Hollywood

What Was Russell Brand Truly Punished For?

Russell Brand’s victims waited nearly 20 years for justice while the BBC and Channel 4 ignored complaints and profited from him. He is now held to account. Who will hold them to account?

Husam Sam Asi 9 November 2026, 11:54 · Updated 9 November 2026, 14:15

Russell Brand speaks at Turning Point USA\'s Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida, July 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

Russell Brand is due to be sentenced at Southwark Crown Court today, after a jury convicted him last Thursday of one rape and three sexual assaults against four women between 2004 and 2009. The judge refused him bail and warned that the rape alone means “a significant custodial sentence”. The man who once sold out arenas spent the weekend in a prison cell.

Justice, at last. But the question nobody in that courtroom answered is why it took twenty years. Brand committed these crimes in plain sight, while the BBC, Channel 4 and the tabloids grew rich on his act. His victims stayed silent for as long as the system that made him was protecting him. They spoke only when that system turned against him.

Russell being Russell

Brand never hid his appetites. He sold them, on air, on stage and in his memoirs, where he boasted that the controller of Radio 2 “loved me and gave me lots of room, so I took that room”. She denies favouring him. A BBC employee made a formal complaint about him in 2007, and the corporation’s own review now admits that it “was not investigated as it should have been”. Staff felt “there was no point in complaining”. In 2008, a woman at the BBC’s Los Angeles bureau says Brand exposed himself to her in a bathroom before a show. He then talked about it on air. Nobody acted until 2019.

Channel 4 buried a staff member’s 2009 allegation. It was “not escalated… nor investigated as it should have been”, its then chief executive, Alex Mahon, admitted in 2024. On Big Brother’s Big Mouth, lawyers hired by the production company found his conduct was tolerated as “Russell being Russell”, and staff felt unable to raise concerns.

Hollywood bought the same act and repackaged it as redemption. In 2011, newly married to Katy Perry, Brand told UKScreen that “love completely changed me”, that he believed in God and that fame “doesn’t answer any of the problems of the heart or the questions of the soul”. The rape he has now been convicted of took place at his home in 2009.

Husam Sam Asi with Russell Brand during promotion for Rock of Ages, June 2012.

The week the system changed sides

Then Brand changed sides. He left Hollywood comedies behind for a channel on Rumble, where millions watched him rail against the “mainstream media”, vaccine mandates and the government. In September 2023, three pillars of that mainstream, the Sunday Times, the Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches, published their joint investigation into his past. Within days YouTube cut off his advertising income, and the chair of Parliament’s culture committee, Dame Caroline Dinenage, wrote to Rumble asking whether he could still earn money there. Rumble called her letter “extremely disturbing”. There was no charge and no trial, yet the punishment had already begun.

Only then did the women come. The Metropolitan Police opened its investigation after those reports and was then “contacted by a number of women who were not known to each other”. They had kept silent for fifteen to twenty years. They spoke when they could see that the institutions were finally on their side.

His American admirers call it a plot. Tucker Carlson claimed that “governments colluded to shut down and destroy Russell Brand”. Yet a unanimous jury heard more than 100 witnesses, acquitted him on three counts and convicted him on four. The crimes were real. The only thing the system chose was the moment.

Ice cream in the Sahara

Hollywood ran on the same rules. Actresses regularly asked me to introduce them to Harvey Weinstein. When I did, they melted in front of him like ice cream in the Sahara. His right-hand woman once told me that she used to be disgusted by the women who threw themselves at him. That was the measure of his power: careers depended on his favour, and everyone around him knew what his favour could cost.

His behaviour was an open secret, and Hollywood laughed about it in public. Announcing the Oscar nominations in January 2013, Seth MacFarlane told the five best supporting actress nominees: “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” The room roared. Nobody acted. Hollywood turned on him only in October 2017, when his films had stopped winning Oscars and his company was sinking. It cast him out within days, and five months later the Weinstein Company was bankrupt, after a rescue deal collapsed over debts it had hidden.

Epstein’s deal

The courts are part of the same machine. In 2008, dozens of girls told police that Jeffrey Epstein had sexually abused them. Prosecutors let the billionaire off with a slap on the wrist: about 13 months in a county jail, which he was allowed to leave most days to go to his office. They also promised not to prosecute anyone who had helped him, and they hid the deal from the girls who had complained. A judge later ruled that hiding it from them was against the law. To this day, Ghislaine Maxwell is the only one of his circle ever convicted. Everyone else who helped him has walked free.

The lesson of all three cases is brutal. The victims of powerful men get justice only when those men become expendable. Brand’s victims waited until he became the establishment’s enemy. Weinstein’s waited until his films stopped winning. Epstein’s are still waiting. And somewhere today, other women will watch Brand’s sentence and do the same grim arithmetic: their abuser is still useful to somebody.