I hated Russell Brand from the night I watched Katy Perry cry beneath a stage in São Paulo. This week a London jury found him guilty of rape and three sexual assaults.
The night in São Paulo
The scene that did it comes near the end of Katy Perry: Part of Me, her 2012 documentary about the California Dreams tour. It was filmed in São Paulo in September 2011, as her 14-month marriage to Brand was falling apart.
Early in the film he is there. He visits her backstage, all smiles, and picks her up in his car. Then he simply disappears from the story.
By the time the cameras reach Brazil, she is curled up in a dressing room, sobbing, while her team stands around not knowing what to do. She comes close to cancelling the show. Then the film cuts to her in full costume on the lift beneath the stage, still crying, as thousands of fans scream above her head.
The platform rises. She smiles. She sings.
I remember watching that and thinking: I’m done with him. That was the day I stopped finding Russell Brand charming, and I never started again.
Why it stuck
It wasn’t just the tears. It was how cold the ending felt. Brand filed for divorce at the end of December 2011, and Perry later said the news came to her by text message.
And she kept going. She finished the tour, and later explained that cancelling would have punished fans who had waited months to see her. She put the heartbreak on pause for two hours a night and picked it back up when the lights went down.
A few months later came Wide Awake, with a video in which she fights her way out of a maze as its walls close in and knocks out a Prince Charming. Perry said it reflected how she had felt since the split, and she never had to name him once.
To be fair, none of this was a crime. Ending a marriage badly is not against the law, and divorces often look crueller from the outside than they are. But it told me something about how he treated the person closest to him, and I couldn’t unsee it.
The verdict
On Thursday 5 November 2026, a jury at Southwark Crown Court found Brand, now 51, guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. He was cleared of the other three charges he faced.
The seven charges involved six women and spanned 1999 to 2009. All six are entitled to lifelong anonymity, and none of them is Katy Perry. Every conviction relates to 2004 to 2009, the years he was becoming one of Britain’s most in-demand presenters.
| Year | Where | Charge | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | His then-home in London, after meeting her at a comedy show | Rape | Guilty |
| 2009 | While working on a Channel 4 project | Sexual assault of a woman working with him | Guilty |
| 2004 or 2005 | Choice FM studios, London | Sexual assault | Guilty |
| 2004 | A bar in London | Sexual assault | Guilty |
| Not given | A bar toilet in London, same woman as the 2004 bar assault | Rape | Not guilty |
| 2001 | Not given | Attempted indecent assault | Not guilty |
| 1999 | A Bournemouth hotel during the Labour Party conference | Rape | Not guilty |
The trial had been expected to run for up to 12 weeks. It took about a month. The judge, Mr Justice Bennathan, refused bail and told Brand a significant prison term would follow, so he spent Thursday night in a cell.
An open secret
The most uncomfortable part of this story is how many people seem to have known. Some of the women described his behaviour as an open secret, and the BBC’s senior UK correspondent says the obvious question now is whether employers and colleagues looked away.
The criminal case exists because journalists dug. The Metropolitan Police opened its investigation in September 2023, after reporting by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches. The women in that reporting were different from those in the trial, and Brand denied their allegations. But without that reporting, there would have been no investigation at all.
Now the broadcasters that made him famous are issuing statements. The BBC has repeated its apology from a January 2025 review of eight misconduct allegations dating from his time there in 2006 to 2008. Channel 4, where he assaulted a woman working on a 2009 project, says it recognises the deep harm done. Its news director said the verdict belongs to every woman who spoke out, in court and in the 2023 investigation.
A comedian who shared an agent with Brand in the 1990s told the BBC that his attitude to women was appalling. He said Brand could swing from charming to angry and threatening when he didn’t get his way. If a fellow comic on the circuit could see it, how many others did, and said nothing?
The man in the dock
The Brand in that courtroom was nothing like the one I remember from the documentary. BBC reporters describe a man who sat almost motionless, staring straight ahead, showing no reaction as the evidence was laid out. He held doors open and thanked the court staff.
The women gave their evidence from behind a screen, their voices sometimes shaking. Brand took the stand himself and answered questions about his sexual past. His wife Laura gave evidence for the defence, and he denied every charge.
Online, the performance carried on. Throughout the trial his accounts posted videos about faith and prayer to millions of followers. In one he said he felt God’s presence walking into court; in another, he and Laura complimented each other’s courtroom outfits. Laura said they read psalms on the way in, and dismissed the media coverage as too evil to engage with.
When the prison van pulled away on Thursday, someone in the crowd shouted at him to hold on to Jesus. His father, Ron, told the BBC he was shocked by the verdicts and called them wrong and devastating.
I don’t doubt a father’s grief. But I kept thinking about the four women a jury believed, and how many years they carried this before anyone listened.
Why my grudge doesn’t matter
It would be easy to write “I always knew.” I didn’t. I disliked a man for the way his marriage ended, and that is not evidence of anything.
The jury didn’t convict him because people found him unpleasant. It weighed the evidence charge by charge, and it cleared him on three of them. That matters too, because justice that runs on vibes isn’t justice.
What strikes me now is where all our attention went. In 2012, millions of us watched one famous woman cry over a famous man and felt we knew exactly who he was. Meanwhile, four women nobody had heard of were carrying something far worse, and they would carry it for well over a decade more.
Those women are the story here. Not Katy Perry, and certainly not my old grudge. They walked into a courtroom, faced a man with millions of followers, and relived the worst moments of their lives in front of the world’s press.
The Met’s Detective Superintendent Andy Furphy said the conviction should send a message that “no one is above the law”, however famous or powerful they are. I hope he’s right. Fame protected Russell Brand for a very long time. On Thursday, it finally didn’t.
What happens next
Brand will be sentenced at Southwark Crown Court on Monday, 9 November 2026. The judge has already said a significant prison term is coming, and the BBC’s correspondent expects his release to be many years away.
It may not end there. Now that the verdicts are in, it can be reported that Brand is under investigation over rape allegations from two more women, and police have already questioned him. Those allegations have not been tested in court.
If any of this is close to home for you, support is available: Rape Crisis in England and Wales on 0808 500 2222, or RAINN in the US on 800-656-4673.
Sources
- BBC News live coverage, “Russell Brand found guilty of rape and three sexual assaults”, 5 November 2026: verdicts, charges, statements and courtroom reporting.
- Rolling Stone Brasil: the São Paulo backstage scene in Part of Me
- Rolling Stone Brasil: Katy Perry on why she didn’t cancel the São Paulo show
- Business Recorder: review of Katy Perry: Part of Me
- ABC News: the Wide Awake video and the divorce
