By Michael Holden
LONDON, Oct 27 (Reuters) – British comedian and actor Russell Brand told police that he had never engaged in any non-consensual sexual activity despite encounters in countless locations and scenarios, a London court was told on Tuesday.
Brand, once one of Britain’s most high-profile broadcasters and the former husband of US singer Katy Perry, is on trial at London’s Southwark Crown Court over accusations of sexual offences against six women between 1999 and 2009.
The 51-year-old has denied all the allegations.
BRAND CLEARED OF ONE COUNT, NEW CHARGE BROUGHT
He is accused of three counts of rape and three of sexual assault and, on Tuesday, the judge instructed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty over an allegation of indecent assault. However, he will now face a new charge of attempted indecent assault over that alleged incident.
The jury had previously been told how all the women came forward to detectives after a documentary was broadcast in 2023 along with a number of newspaper articles about him.
The prosecution has set out its case that Brand was a ruthless predator and the former comedian is expected to set out his defence on Wednesday.
But on Tuesday the court was told for the first time of his responses to the allegations.
Prosecutors read prepared statements Brand gave to police during four interviews held between September 2023 and July 2025 following those allegations.
In these statements, he said that “defamatory and fictitious” documentary and newspaper reports which contained “false, anonymised allegations” against him had led to the media and police inviting other allegations against him.
This, he said, had paved the way for “further incidents to be reinvented or reimagined”.
“I have never engaged in any non-consensual sexual activity,” his statement said.
He said he had repeatedly stated that he had been very promiscuous in the past, behaviour he now denounced. He said he had had sex in toilet cubicles at parties, and had engaged in sexual encounters in “countless locations and scenarios often with people I have just met”.
“Those encounters were always consensual,” he said.
The jury has heard accusations that Brand raped a woman after meeting her at a fringe event at the Labour Party conference in 1999, forced a woman to give him oral sex in toilets at a London bar in 2004, and had molested another woman at a radio station in 2004 or 2005.
He is also accused of trying to pull a woman into the male toilets at MTV Europe, in London, where she was working in 2001, and that in 2009 he anally raped a woman who had agreed to consensual sex at his home.
The final allegation is that he assaulted a woman who was working at the Channel 4 TV station where they were involved in a recording project. She says she was forced into giving him a massage during which he put his head between her legs.
(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
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