The judge presiding over Russell Brand’s criminal court case says the comedian will be handed down a lengthy prison sentence Monday after he was found guilty in a London court of raping a young fan and sexually assaulting three women.
While that much is certain, other questions remain, including one that is worryingly familiar in the UK, a country that has seen the downfall of a host of celebrities accused of sexual offenses. How did he evade justice for so long?
The 51-year-old former stand-up comedian’s conviction and the flurry of reaction from those who once moved in his orbit comes at a time of heightened debate in Britain about the toxic mix of fame, power and abuse.
Britain’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said Sunday that sexual abuse remained a problem in the media industry. “Hand on heart I can’t say ‌to you as the ⁠culture secretary that this is not happening today and in fact, if I had to wager, I would say it is,” she told the BBC.
She warned that women were often too afraid to report offenses as “speaking up has ​a very ‌heavy ​cost.”
Just this week, the popular TV show Married at First Sight UK was axed following an investigation into rape allegations, according to Channel 4, at the same time as British media reported that an unnamed celebrity is attempting to block the publication of his name in relation to sexual misconduct allegations.
After Brand’s guilty verdict, London’s Metropolitan Police superintendent said in a statement that as his profile grew during his acting and comedy career, “so too did his sense of entitlement.”
The Met police also confirmed investigations are continuing regarding two further allegations of rape made against Brand. Prosecutors are assessing whether to bring additional charges, according to Britain’s Press Association (PA).
“I hope this conviction sends a clear message that no one is above the law, no matter how famous or powerful they may be,” senior police officer Andy Furphy said.
But that statement has done little to hold back a wave of concern about the seeming immunity of some powerful figures to skirt accountability.
A mix of grief and relief
Responding to the verdict, British actress Sarah Solemani, who starred in the Bafta-winning sitcom “Him & Her,” said in an op-ed that Brand is finally facing justice but warned that other abusers are “still hiding in plain sight.”
She said the comedy industry has “for some strange reason, brought me into the close orbit of more than your average number of sexual predators, several of whom are still merrily working.”
“I had to pull a project from a company when I was informed it was common knowledge that a high-level exec was known for allegedly raping a colleague. Another famous comic had to pull a project when I informed them a legend they were working with was also an alleged rapist,” she wrote in the Guardian on Friday.
Comedian Katherine Ryan, who worked with Brand on a comedy show in 2018, also responded to the verdict, saying on her podcast that she felt “grief” and “relief,” while commending the bravery of the survivors who “came forward despite Russell Brand having fame, power, money (and) a legion of fans ready to attack them.”
As well as figures within the comedy circuit, British broadcasters have also found themselves in the crossfire.
After Brand’s conviction, the BBC reissued a statement about the celebrity’s controversial stint at the broadcaster in the 2000s, saying it was of “great concern to us that some people felt unable to raise concerns about Brand’s behaviour.”
“We apologised to those impacted, for both the culture and failings at the time, and we reiterate that apology again today,” the BBC said.
Brand’s convictions date back to 2004, 2005 and 2009, the decade when Brand moved from alternative comedy on a radically twisting path that took him to British television, Hollywood and eventually the world of podcasting and conspiracy theories.
In 2006, Brand began co-hosting “The Russell Brand Show” on BBC Radio 2, a weekly Saturday night program during which he had frank, comedic and often X-rated conversations with a co-host and guests.
However, the popular radio show ended abruptly two years later with Brand’s exit after the comedian and his co-host left a series of misogynistic voice messages for famed actor and “Fawlty Towers” star Andrew Sachs about his granddaughter.
During a live radio segment, Brand and his then-co-presenter Jonathan Ross made lewd remarks about Brand’s relationship with Sachs’ granddaughter, Georgina Baillie, with the incident prompting several resignations and sparking a national backlash.
Baillie sent her support to Brand’s victims following Thursday’s verdict while speaking about the devastating impact the BBC scandal had on her life.
“Justice has been served. Although he never raped or assaulted me as I have always said, I didn’t know what happened in the privacy of the rooms that the victims and Russell were in and their evidence was compelling,” she told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. “I now want Russell to right the wrongs.”
Brand’s exposure represents the latest in a string of historic abuse investigations into former BBC stars, including sex offenders Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile who were both staples of family television during their heyday.
“There can be no place for the abuse of power. Across the industry we must work together to ensure that anyone who suffers at someone else’s hand feels able to report it, that their concerns are taken seriously and that they are listened to,” a BBC spokesperson said in a statement.
‘A matter of regret for our industry’
Allegations of rape and sexual assault against Brand were made public in a joint 2023 investigation by three British media outlets – The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4’s “Dispatches” program.
Brand has denied the allegations in the program, which related to multiple women who were not involved in the criminal trial.
Esella Hawkey, the executive producer of the documentary, “Russell Brand: In Plain Sight,” said she was pleased with the verdict but added that she “would much rather these events not have happened in the first place.”
Speaking about how Brand evaded justice for so long, Hawkey told CNN it can be “very difficult” for individuals to challenge “so-called talent and very big names who, you know, have a huge monetary value for the broadcasters.”
“I think television and broadcasting does have a problem with dealing with that behavior and also in enabling people,” she said. “I really do hope that this is an opportunity for the industry to do some inward looking.”
On Thursday, the director of news at Channel 4, Louise Compton, said “the trial heard that women involved in the criminal case came forward after seeing the Channel 4 Dispatches film,” while commending the courage of the women involved.
The TV channel’s role in spotlighting the former comedian’s behaviour has not made it immune from criticism.
Following the 2023 revelations, Channel 4 announced it had opened an investigation into whether people at the channel were aware of Brand’s behavior while he was engaged in programs made for the broadcaster between 2004 and 2007.
The network said the investigation did not find any evidence to suggest Channel 4 employees were aware of Brand’s behavior documented in the expose, but then-CEO of Channel 4 Alex Mahon apologized over a separate allegation about Brand in 2009 that she said was not investigated as it should have been.
“In my view, it is a matter of regret for our industry that repugnant behaviours were tolerated – and indeed appeared on-air – in the past,” Mahon said.

A fresh wave of bomb threats disrupted air traffic across Europe on Friday but the affected aircraft landed safely and searches revealed no explosive devices.
The latest alerts affected at least 18 flights to or from Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Romania and the UK.
Danish police investigated a threat against Copenhagen airport but the airport’s management said it was operating normally.
The warnings followed separate threats on Tuesday and Thursday that forced at least 35 flights to be diverted or searched, raising questions over an apparently coordinated effort to cause chaos for travellers.
A number of European media outlets – including news organisations in Bulgaria, Ireland and the UK – have reported that a group claiming responsibility for this week’s threats sent an email to several outlets warning of further attacks on transport across Europe.
“This is only the beginning,” it reportedly said.
The latest threats affected at least nine flights to and from Prague, four flights over France, two flights en route to Sofia and a flight from Lisbon to Rome. Hungary scrambled fighter jets three times to escort civilian flights in its airspace, the defence minister, Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi, said on Facebook.
The affected flights had knock-on effects but were a tiny percentage – just 0.0674% – of the 26,709 flights that according to the air traffic control agency Eurocontrol were scheduled in Europe on Friday.
A separate spate of threats on Friday against media organisations in Ireland disrupted broadcasts and prompted staff evacuations and police searches of offices and newsrooms.
The taoiseach, Micheál Martin, told RTÉ Radio 1 after it resumed scheduled broadcasting that such threats had to be taken seriously and were an effort to sow fear and anxiety.
“It shows how relatively simple it can be to cause disruption and undermine the normal operation of society,” said Martin, adding that European security agencies would seek to identify those responsible and hold them accountable.
The British broadcaster ⁠Sky said on Friday it had also received a ⁠security threat and reported the matter to the relevant authorities.
Earlier this week, cyber-attacks targeted supermarket refrigeration systems in at least seven European countries.
The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said it was unclear whether the hoaxes and recent cyber-attacks were “all connected”.
She added: “But they definitely all tell us the same thing: today, what is under attack are civilian infrastructures.”
The Nato alliance continued to monitor the situation and was working closely with allies, according to a senior Nato military official.
Investigators have said there was no evidence that hoaxes against airlines and other targets were being orchestrated by a hostile terror group or state actor, such as Russia or Iran, but that inquiries were continuing.
Several European media outlets in Bulgaria, Ireland, the UK and elsewhere reported that a group claiming responsibility for this week’s threats warned in an email of further actions against transport across Europe.
“This is only the beginning,” it reportedly said. The Guardian has chosen not to reproduce the email in full, given its unsubstantiated claims.
Some of the threats on Thursday were signed “fighters of the Male State”, a reference to a Russian far-right, ultranationalist and misogynistic movement founded in 2016. In a Telegram post on Friday the group’s founder, Vladislav Pozdniakov, denied involvement and said the group had not existed since 2021.
Some officials suspect the waves of disruption are linked to European support for Ukraine in its war against the Russian invasion.
Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, said authorities needed more time to identify culprits but that there appeared to be a pattern.
“It ⁠cannot be mere coincidence that so many incidents with exactly the same modus operandi are happening across Europe,” he told the national broadcaster TVE.
“The ​most reasonable assumption is that we are facing ​an attempt at hybrid aggression and a form ​of psychological warfare,” he said, adding that Europe must be prepared for more such challenges.
Mark Rowley, the chief of London’s Metropolitan police, urged a measured response, saying past experience with the paramilitary Irish Republican Army offered valuable lessons.
He recalled the phrase “10p terrorism”, when a hoax bomb call made from a coin-operated phone box could disrupt an entire city, forcing authorities to distinguish between genuine and false threats.
The authorities would need to adapt to an evolving threat landscape involving actors around the world, some backed by hostile states, he said.
“We are going to have to adapt to that same methodology to make sure that we don’t overreact to every message we get online,” he told BBC Radio 4.

There’s a Tuesday night in November that captivates the nation, leaving households on the edge of their couch cushions as they await the results. This week is no different.
The College Football Playoff will release this season’s first round of rankings in its annual made-for-TV ESPN special tonight at 7 p.m.
For the sixth time in its 12-year history, the CFP’s first rankings reveal of the season coincides with Election Day. As a handful of states close their polls, teams and fans will learn where they stand entering the final month before the postseason. The same ratings collision unfolded during the 2024 presidential election.
In past years, when the show ran on the same night as election coverage, its viewership dipped from well over 1 million to an estimated 800,000. But neither ESPN nor the CFP expressed concern over the alignment.
Each Tuesday night from the first week of November through the end of the regular season, the CFP committee releases rankings that help schools understand how they’re viewed by the committee that will ultimately decide whether they compete for a national championship in December.
This fall’s edition, as little as it may be viewed, is especially intriguing. Only three teams remain undefeated, the fewest since 2014. The biggest surprise? No SEC team is without a loss, while Georgia and Kentucky are the conference’s only schools with one loss. Chaos. This may also be the last iteration of the 12-team playoff, as the CFP and ESPN are reportedly pursuing an expansion to 24 teams as soon as next year.
The Justice Department has deployed roughly 1,000 election monitors to observe voting at polling sites Tuesday, and nearly two-thirds of the jurisdictions chosen have consistently voted for Democrats in recent elections, according to a Washington Post analysis.
The department described the deployment as a record-setting effort to ensure election integrity at polling locations in more than 120 jurisdictions in all 50 states.
Though department monitors are dispatched every Election Day, this effort has prompted anxieties among Democrats who say they worry it will allow the Trump administration to interfere with the election or cast doubt on the results.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, maintained in a statement Tuesday the monitors were sent to pursue “transparency for elections in an assertive and nondiscriminatory manner.”
Of the jurisdictions the department selected for monitoring Tuesday, at least 89 voted for the Democratic candidate in the most recent three presidential election years. At least 29 consistently voted Republican, and five have swung between the parties at least once during the last three presidential cycles.
During the 2022 midterms, the Biden administration sent Justice Department monitors to 24 states, including to Democratic-leaning jurisdictions in roughly the same proportion as this year’s deployment, The Post’s analysis found.
Typically, Democratic administrations are interested in monitoring voting in heavily Democratic areas such as large cities because of concerns over voter disenfranchisement, language barriers and access to the ballot. This year, President Donald Trump and his allies have accused Democrats of attempting to cheat and pushed for greater federal control over how voting is conducted — claims that have largely been rejected by federal courts.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the United States would end $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel at the end of this year, following previous discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In 2016, President Barack Obama signed a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding with Israel to provide at least $38 billion to subsidize purchases of weapons, mostly made in the United States. The agreement was due to expire at the end of 2028.
Trump said, however, that the funding will end early.
“We were giving them $4 billion — we are — but it gets cut off at the end of the year,” Trump said in a phone call with Fox News in which he cast the announcement partly as a bow to domestic political reality. Direct aid to Israel has become less popular in both parties, but especially among Democrats, who are likely to take control of at least one chamber of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Trump pointed to Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, who has made a cutoff of aid to Israel a campaign issue.
“They don’t need it,” Trump said, referring to Israel. “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it? It’s a bad talking point.”
Netanyahu has said in recent months that he anticipated U.S. aid will wind down and has repeatedly called on Israel to strengthen its own defense production. In a visit to a West Bank settlement in May, the prime minister said that Israel “needs to free ourselves from dependence.”
Netanyahu’s advisers have long said they anticipated that U.S. public opinion would eventually turn against direct military aid.
Instead of financial support, Netanyahu has pushed for deeper military, intelligence and industrial integration with the United States to be written into the upcoming fiscal 2027 U.S. defense spending bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act.
Israel critics in Washington say that if it is written into law, the two militaries would be intertwined more deeply than ever.
At least 40 jurisdictions across the United States are voting Tuesday on measures related to data centers. The bulk of the measures are in Ohio, where 18 cities and towns will weigh in on whether to restrict or permit data centers in some way.
Significant majorities of Americans oppose the construction of new data centers, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
Ohio has been one of the states at the focus of the United States’ rapid data center build-out, receiving billions of dollars in investment touted by President Donald Trump during campaign rallies. Data centers have also dominated advertising in the Senate race between Republican incumbent Sen. Jon Husted and Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown.
The jurisdictions voting on data centers range significantly in size, from Joliet Township, Illinois, a city of 85,000, to 624-person Monroe Township in Ohio’s Adams County. A half-dozen municipalities in Maine and Illinois will also weigh in on data centers.
Many of the ballot measures are temporary or permanent bans on data centers. Voters moving en masse Tuesday to enact those bans would be another signal of Americans’ wider discontent against the artificial intelligence industry.
Additional Coverage
October 21, 2026
Most Americans want to halt all data center construction
Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corporation, acknowledged Monday that Fox News is suffering from a dip in its ratings but chalked it up to “viewer fatigue” after a year of tumultuous news events.
Murdoch on a quarterly earnings call said that declining year-over-year ratings are in part due to a monumental 2025: the presidential inauguration, the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, the actions of the U.S. DOGE Service under Elon Musk and deadly flooding.
Fox News, known for its news and conservative opinion programming, is a cable TV juggernaut, regularly outperforming rival networks.
Murdoch told investors and Wall Street analysts that viewers are watching less TV, not defecting to competitors. “Those viewers are not going to any other news channel,” he said. “They’re not switching to MS NOW or to CNN.”
For the week of Oct. 19, Fox News brought in 1.7 million prime-time viewers, walloping MS NOW (954,000) and CNN (632,000). Still, Fox’s prime-time audience was down 23 percent from the same week a year prior.
Meanwhile, MS NOW and CNN grew 30 percent and 28 percent, respectively, according to Nielsen data published by Adweek.
In a Tuesday earnings call, Mark Lazarus — the CEO of Versant, MS NOW and CNBC’s parent company — said he’s not seeing news fatigue among the networks’ viewers.
A British man has returned home after a 31,000-mile walk around the world that lasted 28 years.
Karl Bushby, a former paratrooper, was greeted by crowds his hometown of Hull in northern England on Monday, before arriving at his final destination: the home of his mother, Angela.
The idea for the journey was born in a bar, when Bushby, then in his 20s, made a bet that he could walk from the southern end of South America back to England. “Suddenly, it became a challenge,” he told The Washington Post last year.
His only rules: He would not use transport to propel himself forward, and he wouldn’t go home until he got there by foot.
Bushby set off from Chile in 1998 and walked across the Americas, Asia and Europe — navigating the perils of the Darién Gap and the frozen Bering Strait. He swam across the Caspian Sea and the English Channel.
On the penultimate day of his journey, he reunited with family members — including his son Adam, 36 — and met his granddaughter, 12, for the first time, according to the BBC.
A documentary is under production, and Bushby says he plans to write a book.
But, for now, he told a news conference Monday: “I think I’m hanging my boots up.”

Scientists detect signals at the smallest scale ever explored
Scientists have picked up signals from the smallest scale of nature ever explored – 100 billion times smaller than an atom.
A world so small that some physicists have nicknamed it the zeptoverse.
The research, led by scientists based in Cambridge, was obtained from an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
This vast machine at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern) on the Swiss-French border smashes atoms together to break them apart and discover what is inside them.
The result is important because it could help researchers develop a new, more complete theory of how the Universe works.
‘Knocking on the door’ of the zeptoverse
Dark matter makes up a large part of our cosmos, and yet researchers have struggled to detect it.
Scientists know it is there because its gravitational force influences normal matter, but in all other respects it has remained completely invisible.
So in this experiment, particles were smashed together at high energy and scientists studied the material that was thrown out – the shrapnel of collisions.
One of these is a sub-atomic particle – smaller than an atom – called a beauty quark.
The particle is unstable and exists for just one and a half trillionths of a second before breaking down into other forms – decaying.
Despite its short lifetime, researchers managed to detect it interacting with other tiny particles at a scale of a billion-trillionth of a metre.
Some theories suggest that at these scales particles are more sensitive to dark matter and it could influence how the quarks interact and break down. So, detecting activity in this tiny world could help scientists detect dark matter.
“We’re knocking on the door of this zeptoverse,” Dr Harry Cliff, of Cambridge University who led the analysis of the data, told BBC News.
He said this sub-atomic dance provided researchers with a ringside seat to the behaviour of possible new particles.
“And what we want to do now is go in and explore and find what new particles are waiting there. And to do that, what we need is more data,” Cliff added.
The 28 countries involved in the project have agreed a £150m upgrade to this detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHCb), which would increase the frequency of these decays tenfold.
“With that we can probe inside the zeptoverse and see what’s waiting,” Cliff said.
But earlier this year the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) agency, the government body in charge of research funding, announced that it was withdrawing its share of the money for the planned upgrade.
It did so as it announced cuts to several other particle physics and astronomy projects, including Jodrell Bank’s iconic Lovell telescope.
Although this research was led by scientists based in Cambridge, because of the cuts, Prof Tim Gershon, who leads the LHCb international collaboration, told BBC News that the UK’s full involvement in the research would be in doubt.
“The UK is at risk of not being involved and making really major discoveries,” he told BBC News.
“But I think the biggest long-term impact comes from the fact that the UK won’t get the benefits from training young people who really are our greatest product.”
Among those early-career researchers is Dr Mary Richardson-Slipper, who is part of the team that made the zeptoverse discovery. She is reconsidering her future in light of the physics cuts.
“I love being here in the UK, but I am looking at jobs abroad because that seems to be where there are more opportunities at the moment,” said Richardson-Slipper.
She added that “lots” of her fellow researchers working in fundamental physics had already moved.
The cuts are being made despite an overall record increase in the science budget.
Prof Brian Cox, TV presenter and particle researcher at the University of Manchester, who is not part of the research team, described the result as “important”.
“It would be extraordinary to walk away from UK scientific leadership at this moment, damaging the future research programme and seriously damaging our hard-won international reputation,” Cox said.

Video clips showing the aftermath of a deadly crush in Seoul will be removed from the latest Call of Duty game after an angry reaction from victims’ families.
Real life news coverage of the 2022 disaster which killed almost 160 people was included in an opening scene of Modern Warfare 4 to illustrate a fictional invasion from North Korea.
Bereaved families said they were “appalled” to see the footage – which included people being removed on stretchers, body bags on the street and resuscitation efforts – repurposed for the game.
Activision, which makes Call of Duty, has since apologised and confirmed it would be removed in the game’s next update on 12 November.
The crush happened in the narrow alleys of Seoul’s Itaewon district when more than 100,000 people went to the area to celebrate Halloween four years ago.
The streets became so tightly packed that people could not move and some were unable to breathe.
In a statement on Thursday, the families of those who died said the disaster “was a tragedy that caused hundreds of casualties, and citizens who took part in the rescue or witnessed it have suffered from trauma until now”.
“We cannot help but be appalled that the chaotic and desperate scene, in which many citizens at the site performed CPR to save one another and victims lay on the freezing street, was used to create a scene in a game.
“Using such an event as material for a game made for entertainment is in itself highly inappropriate and senseless.”
Activision confirmed it had used real news coverage of the disaster “to establish the game’s fictional narrative” but insisted it had “not intended to reference or trivialise the Itaewon disaster or any other real-world tragedy in any way, shape or form”.
Confirming on Friday that the footage would be removed in a statement, the company offered its condolences and apologised to the bereaved families and victims who have been hurt by this incident.
The decision was welcomed by the 10.29 Itaewon Disaster Bereaved Families Association, however the group told the BBC they had not received a direct apology from Activision.
Modern Warfare 4, which was released last week, had already faced criticism for basing the game on North Korea invading South Korea, as the two countries have been technically at war for decades.
Fighting stopped in the Korean War in 1953, but the two countries never signed a peace treaty and conflict is a very real worry in that part of the world.