Nov 5 2026 - 5:00pm
Russell Brand has been found guilty of one count of rape and three of sexual assault. Even his most diehard fans should not be surprised: few men in the public eye have been so open about their predatory behaviour and obsession with sex. Indeed it’s since been reported that Brand has been accused of raping two more women, including a 16-year-old girl, and may face further charges.
The fact that he got away with it for so long speaks volumes about his sense of impunity. Many sexual predators hide their behaviour from family and friends, but Brand revelled in playing the libertine. On stage, he boasted about his preferred age range being “from 16 to death”, telling women in the audience they could probably have sex with him. And he used his celebrity to create a culture in which other people were roped in to enable his predatory behaviour.
A former personal assistant described how she was expected to collect phone numbers from female fans. Her recollection that “everyone normalised and dismissed his behaviour” goes to the heart of why it’s so hard to bring sexual predators to account in Britain. Rape prosecution rates are low and convictions even lower, not least because of widespread suspicion of women who say they have been assaulted.
No one, witnessing Brand boast about his gargantuan sexual appetite, should have seen anything but a series of enormous red flags. Yet the more outrageously he behaved, the more he was lionised. The New Statesman even invited him to guest-edit the magazine. It included an “essay” by Brand, treating a notoriously sleazy comedian as though he were a noted intellectual.
That was in 2013, five years after a series of scandals that should have ended his career for good. In 2008, Brand “joked” on BBC Radio 2 about exposing himself to a woman who worked in the same building in Los Angeles. It was a public admission of indecent exposure, yet Brand clearly believed he would face no consequences. He was right.
Later that year, also on Radio 2, he and Jonathan Ross made a series of prank calls to the elderly actor Andrew Sachs. When Sachs did not pick up the phone, they left lewd messages on his answering machine, boasting about Brand having sex with his granddaughter. Thousands of people complained, Brand was sacked, two senior BBC figures resigned and the corporation was fined £150,000 by Ofcom.
Inexplicably, however, his career prospered. “As his profile grew, so too did his sense of entitlement,” Detective Superintendent Andy Furphy said after the rape case. Now, as Brand faces a long prison sentence, all the people who excused and indulged him for so many years should reflect on their own part in his career of pitiless predation.
The comedian told them what he was, time after time, and they chose not to believe him. And it was women, lacking his fame and status, who paid the price.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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