The rise and fall of Russell Brand, shapeshifting sexual predator

Many years ago, Russell Brand’s career in the public eye began with an arrest. He denied all charges, of course. “I was never there!” the then-teenager cried, as a policeman read him his rights. Brand flounced onto his unmade bed. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he sulked. “Well, it is,” came the response, “so get your brain in gear.”

That was 1994. Brand was appearing as “Billy” in an episode of The Bill. At the time he was an aspiring actor who’d recently been expelled from the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts for truancy and drug use. This was his first major screen role.

Billy was just a character, of course, but as a cocky, unkempt, oddly charismatic man-child with a knack for refusing to admit wrongdoing, he also served as a useful introduction to the man playing him. Brand would go on to make a garish reputation from those very traits – and adding a few more adult qualities as he grew older, too.

Soon after that appearance he largely gave up acting for the next decade, embarking instead on an occasionally dazzling career performing as himself.

Or rather, performing as whatever version of Russell Brand was most useful to him at that moment. Feral TV host? Rock-star comic? Insatiable sex addict? Pseudo-intellectual? Unlikely family man? Political revolutionary? Conspiracy-peddling influencer?

His most recent, and current, incarnation is as a profound man of faith – an identity coincidentally adopted at the exact time he needed to appear without sin.

Today his current faith of choice is Christianity. In the past Brand has also had a Hindu wedding and identified as a Buddhist, so much so that he was once selected by the Dalai Lama to host a youth event.

Yet three decades on from The Bill, Brand, now 51, has been back in trouble with the law. Again, he denied everything. Again, he couldn’t believe it. But this time the arrest was all too real, the charges deeply serious, and the consequences career-finishing.

On November 5, Brand was found guilty of three charges of sexual assault and one rape, following a three-week trial at Southwark Crown Court. He was told he was facing a lengthy custodial sentence and would be sentenced on Monday. After a lifetime of shapeshifting, even he won’t be able to slip out of this one.

Diary of an impish kid

“A trivial Greek tragedy” is how he used to describe his early life as an only child in Grays, Essex, and it was certainly tragic. As he tells it in his autobiography, My Booky Wook, he was an intense and awkward child, and so obsessed with his mother, Barbara, that he felt they should get married. His father, Ron, left when Brand was six months old, to be replaced by a macho stepdad called Colin, whom Brand hated.

Barbara was his biggest fan, and the original reason for what would become a desperate, insatiable need for attention and ego-stroking. “My mum thinks I’m an excellent swimmer,” he said in 2007, “simply because I’ve not yet drowned.”

The family was poor, and Barbara had cancer three times. Brand, who was mostly a loner at school, was gifted but coy. As one perceptive school teacher wrote in a class report: “Russell is more able than he would have us think.”

“I was very unhappy,” Brand would later admit. “I didn’t get on with my stepdad at all. And I just remember feeling lonely and totally impotent – there was nothing I could do about my situation… I had to deal with feeling ordinary, dull, tedious and powerless by trying to subvert those ideas, being anarchic and dangerous.”

At 13, the agile mind his teacher identified found what it really needed: attention and adulation. A school production of Bugsy Malone, in which Brand, a portly boy, played “Fat Sam”, proved formative. “People laughed, and I felt this sudden rush of adrenaline surging through me. It was like a drug.”

Ron, a “wheeler-dealer”, eventually came back on the scene; Brand later wrote that his father would invite him over to his house, then put porn on the television for him while he “diddled birds in the room next door”.

The teenage Brand developed bulimia, and found escapes in drugs, sex and self-harm. As a treat, Ron took him to Thailand when he was 16.

Immediately he hired three prostitutes: two for him, one for his son. Years later Ron would comment when his son was charged with rape and sexual assault. “The Russell Brand vendetta,” he wrote on Facebook. “Like a man who owns an orchard being accused of stealing an apple.” He supported his son in court last month.

Naughty boy or Messiah?

In the same year as his Thailand trip, Brand left home, signed on at an extras agency and won a place at Italia Conti, necessitating a move to London.

Like many in a new city, he decided to reinvent himself: growing his hair out, wearing flamboyant clothes, exaggerating his fey physical ticks and developing a florid, arcane manner of speaking. His memoir includes a photograph of him as a child, wearing fancy dress, his hand cocked on his hip. “This is the exact moment when I decided to act gay to attract girls. It took 15 years to produce results,” reads the caption.

After being expelled from Italia Conti, “the baton of self-harm was handed directly from eating disorder to narcotics abuse in a single, graceful movement”, as he put it in 2006. You name it, he snorted it, swallowed it or smoked it.

Taking heroin, he “felt enveloped in this womb of comfort”, he said. “And although I spent every day in this kind of heroin daze, it just seemed to make life much more manageable.”

At the peak of his three years on the drug he flourished as a wild child on MTV, where he established himself as a presenter who’d do and say anything. In one infamous segment he masturbated a male stranger in a public toilet – despite being, in his own words, “hysterically heterosexual”. His celebrity interviews generally involved him flirting relentlessly with his guests.

Staff at MTV – especially female staff – saw all sides of him, before and after he quit drink and drugs in 2002. One complainant in Brand’s recent trial was a colleague from the time. According to her testimony, the two of them were friendly in the office until suddenly “his demeanour changed” and, during an alleged attack, Brand “turned into this wild-eyed maniac”.

His wildness would eventually cost him his job, when he arrived for work on the day after 9/11, high, dressed as Osama bin Laden and with his drug dealer in tow. He was due to interview Kylie Minogue. It was, he’d later say, probably “the worst time to do it, in many ways”. A few months earlier, inappropriate behaviour had resulted in him being kicked out of the Edinburgh Fringe, too.

He was later rehired by MTV to present a chat show, and proved just as inappropriate. “He is completely crazy and a bit of a vile predator,” pop star Dannii Minogue recalled in 2006, shortly after experiencing the Brand treatment live on air.

“He wouldn’t take no for an answer … He always goes that step too far. Never quite far enough to slap his face but usually too far. Throughout the whole interview he kept making shocking remarks that I can’t even repeat. Just uttering the words would make me blush.”

‘He is completely crazy and a bit of a vile predator.’

Dannii Minogue, in 2006

The model Kelly Brook had a similarly grim experience, recalling how Brand repeatedly asked to see glamour photos of her taken at age 15.

Yet all those events, especially the Bin Laden stunt, would only end up adding to the Brand myth. In the early noughties, badly behaved rock stars were a dying breed. Brand was more than happy to loom into that gap, and became a permanent tabloid fixture as a result.

With each passing year of that decade, his fame grew, his reputation added another layer of notoriety, and a man whose greatest addiction was fast becoming attention couldn’t get enough. But then, neither could commissioners and bookers. Updating his look again, he dyed and backcombed his hair, grew a beard, began liberally applying eyeliner, and built a uniform of skinny jeans, winklepickers, silk scarves and shirts unbuttoned to the navel.

He knew it was outmoded and knew it was startling.

A ‘star is born’

Paired with an undeniably quick wit, the whole effect was brilliant. After people started noticing him as a host on UK TV channel E4, he was invited to disturb more mainstream television. One was the BBC’s Friday Night with Jonathan Ross in 2006, which was later considered his “star is born” moment. Watching clips of it now, it’s difficult to tell who is more spellbound: the audience, his fellow guests, or Ross.

Fleet Street was similarly charmed. He gave the tabloids plenty to talk about, while the broadsheets and colour supplements lined up to try and psychoanalyse this oddity. “He was charming, articulate, outrageous and very, very funny,” Piers Morgan wrote in a particularly revealing interview with Brand for GQ.

Almost all those interviews eventually fixated on sex. Brand was fond of it, you see. As a younger man he was put into rehab (“the winky nick”, as he put it) for sex addiction. Occasionally he confessed to associating sex with guilt – “afterwards a fog of guilt descends”, he wrote – but on the whole, he was more than happy to extol his priapic excesses.

“I love f---ing,” he told The Observer in 2017. “My house has a hot tub for damned good reasons, and none of them spiritual.” In his interview with Morgan he’s asked whether he’s slept with more than 1000 women. Brand is hurt that the suggested number is so low. In a “good week”, he said, he’d sleep with 20 women. “One in the morning, maybe two for lunch and three for tea. Then someone might stick around all night.”

When Morgan asked whether he was a “sexual predator”, Brand responded: “I resent the word ‘predator’. I like to think of myself as a conduit of natural forces. After all, the most natural thing in the world for people to do is f---, isn’t it? All you have to do is remove all the reasons why women don’t actually go through with it, like pride and reputation.”

Wherever he went, this reputation preceded him like a bad cologne, of course. Some women threw themselves at him but others conspired to never be in his presence. Jo Hemmings, a psychologist who has often worked on reality TV, recalls the culture on Big Brother.

“He worked on Big Brother’s Big Mouth and I was on Big Brother’s Little Brother, but some of the crew were the same and I know that the women – girls, as they were, really – felt uncomfortable being around him,” she says. “He got rather into their personal space and was pretty intense but, back in the day, people didn’t want to speak up about their concerns, other than preferring not to work on his show, for fear of losing their jobs or rocking the boat.”

Never idle, Brand had simultaneously launched a stop-start radio career, initially on indie-rock station XFM, until he was sacked for reading pornographic stories on air. He moved to BBC Radio 2, until he was taken off air from that, too, in what could have been the greatest scandal of his career, had he been anybody else.

His time as a BBC radio host was already studded with sackable moments. Like the time he called his newsreader “erotic” and told her, on air, that “we’re going to get under that desk and we’re going to unleash hell on your thighs”. Or the time he conducted a telephone interview with Jimmy Savile and promised he’d send his assistant to his flat, naked, to massage him.

The prank-call incident

Worse was to come. Late one night, Brand and Jonathan Ross thought it would be funny to call the then-78-year-old actor Andrew Sachs, who’d been due to appear on the show. Both Brand and Ross left messages on Sachs’ answering machine informing him that Brand had had sex with Sachs’ granddaughter, 23-year-old singer and erotic dancer Georgina Baillie. The backlash was swift and brutal, growing to such a tumult that even Gordon Brown, then the prime minister, joined in, calling it “clearly inappropriate and unacceptable behaviour”.

“I was full of self-pity, self-hatred. I wasn’t eating,” Baillie said last week of the immediate aftermath. “I went back to using [drugs]. I turned to an eating disorder … It went on for weeks. I’m terrified to this day of newspapers, I can’t look at them.” She confirmed she received no apology from Brand or the BBC. Ross wrote her a letter she never saw.

Brand and Ross were suspended (with Brand then quitting before he could be fired), and the controller of Radio 2, Lesley Douglas, resigned. Again, though, Brand didn’t seem too fussed, instead enjoying the attention.

Perhaps the greatest rebuke in “Sachsgate”, as it became known, was delivered by former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, at the GQ Awards five years later. Brand, presenting, had shocked the audience by commenting that the night’s sponsors, Hugo Boss, had once made uniforms for the Nazi Party. Moore, newly awarded “writer of the year”, chose his target and didn’t miss.

“I was very interested when Russell Brand chose to praise the stylishness of the Nazis,” Moore told the room. “Because, of course, that fits with the fact that when they persecuted the Sachs family in the 1930s, Andrew Sachs, who was only young, then fled to this country. He was then persecuted by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross in their disgusting phone call.” The room broke into thunderous applause.

“What I’ve learnt – to my cost – on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you’re giving them what they want,” Brand once mused. “But the minute you’re not, you’re f---ed. They’ll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.”

The many rebrands

To say that Sachsgate damaged Brand’s career would be to misunderstand how rarely a fly landed on him during the first four decades of his life.

He was moving far too fast, building a CV that took in comedy, radio presenting, TV and, increasingly, Hollywood films (including 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which he largely played himself; Rock of Ages, in which he largely played himself; and the remake of Arthur, in which … you get the idea).

By 2011 he had also married American pop star Katy Perry at the height of her career. Their wedding, a closely guarded traditional Hindu ceremony, took place at a luxury resort in Rajasthan, India, with the bride and groom sitting atop elephants.

Their marriage lasted for 14 months. In an interview in 2013, Perry, who would call Brand “very controlling” and “really hurtful”, told Vogue: “I haven’t heard from him since he texted me saying he was divorcing me [on] December 31, 2011.”

Brand returned to Britain from Los Angeles and reinvented himself as a political revolutionary. His next stand-up tour, Messiah Complex, was about Che Guevara, Gandhi, Malcolm X and Jesus. He wrote a book, Revolution, which advocated non-voting. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols called that “the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard”.

In 2014, the same year he topped a YouGov poll asking which celebrity had the most negative influence on public debate, he launched a YouTube show, The Trews, in which Brand quickly made his first forays into conspiracy theories, including claiming the US government might be behind 9/11.

When Ed Miliband, the then Labour leader, appeared on The Trews in a desperate attempt to woo Brand’s politically disaffected fans before the 2015 general election, he was widely mocked. Brand, reversing on his earlier policy regarding the democratic process, endorsed Miliband. Despite leading an unpopular coalition government, the Conservatives won a majority.

Brand ended The Trews in 2015, soon shapeshifting again into a reformed figure who wished to marry and have children. He reunited with a former girlfriend, Laura Gallacher, and they wed in Henley-on-Thames in 2017. They have three children: Mabel, 10, Peggy, eight, and Herb, three.

From their Oxfordshire base he set about turning himself into a guru, initially via podcasts and his YouTube channel. Slowly but surely he accrued a fierce online following, while simultaneously presenting as a wholesome family man. In an interview, he praised the MeToo movement as a “really positive change”. He also appeared on The Great British Bake Off, baking a vagina made from biscuits as his showstopper.

Journalists were still being charmed. “He was just very engaging,” admits one female writer, who interviewed him during this period. “You rack your brain now, thinking: ‘How could I have got someone so wrong?’ But I found him perfectly lovely, to the point where I’d say he was one of my favourite interviews because he was so engaged in the chat.”

At the end of the 2010s YouTube was largely where Brand made his home. The British public had long grown bored of his act; TV commissioners knew better than to take a risk on him; politicians considered him repellent to voters; even fellow celebrities started to call him out.

But broadcasting from his Oxfordshire home was easy and lucrative: the more sensational his takes on current affairs and politics, the more his audience grew. By 2022 he had 6 million subscribers, many of them die-hard acolytes from either extreme of the political spectrum, plus a growing number attracted to Brand as a quasi-religious figure. And he would need their support: the following year, an investigation by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches accused Brand of rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse in a period spanning seven years and during the height of his fame.

Brand tried to get ahead of the story, posting a video titled “So, This Is Happening” – a two-minute pre-denial in which he “absolutely” refuted the allegations. Brand’s army mobilised in the comments.

“We’re with you, Russell,” wrote one, yielding 4000 “likes”. “I’ve been wondering how long it would be until they tried to pull this card,” another read, beside a crying emoji. “I’m with you all the way, Russell. They did it to Assange. They tried it with Bernie Sanders. They did it to Corbyn. They’ll try it with anyone they find a threat,” lamented a third.

As his reputation tanked further, Brand found God, enlisting Bear Grylls to baptise him in the River Thames. The timing of his conversion was considered suspicious, and never more than when Piers Morgan challenged him to find a particular Bible verse, live on air.

For what felt like an hour, Brand silently leafed through the good book, failing to find what he was looking for. He continued to carry a Bible everywhere, including to court in recent weeks.

After his baptism he moved his family to Florida, where his tendency towards conspiracy theories and support for the MAGA movement meant he was welcomed with, if not open arms, then certainly a curious handshake. There, his broadcasting took on a religious nature. He and Laura would read from the Bible and light candles; he’d present himself, Messianic hair in full flow, in front of stained-glass windows.

In reality, the ongoing legal battles meant his finances had dwindled. In recent months he’s been selling, QVC-style, “magical amulets” that he claims protect people from Wi-Fi and “other evil energies”, as well as the odd nutritional powder.

His circle has shrunk, as well, to a small handful of trusted friends, including Jake Smith, his American manager and producer, and Joe McCann, a former boxer who often accompanies Brand to church. Along with Laura and, on one occasion, her father, former golfer Bernard Gallacher, both have attended court with Brand in recent weeks. McCann, easily spotted by his top-knot and tattoos, served as Brand’s bodyguard as he stalked into court, usually muttering that he feels blessed.

Brand always needed to be looked at, always wished to be followed. He once published a children’s book retelling The Pied Piper of Hamelin, the old tale about a mysterious figure whose flute enchants the naive.

“I think the Pied Piper is such an interesting figure,” Brand said at the time. “When you think about [it], it’s weird what he did, taking them children away, and it makes you ask questions. Why did he do it? Is that OK? Why did it happen?”

The eventual book, Russell Brand’s Trickster Tales: The Pied Piper of Hamelin, was published in 2014. The titular figure was depicted as a tall, slender man with a nest of long, knotted black hair. “More than anything else,” Brand said, “I’m the trickster.”

The Pied Piper has finally been caught. But can anyone silence him for good?

Additional reporting by Kimberley Bond

Telegraph, London

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491 or Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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