Russell Brand charged with rape
He's due in court in London on 2 May
Russell Brand has been charged with rape.
Among other things.
The charges relate to four women and have been brought following an 18 month investigation by the Met Police which remains open.
A spokesman for the Met Police said, “…detectives ask anyone who has been affected by this case, or anyone who has any information, to come forward and speak with police.
“A dedicated team of investigators is available via email at CIT@met.police.uk.”
If you have any information which might help officers, please contact them.
Brand previously denied all the allegations made against him in a joint investigation by the Sunday Times, Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches programme.
That investigation, in itself, had taken around four years thanks to the hard work of journalists led by Sunday Times media editor Rosamund Urwin.
The former comedian recently moved his family to America and made a concerted effort to associate himself with President Trump and the MAGA movement. Trump has since also extended an invitation to the Tate brothers as they await trial on sex trafficking charges and now we wait.
Will Brand willingly return to the UK to face criminal charges? Will Trump prevent his extradition if he doesn’t voluntarily get on a plane?
The women accusing Brand of rape and sexual assault have already waited 18 months to get to this point. And now who knows how long the glacially slow British justice system will take to bring this man to trial. Finally.
Add up the hours and days and months and years that journalists and the police and the CPS have worked to make a case against this “open secret” in the entertainment industry.
The talk on the internet today is celebratory but also a deluge of mocking posts suggesting how unsurprising the news is. Satirical US magazine, The Onion, led with the headline ‘Nation could have sworn Russell Brand was already convicted sex offender’.
Thousands of people on the internet congratulating themselves for sussing him out. I’m happy for them but also, what does this say? We can all believe that someone is behaving in this way towards women but remain content to do nothing at all about it.
Even with this general agreement that we all knew he was ‘dodgy’, it has taken so long and so much to even charge him with anything. The police investigation would not have happened without those journalists relentlessly working to get the story in the public domain, reaching an extremely high legal threshold to do so.
So much work by so many people to get this man anywhere near the consequences of his alleged actions.
The women talked to one another, talked to those journalists, because that’s all they could do.
Until now.