On Friday, actor Russell Brand was accused of raping, sexually assaulting and abusing four women over the course of seven years, with one alleged victim being a 16-year-old he allegedly called “the child,” according to a bombshell report that was vehemently denied by the British actor and comedian prior to its release.
The allegations against the 48-year-old stem from the time when he was at the height of his fame, between 2006 and 2013, according to a joint investigation by The Times of London, The Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatches.
Several women came forward to claim instances of rape or sexual assault. One woman alleges the actor raped her against the wall of his Los Angeles home, and she was treated at a rape crisis center the same day, with the outlets citing medical records.
She later told Brand she had been scared and felt taken advantage of, telling him, “When a girl [says] NO, it means no” — to which he responded he was “very sorry” and asked if she would forgive him, text messages cited by the report show.
Another accuser alleges that she was 16 at the time that she entered into an “emotionally abusive and controlling,” three-month relationship with him, claiming that the then-31-year-old called her “the child” and assaulted her.
She added that Brand once allegedly made her choke when he “forced his penis down her throat,” and she punched him in the stomach to get him to stop.
The third accuser claimed the “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” star sexually assaulted her while she worked with him in Hollywood and said he threatened legal action against her if she went public with the allegations, while a fourth alleged victim said she was sexually assaulted, physically and emotionally abused by him, the outlets reported.
Most of the women who came forward with their stories wanted to remain anonymous in the exposé and a subsequent documentary that will be released Saturday on Channel 4’s Dispatches series. In the article, their names were changed to protect their identities.
Brand denied the allegations in a preemptively released video on YouTube and X, formerly Twitter, alerting fans to “serious criminal” allegations that he said would be made against him.
Watch:
“I have received two extremely disturbing letters, or a letter and an email, one from a mainstream media TV company, one from a newspaper, listing a litany of egregious and aggressive attacks,” he said.
“Amidst this litany of astonishing, rather baroque attacks, are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute.”
“These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. As I’ve written about extensively in my books, I was very very promiscuous,” Brand professed. “Now during that time of promiscuity the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual.”
Brand said he believed he was the subject of a “coordinated attack,” pointing to previous examples of these attacks, saying, “We’ve seen coordinated media attacks before like with Joe Rogan when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn’t approve of and we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same language,”
Brand claimed there is a “serious and concerted agenda” to “control” independent spaces such as YouTube and X, and he was going to look into the matter because it was “very, very serious.”
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