misinformation about subjects such as Covid vaccines and the war against Ukraine. The result was a sharp rise in viewer numbers and millions of pounds in revenue. When the rape and sexual assault allegations emerged several years later, he claimed he was the victim of a coordinated attack by the mainstream media because he was getting “too close to the truth”.
As the police closed in on him, Brand said he had found God. In April 2024, he was christened in the River Thames by the television presenter Bear Grylls, his font of choice thick with sewage.
Once a darling of the British left, his conversion to Christianity led to him being embraced by the American right. He was invited to Donald Trump’s second inauguration and forged friendships with the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk and the former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson.
Shortly before he was charged, he moved with his wife and their children to Florida, claiming he was under attack from the British justice system and media. While prosecutors apparently worried they might have to extradite him to face trial, he returned to the UK voluntarily, perhaps hoping he would find another captive audience in the jury.
It was not to be. Instead, when the jury delivered their verdict on Thursday, Brand held his head high and appeared emotionless as he was led away by the dock officers down to the cells.
So far, Laura Brand has stood by her husband at the apparent expense of her own career as an author and wellness influencer. Their regular video podcasts during the course of the trial provided an unusual insight into the life of a couple who at points seem to have made light of the proceedings hanging over Brand.
For some of Brand’s victims, there may be some comfort in the fact he will, at long last, be punished after hiding in plain sight for decades. However, they will be entitled to question why a sex offender who became a millionaire by playing his abuse of women for laughs evaded justice for so long.
