Russell Brand took the stand for the first time in his ongoing rape and sexual assault trial on Wednesday and revealed that no one else has agreed to testify on his behalf.
At London’s Southwark Crown Court, the prosecution has completed presenting its case and Brand’s defense team, led by Ian Winter, is now set to detail its arguments for the jury.
The prosecution ran the court through all of the charges against the presenter and comedian, also star of St. Trinian’s and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. He is accused of three counts of rape, three charges of sexual assault and one allegation of attempted indecent assault, with six women alleging offenses dating from 1999 to 2009. The final charge was reduced from indecent assault to attempted indecent assault by the judge, Justice Bennathan, on Tuesday afternoon.
Among the claims is a woman who says Brand raped her in a Bournemouth hotel room in 1999 following one of his comedy gigs. Another says he grabbed her breasts and pushed her into a toilet in a bar in Soho, where he orally raped her in 2004. A separate woman alleges Brand anally raped her at his home in Hampstead in 2009, after consensual vaginal sex. Brand vehemently denies any criminal wrongdoing.
According to Sky News coverage, there was a “significant shift” in the courtroom on Wednesday as Brand took the stand as the defence’s first witness. After taking his oath, his barrister began probing Brand on the “sea of change” brought about in his life after marrying U.S. pop superstar Katy Perry in 2010. “It did,” replied the defendant. “Staggering fame.”
Brand was asked about the documentary that prompted the police to first investigate him in 2023. Made by Channel 4’s Dispatches and followed by allegations in The Sunday Times, the program accused Brand of rape and assault. “It was devastating,” he told his barrister, who then asked: “Were you able to persuade a single person with relevant evidence to come to give evidence on your behalf?”
Brand replied: “I have not.” When Winter asked if anyone “would touch him with a bargepole,” Brand said, “No.” He added: “My entire life has been consumed by these allegations. I have devoted myself to these matters.”
Winter took Brand through various statements from the complainants, some of whom he remembers meeting and others whom he says he has no recollection of. Winter asked Brand, “Is that something that you normally do? Speak during sex?” His client replied, “Yes… I believe I would have been saying: ‘Am I doing this right, do you like this, is this OK?”
Brand said when asked for his opinion on consent: “Consent is a fundamental, essential and necessary, and in many ways more important than sex itself.”
He discussed the first complainant, saying he remembered meeting her at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth in 1999. He told the court he found her “loquacious” and “interesting,” and when asked if there was any truth in her claim that Brand raped her that night in a hotel room, the defendant said: “No.”
The prosecution, cross-examining Brand, then suggested he “just didn’t care whether she was interested in having sex with you or not.” Brand refuted that and told them he cared “very much.” He added: “I know what no means.”
The third complainant says Brand groped her breasts in a bar before pulling her to the toilets and forcing her to perform oral sex on him. He does remember meeting her, he told the court. He said a friend introduced him to the woman, telling him “something like, ‘There’s a bird here who really wants to meet you mate.’” Brand told the court that he would have said to this woman upon meeting her: “‘You’re really, really beautiful.’”
“Is there any question you just grabbed her breasts?” Winter said to Brand. “Absolutely not,” he replied, saying the act does not turn him on because it’s “disgusting behavior.”
He remembers speaking to the complainant for less than a minute before going to the bathroom to “fool around.” Winter said: “As far as you’re aware, is there any question that she did not consent to going into the cubicle with you?” Brand told him: “There’s absolutely no question.” Winter also asked: “Did your penis enter her mouth at all whilst in the cubicle?” His defendant said, “No.”
On the allegation that he anally raped another woman at his North London home in 2009, Brand said after a “memorable” sexual encounter he was “excited and enthusiastic” to see her again. The woman said they had consensual vaginal sex in his bedroom, which Brand recalls. When asked if he had then anally raped her, Brand said: “No.” He was asked if she told him to stop, to which he replied: “No.”
The trial could last up to six weeks.

I have made many attempts to lessen the existential disaster we call Tuesday – tacos, trivia – but lately only one thing works. Every night just before 8pm, I hide my phone under a pillow in the next room, plate up a carb-heavy dinner, and turn on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) for Sweater Weather, a series of films dedicated to the transitional season.
Every Tuesday in October, Alicia Malone, an affable Australian film historian wearing business casual and a flippy bob, introduces a double feature. These are often midcentury melodramas featuring striking leads, serpentine plots, and the burnt hues of fall rendered in indulgent Technicolor. Like All That Heaven Allows (1955), about a widow who finds herself crushed under the weight of 1950s suburban conformity – and the teeny waistline of her swing skirts – while nursing a crush on her much-younger gardener. Or Leave Her to Heaven (1945), about a beautiful socialite so obsessed with her hapless husband that she will kill anyone who threatens their bond.
In these films, everyone has their original teeth and no one takes Ozempic. It’s my weekly break from doomscrolling, from whatever-maxxing, from the maddening norm of vertical content. I want to live in the world of Sweater Weather cinema all year long.
TCM has aired old movies since 1994, when the cable channel was launched by CNN’s founder, Ted Turner. The businessman was obsessed with movies – his favorite, Gone with the Wind, christened the network’s first broadcast – and had acquired MGM studio’s big film catalog from which to pull titles. At the time, deeper-cut movies rarely played on major networks, and real buffs had to trawl library archives to find what they were looking for.
From the start, TCM projected a reverence for the medium, airing uncut films in a wide range of genres – a 1930s screwball comedy in one slot, an 80s slasher flick in the next. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are never interrupted by commercials for car insurance or pharmaceuticals. The network’s present-day hosts – led by Ben Mankiewicz, grandson of Citizen Kane scribe Herman J Mankiewicz – and guest stars serve up insider stories as they present each film. Tom Hanks once spoke on TCM of having to tell Bette Davis, then an intimidating grande dame of the screen, that she had stolen his wife’s seat at an Academy Awards afterparty. When Amy Madigan won an Oscar earlier this year for best supporting actress in Weapons, TCM brought her on to talk about past roles, including one alongside the late Gene Hackman.
Even Donald Trump appeared on TCM, in 2007, where in typical fashion he compared himself to Charles Foster Kane, the wealthy yet pitiable tycoon from Mankiewicz and Orson Welles’s masterpiece, Citizen Kane.
I am not someone who feels sentimental about brands or companies. I like to think I’m smart enough to know they will never love me back. But TCM is different. Karie Bible, an author and tour guide at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, interment site of many icons, feels the same way.
Bible started watching the channel as a college student in the 90s. “It’s kind of emotional to explain, but TCM has been like a close, comforting friend during some very dark hours of my life,” she said. “When I was in the hospital about to have a kidney operation I was watching it.”
Bible remembers lying on a gurney after surgery, watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and then the 1960s horror flick What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? “When they came to wheel me out, I told them I wasn’t going until Baby Jane was over,” Bible said. “My dad had to take away the remote so they could take me off the table.”
TCM does not share ratings, but in 2020, 68.2m homes had access to it: retirees, small-town kids and director Martin Scorsese, who reportedly keeps TCM on in his editing suite. I would not say I am dating my boyfriend solely for his TCM subscription, but when he dropped that he had one during our first date, I decided there would be a second. It signals something charmingly analog, an instinct to choose careful curation over autopopulating recommendations on streamers such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO.
Can a network like TCM, which is programmed by people who clearly think a lot about what to put on air, survive in this media ecosystem?
In early October, when Paramount Skydance announced its acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery – and therefore a collection of cable channels including CNN, MTV and TCM – fans panicked. A flowchart allegedly produced by the new mega-media company Skydance listing its new properties made the rounds on a Reddit forum for TCM viewers; TCM’s logo was notably absent. “This is very ominous,” one user wrote. “Doomed,” wrote another. (The image is of unknown origin; Skydance’s website includes TCM on a list of brands.)
It felt like deja vu. In 2023, after the $43bn merger of Warner Bros and Discovery, executives laid off several TCM executives, including longtime head of programming Charles Tabesh, an enthusiastic champion of both obscure and well-known movies. The move disturbed film buffs, who saw it as a death knell for the network. Heavyweight TCM fans including Scorsese and fellow directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Spielbergcalled Warner Bros Discovery’s head, David Zaslav, who acquiesced by bringing Tabesh back (though not the 70 TCM staffers also cut). There was a sigh of relief among certain circles: art had prevailed.
Now comes Skydance. Staff are reportedly bracing for layoffs across the company, which carries $80bn in debt due to the merger. “One of the easiest ways to remedy some of that debt is to sell some of the linear TV assets,” said Gabriel Miller, co-founder of the Industry, a newsletter about film production. “Obvously [Skydance CEO] David Ellison isn’t going to sell CNN, but something like Comedy Central or BET might be something that potentially ends up getting sold.”
TCM, too? The official line is that the network is staying put for now, IndieWire reported. A representative for TCM declined to comment on the record to the Guardian. A representative for Skydance did not comment on the company’s intentions for TCM.
TCM has spent decades cultivating its fanbase.
Because the network does not air commercials, it cannot make money off of ads. It instead relies on carriage and streaming fees (there is an app available for people who already have a TV subscription through traditional cable or a live TV streaming service).
It also hosts live events, including a Los Angeles film festival and “classic film cruise” that set sail earlier this month.
Marsha Gordon is a history professor who penned a biography of Ursula Parrott, the 1920s novelist who is credited for inventing the word “ex-wife”. Gordon spoke at a recent TCM festival, introducing a 35mm print of The Divorcee, an adaptation of Parrott’s work that is older than the Empire State Building. The screening took place at 10am on a Friday morning; Gordon expected maybe 30 people in the audience. Nearly 500 people showed up. “They were reacting exactly as you would imagine people would have reacted in 1930: laughing and holding their breath and boo-ing at the right places,” she said.
Programmers for the festival and the daily TV schedule have a “sense of play”, Gordon said. They want viewers to have a good time. See: Creepy Cinema, an annual celebration of campy Halloween co-hosted by Sex and the City actor Mario Cantone, who often uses his airtime to give impressions of stars such as Joan Crawford or Bette Davis.
In February, social media users (gleefully) accused TCM of sending a message with its decision to air Gaslight before Trump’s State of the Union. The 1944 film, about a husband who slowly convinces his wife that she has gone insane, spawned the eponymous term relating to the type of psychological manipulation Trump and other men have been accused of. “The counter programming at @tcm remains unmatched,” comedian Patton Oswalt posted on Threads. The timing could have been coincidental: that night, TCM scheduled a series of remakes that had been nominated for Academy Awards, a category that Gaslight falls into. (A representative for TCM declined to comment on the theory at the time.)
Coincidences like this might not go over well with David Ellison, son of Larry, the eighth-richest man in the world and a Trump ally who donated $45m to a Pac supporting his candidacy in 2024. The younger Ellison has downplayed his own connection to the Trump administration, saying he doesn’t “want to politicize” Skydance and highlighting its “good relationship[s]” with the Biden administration and Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom.
Then again, Ellison has one thing in common with me: he claims to love film. The industry scion originally founded Skydance to produce his passion projects. “I think he’s someone who actually cares about cinema and is going to try to make [TCM] work,” said Miller of the Industry newsletter.
Chris Yogerst, an author and media historian who wrote a book on the original Warner brothers, is similarly optimistic. He could see a near future where TCM pivots to streaming-only – like the highbrow Criterion Collection, which is celebrated for its library but lacks the friendly host setup of TCM. “They could make a hub [on HBO Max] or an app where the brand still serves the same format, but it’s just adapting to the digital era a little bit more effectively,” Yogerst said.
Reports of TCM’s death may be exaggerated – and are also great PR, said Peter Saraf, chair of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “When Zaslav tried to shut down TCM, he actually did it such an amazing promotional favor,” Saraf said. “So many people came out and said, you cannot do this. Just the fear of something going away makes you want to watch it even more. I think it would be very foolish of Ellison to even consider touching it.”
So Sweater Weather cinema continues, at least for the rest of fall. And as always, I will be there. This week, a friend suggested making plans Tuesday night. I countered with happy hour, explaining my prior commitment. She said that’s fine, and that we should meet up close to my apartment – she would like to come over after and watch TCM, too.

Season 35 of Dancing With the Stars is heating up — and the competition is narrowing as more celebrities are sent home each week.
The ABC show kicked off Sept. 15 with a new group of celebrities hoping to follow in the footsteps of Season 34 champion Robert Irwin.
This year’s cast includes familiar faces from across the entertainment industry, including Glee star Harry Shum Jr., 10 Things I Hate About You actor Julia Stiles and The Traitors’ Maura Higgins.
Carrie Ann Inaba, Derek Hough and Bruno Tonioli are back at the judges’ table, with Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough returning as hosts for their fourth consecutive season. Shirley Ballas, who is pro dancer Mark Ballas’s mother and the head judge on the U.K. version of the show, stepped in as a guest host on Tuesday.
But who was the latest celebrity eliminated from the contest? Here’s what happened.
Who left ‘Dancing With the Stars’ last night?
Week 7’s Horror Movie Night ended with two couples leaving the competition, following no eliminations during last week’s Dedication Night show. The results combined Week 7’s judges’ scores and viewer votes with the judges’ scores and viewer votes carried over from Week 6.
This week’s unlucky couples? The Bachelorette star Tyler Cameron and his partner, Sharna Burgess, went home along with Savannah Bananas baseball player Jackson Olson and his partner, Emma Slater.
Olson’s exit, in particular, was a surprise after he tied for fifth place with Maura Higgins, who stayed and beat both Julia Stiles’s and Tatyana Ali’s judges’ scores. But the combined results across both weeks weren’t enough to keep him in the competition.
Cameron called the experience “incredible” and said Burgess “has been so good to me.” He added, “You saw me upset up there, I was disappointed with myself because I feel like I let her down because she’s given me so much. I have a special woman in my life now, I’m very lucky.”
Olsen said, “I wanted to be on this since last year and I made a bunch of videos about it and I got on it and I got the most amazing partner, Emma, so this journey’s been amazing.”
At the top of the leaderboard, Shum and pro partner Jenna Johnson (whose Week 5 lift sparked the controversy that led to Val Chmerkovskiy’s one-week suspension) earned 10s from each judge for their contemporary routine — the first perfect score of the season.
Chmerkovskiy, back on the dance floor, and his celebrity partner, Jenna Dewan, scored 37, meaning they tied in second place with Connor Wood and pro dancer Rylee Arnold.
Who else has left ‘Dancing With the Stars’?
See the full list of celebrities eliminated from Dancing With the Stars below:
Week 7: Tyler Cameron, The Bachelorette star and Jackson Olson, baseball player
Week 6: No elimination
Week 5: Guillermo Rodriguez, TV personality
Week 4: Ciara Miller, reality TV star
Week 3: Taylor Hanson, singer
Week 2: Giada De Laurentiis, chef
Week 1: Conner Leavitt, reality TV star, and Sarah Jane Nader, influencer
When is ‘Dancing With the Stars’ on again?
There’s a shakeup in the schedule next week. Due to Election Day on Tuesday, Dancing With the Stars returns next Monday, Nov. 2, at 8 p.m. ET on ABC and Disney+ for Disney Night. Wicked star Cynthia Erivo will be the guest judge.
Episodes are available to stream the following day on Hulu.

A pair of films may have played a critical role in moving voters to vote for the Change bloc over the bloc of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Israeli elections held Tuesday.
The first has become a box-office hit. The second didn’t play in the country at all.
As election results come in, the anti-Netanyahu “Change” bloc led by former military commander Gadi Eisenkot’s center-right Yashar (Straight) party is notably behind the far-right government of Netanyahu, the leader of Likud and the longtime prime minister in power during and after the October 7 attacks. Netanyahu’s bloc has a 54-47 Knesset-seat advantage with more than 70% of the vote in. But he has no clear path to reach the 61-seat majority threshold via a coalition government since five of the six parties outside his bloc are highly unlikely to join him (and the sixth is a toss-up). Gridlock and a new election in the coming months seem very possible.
The first of the two films that might have brought us here is Avi Nesher’s Our Loves. An action-tinged sentimental story of Israelis fighting to survive during the October 7 Hamas attacks, the movie does not wear politics on its sleeve.
But in showing an absent army and focusing on security failures, the film is, for all its undercurrents of unity and patriotism, at least implicitly critical of the Netanyahu government in charge at the time. Moreover, it’s a hit. Released purposefully two weeks before the election, the drama has garnered 150,000 admissions in Israel — a high tally for a non-Hollywood movie in the small country, and a number that could have given Netanyahu a few more key seats.
Nesher has been outspoken that he does not support the Netanyahu government and said he believes that its members wouldn’t like the film. “I do not share the government’s point of view at all. I’ll be one of those people who are not voting for this government,” he told The Hollywood Reporter at TIFF, and he has continued comments to that effect in the Israeli press.
Nesher’s words carry weight, not only because he is a beloved filmmaker but because he has made movies about finding one’s way out of previous eras of crisis (his Rage and Glory and Image of Victory are both set around the nation’s founding conflict in 1948) and he is seen as a form of artistic light in the darkness.
That Eisenkot, 66, lost his son fighting in Gaza also gives the movie a kind of heft on his behalf; it’s easy to watch the film and think of the candidate and what he went through. (Less so Netanyahu, whose own son has until recently been in Miami.) There’s even a tough military character in the film not much younger than Eisenkot.
The second cinematic wrench is NAZA, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary hit involving two dozen IDF whistleblowers revealing how Netanyahu’s government has conducted the war in Gaza. Though not released in Israel, word of it has been all over the Israeli press in recent weeks.
The effect is tricky — even many Netanyahu critics have criticized the movie for not telling the whole story; an anti-IDF film wouldn’t necessarily sit well with at least some Eisenkot supporters either. But the Netanyahu government tried to capitalize on this fact by making noise that they would attempt to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship (there is no known legal basis for them to do this).
While that move played to Netanyahu’s base, it didn’t seem to move the needle with the great swath of voters that Likud needed to win over — and in fact may have backfired, making it seem like the government was not open to any criticism, something Change voters absolutely feel should be in play.
Gauging the effect of a single doc on a complicated real world situation isn’t easy, of course. But mainstreaming the conversation about the war — newspapers have been filled with op-eds in the media-happy country since its Venice premiere last month — may have dinged the man who’s led it. (It’s worth noting that for all of Netanyahu’s political durability over the past three decades, his Likud Party these days is actually not a majority force on its own. It received fewer than 25% of the votes Tuesday and is reliant on a coalition-union with far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties to approach a majority.)
Meanwhile, a film fixture ended up potentially moving the film needle herself Tuesday. Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot — the closest the country has currently to a national icon — released a video Tuesday of herself at the polls saying she was voting for Change. She flew in from Los Angeles to vote and in her Instagram post urged all Israelis to the same (some 80% did) before noting her anti-Netanyahu preference.
She then even appeared in a sketch on Eretz Nehederet (the Israeli SNL) that aired election night while the polls were still open, getting into an Uber and talking about living in Los Angeles as an Israeli.

Kevin Bleyer, an Emmy-winning writer on “The Daily Show” who previously wrote speeches for former President Barack Obama, died in a fatal car crash over the weekend. He was 54.
The Maryland native died Oct. 25 while driving on a rural road in Millrift, Pennsylvania, where he had a home, his family confirmed on Facebook Oct. 27. No one else was injured in the crash.
“Kevin spent his life finding the perfect words to make people laugh, think and see the world a little differently,” his wife Nella Vera said in the statement. “I was lucky enough to know the humor, curiosity, mischief and tenderness behind those words — and to be loved by a man who made my own world more joyful, more adventurous and infinitely more beautiful.”
USA TODAY reached out to Bleyer’s representative for comment.
Bleyer was born in Bethesda, Maryland, raised in Seattle, and attended Stanford University in California. For the past 20 years, he considered New York City home, though he also had a home in Millrift, Pennsylvania.
He began his career working as playwright Anna Deavere Smith’s dramaturg and assistant at New York’s Public Theater and Broadway’s Cort Theatre. He later moved to London, where he worked for journalist David Brancaccio at the London Bureau of Public Radio International business affairs program, Marketplace.
Kevin Bleyer worked under Bill Maher before his job with Jon Stewart
Bleyer launched his late-night writing career in 2000 when he joined Bill Maher’s talk show “Politically Incorrect” and stayed until ABC canceled it in 2002. His next gig was at Dennis Miller’s CNBC self-titled political talk show, which aired for 16 months until May 2005.
He found a stable career in industry as a staff writer at Comedy Central with Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” in 2005. He won four Emmy Awards for his writing on the talk show and was nominated eight times. His work on the show also earned him a WGA award in 2010 and a Peabody in 2015.
During his nine-year tenure on ” The Daily Show,” he wrote for the Oscars in 2006 and 2008 when Stewart hosted.
His other roles include being a writer and producer on NBC’s “Today” show, a supervising producer for MSNBC’s “Ronan Farrow Daily,” writing a weekly column for The Daily Beast and serving as a recurring voice for The Onion Radio News.
Kevin Bleyer wrote for Obama, Bill de Blasio
Bleyer’s career also took him into politics, writing for Obama’s addresses at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinners. He later went on to serve as deputy chief speechwriter for former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who served from 2014 to 2021.
He also worked overseas, living in Kyrgyzstan in 2013 when he executive produced the first political satire news show in Central Asia titled “Studio 7.”
When he returned to the United States, he cofounded Pilot Media Initiatives alongside writer Dillon Case. The production organization helped start civics-minded media programs in democratically challenged countries, including Nigeria, Kenya, Jordan, and Estonia.
“Whether working with the U.S. State Department in Central Asia to bring political satire programming to that part of the world or delivering biting and poignant takes on ‘The Daily Show’ and many other programs, Kevin did just that,” producer Llewellyn Wells said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “He left the world a better place than he found it. The heavens are shining brighter today, the earth lost an angel.”
He also wrote for scripted television, including “The Right Stuff” on Disney+, “Sleepy Hollow” on Fox and “Significant Others” on Bravo.