Just enjoy the show: how Russell Brand got away with it
11 min read
The House and PoliticsHome’s Editor-in-Chief, Alan White, was investigating allegations that Russell Brand was a rapist over a decade ago. He explains why it takes so long to bring the perpetrators of such crimes to justice.
Until now, I have resolved not to speak or write about my past work on the Russell Brand case, for fear of distracting from the incredible work of Rosamund Urwin and Charlotte Wace, whose brave, diligent, and sensitive work was responsible for getting justice for his victims.
It seems likely more will come forward, and every plaudit possible should be sent the way of these reporters; not just for the positive impact their work has had in terms of securing justice, but for the wider journalistic industry, beset as it is with trust issues.
However, I feel it is worth adding my experiences to the discussion around Brand, as they might shed a little clarity on a few issues. I still see doubters on social media when it comes to this case: “Why didn’t the victims come forward?” “Why is it only coming out now?”
And I feel I can offer something by way of an answer: even when people do come forward to tell their story, it can take years to get it over the line, and often there aren't the resources (be it time or manpower) available to even get that far. And this is how it looks.
I believe I was first told Russell Brand was a rapist in 2013. It came from a single source, who had heard it from someone else, and that person didn’t want to go public. Storywise, it was something of a dead end. I tried to find out more from people I thought might know, but drew a blank.
At the time, I was a freelance journalist who mostly specialised in comment and had rent to pay and other projects to prioritise. Brand went on the “might be a thing” section of my to-do list, along with many other possible stories. In the background, I’d ask questions about it and see if any incremental progress could be made on finding out if it was true.
Five years later, now a staffer at a major publisher, I had made some of this incremental progress. Hours of late nights staring at message boards and web forums for anonymous complaints, and talking to people who'd been in his vicinity, had eventually meant I was aware of two likely victims and several other possible ones. I had yet to persuade any to speak publicly.
Had they decided they wanted to speak, the likelihood is that it would not have provided us with a publishable story. At the time, there was not much of a playbook for a news desk when it came to sexual assault allegations: a story which was, essentially, the complainant’s word against the alleged would not make it past the libel lawyers.
Our libel law was (and remains) unusually kind to the people being written about. In England and Wales, the claimant doesn’t have to show that what was published is false. The publisher has to prove that it’s true, and in a sexual assault case that effectively means proving, on the balance of probabilities, that the assault happened. That usually means witnesses who are willing to stand up in court, which is exactly what frightened, anonymous sources can’t promise.
Going to the police instead offers little reassurance: police recorded 74,174 rape offences in the year to December 2025, the highest since records began in 2002/3, while charges for rape that year numbered 6,727. Given those odds, plus the legal risk of speaking publicly, it isn’t surprising that many women stay silent.
However, the balance for journalists did shift somewhat with the Harvey Weinstein scandal. The New Yorker’s reporting gave news desks confidence that this sort of thing could be reported, with the right amount of documentary evidence. Weinstein was, in essence, “Al Caponed” - they got him on the payments of settlements to accusers, but the story also showed that a sheer volume of anonymised evidence could also carry weight.
I was involved in one story not long after, in which an MP was accused of sexual harassment. We had approached him on day one with the allegations, and were met, predictably, with a legal threat from his lawyers. After sending further allegations from new complainants over a number of days, his next action was to issue a public apology.
Russell Brand, however, remained a tougher nut to crack. Several things seemed clear. First, he was obviously a predator, and a smart one. He was cautious in how he chose his victims. Often, they were vulnerable characters who didn’t seem likely to talk to a reporter on an anonymous basis, let alone take the witness stand. There was also a lot of consensual sex, which, deliberately on his part or not, acted as a remarkably effective smokescreen. In the laddish culture of the early 2010s, his constant references to this in his live shows and elsewhere were unremarkable.
But his ability to hide in plain sight was only exacerbated by the bizarre metamorphosis he’d undergone throughout the years that I had been investigating him. I don’t know whether this shift was entirely designed to mask his sexual abuse, but it certainly seemed to help.
His journey from shock-jock comic to left-wing cause célèbre began in October 2013, when he guest-edited the New Statesman’s “Revolution” issue and told Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight that he had never voted. Many viewers thought he’d won that confrontation. Over the next two years came a book, Revolution, a YouTube channel, The Trews, and a successful campaign to save the New Era estate in Hackney from eviction. Parts of the progressive commentariat embraced him: he turned up at Guardian news conferences, and he was named one columnist’s “hero” of 2014. By 2017 he was urging young people to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, and telling Emily Maitlis he had contributed to Corbyn’s rise “in some small way”.
What we were witnessing, throughout these years, was a performance. In its own sick way, it was a masterful display of showmanship. As it built momentum, more and more senior figures on the left embraced him, much to my horror.
By this point, I was not the only reporter aware of the allegations against him. Indeed, I was now looking far more closely, alongside another correspondent who had heard much the same as me. Yet these whispers did not seem to deter senior activists; I was told that around 2014 one even went so far as to “bollock” a woman who had tried to steer another activist away from him. Ellie Mae O’Hagan, who was among the women I was talking to over a decade ago, has described on social media how her efforts to dissuade progressive activists from getting too close to Brand resulted in “blazing rows online and in real life,” and “the most egregious misogynistic abuse from my peers.”
And as these senior, often famous figures offered their support for him, so his online following, and the crowds at his shows, grew and grew, becoming ever more passionate.
Brand’s ingratiation was staggering to me because, quite apart from what was being said behind the scenes, the red flags were in plain sight. In November 2014, for instance, a picture of him and the controversial pick-up artist (PUA) Julien Blanc, who had been refused a visa to visit the UK, surfaced. (The UK’s refusal came after the Australian government forced him to leave the country because he had shared photos on social media showing him pretending to choke a series of women under the hashtag #ChokingGirlsAroundTheWorld).
Brand issued a video statement saying that he’d never support Blanc’s ideas and didn’t know who he was. For some reason this explanation landed without dissent, which was curious to me: he’d provided a quote for a book that came to be seen as the ‘bible’ of pick-up artistry, The Game, in which journalist Neil Strauss went undercover in a PUA community, and had repeatedly talked about neurolinguistic programming and other PUA techniques on his radio show.
In its own sick way, it was a masterful display of showmanship
Indeed, quite apart from the private conversations I had, my notes from this period are a litany of public information: an anonymous ex-girlfriend described numerous incidents of controlling, borderline abusive behaviour in a published memoir, and there were numerous instances of him publicly joking about rape and violence against women on various shows.
In 2012, for example, The Sun had even reported how Brand sexually harassed a wardrobe assistant working on the musical What About Dick?. "Russell tried to persuade a wardrobe assistant to show him her breasts, but she was having none of it - at first," claimed The Sun. “But when it started to look like they weren't going to get any work done, she gave in and flashed him. Russell is a charming scoundrel, and everybody let him get away with murder on set.”
Two years after that, a masseuse who said she’d been assaulted by Brand was subject to a permanent injunction after he and his then-girlfriend, Jemima Khan, said that her allegations amounted to harassment. Under its terms, the only people she was allowed to tell about them were the police and her own lawyers. It is my understanding that Khan would be amenable to varying this injunction: Dan Neidle has done excellent work on explaining this extraordinary situation.
But in between, he was guest editing the New Statesman, which had staged a photo of him looking like Christ at the Last Supper, surrounded by its staff.
And so quite apart from the legal barriers to publication, the practical ones were being exacerbated by the sheer buzz around Brand’s smoke and mirrors. It seems ludicrous to say now, but he was an imposing figure with huge mainstream support and a devoted audience. Some of whom, I had no doubt, would not be afraid of enacting physical violence to protect their hero.
This is why the Sunday Times’ work on him is even more impressive than many realise. His victims were scared; they feared him, and they feared his fans’ reaction. No doubt the biggest names among his media cheerleaders and employers who, at the very least, knew something was ‘off ’ with Brand will never be held to account for their role in erecting another barrier to the truth.
Inevitably, more pivots and identities would follow on Brand’s part, all of which make more sense when you consider the trajectory of a predator, who needs both fresh prey and a core base of defenders. The attractive place for men like Brand is a place where the cause overrides all. By 2022, he had moved into anti-lockdown conspiracies and was starting to appeal to MAGA figures, and in the wake of the first allegations finally being made public, he was, of course, a Christian.
I first began discussing my (very limited) progress on the story with Ros Urwin in 2018 - I had moved into news management by this point, and knew she was trying to report the truth too, so I told her the little I knew. I wasn’t confident that anyone could pull it off, but four years later, she and her colleagues eventually delivered a reporting masterclass, finally securing the documentary evidence and consent from the victims that had eluded me and others for so long.
Going back through my notes now, what strikes me is how little of it was hidden. Brand never really tried to conceal the evidence. He simply needed to offer his audience something they wanted more: be it a revolution, a nebulous cause, or a redemption allegory - and each time a new crowd began to cluster around him.
Brand should induce shame. Shame that reporters were frustrated by the law, and demonised by his cult. Shame for the indifference of those who, finding him amusing, suspended their critical faculties and so gave a rapist a free pass.
In November 2026, a jury at Southwark Crown Court found him guilty of one count of rape and three of sexual assault, and cleared him of two further counts of rape and one of attempted indecent assault. That justice belongs to Ros Urwin, Charlotte Wace and, above all, the women who gave evidence. But it’s worth asking how much sooner it might have come if fewer people had been enjoying the show.
