The
downfall of Russell Brand: from Big Brother and Hollywood to convicted rapist
Former
comedian long traded on his extreme persona, yet many will wonder how he was
allowed to act in plain sight for so long
Thu 5 Nov
2026 14.44 GMT
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 in London 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”.
Russell
Brand in 2004. Photograph: Metropolitan police/PA
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 in
Britain, 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.
Brand on
Big Brother’s Big Mouth in 2006. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
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 in London, 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.
A young
Brand in a police handout photo presented as evidence at his trial. Photograph:
Metropolitan police/Reuters
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 the renowned 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.
0:34
Russell
Brand faces police questions in 2025 interview clip – video
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 a wider audience on Radio 2, where it will be forever
remembered for what became known as “Sachsgate”. In October 2008, he and his
guest, the chatshow host 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.
Brand
with Jonathan Ross in 2009. Photograph: James Curley/Rex Features
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 the media regulator 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, who after his death was revealed as one of Britain’s worst sex
offenders.
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 BBC Newsnight’s
Jeremy Paxman, who questioned why his views on politics should be taken
seriously when he had never bothered to vote.
Russell
Brand and the Labour MP Tessa Jowell during the filming of Question Time in
2013. Photograph: Matt Crossick/PA
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.
Russell
Brand, accompanied by his wife, Laura, and her father, Bernard Gallacher,
arriving at Southwark crown court. Photograph: Alberto Pezzali/AP
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.
Brand in
an interview with Tucker Carlson in 2023. Photograph: YouTube
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.
'Justice
has been served' for Russell Brand's victims, prosecutor says – video
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.
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