Russell Brand is a convicted predator. Women the world over have reason to feel relief

Opinion

Katy HallAge deputy state topic editor

November 10, 2026 — 11:30am

November 10, 2026 — 11:30am

There’s a collective sense of relief that comes from Russell Brand being sentenced to 10 years and six months is palpable. Not just because a jury finding him guilty of rape and sexual assault offers a sliver of justice to a handful of his victims, but also because it decimates the credibility of the spin he spent years applying to his horrendous, and at times criminal, behaviour.

Long before the allegations aired in court were made public, as well as the countless others that have surfaced (some of which are now under investigation by the UK police), Brand was as much a one-man reputation rehabilitator intent on controlling the narrative as he was a comedian.

When recounting in his 2007 memoir why he was fired from MTV six years’ earlier, for example, Brand implied that the pop star Kylie Minogue was in part to blame. Brand, still an active drug user at the time, said he’d invited his dealer and his dealer’s eight-year-old child to the TV show’s set, where the trio crammed into a bathroom and the two adults smoked crack before taking a tour of the studio. According to Brand’s telling, it was here that Minogue – who was appearing on the show as a guest – endured an “awkward chat” with the dealer.

“I thought: ‘It don’t get any better than this.’ And it didn’t, cos they sacked me about two days later,” Brand wrote.

What he put far less emphasis on, though, and what’s far more likely, is that he was fired because that day was September 12, 2001, and in addition to smoking crack at work, he’d shown up dressed as Osama bin Laden.

When he was later asked about his sacking on a US talk show, he was again quick to spin his actions, saying, “when I was a crack and heroin addict, I made some unusual decisions”. On his choice of attire, Brand added that it was “the worst time to do it in many ways,” as if to suggest there was a more appropriate time to appear on television dressed as a terrorist responsible for killing thousands of innocent people.

In a sprawling two-hour-long interview with US right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly earlier this year, Brand again flexed his avid propensity for reframing his past.

When asked about allegations surrounding his involvement with a teenager, which were aired in 2023 but not a part of this criminal trial, Brand said, “I did sleep with a 16-year-old when I was 30. But when I was 30, I was a very different person … I was an immature 30-year-old.”

By this telling, it would be easy to walk away thinking that the pair had a one-off sexual encounter that he perhaps now, with hindsight, regretted. What the 51-year-old chose to omit in this recontextualisation of events, and what Kelly did not to push him on, was that the pair allegedly had a relationship for three months while she was still at school.

The now adult woman said that after literally bumping into each other in the street in 2006, where he rifled through her shopping bags and told her what she would wear on a date with him, Brand instructed her to save his phone number under a girl’s name to avoid suspicion from her parents. He reportedly nicknamed her “the child”, and became visibly aroused upon learning she was a virgin. She also said he taught her how to lie to her parents after they repeatedly tried to keep them apart, and that Brand was once so forcible with her during sex she had to punch him in the stomach to make him stop.

In court last month, Brand painted a sad picture of a man abandoned by all of his friends, colleagues and acquaintances, saying none were willing to give evidence in his defence or support him since the allegations came to light. And yet, two of his former girlfriends and his wife offered glowing portraits of him to the jury and in full glare of the media.

One ex described him as a “gentle, warm, kind and adventurous” man, while another said he had been “introspective, gentle and loving” when they dated.

When his wife Laura Brand gave evidence, she said that when they began dating, “it was difficult for him to be monogamous”, an elegant way of rephrasing the fact he refused to stop sleeping with other people. They began dating months after Brand and the schoolgirl ended their relationship, and when Laura was 19, and Brand was 31.

After they broke up due to his self-described promiscuity and hedonism, the pair eventually reconciled 10 years ago and now share three young children together. When rewriting this period of history, Brand said that when they first dated, he was “in a phase where I thought the world was an amusement park full of orgasms” – a phase which had seemingly since ended. Absent from his view on their past was the fact that Laura’s frontal lobe was still several years off fully forming.

But in the world according to Russell Brand, these pieces of information are less crucial facts and more semantics that detract from what really matters. Yes, he was a drug addict, but now he’s sober. Sure, he slept with a child when he was 14 years her senior, but the law permitted it. OK, he struggled with not cheating on his partners, but today he’s a proud family man who’s found God.

In painting a detailed picture of “that was then and this is now”, and admitting the error of his ways, Brand tried to preemptively save himself from a legal reckoning by self-imposing a moral one.

But his one-sided insurance policy has collapsed, and for the first time ever, the full narrative power he once had has crumbled. Now, his victims have voices that people want to hear, and the microphone he was handed over and over and over again for two decades has been taken away.

Maybe he genuinely believes his own spin. Perhaps in trying to convince the world that he was simply a pants man and not a rapist was his way of trying to convince himself, too. Whatever the case, he now has a decade to sit and think about it.

Katy Hall is a senior editor and regular columnist.

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Katy Hall is deputy state topic editor. She was previously the deputy opinion editor for The Age.

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