Russell Brand’s trial so far

After three weeks at Southwark, one charge against Russell Brand has been thrown out and replaced with a lesser one, he has given evidence for more than four hours, and on Tuesday twelve citizens will begin deciding his fate. The rest of us decided it three years ago, on the strength of a television programme. That ought to worry you, whatever you think of the man.

Every morning for three weeks a car has drawn up outside Southwark Crown Court, and out has climbed a man with the hair of a disgraced Regency poet and the vocabulary of a thesaurus that has been left out in the rain, holding his wife’s hand. The photographers bellow. He says something gnomic: “Today is the day for truth and justice.” Then he goes inside, sits in a glass box and listens while strangers describe, in close and harrowing detail, things they say he did to them twenty years ago. In the evening, as often as not, he and his wife sit on a porch and talk to the internet about Jesus.

This week he came out of the glass box and into the witness box, and the trial of Russell Brand moved into its final act.

Brand, 51, faces seven charges involving six women between 1999 and 2009: three of rape, three of sexual assault and one of attempted indecent assault. He denies every one of them. That last charge is not the one he went into court facing. The original count of indecent assault has gone, replaced by a lesser one, and I shall explain why in a moment. A jury of eight men and four women, sworn in on 13 October after six prospective jurors were excused because they could remember the 2023 Channel 4 documentary that set all this in motion, will hear the defence’s closing speech on Monday. Mr Justice Bennathan expects them to retire to consider their verdicts on Tuesday, 3 November, and he will accept only unanimous verdicts.

Let me say at once what I can and cannot do in this column, because it is rather the point of it. I can tell you what the jury has heard. I can tell you what each side has said. I cannot tell you which of the women I believe, or which of the allegations I think will stand up, because the law of contempt forbids it while the jury is still out, and quite right too. What I can tell you is that Southwark has produced, over three weeks, some of the most extraordinary evidence heard in an English courtroom in years, and that almost none of it resembles the story the rest of us were told in 2023.

Read the full article on Jay Beecher’s Substack.