Ekeroth: Ten Years in Prison - But How Do We Know Russell Brand Is Guilty?

EDITORIAL • Russell Brand has been sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for rape and sexual assault. Nine years of that term rest on a 2009 rape conviction. According to the public reporting, there was no forensic evidence, and two people gave irreconcilable accounts of what happened. The case raises the same questions of legal certainty that Samnytt has previously raised in Swedish sexual offence trials.

The British comedian and commentator Russell Brand was sentenced on 9 November to ten years and six months in prison. Nine years relate to a 2009 rape conviction. The remainder of the sentence covers three sexual assaults. Brand has denied all of the charges and was acquitted on three of the seven counts, including two other rape allegations.

The evidence that has been reported in public still raises questions. How could the jury find the case proved beyond reasonable doubt, especially on the rape count that alone carried nine years?

What do the two accounts say?

The woman, then 21, met Brand after a performance at the Hammersmith Apollo in London in 2009. Both sides describe the first part of their encounter as consensual, including a later visit to Brand's home in Hampstead.

She later alleged that Brand continued in a way she did not consent to, despite her protests. Brand denies her account and says the encounter was consensual throughout.

That the first part was consensual does not settle the question of guilt. The decisive issue is whether she consented to what she says happened later. No one else saw what took place in the bedroom.

The text messages were never produced

One claim raised at trial concerned a text conversation several months later. According to the woman, she told Brand he had already gone far enough and treated her badly, and that he replied: "Sorry."

But according to journalists who covered the trial, neither she nor Brand still had the phones. No original messages could be produced. The wording reported in court therefore rests, as far as the public reporting shows, on her memory, about 17 years later. Brand said he did not remember the conversation.

Even if the wording has been recalled correctly, its meaning is far from clear. An apology after someone says they were treated badly can refer to callousness, humiliation or something else entirely. The defence noted that, in the recounted exchange, she did not write that she had been raped.

And without the original texts, neither the wording nor the context can be checked at all.

What could the other witnesses actually tell the jury?

There was, however, one circumstance of greater evidential value. The woman's parents, a friend and other people testified that she spoke of an offence already in 2009, long before the 2023 media investigation of Brand. An early account of that kind weighs against the idea that the allegation first arose after the documentary.

But the evidence has to be assessed for what it is. These witnesses can say what she told them, when she said it, and how she appeared. They cannot, from their own observations, establish what Brand did during the encounter. Five people repeating the same woman's account are not five independent witnesses to the event. And her parents then stayed silent for nearly 20 years. Why not any longer?

The woman also said she sought medical care afterwards. When passing sentence, the judge referred to her description of injury and of Brand's driver giving her tissues as she left the house.

I have not been able to verify whether the driver himself confirmed this in court, or what medical records, if any, were put before the jury. That matters, because independent documentation of injury would give the evidence a different weight. Even then, such documentation would not, by itself, settle the question of consent.

British police have confirmed that no usable forensic evidence or CCTV footage was available. From the public reporting, the woman's account, and what she had already told others, therefore appear to be the main evidence. The full case file may contain further detail, but the jury gives no public reasoning for its finding of guilt. That, in itself, is extraordinary.

So why did the jury find one version proved beyond reasonable doubt? Judging by all the reporting, it is hard to understand.

Brand's lifestyle and memory

The prosecutor also raised Brand's earlier conduct towards women and his extensive sex life. Brand has himself described using his fame to obtain sexual encounters. But what does that prove about the acts he has now been convicted of? Next to nothing.

During the investigation, Brand first said he did not recognise some of the women, and later gave accounts of sexual encounters. The prosecutor used this to challenge his credibility. That is relevant if a defendant actually contradicts himself. But memories from 17 to 27 years ago can return when photographs, dates and other details are shown. That someone does not immediately remember a former sexual partner is not particularly remarkable, least of all in Brand's case.

Even a deliberate withholding of facts about an old relationship would have limited direct evidential value for what happened during one particular encounter. The risk, of course, is that a negative picture of Brand as a person is given more weight than it deserves in the concrete question of guilt.

Nine years in prison, and no public explanation from the jury

Judge Joel Bennathan sentenced Brand to nine years for the rape conviction. In setting the sentence he took as his starting point the course of events the jury had found proved: that Brand continued despite the woman's protests. The judge's sentencing remarks explain why the offence was treated as serious. They do not explain how the jury weighed the conflicting accounts.

The British jury system does not normally provide a detailed public explanation of a guilty verdict. At the same time, Brand was acquitted on three other counts. In one case he was convicted of sexual assault but acquitted of a rape allegation from the same woman. The jury therefore distinguished between the charges. What proved decisive in the count that carried nine years does not appear from the verdict.

Sweden and the "pink statute book"

The British case recalls problems Samnytt has described in "The Court Believes, and Your Future Is Lost" and in my earlier column "When the Rule of Law Sacrifices Young Men". Here too, a conviction can have enormous consequences even though the decisive part of what happened is very hard to test after the fact.

Look only at the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention's 2025 evaluation of the consent law. The share of rape convictions based solely on oral evidence rose from 16 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023. Among convictions in the new types of cases added by the consent law, the share was 39 percent. Three in four defence lawyers who answered the council's survey thought legal certainty had been weakened by the change in the law.

The figures do not show that a given share of those convicted were innocent. They do show how often the courts now consider oral evidence sufficient. The council also describes how the courts assess the reliability of those accounts. That question must be open to critical discussion, especially when the alleged offence is a lack of consent during a limited part of an otherwise consensual sexual encounter.

And this is where the so-called pink statute book comes in. In the debate on sexual offences, ordinary objections - faulty memory, alternative sequences of events, a lack of independent supporting evidence - are often treated as hostility towards victims. The result can easily be an overly generous assessment of the evidence, in cases where the accused has little opportunity to produce contrary proof.

How do you defend yourself against a claim about a sexual encounter many years ago, when the only thing you can show with certainty is that the encounter took place? The answer is simple: you hardly can. That is why oral accounts have to be tested for their reliability, not for how sympathetic the person telling them appears.

In Sweden, guilt must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. That is a high standard in sexual offence cases too. But when the share of convictions based solely on oral evidence is rising, we should examine how that standard works in practice, instead of repeating, as a mantra, that it is formally unchanged.

Swedish media have already made up their minds

Then there is the Swedish media coverage. It is telling. In Svenska Dagbladet, London correspondent Charlotta Buxton writes under the headline "He joked for years about the assaults". The offences are described as a long-open secret, and the paper asks why Brand was not stopped earlier.

In other words, the question of guilt is already settled in the journalist's account. The only interesting point, apparently, is how Brand could continue his career for so long despite his behaviour.

But how many Swedish readers have been told that the alleged text conversation could not be produced, that the people who corroborated the woman's early account did not witness the alleged rape, or that there was no forensic evidence?

It is striking how quickly journalists in the established media can move from reporting a conviction to treating the convicted man's guilt as an obvious historical truth, without paying much attention to how that conclusion was reached.

In Brand's case there is also a media picture of a controversial and unsympathetic person, who in recent years has become an outspoken opponent of those same established media. That makes it especially important to examine which facts are presented to readers, and which are left out.

The Svenska Dagbladet article is a typical example of how a journalistic story about guilt and a cover-up can take precedence over a critical examination of the evidence itself. To a reader who only sees that picture, it becomes almost incomprehensible that anyone would question the verdict.

But those are precisely the questions that ought to be obvious when a person is sentenced to ten years in prison for an event 17 years earlier.

It must be possible to question a verdict

Brand has become a controversial commentator and a critic of established media. His supporters have therefore claimed that the accusations are politically motivated. I have not seen clear evidence that the British legal process was steered by political interests. Journalists' inquiries began as early as 2019, though the fact that the case came to a head now does make one wonder. That is a different question from whether the evidence put forward was sufficient.

I have not had access to the full case file, and I therefore cannot say with certainty that the verdict is wrong. But what has been made public gives good reason to ask difficult questions. In the 2009 rape conviction there were no forensic traces, the much-discussed text conversation could not be shown, and the people who repeated the woman's early account had not themselves witnessed the alleged offence. Their testimony is relevant, yes. But its limits must also be acknowledged.

Nine years in prison is an extraordinarily severe penalty. When it is imposed for an event 17 years earlier, it must be possible to examine how reasonable doubt was in fact excluded. That discussion is needed in Britain, and just as much in Sweden.

Kent Ekeroth is Executive Director of Samnytt and a former member of the Swedish Parliament.