Russell Brand Found Guilty of Rape and Sexual Assault at Southwark Crown Court

British comedian and actor Russell Brand has been found guilty of rape and sexual assault by a jury at Southwark Crown Court in London, bringing to an end a trial that heard evidence from six women about alleged offences spanning a decade.

The 51-year-old was convicted on Thursday, 5 November, of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. He was cleared of two further counts of rape and one count of attempted indecent assault. Brand, who denied all of the charges, was remanded in custody and will be sentenced on Monday, 9 November.

The verdicts in full

The jury of eight men and four women reached its verdicts after around eight and a half hours of deliberation. The seven charges dated from 1999 to 2009 and concerned six women, all of whom are entitled to lifelong anonymity.

The rape conviction relates to a 21-year-old fan whom Brand met after one of his stand-up shows at the Hammersmith Apollo in west London in 2009.

The three sexual assault convictions cover separate incidents: the groping of an MTV worker at a bar in central London in 2004; the kissing and groping of a woman at the Choice FM studios in London in 2004 or 2005; and the sexual assault of a woman working on a Channel 4 project in 2009, when she was forced to give him a massage.

Brand stood in the dock as the verdicts were read out, closing his eyes as he heard the guilty verdicts. His wife, Laura Gallacher, was in the public gallery as the jury delivered its decision.

What happens next

Sentencing will take place on Monday, 9 November. The trial judge, Mr Justice Bennathan, told Brand he faced a lengthy prison term and refused him bail.

Under sentencing guidelines in England and Wales, a rape conviction carries a range of four to 19 years in custody, with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment in the most serious cases. The judge must also decide whether the sentences for the three sexual assault convictions run alongside the rape sentence or consecutively.

The investigation behind the case

The case followed a Metropolitan Police investigation that began in 2023, during which officers interviewed more than 100 witnesses and reviewed thousands of documents. The Crown Prosecution Service authorised the first charges in April 2025, and two further charges were added in December 2025, bringing the total to seven charges across six women.

The trial began on 12 October. Brand pleaded not guilty throughout and told the court the incidents had either been consensual, had been reinvented or had been re-imagined. Prosecutors told jurors that Brand had been obsessed with sex and had used women to satisfy his own desires.

The charges covered the years in which Brand rose from performing stand-up comedy in small venues to becoming a television presenter and a Hollywood film star. The Metropolitan Police confirmed that investigations are continuing into two further allegations of rape, and prosecutors are assessing whether to bring additional charges.

A fall from the top

Brand was once one of Britain’s most high-profile broadcasters and went on to star in several Hollywood films. He is the former husband of US pop singer Katy Perry. The trial judge praised the way the case had been prepared, describing it as “very well prepared”.

Under the usual rules in England and Wales, a person given a fixed-term sentence of at least four years for rape would normally serve two-thirds of the sentence in custody before being released. Monday’s sentencing hearing will be watched closely, given the scale of the case and Brand’s public profile.

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Featured image: Russell Brand, photographed in 2011. Photo: Eva Rinaldi, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.