Russell Brand Trial Turns on a 2004 Soho Claim

A woman told a London jury on 19 October that Russell Brand forced her into oral sex in a locked Soho toilet in 2004. The former Big Brother’s Big Mouth presenter, 51, denies that claim and six other sexual offence charges involving six women. He says every encounter was consensual.

The account, given on the sixth day of the trial at Southwark Crown Court, sits in the year Brand’s Channel 4 fame took off. His barrister put to the woman that they went into the cubicle for a kiss and a cuddle and stopped because the floor was filthy. She said she was dragged there against her will.

She Says He Grinned Like a Clown in a Soho Toilet

The woman, known only as complainant three, was in her 20s and working for MTV when she went to a birthday party at the Nordic Bar in Soho in July 2004. She had asked a friend to introduce her, she told police, because she thought Brand was funny on Big Brother’s Big Mouth. Within a minute of talking, she said, he grabbed her breasts.

“He literally just grabbed my boobs, out of nowhere, just in the middle of a conversation and I just remember this weird maniacal grin, looming in front of me,” she said in a recorded police interview played to the jury. “I was completely in shock and was like ‘what the hell are you doing? I’ve literally just met you’. Then literally he grabbed my arm and dragged me into the toilets.”

She described Brand looking “like a clown, (with) that sort of weird look in the eye.” The floor of the cubicle was flooded, she said. He jumped onto the closed lid, unzipped his trousers, and pushed her head down. She said she told him she did not want to do it. She said he answered, “come on, come on, don’t be a spoilsport,” or words close to that, and would not let her go.

Survival, she said, tried to kick in: do what he says, then you are out of here and it is done. She told the court she froze. After the alleged rape a man knocked on the door and asked if she was all right. Brand unlocked it and walked out, she said, then turned and suggested they swap numbers “like it was just all normal.”

She said she felt numb, hunted for a friend, and was then steered into the back of a car she believes was hired by Big Brother producer Endemol, heading for an after-party in Camden, with Brand beside her. She said he exposed himself again and told her to “come on, suck it.” She said no, and that this time he took the refusal.

Giving evidence from behind a screen, she told Ian Winter KC, Brand’s barrister, that she had drunk six or seven vodka, lime and sodas. “I was tipsy. I wasn’t paralytic,” she said. Asked if she had been looking forward to meeting him, she said she was not a giddy schoolgirl. Asked if she had gone into the toilet of her own accord, she said: “I don’t agree. I was dragged there against my will.”

She broke down as she described coming out of the cubicle. “I was in shock and my mind wasn’t functioning properly. I was in shock, I was completely paralysed. I was in a daze. I was frozen and numb. My whole body was about to shut down.” Later she told the jury it was almost like watching a film of something happening to you.

Why She Waited 19 Years to Call Police

She rang the police 19 years after the party, in 2023, and told them she had been raped. She said she hoped the call would be cathartic. She denied that a television documentary about Brand had pushed her to do it. For years, she said, she had not told the whole story because she felt ashamed, even though she did not think it was her fault. “I wanted to change the narrative so I wasn’t a victim in my head,” she said.

Winter asked why she had waited nearly two decades, and why she had not spoken to police during the 2016 #MeToo wave, when he said women were examining whether they had been assaulted by famous men. Prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC objected that the proposition was too sweeping, and Mr Justice Bennathan agreed. The woman still answered.

In those days, he was a celebrity and it would be his word against mine. I would be ostracised in my work environment or friends. I just thought the odds weren’t in my favour and I didn’t want to have to go through a court where somebody is tearing down my character. I know it’s all very different now. In those days, you just weren’t believed as a woman and it was a lad culture of ‘you were wearing this, so you were asking for it’ and all that rubbish we were told back then.

The third complainant, evidence at Southwark Crown Court, 19 October 2026

The thought of reporting it “terrified me,” she said. She had hoped somebody else would go first. “When you’re one little voice, you’re not sure if you’re going to be heard or believed.” She said she did not, at the time, realise that forced oral sex would be classed as rape.

She told the jury she had given friends and family a softer version over the years, in which she got away before being raped. She also said that when MTV hired Brand again in 2006, about two years after the bar, she was appalled and told a colleague he was a “sexual predator.” Winter suggested the pair had abandoned a consensual fumble because the toilet was flooded, and that Brand did not expose himself in the car. He also told jurors that Brand has no memory of the night.

Seven Charges Built in Two Waves

Brand faces seven charges from six women: three counts of rape, three of sexual assault, and one of indecent assault, alleged between 1999 and 2009. He has pleaded not guilty to all of them. The women have lifelong anonymity. Karmy-Jones told the jury they did not know each other, have never met, and came forward independently.

On 14 October she opened the case by calling Brand ruthless, calculated and manipulative, and a sexual predator with an indiscriminate and voracious desire for sex. She said a former flatmate, Mark Pinheiro, would say Brand wanted to sleep with 5,000 women and claimed the way to do it was to tell them what they needed to hear. The alleged scenes, she said, were a hotel room, workplaces, a toilet cubicle in a bar, and Brand’s home, across the decade his public profile took off.

THE SEVEN COUNTS

The indictment was not built in one sitting. On 4 April 2025, Jaswant Narwal of the Crown Prosecution Service authorised the first five charges, involving four women and alleged offences between 1999 and 2005. Narwal said prosecutors had reviewed a Metropolitan Police file that followed “the broadcast of a Channel 4, Sunday Times and Times investigation in September 2023.” Brand appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 2 May 2025 and pleaded not guilty to those five counts at Southwark on 30 May 2025.

On 23 December 2025, Lionel Idan, Chief Crown Prosecutor, authorised two further charges, a rape and a sexual assault, involving two more women and alleged offences in 2009. Brand appeared by video link on 20 January 2026 and pleaded not guilty to the new counts on 24 February 2026. The trial, moved from June, opened with jury selection on 12 October 2026. Eight men and four women were sworn.

Endemol Left Informal Complaints Unheard

The Soho count is not a workplace charge, but it is a workplace-adjacent one. The woman worked for MTV. Brand was in the room because of Big Brother’s Big Mouth. The car she says she was put into, she believes, belonged to Endemol, the company then making those Channel 4 shows. That is the fame machine the prosecution says was growing at the same time as his sense of entitlement.

On 14 June 2024, Banijay UK, which now owns Endemol, published the findings of a Lewis Silkin inquiry into Brand’s years on EFourum, later Big Brother’s Big Mouth, Kings of Comedy (2004 to 2006) and Big Brother’s Celebrity Hijack (2008). Investigators spent 385 hours on interviews and files after the 16 September 2023 Dispatches film Russell Brand: In Plain Sight.

WHAT THE ENDEMOL INQUIRY FOUND

• Formal complaints: None were raised about Brand on those programmes.
• Informal complaints: Staff raised concerns about him asking runners for audience phone numbers and about female crew feeling uncomfortable; those informal complaints were not escalated or adequately addressed.
• Process: There was no clear escalation route then, and little training on respect at work, the code of conduct, or ethics.
• Contracts: Brand’s Endemol deals did not ban sex with people he worked with, contrary to what Dispatches and the newspapers had alleged.
• After the film: Two people used Banijay’s confidential lines; neither chose to give further information.

Patrick Holland, Banijay UK’s chief executive, said Endemol had support and escalation procedures, but they were not understood or followed to the standard expected now.

We are extremely sorry to anyone who was impacted by this behaviour and felt unable to speak up or that their voice was not properly heard.

Patrick Holland, CEO, Banijay UK, 14 June 2024

That finding does not decide the Nordic Bar count. It does show what “lad culture” looked like on the productions that made Brand a star in the same years the third complainant says she stayed silent.

He Told Police the Accounts Were Imagined

Brand’s answer, already read to the jury from a prepared statement he gave police, is that he has never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity, and that the accounts were reinvented or imagined after a defamatory documentary and the press that followed it. He declined to answer questions in interview and handed over written statements instead, the prosecution said.

After the first charges in April 2025 he posted a video saying he had been a drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile, but that he had never been a rapist. “I’ve never engaged in nonconsensual activity,” he said. In September 2023, before Dispatches aired, he had already called the allegations very serious criminal claims that he refuted, and said his sexual relationships in that period were always consensual.

Winter’s cross-examination of the third complainant ran on that track without waiting for the defence case. He put a consensual trip to a filthy toilet, a man with no memory of the night, and a 19-year gap that closed only after a film about Brand. The woman put a locked door, a clown grin, a car, and a culture that told her she would not be believed. Those are now the two stories the jury has on counts three and four.

The louder public argument around the trial has been about Brand’s later politics and faith, as if the indictment were a referendum on the person he became after 2009. The indictment stops in 2009. The live fight in Court is older than that: whether six separate accounts from the years he was becoming famous are memory recovered, or memory rewritten.

The Trial Is Listed for Six Weeks

The court has been told the case is expected to last six weeks. Prosecution evidence is listed to run for some time before Winter opens the defence. Brand, of Oxfordshire, is on bail. He has arrived some mornings with his wife, Laura Gallacher. On 19 October the jury was also shown a floor plan of the Nordic Bar, mapping the chat, the toilets, and the way out.

HOW THE CASE REACHED SOUTHWARK

1. 16 September 2023: Channel 4 airs Dispatches film Russell Brand: In Plain Sight, with a Times and Sunday Times investigation; the Metropolitan Police later receive reports of sexual offences.
2. 4 April 2025: The CPS authorises five charges relating to four women and alleged offences between 1999 and 2005.
3. 30 May 2025: Brand pleads not guilty to those five counts at Southwark Crown Court.
4. 23 December 2025: The CPS authorises a further rape charge and a further sexual assault charge, relating to two more women and alleged offences in 2009.
5. 24 February 2026: He pleads not guilty to the two new counts.
6. 12 October 2026: The trial opens; the prosecution case begins on 14 October; the third complainant gives evidence on 19 October.

Karmy-Jones told the jury that when they hear the women they will find the evidence compelling. Brand’s prepared line is that nothing non-consensual happened, and that the film came first. He denies all seven charges. The trial continues.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on an active criminal trial and is for information only. It is not legal advice, and it does not decide guilt or innocence on any count. Russell Brand has pleaded not guilty to all seven charges and has the right to a fair trial; the allegations are unproven unless a jury finds otherwise. Readers with a legal interest in the case, or in reporting restrictions around sexual offence complainants, should consult a qualified solicitor. Names, charges, dates and statuses are those given in court and in Crown Prosecution Service statements and may change as the trial proceeds.