At Southwark Crown Court on Monday, 19 October, the jury heard a police-recorded interview in which a woman said Russell Brand sexually assaulted her at a Soho bar in 2004, less than a minute after they met, then took her into a toilet and orally raped her. Brand, 51, denies it. He faces seven counts — three of rape, three of sexual assault and one of indecent assault — involving six women between 1999 and 2009. He has pleaded not guilty. A hearing is not a verdict.

The Guardian and The Independent write that the woman, the third complainant, is not named in public. She told police they were talking about Big Brother, with no flirting, when he allegedly grabbed her breasts and had a grin “like a clown”. Then, she said, he took her arm and pulled her into the toilets. In the recording she said she told him she did not want to and that she froze. Those are interview statements, not findings of the court.

Brand sat still in the dock while the pre-recorded interview was played. The Independent notes that his wife, Laura Gallacher, accompanied him to court. The trial is in its second week.

The woman said 2023 reporting on alleged sexual misconduct led her to go to the police. The Independent writes that she was in her twenties in 2004. We have not published her name; the sources do not give it.

In cross-examination, Brand’s barrister, Ian Winter KC, suggested she had happily accompanied him to the toilets and had been excited and charmed to meet him. She replied that she had not been charmed in the slightest: she had met him for a minute before the assault she described. That is the dispute before the jury, not a conclusion of ours.

At the opening of the trial the prosecution, through Riel Karmy-Jones KC, described Brand as a calculated sexual predator. That is the prosecutor’s case, not a sentence. The jury has not spoken. The trial continues.

Image: Southwark Crown Court, London, 14 November 2017, Jorge Franganillo, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The building, not the courtroom; the person in frame is not Brand.

Sources consulted: Russell Brand had ‘maniacal grin’ as he dragged woman into toilet and raped her, court told — The Guardian; Russell Brand had ‘big grin’ as he grabbed woman’s breasts and dragged her into toilet and raped her, woman claims — The Independent.