Russell Brand pleads not guilty to charges of rape and sexual assault
British actor and comedian Russell Brand has pleaded not guilty in a London court Friday to rape and sexual assault charges involving four women dating back more than 25 years.
Brand, who turns 50 next week, denied two counts of rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault. He said "not guilty' after each charge was read in Southwark Crown Court.
His trial is scheduled for 3 June 2026 and is expected to last four to five weeks.
Prosecutors said the offenses took place between 1999 and 2005 — one in the English seaside town of Bournemouth and the other three in London.
Brand is accused of raping a woman at a hotel room in Bournemouth when she attended a 1999 Labour Party conference and met him at an event where he was performing. The woman alleged that Brand stripped while she was in the bathroom and when she returned to the room he pushed her on the bed, removed her underwear and raped her.
A second woman said Brand grabbed her forearm and attempted to drag her into a men's toilet at a television station in London in 2001.
The third accuser was a television employee who met Brand at a birthday party in a bar in 2004, where he allegedly grabbed her breasts before pulling her into a toilet and forcing her to perform oral sex.
The final accuser worked at a radio station and met Brand while he was working on a spin-off of the 'Big Brother' reality television program between 2004 and 2005. She said Brand grabbed her by the face with both hands, pushed her against a wall and kissed her before groping her breasts and buttocks.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
LeMonde
2 hours ago
- LeMonde
Champions League final: Paris will see an unprecedented police deployment
French authorities have aimed to dispel the unenviable memory of the 2022 UEFA Champions League final, held at the Stade de France, a major stadium in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. That day, the match between Real Madrid and Liverpool turned into a security fiasco, with hundreds of Spanish and British fans being attacked, robbed and assaulted, all while the police officers present appeared overwhelmed by the events. Therefore, the deployment of 5,400 police officers and gendarmes throughout Paris, for the period around the match between Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and Inter Milan, held in Munich and scheduled for Saturday, May 31, is set to be as much about security as it is about political considerations – as well as about France's international image. The government, and, above all, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, face a three-fold challenge. For weeks now, several meetings have been held at the Paris Police Prefecture, the nerve center of security for a sporting event that has been deemed high-risk. To ensure that it goes ahead without a hitch, the authorities have called in large numbers of law enforcement personnel, including mobile gendarmes, riot police, intervention units and transit police. In addition, plainclothes officers have also been prepared for deployment, and they have received clear orders from Paris' Public Security Directorate. Plainclothes teams "will be primarily tasked with fighting crime, by detecting and suppressing pickpocketing, violent theft and other assaults that could target spectators and fans in public transport. The security operation will have to be particularly proactive and result in the systematic arrests of offenders."
France 24
a day ago
- France 24
Comedian Russell Brand pleads not guilty to rape, sexual assault charges
The media personality turned anti-establishment influencer faces one count of rape, one of oral rape, two of sexual assault and one of indecent assault between 1999 and 2005, involving four women. Crowds were waiting as Brand, 49, arrived at Southwark Crown Court in an open-buttoned shirt and dark blazer for the plea hearing, after being granted conditional bail at a previous hearing. He gained international recognition as the husband of pop star Katy Perry, but is better known in the UK for his hyper-sexualised and often lewd comedy routines and TV and radio appearances in the early 2000s. Now living partly in the US, Brand appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court in central London earlier this month, where he showed no emotion as a prosecutor read out allegations against him. On Friday Brand appeared in the dock flanked by two officers, where he stood stock-still and looked straight ahead as he delivered his pleas. He is now due to stand trial next year, on June 3, 2026. Prosecutors charged Brand following a police probe into allegations aired in a 2003 Channel 4 documentary. He is accused of raping one woman in a hotel room following an event in the southern Bournemouth area in 1999. Another charge relates to the oral rape and sexual assault of a woman in 2004 in central London. The accusations involve four women, including one who was a TV worker, and another who was a radio station worker at the time of the alleged assaults. In a video response on X after he was charged in April, Brand said he was "grateful" for the "opportunity" to defend himself. Conservative guru "I was a fool before I lived in the light of the Lord. I was a drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile, but what I never was was a rapist. I've never engaged in non-consensual activity," he said in the video. Born in 1975 to working-class parents in Essex, east of London, Brand began his stand-up career as a teenager, eventually working as an MTV presenter and host of a Big Brother spin-off. He presented a show on the BBC's Radio 2 station between 2006 and 2008, but quit after an on-air prank when he left a sexually explicit voicemail for "Fawlty Towers" actor Andrew Sachs about his granddaughter. Once a left-leaning political campaigner and Hollywood star, he has rebranded himself as a conservative guru to his millions of social media followers.
France 24
a day ago
- France 24
Hundreds of deepfake music videos are celebrating the resident of Burkina Faso… why?
What do Beyoncé, Rihanna, R. Kelly, Selena Gomez and Eminem have in common -- besides being world famous singers? They also all appear to have recorded a version of a banger called 'God Protect Ibrahim Traoré ' and posted it on YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. It is an ode to the glory of the president of Burkina Faso, who came to power in a coup d'état in September 2022. As gospel music plays in the background, the music video shows the president of Burkina Faso comforting a wounded man and being cheered on by a crowd of kids. 'God protect Ibrahim Traoré, stand him in your grace, give him wisdom, give him strength to lead this fragile place,' go the lyrics in the version supposedly featuring American singer R. Kelly. R. Kelly can be seen riding a motorcycle as a burst of gunfire explodes behind him. The song goes on to refer to the Islamist insurrection affecting both Burkina Faso and other countries in the Sahel: Jihadist storms have raged too long Displacing hearts and homes Oh Lord, we need your justice now In these blood-stained zones. Later on in the music video, Rihanna appears, calling for "five more years of soldier's rule', thus showing her support for keeping Ibrahim Traoré and his military junta in power. Hundreds of comments in English appear below the music video that supposedly shows R. Kelly and Rihanna, most featuring glowing messages of support for Traoré. They were written by social media users who say they are from English-speaking African nations including Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Malawi. It is impossible to say if these messages were published by social media users or if they are part of the disinformation campaign. In total, our team counted at least fifteen different versions of 'God Protect Ibrahim Traoré' on Youtube, all in English, and all featuring deepfake celebrities singing odes to the Burkina Faso president. AI created music videos However, all of the many versions of 'God Protect Ibrahim Traoré' are deepfakes. They are poor quality, not very realistic -- in fact, they all look like video games. Aside from that, there are other clues that they were AI-generated. The face of one man in the crowd is deformed. The banner featuring Traoré's name has illegible letters on it -- AI still struggles to create legible text on a photo. If you look at these videos on YouTube, they are actually described as 'altered or synthetic content', which means AI-generated. But even though these music videos are clearly false, a number of English-speaking influencers have fallen for them and continue to share them. Nancy Blaq, a Ghanaian influencer with 2.7 million followers, shared the version 'sung' by Beyoncé on Facebook. 'During her sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden last night, the global superstar paused between her chart-topping hits to deliver a message that left the audience in awe: 'God protect Ibrahim Traoré, protect Burkina Faso'', the influencer wrote in a post from May 10. The video was also shared on May 4 by a Facebook page said to be the Russian television channel Rossiya 1 Afrique. Pro-Traoré content has also been shared by social media users who support the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), which includes Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. "Viva Ibrahim Traoré, Viva the Burkinabé army, Viva the AES army," wrote one pro-AES Facebook user in French along with the Beyoncé music video. 294 fake music videos shared by 127 YouTube channels Our team set out to determine just how widely these fake clips had been shared. To do so, we used a software program that enabled us to identify the fake pro-Traoré music videos published on YouTube and how many views they had obtained. While the first versions of 'God Protect Ibrahim Traoré' appeared on YouTube in March, most were published in early May. We counted at least 294 fake music videos that were posted on YouTube. Together, they obtained more than 8.6 million views. These videos were shared on at least 127 YouTube channels. Most of these chains were created recently and have existed for between six and two months. A fair number of them only contain pro-Ibrahim Traoré content, which suggests they were specifically created to support the Burkinabé president. AI was also used to create the page graphics for a number of these YouTube channels. For example, the text on the banners of some of them is gibberish, which can often happen with AI-generated images. 'It's clear that this is a coordinated campaign' 'It's clear that this is a coordinated campaign,' says Samba Dialimpa Badji, a researcher in disinformation and fact-checking at the University of Oslomet in Norway. 'Even if we don't have the elements to prove that Burkina Faso's government is behind this communication campaign, they are certainly benefiting from it.' The Burkina Faso government does not have a history of using AI to create fake videos en masse. "What we've observed up until now is that they mostly relied on influencers on social media -- WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter -- who posted content glorifying Ibrahim Traoré or showing their support for the military junta in power in Burkina Faso. AI makes it possible to create fake content very rapidly, easily and in large quantity,' Dialimpa Badji added. 'There is no sign that real people are behind these posts,' says the researcher. 'It could be that the accounts sharing this content were also AI-created. One single person could easily do that: create different accounts on different social media platforms and create content in an automated way,' Dialimpa Badji said. Music videos made in Nigeria Our team was able to make contact with the person behind the YouTube channel where a clip called 'God Protect Ibrahim Traoré by R. Kelly" garnered more than 1.9 million views. The person claims to be the creator of this video, which checks with the date the video was created. The YouTuber, who is based in Nigeria, says he is an artist who specialises in using AI to create music videos. He said that he charges about $1,000 (€881) for each music video. He said that using AI to make videos honouring the president of Burkina Faso started out as a personal project. 'My motivation was that Ibrahim Traoré does what many African leaders don't do,' he said. 'I admire him a lot.' 'When people saw that these videos were going viral on my channel, they started asking me to make the same kind of video for them,' he said. 'So that's when I started charging for creating the music videos and promoting them.' The creator said that he was actually behind most of the popular music videos celebrating Ibrahim Traoré on YouTube and TikTok. We weren't able to verify this claim. He also did not respond to our questions about the identity of his sponsors. "The people behind this campaign probably looked for people who had the skills to create AI-generated content [like in Nigeria] where you can easily find someone to carry out this service,' Dialimpa Badji said. Was the publication of these music videos coordinated with Burkina Faso's government? Why was there a sudden explosion of pro-Traoré music videos in May? Interestingly, the Burkina Faso government launched a new communication campaign to up the profile of the president at the same time that many of these videos were posted online. On April 27, Burkina's Information Agency published a news brief boldly claiming that 'Captain Ibrahim Traoré [is] worshipped around the world'. As proof, the news agency cited a tweet by the well-known Ghanaian rapper, Sarkodie, who posted the message 'God Protect Ibrahim Traoré' on X on April 25 -- exactly the same phrase as the music videos. A few days later, on April 30, Burkina Faso's authorities declared a ' global day in support of Ibrahim Traoré', calling for people to take to the streets in Burkina Faso and abroad. The posting of these fake music videos seems coordinated with the communication campaign meant to promote Traoré's image, said Mathieu Pellerin, an analyst specialist in the Sahel region with International Crisis Group: 'Since taking office, President Traoré has been using direct references to Thomas Sankara, which give him an air of legitimacy, considering the Burkina Faso population's adoration for Sankara". Thomas Sankara was the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso who was assassinated in 1987. Even today, Sankara is an anti-colonial, pan-Africanist icon in Africa. "This aligns perfectly with the ideas that Traoré wants to represent for his country and beyond: popular uprising, a rupture with colonialism and imperialism in favour of sovereignty, both for Burkina Faso and in a pan-African sense. These are also the messages transmitted by this AI campaign, which is amplifying his message outside of Burkina Faso.' Videos aimed at an English-speaking public Most of these fake music videos promoting Ibrahim Traoré feature singers from the English-speaking world. This isn't by chance. According to the BBC, the users posting most content on X in support of Ibrahim Traoré are from the English-speaking world, including Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and the United States. 'We've noticed that these posts are especially going viral in English-speaking countries. So I think that means that these countries have been targeted, probably in an attempt to break out of the straightjacket of the French-speaking world,' says Dialimpa Badji, 'They have probably concluded that in the French-speaking world, particularly in West Africa, a percentage of the public will already know about Traoré. And so perhaps that populations won't be as easy to manipulate with this type of content, because they know a bit already about the situation in the Sahel, in Burkina Faso, in Niger… where there is already a sort of defiance against those in power." 'This propaganda is probably meant to mask the failure of Traoré's security policies and to promote his political position both nationally and internationally, to reduce the chance that he might end up diplomatically isolated,' Pellerin says. 'He's had undeniable success with the latter, considering his popularity within the region and internationally. But I don't think that it is quite the same internally. Even though the president has a base of popular support, it seems like that has been eroding, considering the fact that the regime hasn't been able to restore security in the country. Not to mention the fact that increasing numbers of civilians have been arrested.' In recent weeks, Burkina Faso has suffered several setbacks in its fight against jihadists with JNIM, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda. 'Considering the success of this campaign, it wouldn't be surprising if other countries start using the same technique -- like Mali, for example, where disinformation is already rampant,' Dialimpa Badji said.
