Russell Brand is not guilty of accusations of rape and sexual violence
Russell Brand is not guilty of accusations of rape and sexual violence.
The comedian and actor appeared on Friday at Southwark Crown Court in London for a hearing, where he formally denied all five charges against him, including a claim of rape, a statement of indecent attack, one of oral rape and two further counts of sexual violence. The alleged incidents relate to four separate women in incidents that took place between 1999 and 2005.
The 49-year-old will now be confronted with a trial, which will only start 3 June 2026 due to the delays of the court.
With sunglasses, an open pin line shirt, jacket and a skinny jeans, the brand arrived early on Friday morning by his lawyer Oliver Schneider-Sikorsky-Die successfully defended Kevin Spacey against accusations of sexual violence in 2023. The hearing lasted a matter of minutes.
The brand was charged at the beginning of April by the metropolitan police of London after an investigation that started in September 2023.
He first appeared on the Westminster Magistrates Court on 2 May, where the main magistrate granted him a bail and, because of the seriousness of the allegations, the case referred to the Central Criminal Court of London. The location was later changed to the Crown Court, where Spacey’s process took place two years earlier.
After the charges were initiated for the first time, the brand – now living in the US – went to its social media channels to deny the allegations, as they came up for the first time.
“When I was young and single before I had my wife and family, I was a fool, a fool was before I lived in the Lord’s light, I was a drug addict, sex addict and an imbecile,” he said in a video. “But what I have never been a rapist. I have never had a non-consensual activity. I pray that you can see that by looking in my eyes.”
The investigation was first launched after the police received various allegations in the aftermath of an important investigation of both the documentary series “Dispatches” by Channel 4 and the Sunday Times.
The 2023 Exhibition saw brand accused of “rape, sexual attacks and emotional abuse.” A representative for the show said that “five women, four of whom asked to stay anonymous, agreed to share their stories about serious sexual accusations in the program.”
The plea of not guilty plea in Southwark marks the next chapter for brand. Although his star power had long been dimmed before the allegations came to light, he was an important figure on British TV and Radio in the mid -2000s and would later find fame and fortune in the US thanks to films such as “Sarah Marshall” and “Get him to the Greek”, not to mention a high profile between 2010 and 2011.
Since he went out of the mainstream Limelight ten years ago, he started to gather another online for his political views, first on the left wing before he shifted to the right, using his YouTube and Rumble channels to post about conspiracy theories, the most remarkably linked to Covid in January.
Months after the exposure ran at the end of 2023, the brand also converted to Christianity and was pronounced about his new faith. Last year he prayed on stage with Tucker Carlson and later Jordan Petersen at events in the US earlier this month, Carlson went on social media to call the Trump administration to ‘save’ the brand of what the rape and sexual attacks he described as ‘politics and absurd’.
