Russell Brand Defense Tells Jury: No Evidence He Is a 'Psychopath Who Rapes'

Russell Brand has pleaded not guilty to three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one count of attempted indecent assault, and this week his defense lawyer told the jury there is "no evidence" the comedian is "some kind of psychopath who rapes people and thinks it's normal."

Ian Winter KC, defending Brand, delivered his closing argument after a three-week trial at which the alleged incidents, dating between 1999 and 2009, were examined. His central claim: Brand believed every encounter was consensual.

"The fact he behaved normally during and after all of those 'rapes' tells you what you need to know. He believed they were all consenting," Winter said, according to Sky News. "You would have to be a psychopath to be raping someone and asking them if they were enjoying it at the same time."

What did the defense actually argue?

Winter built his case on Brand's behavior after the alleged assaults. He told the jury Brand had left his email addresses and photographs behind and tried to kiss one of the complainants goodbye when he left.

"Rapists do not leave their address," he said. "Rapists do not leave their photographs."

He pressed the same logic on the broader picture: "Even being manipulative in the pursuit of consensual sex is completely lawful."

The jury, Winter argued, must separate moral judgment from legal judgment. He urged jurors to disregard Brand's "highly promiscuous" lifestyle.

"Put out of your mind any distaste you may feel for the way he lived his life… That way of living is not criminal," he said. "Disgusting, distasteful, immoral, who cares? It's irrelevant to your consideration."

He closed with a direct instruction: "Do what the journalists totally failed to do, put all condemnation completely out of the mind and apply pure, cold logic to the question: 'Are we sure on the evidence we have seen [Brand] did do what is alleged?'"

His one-line verdict, as delivered to the court: "Brand is innocent."

Why did the Channel 4 documentary take center stage?

A significant portion of Winter's closing argument targeted a 2023 Channel 4 documentary, produced as part of a joint investigation with The Sunday Times of London, in which five women accused Brand of "rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse." Brand issued a strong denial ahead of the broadcast.

Winter called the 90-minute program "one-sided" and "produced in a dramatic manner," and was reportedly scathing of its claim to be a documentary at all.

He told the court Brand had not spoken to any of the journalists involved. Brand received only a "right of reply" — the standard practice in which a journalist contacts a story's subject, details the allegations and offers a chance to respond — and Winter argued that offer existed to "protect their defamation risk."

One complainant in the current case, who claims Brand anally raped her following consensual sex in 2009, said in her evidence she had watched the documentary before coming forward.

"One wonders what her evidence would have been if she'd not seen the program," Winter said.

What does the contamination claim mean for the verdict?

The defense's sharpest argument was that the documentary itself manufactured the trial. Winter said the allegations in the program had never been tested in court, and that the journalists had "poisoned the well of justice" by prompting the complainants to come forward.

"There is nothing random at all about these people coming forward… They have all come forward because they have been brought at the invitation of that program," he said.

"They are all, we say, thoroughly contaminated by the program. The very existence of them as complainants is fundamentally corrupted by that program and publicity and [that] renders it fundamentally unfair."

Whether the jury accepts that contamination argument may decide the case. It is a defense that asks jurors to distrust not the complainants' testimony itself, but the circumstances that produced it — a harder standard to meet.

What about the memoir?

Winter also accused the prosecution of "desperation" for using Brand's 2007 memoir, "My Booky Wook," as evidence. Brand was cross-examined over passages in which he claimed to pretend to be gay to gain women's trust.

"In 2007 he wrote a funny book, 'My Booky Wook,' it contains some jokes," Winter said. He argued the jury was being asked to "take what he wrote eight years after the event and somehow use it as evidence of what he was doing in 1999."

The prosecution, for its part, called Brand's defense "a lot of half-truths" that were "spun into lies."

What happens next?

The jury must now weigh seven charges spanning a decade against a defense built on two pillars: that Brand believed he had consent, and that the Channel 4 broadcast compromised the complainants before they ever reached a courtroom. The verdict, when it comes, will also be read as a judgment — fair or not — on the role of investigative journalism in initiating prosecutions that might otherwise never have begun.