British comedian and actor Russell Brand has been found guilty of raping a woman and sexually assaulting three others, after a four-week trial at Southwark Crown Court in London.
The jury delivered its verdicts on Thursday, 5 November, convicting the 51-year-old on one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. It cleared him of two further counts of rape and one count of attempted indecent assault.
Brand stood in the dock as the verdicts were read out, closing his eyes as he heard the word guilty. Within minutes, Mr Justice Joel Bennathan refused him bail and sent him down to the cells. He will return to court for sentencing on Monday, 9 November.
“You’ve been convicted of a number of offences including rape,” the judge told him. “The consequence of that is inevitably a significant custodial term.”
What the jury decided
The four convictions cover offences against four women between 2004 and 2009, a period when Brand’s career was climbing from stand-up comedy into television and film. The jury heard that he raped a 21-year-old woman at his home in north London in 2009, days after meeting her at one of his stand-up shows at the Hammersmith Apollo.
The sexual assault convictions relate to three separate incidents: groping a woman at a birthday party in a Soho bar in 2004; assaulting a radio worker at the Choice FM studios in London in 2004 or 2005; and assaulting a woman working on a Channel 4 project in 2009.
The jury cleared Brand of raping a woman he met at a cabaret show on the fringes of the 1999 Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, and of trying to drag a woman into a toilet to indecently assault her in 2001. It also cleared him of orally raping the woman from the Soho bar incident.
The split verdict — guilty on four counts, not guilty on three — came after around eight and a half hours of deliberation by a jury of eight men and four women.
“Predatory” and an abuse of celebrity
Outside court, the prosecution was blunt. David Roberts, a senior crown prosecutor in the Crown Prosecution Service’s London rape and serious sexual assault unit, said Brand had used fame as a weapon.
“Russell Brand was predatory and used his celebrity status to commit sexual crimes,” Roberts said. “Although his tactics varied, at the centre of every assault was an abuse of power and sexual greed, with a complete disregard for the impact of his actions.”
He added: “I would like to thank all the women in this case for their courage in coming forward and seeing this sexual abuser brought to justice.”
The Crown Prosecution Service — the public body that decides whether to bring criminal charges in England and Wales — confirmed the convictions in a statement on Thursday.
How the case reached court
The investigation began in September 2023, after a joint investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches reported allegations from several women. Detectives interviewed more than 100 witnesses and reviewed thousands of documents before charges were authorised in April 2025.
Brand, who starred in films including Arthur and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, denied all wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to every charge. The trial began at Southwark Crown Court on 12 October.
Police say their work is not finished. The Metropolitan Police confirmed that investigations are continuing into two further rape allegations against Brand, including one involving a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
Why this matters
The verdict lands in a week when courtrooms have dominated the news — in Hong Kong, activist Joshua Wong was handed ten more years in prison on Thursday. But the Brand case carries a different weight. Every offence the jury convicted him of happened between 17 and 27 years ago, and the case rested almost entirely on the testimony of the women involved. Convictions in non-recent sexual offence cases are notoriously hard to secure: memories fade, physical evidence is gone, and defence lawyers can pick at every inconsistency. That this jury convicted on four counts and acquitted on three suggests it weighed each allegation on its own evidence.
For the women who came forward, the verdict is vindication after years of waiting. For the wider public, it is a reminder that celebrity — the packed theatres, the television deals, the millions of online followers — counts for nothing in a courtroom. Monday’s sentence will show how seriously the British courts treat that abuse of power. Rape carries a maximum of life imprisonment in England and Wales, with guidelines pointing to four to 19 years in custody; sexual assault carries up to ten years.
