How the Russell Brand trial puts consent on trial

Russell Brand spent more than four hours in the witness box at Southwark crown court on Wednesday, in a trial that raises questions many members of the public will recognise: how consent is understood, how fame and power can shape intimate encounters, and how the justice system weighs accounts given years after the events in question. Brand denies three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one charge of attempted indecent assault.

Six alleged victims told the court that the comedian appeared charming before switching suddenly and forcing them into sexual activity in a toilet, a hotel room, workplace corridors and his bedroom, then acting as if nothing had happened afterwards. The alleged locations, from workplace corridors to hotel rooms, are ones ordinary people move through every day.

The defendant’s own account of his past conduct formed a central part of the day’s evidence, and it is here that the trial touches most directly on wider public debates. Brand accepted in evidence that he had an “obsession” with sex when he was younger, but denied setting himself a “goal” to sleep with 5,000 women. “I do recognise I have been a very determined and focused man and with regard to the latter, with women, of course, which is the subject of my trial, I’ve been persuasive, seductive, begging and flirting, and dedicated a lot of my life to what seems now beyond-reckless philandering and idiocy,” he said.

That denial was tested against earlier testimony. Mark Pinheiro, a former friend of Brand, had previously told the trial that Brand boasted during a car journey to the Labour party conference in Bournemouth about his techniques for “pulling” women and allegedly revealed an ambition to sleep with 5,000 women. When Riel Karmy-Jones KC, prosecuting, asked Brand, “Is it a goal you may have had?”, he replied: “I don’t agree, I don’t recall the conversation you are referring to.” Brand also suggested that a reported conversation from 1999, in which he spoke of never leaving an interaction with a woman without a “conquest”, was a riff on a Woody Allen joke.

Brand went further in a notable concession to the jury, telling them he now believed it was “wrong” of him to use his fame for sex. “As I became more successful and famous I was very comfortable allowing that to facilitate sexual access which I agree with you was wrong,” he said.

The individual allegations were then examined in detail. One alleged victim says she was raped after meeting Brand at one of his Hammersmith Apollo standup performances in 2009. The court heard that he stored her name next to the letter T, which he said stood for “tart”. Asked what he meant by the word, he replied: “That was what I used to denote casual hook-ups.” He told jurors the woman had not said “no” or told him to stop as they were having sex.

A separate allegation is that Brand sexually assaulted a Channel 4 worker in 2009 during a recording session, after she had been forced by members of his entourage to give him a massage. Brand agreed that, while he says he cannot remember that day, it would have been “petulant and childish” to refuse to continue the recording without first receiving a massage. Asked if he had found thrusting his head into her lap funny, he replied: “I don’t remember. I don’t think it’s funny now.”

On the question at the heart of the case, consent, Brand recalled only consensual encounters and told the court that “consent is more important than sex itself”. The prosecution argued he had built his evidence in response to the allegations. Karmy-Jones accused Brand of staying silent on the accusations in his police interviews so that he “forged” his account around the evidence. “Were you waiting to see all that evidence before you gave your account?” she asked. Brand replied: “I was doing my best to participate.”

Brand also described the consequences he says he has suffered since reporting of the allegations, including a 2023 Channel 4 Dispatches documentary and news stories, which he blamed for his public fall from grace. Asked about the impact of the Dispatches programme, he said: “It was devastating.” He told the court that after the programme and the articles he was unable to stay with his son at Great Ormond Street hospital in London while the boy was having surgery. “Due to material that had been published in the public eye they had to bar my attendance and presence,” Brand said. He added: “My entire life has been consumed by these allegations.”

He also said he had been unable to persuade any friend or acquaintance to give evidence on his behalf. When his barrister, Ian Winter KC, asked him, “Will they touch you with a bargepole?”, Brand replied: “No.” He described the last few years as “deeply traumatic” and said that focusing on the allegations and trying to remember incidents from his past had damaged his personal life.

The trial continues. The jury must now weigh these competing accounts and reach a verdict on the seven charges Brand denies. How the court’s definition of consent, drawn out in testimony over four hours in south London, will shape public understanding of it beyond the courtroom remains an open question.