Russell Brand verdict a landmark victory for our understanding of consent – Gaby Hinsliff

Russell Brand's rape and sexual assault convictions uphold the vital principle that women can say 'no' — even after they’ve said 'yes'

Even after several outrages, Russell Brand continued to rise to fame as the presenter of Channel 4's 'Big Brother's Big Mouth' in 2006. File picture: Yui Mok/PA

Sat, 07 Nov, 2026 - 06:20

Gaby Hinsliff

With all the sanctimony a born-again Christian rapist can muster, Russell Brand paused on his way into court last week to address reporters. Britain was, he told them piously, “blessed” to have a legal system capable of accommodating truth and justice.

Well, amen to that: The former comedian learned on Thursday that he will serve a substantial jail sentence, having been convicted of one count of rape and three of sexual assault. It might be a landmark verdict for our understanding of consent.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when comedy was the new ‘rock’n’roll’, and Brand would casually cherrypick girls from the crowd at his gigs, he could surely have had all the willing sex he wanted. Yet he seemingly got his kicks from the unwilling, who were forced across boundaries.

'You’re dirty' he texted his rape victim

“You’re dirty and I wanna push you further,” he texted one victim, months after raping her anally and saving her number in his phone under ‘T’ for ‘Tart’.

The woman — who was in her early 20s when she first gave him oral sex backstage after a gig, and had gone a few days later to his house for what began as consensual sex, but soon became something very different — responded angrily via text that he’d treated her “like an animal”.

For too long, cases involving young women who alleged rape, having initially gone willingly to the bedrooms of rich or famous men, have ended in sour, uneasy acquittals.

Well, not any more. This verdict upholds the principle that consent to one thing is not consent to everything; that women still have the right to say ‘no’, even if they have in the past said ‘yes’.

Police probing further allegations

Not all of his six accusers — strangers to each other, until this case brought them together in the most wretched of circumstances — got the verdict they wanted.

The jury acquitted Brand of two further counts of rape and one of attempted indecent assault. But in the ‘court’ of public opinion, there will be little mercy for Brand, nor perhaps for the industry that sheltered and indulged him.

After his conviction, the police revealed that he is under investigation for two further rape allegations.

How did he get away with it?

How did Brand get away with it for so long? The same way as the other celebrities who have been belatedly exposed, along with some who haven’t yet: Expensive lawyers, corporate tolerance for the excesses of men making big money, the misplaced shame of women worrying that somehow it might have been their fault, and toxic workplaces where junior women knew it was pointless even complaining.

Several of his victims worked in the media in the 2000s, and I remember that era well. The nagging fear wasn’t just that you might not be believed if you complained of sexual harassment, but that you might be believed, and that then it would be you, rather than him, who got sacked.

Enda Brady: Russell Brand has joined a long list of abusers hiding in plain sight

Convicted rapist Russell Brand spends first night in cell and faces years more

Russell Brand: A chaotic rise to fame mired in as much scandal as downfall

One victim, groped in front of four of Brand’s entourage of hangers-on, said none intervened to help her; instead, one started laughing, as if to break the tension.

I knew what she meant when she explained that she hadn’t reported it to her boss, because it was the sort of workplace where they rated the women on how they looked.

Brand’s former PA, Helen Berger, told the court he would interrupt work on a deadline to ask if he could “go and have sex now”, like a spoilt child whining for an iPad; yet his behaviour was normalised and tolerated by everyone around him.

Think about that when the usual suspects are complaining about the new laws that came in to force in the UK at the end of October which require employers to take all reasonable steps to protect staff from sexual harassment, both by colleagues and clients.

That change in the law didn’t just fall out of the sky: It’s the result of years of bitter female experience of just how little some employers care.

'Transgressions always followed by promotion'

As the BBC’s Lorraine Heggessey once said of Brand, his transgressions were always followed by promotion.

The outrage he created was the very thing that mainstream media, desperate to seem more louche and edgy, craved: The more he pushed the boundaries, the more he seemed to be professionally in demand, even as he spun obviously out of control.

At the height of a raging heroin addiction, he was sacked by MTV for arriving at work dressed as Osama bin Laden, accompanied by his drug dealer. Hired instead by XFM, he was promptly fired again, this time for reading porn on air.

After getting sober, he went on to present Channel 4’s Big Brother spinoff shows, write a football blog for the Guardian, and present a show for staid old BBC Radio 2.

He had to resign after he and his co-star, Jonathan Ross, made crude prank calls to the actor Andrew Sachs.

When Brand’s luck ran out with the mainstream media, he reinvented himself as a radical-left guru on YouTube, where people who should have known better still paid homage. (Ed Miliband, who as British Labour Party leader went on Brand’s show in 2015, has since stressed that he wouldn’t have done so if he’d known about the rape allegations.)

Even after Channel 4’s Dispatches aired Russell Brand: In Plain Sight in the autumn of 2023, he moved to Florida and found a new niche on the Maga circuit, seemingly discovering both religion and a range of populist conspiracy theories.

Did all those resurrections make him feel untouchable? Only towards the very end of the trial, in a rambling appearance in the dock, where he begged the jury’s forgiveness for what he called “reckless philandering”, did something seemingly start to unravel.

Jury sets Russell Brand's victims free

In court, one of his victims said of being raped by him that, because they had previously had consensual sex, “I didn’t feel I had as much right to feel as bad about it as I did.”

Now, a jury of her peers has given her that precious right back, along with so many other women down the years who will recognise the feeling she describes.

If Russell Brand’s world felt to him like one delightful “amusement park of orgasms”, as he once said, for too many women it must have been more like being trapped in a fairground house of horrors. Now, at last, a jury has set them free.