British comedian and actor Russell Brand was sentenced on Monday to ten years and six months in prison after being convicted of raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others during the years when he was rising to fame in British entertainment.
The sentence was handed down at Southwark Crown Court in London by Mr Justice Joel Bennathan, who told Brand that he had "become a sexual predator" as his career took off two decades ago. The judge said Brand had shown a "casual and arrogant disregard" for a woman's right to say no, and described his attitude during the offending as one of "staggering arrogance". Brand, 51, showed little emotion as the sentence was announced.
The total term is made up of nine years for the rape, with the sentences for the three sexual assaults running consecutively to it. He received nine months for sexually assaulting a woman at a bar in Soho in 2004, eighteen months for an assault at the studios of the radio station Choice FM in 2004 or 2005, and eight months for a further sexual assault while he was working on a Channel 4 project in 2009. The three assault sentences run concurrently with one another, so the longest of them — eighteen months — is added to the nine-year rape sentence, giving the overall term of ten years and six months.
Brand will have to serve two-thirds of the sentence in custody before he can be released on licence, and his name will remain on the sex offenders' register for life. He had been in custody since Thursday, when the jury returned its verdicts, and spent the last four nights at HMP Wandsworth in south-west London before returning to court for sentencing.
The convictions came at the end of a trial that began in October and lasted around four weeks. A jury of eight men and four women found Brand guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, and acquitted him of two further counts of rape and one count of attempted indecent assault. Six women gave evidence during the trial, and the offences of which he was convicted took place between 2004 and 2009.
The rape for which he received the nine-year term was committed against a 21-year-old woman in 2009, after she met Brand at one of his shows at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. The three sexual assaults involved women he encountered through his work in television and radio: one was grabbed within a minute of meeting him at a Soho bar in 2004, another was assaulted at the Choice FM studios, and a third was assaulted while he was filming a project for Channel 4 in 2009, when he demanded a massage and placed his head in her groin area.
Brand pleaded not guilty to all of the charges and maintained throughout that every encounter had been consensual. His wife, Laura, and his father, Ron Brand, were in court to support him as the sentence was passed. The judge rejected the idea that the assault sentences should run at the same time as the rape sentence, saying that making them all concurrent would not adequately reflect the overall gravity of offending against several women over five years.
The case first reached the public in 2023, when a joint investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4 exposed allegations against Brand from several women. The reporting prompted a police investigation, and Brand was later charged with three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one count of attempted indecent assault. The Metropolitan Police confirmed last week that it is also investigating two further allegations of rape against him, separate from the charges in this trial.
Brand was once one of Britain's most recognisable entertainers, known for outrageous stand-up routines and for presenting television and radio shows, before building a film career with roles in comedies such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek. In more recent years he had reinvented himself as an online commentator with a large following on social media and video platforms, a reinvention that continued even as the allegations against him were being investigated.
What happens next will depend in part on whether Brand seeks to appeal against either the convictions or the length of the sentence, something neither he nor his lawyers have yet indicated in public. For now, the sentencing closes the criminal case that began with the 2023 reporting, but the further police investigation means the wider story is not yet finished — and the case is already being discussed as one of the most consequential verdicts against a British celebrity of the post-#MeToo era, a moment in which a court has held a famous performer to account for conduct from the height of his fame.
