A woman told police that British actor and comedian Russell Brand grabbed her breasts before dragging her into a toilet at a bar and orally raping her, a London court heard on Oct 19.
Brand, once one of Britain’s most high-profile broadcasters and the former husband of US singer Katy Perry, is on trial facing three counts of rape, three of sexual assault and one of indecent assault against six women between 1999 and 2009.
The 51-year-old denies the allegations, and he told police after his arrest that he had never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity and the accusers might have reimagined events.
The third of the six complainants to give evidence alleged Brand had assaulted her after she met him at a party in a London bar in 2004.
In a tearful police interview played to jurors at Southwark Crown Court, the woman, who worked for MTV, said she wanted to meet Brand because she had seen him on television and thought he was funny. But less than a minute after talking to him at the bar, he assaulted her, she said.
“He literally just grabbed my boobs in the middle of the conversation,” she said, adding that he had a weird grin as he did it.
Immediately afterwards, while she was in shock and disbelief, he grabbed her arm and pulled her to the nearby toilets, she said.
“It happened so fast,” she told police.
She said he jumped onto the toilet seat and tried to force her to perform a sex act on him. “He said, ‘Come on, come on. Don’t be a spoilsport,’” she recounted, saying he was holding her forcibly by her head and hair. “I just froze. I didn’t know what to do.”
She said while his words were not threatening, the force of the encounter and the look in his eye had been.
As the party moved to a nightclub, she found herself in a car with Brand, where he again exposed himself. This time, he accepted it when she refused to perform the sex act, she said.
She told police that while she later confided to a friend and her sister that Brand tried to orally rape her, she said she disclosed what really happened only after a 2023 documentary and press report about him.
She said she “reinvented it a bit because I didn’t want people to judge me. I felt ashamed”.
Last week, the first complainant told the court that Brand raped her after she met him at a fringe event at the 1999 Labour Party conference in southern England.
The second of the complainants told London’s Southwark Crown Court that in 2001, a “wild-eyed” Brand tried to pull her into the male toilets at MTV Europe, in London, where she was working.
The trial, which is expected to last around six weeks, continues. - Reuters
