Bernard Gallacher was invoked in a Southwark crown court hearing on Monday as Ian Winter KC told jurors that 2023 reporting had “poisoned the wells” in Russell Brand’s rape trial. Brand, 51, denies seven offences, including rape and sexual assault, against six women over allegations spanning 10 years from 1999.
Winter said the later reporting was meant to prompt other complaints. Prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC rejected that in her closing speech on Friday, saying the coverage did not have “such a subliminal hold on the minds of six perfectly rational women” that they would “invent, reimagine, recharacterise, recast” their encounters with Brand.
Southwark crown court
Winter told the jury that allegations about the comedian’s conduct in 2023, reported in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary and Times and Sunday Times stories, had “poisoned the well of justice” in the case. He also said there had been “monstrous delays” before the women in the criminal trial came forward to police.
He told jurors: “They poisoned the wells in the hope and intention that other people come forward and make allegations against him.”
Russell Brand and six women
The defence also tried to narrow the dispute around consent, telling jurors: “It is an extremely curious feature of this case that out of the many, many women that Mr Brand had sex with during this period only three of them say they did not consent to anal, oral or vaginal sex.” Winter added: “Disgusting, distasteful, immoral – who cares? It’s irrelevant to your consideration.”
He then told the jury: “There is no evidence he is some sort of psychopath who rapes people and thinks it’s normal.” The case includes the earliest allegation, which dates back to 1999, when a woman said Brand raped her after performing at a fringe cabaret event during the Labour party conference in Bournemouth and left his email address after asking if she was enjoying herself.
Ian Winter KC
The closing speeches now leave jurors with competing accounts of the same evidence: the defence says later reporting distorted how the allegations emerged, while the prosecution says six rational women did not reshape their experiences because of it. The jury now moves from argument to consideration of which account it accepts on the seven charges before it.
