Russell Brand sentenced to 10.5 years; Jemima Goldsmith alleges violence and abuse

Sentence and convictions

Russell Brand, 51, was sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in prison at Southwark Crown Court on Monday, 9 November. He had been convicted on Thursday, 5 November, of raping a fan and sexually assaulting three other women in separate incidents between 2004 and 2009. He was cleared of two further rape charges and one count of attempted indecent assault. Brand spent four nights in a cell before the hearing. His barrister, Ian Winter KC, argued that the offences were connected and were a consequence of the fame Brand was acquiring, and pointed out that the final offence happened shortly after Brand had met the singer Katy Perry. The judge told Brand that his fame had led him to believe he could act as he liked.

Victims' accounts

One victim told the court that Brand's fame had left her afraid to speak out for years, and said the power imbalance had made her feel powerless. Another said she feared the sexual assault would haunt her every day, and described the process of reporting it as a marathon she had not trained for. Brand's wife, Laura Gallacher, was in court when he was taken down to the cells after sentencing.

Goldsmith's allegations

Hours after the sentence was handed down, Jemima Goldsmith, 52, a television producer who dated Brand for about a year around 2014, posted a long statement on X. She wrote that she was in awe of the women who came forward at the trial:

“I am in awe of the courageous women who came forward at Brand's trial, told their stories, testified and ensured justice was done.”

She went on to describe her own experience of his conduct and said she had to call the police in 2014 to have him removed from her house during a violent incident:

“I had to call the police to have him removed from my house in 2014 during a violent incident.”

Goldsmith said she chose not to press charges because she worried about the impact of press attention on her then teenage children. She said she had neither seen nor spoken to Brand since 2014, and that she had helped the journalists who exposed the allegations against him in 2023 and would have testified to his abusiveness had they been sued.

The 2015 injunction

Goldsmith also responded to renewed reporting about a harassment injunction she and Brand obtained against a masseuse. According to Goldsmith, the woman visited her house for roughly 30 minutes on 7 June 2014 to give Brand a massage, and later told police that Brand had pushed her in the back as she was leaving and that she had been attacked by Goldsmith's dog. Goldsmith said she "did not see anything untoward" during the encounter. Police, after taking a statement and reviewing CCTV footage, concluded there was no case to answer. The BBC dated the injunction to October 2015, and it barred the woman from talking about the alleged assault, including to police. Goldsmith said she agreed to a harassment order suggested by Brand's lawyer in order to stop the woman targeting her and her family, and accused the woman of a campaign of harassment that included disturbing emails.

Political reaction

Prime Minister Andy Burnham spoke at a hospital in Hertfordshire while the sentencing hearing was under way. He said the women who came forward would bring about wider changes to the legal system, and that he would press for more support for victims, including rape and serious sexual offence teams in every police force. Burnham also said he would look closely at remarks by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who backed changes to legislation to tackle "rape myths". Goldsmith, who married former Pakistan cricket captain Imran Khan in 1995, has said online commentary about the injunction presented an untrue narrative.