Russell Brand has been granted bail after news of additional sexual assault charges against him broke last month.
The ex-comedian reportedly appeared at a London hearing via video link from Florida on Tuesday following the December news that he had been charged with more accounts of sexual assault. He is next set to appear at Southwark Crown Court on Feb. 17.
In March last year, the Forgetting Sarah Marshall and St. Trinian’s actor was charged with one count of rape, one count of indecent assault, one count of oral rape and two counts of sexual assault over sex crimes allegedly committed between 1999 and 2005. He pleaded not guilty in May, and a London judge set a provisional trial date of June 3, 2026. The alleged crimes relate to a 1999 rape in the Bournemouth area of the U.K.; a 2001 indecent assault of a woman in Westminster, London; the 2004 oral rape and sexual assault of a woman also in Westminster; and the sexual assault of another woman in Westminster between 2004 and 2005.
Last month, the U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service announced further charges stemming from separate police reports involving two women in 2009. It is these charges that Brand was in court for Tuesday. In total, he faces criminal allegations of sex crimes against six women.
Brand vehemently denies the claims made against him. Since the allegations have come to light, he has turned to Christianity and been baptized. He responded to the news in a video shared on his social media last year, stating: “I’ve never engaged in nonconsensual activity. I pray that you can see that by looking in my eyes.”
Detectives began investigating in September 2023 after receiving a number of allegations, which followed reporting by Channel 4’s Dispatches and The Sunday Times. One of the women told Dispatches that Brand entered a relationship with her when he was 31 and she was 16. Their relationship lasted three months, she had said, and Brand had been “emotionally abusive and controlling.” Another claimed that Brand raped her in 2012 in his L.A. home, according to the Sunday Times.
The claims against him date between 2006 and 2013, when Brand was at the height of his fame working on Big Brother’s Big Mouth, Kings of Comedy and Big Brother’s Celebrity Hijack.
A Banijay U.K.-commissioned investigation later found informal complaints concerning Brand were made over 20 years ago on set, and another review into Brand’s behavior at the BBC, in particular between 2006 and 2008 when he worked for 6 Music and Radio 2, found that fellow employees believed he “would always get his way, and therefore stayed silent.”
