BRITISH FORMER COMEDIAN Russell Brand was today convicted of rape and three counts of sexual assault following a trial in London. 

The incidents Brand was convicted of took place on dates between 2001 and 2009, when he was a well-known media personality. 

In 2007, Brand released a memoir entitled My Booky Wook in which he detailed his past drug addiction, subsequent sobriety and his growing fame. 

The book also contained various crude depictions of his sexual appetite and characterisations of women which were put to Brand during his time in the witness box.

Brand was found not guilty of raping a woman he met at a cabaret show on the fringes of the 1999 Labour Party conference in Bournemouth.

The complainant in that charge told the court she believed Brand was gay when they first met, leading to her agreeing for him to come to her hotel room.

In his book, Brand used a picture of himself as a seven-year-old and wrote the caption: “This is the exact moment when I decided to act gay to attract girls. It took 15 years to produce results.”

The prosecutor said: “That’s something you would do, wasn’t it? That was something you would do to make girls trust you?”

“No,” Brand replied.

‘Object of my desire’

Prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC told the court that Brand liked to exercise “control” over women, and felt “disdain” towards them as he pursued his goal of sleeping with 5,000 women.

She pointed jurors to his book where he discussed his “birthright orgasm” and a 2017 interview Brand gave when he referred to women as “amusements” in a “playground of orgasms”. 

As again relayed in court, the jury was told of Brand’s writings in which he called himself “demonically sexy” and admitted he could be “uneasy company” when in the pursuit of sex.

He wrote:

If I want something – whether it’s a job or a woman – I will determinedly, resolutely, remove anything that’s in the way, until I possess the object of my desire.

Prosecuting barrister Karmy-Jones referenced that line from Brand in her closing speech, telling the jury: “A lack of consent, no problem for Mr Brand, just an obstacle he would have to remove, or perhaps ignore.” 

Court sketch of Russell Brand in the dock at Southwark Crown Court Elizabeth Cook Elizabeth Cook

Brand’s defence barrister Ian Winter sought to counter the references to My Booky Wook, saying that the prosecution’s use of them was a “bid of desperation”.

Winter said it was a “funny book” containing jokes. He highlighted the passage alongside the childhood photograph in which Brand wrote that he “decided to act gay to attract girls”.

The barrister said it was “so obviously a joke…the joke is that it didn’t work.”

Karmy-Jones read out other extracts from My Booky Wook, in which Brand had said he “would never have relented until I received my birthright orgasm”.

In another he wrote: “My egotism and the single-mindedness with which I pursued potentially sexual conquests could often make me uneasy company”.

In the book, Brand referred to himself as a “fervid, febrile mass of sexual energy” towards the end of sex, adding: “I’ll do anything. I’m demonically sexy.”

- With reporting by Press Association