Two courtrooms, one celebrity: how did the Russell Brand case compare with the rape trial next door? | Russell Brand

In another episode, they pray for people who are enduring difficult times. “We pray for all people that have suffered harms. May we experience deep, deep love,” he tells his listeners, before it seems to occur to him that members of the media may be tuning in. “There may be people watching to find mean things to say,” he says. “We pray for them, too.”

One hundred and eight journalists are here to cover the case. Are we all just trying to find mean things to say? And if not, why are we all peering so intently at the trial of a comedian and actor whose career has waned? What are we hoping to understand with this exhaustive focus on a case examining whether Brand raped or sexually assaulted half a dozen women over a 10-year period from 1999 to 2009?

People are fascinated by Brand, now 51, because he has been so unflinchingly frank about how he has used women for sex – in his books, in his comedy. For years, this was a core part of his appeal; many of the millions who listened to him and read what he had to say just laughed indulgently at his anecdotes about shagging women and treating them badly. His persona pre-empted criticism: if you weren’t smiling at him, it was because you had no sense of humour.

Alongside Brand, the era that spans my early adulthood looks set to go on trial – an era of rampant sexism masked as ironic laddishness, which made it so tricky to argue with because every insult was just a hilarious joke.

By now, anyone who has listened to the news, or scrolled on their phones over the last few weeks will be familiar with the charges against Brand made by six unconnected women: that he raped one of them at the Labour party conference in 1999, that he orally raped another in the toilet of a bar, that he attempted to drag a receptionist to a toilet at MTV, that he anally raped a woman who had gone to his home for consensual sex, that he pinned a radio employee against the wall and kissed her while a colleague laughed, that he placed his face in the groin of a television production worker and demanded a massage. Brand denies all seven charges – three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one count of attempted indecent assault.

As the trial begins, the journalists who have managed to secure a seat in court 3 are taking notes on laptops, trying to keep up with the complexities of the case. Whenever a particularly disturbing fact is revealed, about 30 journalists start typing in unison. It becomes very loud. When one witness notes how Brand “went from someone who was quite affable, jovial, and turned into a wild-eyed maniac”, it sounds like a tropical rainstorm drumming on a tin roof. Even the judge has remarked on the disruptive noise of the furious typing.

By day four, I am beginning to wonder what I can add to the collective thoughts of dozens of journalists and podcasters, and Brand himself, on this trial. So the following morning I turn left instead of right out of the tube, and make my way to a different rape case starting at another court, a 15-minute walk in the other direction.

This is the story of two rape cases; one that the whole world is paying attention to and one that has attracted no attention at all.

As Russell Brand listens to the evidence of his six accusers, a mile away in court 9 of Inner London crown court, Michael, a 32-year-old data analyst, sits in the dock as a prosecution barrister outlines what happened during the afternoon of 17 June 2025, shortly after this defendant, who was driving through London in his BMW, on his way to get a hair cut, spotted a 17-year-old girl, whom he found attractive, and stopped his car.

I’m the only journalist here; the creeping extinction of local newspapers has prompted a stark decline in coverage of most court cases. This morning, there were no lines of police and photographers outside the court, there was no jostling for a seat in the courtroom, no artists sketching the scene. The defendant is wearing a new light-grey suit, the slit at the back still tacked together. He is accompanied by his father and a friend. His father is silent and looks morose, but as the defendant is taken to the dock to be locked in for the duration of the hearing (something Brand is not subjected to), he reaches out to brush his son’s hand in a wordless gesture of support.

The jury at Brand’s trial is made up of eight men and four women. Here there are nine women and three men, who take notes as the prosecution barrister explains in her opening statement that the complainant, who had just turned 17, was walking home from college with a 15-year-old friend, when the defendant saw them, and pulled up by the kerb, and asked for her number, suggesting they should all go to a restaurant together later. Not long after, he messaged her and they arranged to meet in a nearby Morrisons car park. The defendant said he would collect a friend so they could go on a double date. In due course, the two girls were picked up, and they all stopped to buy some alcohol. The 17-year-old chose a chocolate BuzzBallz cocktail (a milkshaky alcoholic drink that costs about £4.50), of which she only drank about half. They were all driven to a nearby flat, where the defendant said they would stop for a while “to get to know each other”, before going out to eat. They did not end up going to eat. In the flat, the other man took the 15-year-old to a bedroom, and Michael sat with the complainant on the sofa for a while, before – she says – he dragged her on to his lap, and then over the course of around an hour raped her four times.

Later, she and her friend were dropped by the defendant at the bus stop. The next day, she visited the police station to report that she had been raped.

All rape cases are different, of course, but there are similar themes that run through these two trials, which are happening at once, at opposite ends of Borough High Street in south London. In both cases, the defence rests on consent. No one is denying that intercourse happened, but the defendants’ lawyers are arguing that the sex was wanted by both parties. This is the classic “he said, she said” conundrum. It feels illuminating to sit through this case in parallel, to observe proceedings, stripped of the drama unfolding around Brand’s trial, to understand the process, the core challenge of determining if consent was given, of persuading a jury of guilt or innocence.

Both cases involve a power imbalance: in Brand’s, celebrity; in this courtroom, the fact that the defendant is almost twice the age of the alleged victim. In both cases, the defence barristers acknowledge that their client’s behaviour was either “ungentlemanly” or “distasteful”, possibly even immoral, but argue that behaving badly is not illegal.

Both courtrooms are tired: the chairs are frayed, revealing yellow foam innards; in Southwark crown court the lifts are temperamental; in the neighbouring court the tech doesn’t always work, and the heating veers between sweltering and icy.

It is a peculiar experience spending three weeks at two rape trials. To begin with, hearing the explicit content feels awkward, but quickly it becomes totally normal to be listening to detailed discussions of vaginas, penises, ejaculation, fingers, rectums, orgasms. But the judges in both cases still have to encourage the defendants not to use euphemisms. Even Brand has to be reminded to speak plainly. “Don’t be too coy or shy,” the judge tells him. “We are all grown up here.”

The jury watches a recorded interview with the complainant, filmed a few days after the alleged rapes. She is calm and articulate, sitting on a sofa in the police station, hugging a cushion to her stomach as she sets out what happened. She doesn’t cry, but looks very young, her knees touching and her feet in big trainers turned inwards, pigeon-toed. She says she told the defendant, “I don’t want to do this” and, “You’re moving too quickly.” “I was not enjoying myself,” she says. “The whole thing was rough and fast.” The defendant did not use a condom. When she told him it was painful, he made shushing noises. “I was in such a state of shock, I didn’t know what was going on.”

When she got home, her mother sensed something bad had happened. “She said, ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ But I wouldn’t tell her.’” Instead she told a cousin later that night, who told her to go to the police.

In the afternoon, the girl, who is now 18, is brought into the court via an unseen corridor at the back of the courtroom, and gives evidence from behind a reddish velvet curtain pulled across the witness box so the jury, judge and lawyers can see her, but the public and the defendant cannot. As she answers the prosecution barrister’s questions, she sounds sure of herself, unfaltering.

“Did you go to that address thinking that you were then going to go to a restaurant?”

“Yes.”

“Did you at any time want to have sex with him?”

“No.”

“Were you expecting that to happen?”

“No.”

When the defence barrister stands up to argue that, contrary to her account, the sex was consensual, she remains composed for a while.

The broad process in both courtrooms is the same: interviews recorded by the police with the complainants when they first report the rape are played on several screens. The prosecution barrister (in both cases a woman) questions the complainant about the alleged assault, and the defence barrister (who in both these cases is a man) cross-examines her. Even though we know the experience of being cross-examined in a rape trial is often shattering, and even if we understand that it needs to be rigorous in fairness to the accused, it still feels brutal. None of the women in either case is asked about her sexual history, and the defence barristers acknowledge that victims of rape can behave in unexpected ways – they may not scream, or resist, or try to run away – but, despite this preamble, the women are then subjected to intense questioning about their decisions and their responses.

The teenager is asked many questions about whether and at what point and how she said no, and why she accepted a lift back with him. Every step of their encounter is interrogated.

“It is right, isn’t it, that he asked you if you wanted to sit on his lap?” the defence barrister asks.

“No.”

“I suggest that he asked you to sit on his lap.”

“No, he asked me to move closer to him.”

“You said to police that he dragged you.”

“Are you suggesting that I’m lying?”

“I’m suggesting that he didn’t drag you to sit on his lap. It would be very difficult to. He asked you to sit on his lap and you agreed.”

“No.”

“When you were on his knee, he was touching you in a sexual manner.”

At this point the complainant begins unexpectedly to howl, from behind the curtain, a loud, uncontrolled cry. The court clerk gets up to rummage around for tissues, and takes them behind the curtain. The judge asks the girl if she needs a break or if she is able to compose herself. She apologises and says she will try.

“You don’t need to apologise. It’s about getting the best evidence from you, and we can’t do that if you’re very distressed.”

She calms down and the defence barrister continues.

“After that, you had sex on the sofa.”

“I didn’t have sex. I was raped,” she says firmly.

“You may have regretted this very much afterwards but while it was happening you participated,” the defence barrister says.

“No.”

“You may have got very upset with yourself later for having had sex with someone you have only just met.”

“No.”

“You didn’t say stop.”

“That’s incorrect.”

“You didn’t say it was hurting.”

“I did. I did say it was.”

“And it was a relatively short time before you had sex again.”

“We didn’t have sex again. I was raped.”

Michael’s father gets a string of rosary beads out of his coat pocket and appears to be praying.

Brand is also praying as the women give evidence against him. On several days, I get the last available courtroom seat for journalists, a chair in the friends and family section, to the side of the court, with a side view straight into the dock, which is left unlocked and open, so I can see Brand in profile. I see how he stands, with his eyes shut for more than a minute at the start of the morning before the jury comes in, and how he falls quickly to one knee before taking a seat, discreetly crossing himself.

His faith is a recent development, emerging, perhaps coincidentally, around the time of the allegations against him. He said his 2024 baptism in the Thames, which television adventurer Bear Grylls assisted with, was “an opportunity to leave the past behind and be reborn in Christ’s name”.

Brand calls the glass box where he sits, with most of the press seats behind him and the court in front, the “aquarium dock”; say what you like about him, he has a talent for words. His expression is fixed and blank; he is remarkably still, except for the fingers of his right hand, which move along the beads of a rosary, dangling between his knees. Very occasionally, if a witness says something that is potentially helpful to him, he turns to glance at his wife, Laura, sitting in the seat behind me.

His father, Ron, is also here to offer him moral support. In apparent deference to his celebrity status, Brand and his team have been allocated court 6, along the corridor, to retire to during breaks. Ron is not invited to join them, so spends his breaks perched on the corridor sofas that have been used by thousands of nervous defendants over the decades. In his 2007 memoir My Booky Wook, Brand recounts how his father took him on a trip to Asia when he was 17 and paid for him to spend the night with a sex worker in Hong Kong. Perhaps this is why Laura appears a bit brusque with her father-in-law.

Outside the courtroom, Brand seems at pains to signal that he is a changed man, a decent, devout individual. On day one, when one journalist shouts out (not especially politely) to ask him how he is feeling, he replies: “I feel, of course, concerned, but hopeful that this process will lead to good outcomes for everyone involved. That’s my prayer. And thank you for the polite way that you asked the question. I appreciate that.”

Commending the journalist for politeness seems an unsubtle attempt to reveal himself as someone who values manners and sensitivity. I think: let the jury be the judge of that, rather than attempting to sway people before proceedings have even begun. I feel the same way about the Bible sometimes in his hand when he is photographed, with multicoloured Post-it notes marking different pages, and the Christian studies book by an American writer, Praying the Names of God for 52 Weeks. Isn’t this also an obvious attempt to convince us of his purity and goodness?

On arrival, he goes through the court security arch, setting off the alarms so the lights flash red. “Once more,” he is told, but it happens again, until he yanks out a large silver crucifix from under his shirt, wondering if it might be the problem. He stretches out his enormously long arms so the guard can sweep over his body with a handheld scanner. There’s something about the position he takes that makes me wonder if he is deliberately echoing Jesus on the cross. He looks silently towards the ceiling in a martyred attitude. I think I’m imagining this until I later hear barristers, working on a different case, laughing about his crucifixion pose.

At the courtroom cafe, Brand is friendly to his team of half a dozen supporters, helping carry water and cups of coffee upstairs, balancing three double espressos in one hand (although he lets one of his sidekicks, an American man who looks like his strangely shrunken twin, with the same long black hair, greying beard, stacked boots, skinny grey jeans and crucifix, pick up the £34.65 bill). He even gives a cheery thumbs up in my direction when I catch his eye as he steps back into his black people carrier at the end of the day.

But, as the weight of the allegations stack up against him, day by day, his defence barrister, Ian Winter KC, doesn’t bother trying to paint Brand in a saintly light or even in a particularly positive way. In a nutshell his defence goes: “Disgusting, distasteful, immoral. Who cares?” Brand’s behaviour during this period might well have been exceptionally gross, but that doesn’t mean he has broken the law.

The prosecution barrister, Riel Karmy-Jones KC, sounds sad and regretful, as she paints a picture of Brand as a man on a mission to sleep with 5,000 women, a man for whom women were disposable, a man who was “rampant in his desire to have sexual contact whenever he wanted, whenever he pleased”. She quotes a 2017 interview where Brand describes women as “amusements in his playground of orgasms”. She tells the jury that in his comedy shows he would invite members of the audience to have sex with him afterwards. “If you have a vagina and a heartbeat, we’ll be at this pub afterwards,” he told them. He said his age range was “16 to death”. We hear from a former friend who says Brand would select members of the audience to be invited back to his dressing room for consensual sex. We hear that sex in toilets was not unusual.

The defence barrister says all of this is irrelevant; all that matters is whether consent was given. Winter is very critical of the six complainants for the long delay in coming forward with their allegations, a delay he describes as “monstrous” and which he says has contributed to the “poisoned well” of evidence. Brand’s accusers each say they have different reasons for not reporting the offences at the time: they felt no one would believe them; they wanted to forget about what happened; they blamed themselves for not having prevented the attacks; one woman felt guilty for having willingly gone to his home for sex. They have taken years to come forward, finally prompted by a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary in 2023 that profiled his behaviour towards women.

The passage of time does make things difficult. Some of the evidence dates back to events 27 years ago and memories are hazy. One witness, a former flatmate of Brand’s, demonstrates how hard it is to be certain. “I think I almost remember him saying he raped her,” he tells the court, unhelpfully.

Michael is called to give evidence on the second day of his trial. His suit looks more crumpled. As he walks to the witness box, he has sweat on his face and trails a faint smell of aftershave. His defence lawyer asks him to describe what happened in the flat, and how they came to be having sex. He clearly finds the lawyer’s requests for graphic details excruciating, and his responses become steadily inaudible.

“I know it is embarrassing, which may be why you are mumbling,” the judge says. At one point, he doesn’t have the words to describe how the sex happened, so he mimes the action, thrusting backwards and forwards in the witness box. His friend guffaws; his father frowns at his feet.

The prosecution lawyer is briskly efficient, highlighting the speed with which Michael progressed from seeing the girls in the street to getting them into a flat. She asks how he can possibly have decided so quickly that he was attracted to the 17-year-old as he was driving along the road. “How long had you observed them before you pulled over?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“I suggest it could only have been a few seconds.”

The prosecution barrister wonders if he stopped his car because he thought the girls looked young.

“Were you attracted to her or did you think a younger girl might be easier to manipulate?”

“No.”

She reminds him that the complainant had told him that she needed to get home to babysit her younger brother at seven that evening. She asks him if he noticed that the girl had braces on her teeth. His answer is evasive, so she reminds him that in his initial police interview he acknowledged that the oral sex had not continued for a long time because the girl’s braces hurt his penis.

“Your behaviour was predatory, wasn’t it?” the defence barrister says.

“I see now that I shouldn’t have spoken to them.”

“They are children – do you accept that?”

“I accept that now.”

But he argues that the complainant told him she was older than 17 and is “lying about everything” because “she might feel embarrassed”.

“Are you saying that she is so annoyed with herself that she had sex with you that she reports you to the police for rape?”

“I am baffled,” he says. “She was calm, she spoke nicely, we shared a vape.”

“Why on earth would she go to the police if she was so happy?” the prosecution barrister asks.

“Perhaps she was just so annoyed with herself. If she had told me no, I would never have carried on. I know what no means. I know what consent means.”

Brand is in the witness box a few days later and the experience instantly strips him of his starry sheen. He has been arriving at court looking Hollywood-ready each morning, each day in a different theatrical approximation of a staid court outfit. He makes a nod to wearing a tie, without wearing an actual tie. One day, it’s a long white silky ribbon. On another, it is a brownish stringy strip. Today, it is a silk scarf wrapped around his neck, between piratical turned-up shirt collars. He has a wide array of different sunglasses he puts on for maybe four seconds for the few steps between the minivan and court door. I’m puzzled by the sunglasses. This is late October in London, so most days it’s not sunny. Are they to signal that he is a celebrity, on a different plane from everyone else? Why would he want to do that?

Even his gait is that of a famous man. He walks along the long corridor from court 6 to court 3 with the slight strutting, loping sway of a model on a catwalk, stepping over the areas of the dirty red carpet that have been stuck together with yellow and black striped tape. After Brand has walked past, I hear a barrister congratulating his client as they wait for their own hearing to begin. “Look, see, you’re in good company. That was the Hollywood film star.” His client does not appear to know who Brand is.

The celebrity buzz seeps into the room. It feels like theatre, or a TV courtroom drama. There’s no space for the public in court 3, but people keep turning up, hoping to watch. A few find their way to court 15, the overflow room for journalists who haven’t found a seat in court 3. On one morning I’m sitting next to a man, probably in his late 70s, wearing a beige mac and eating his way through a packet of Halls as he watches discussions of sexual assault, the smell of the cough sweets wafting potently around the room.

When Tommy Robinson’s trial begins one floor down, the media scrum outside the court intensifies, as citizen journalists and supporters (one wearing a union jack suit) line up outside. There is a noticeable absence of people declaring themselves to be Brand fans, although his mid-trial podcasts attract messages wishing him and his family well, which he and his wife read out.

Brand’s lawyer encourages him to address the way his supporters have melted away following the accusations of sexual assault. Brand says it has been “devastating” and that when his son was having heart surgery in Great Ormond Street hospital, the doctors barred his “attendance and presence” because of the material published about him.

“Were you able to persuade a single person with relevant evidence to come and give evidence on your behalf?” Winter asks.

“I have not.”

“Would they touch you with a bargepole?”

“No.”

To begin with, he barks out his answers, his hands behind his back, like a soldier responding to a sergeant major. The judge, Mr Justice Bennathan, who throughout the trial is a friendly, avuncular presence, compliments him for his powerful projection. “Mr Brand, that is nice and loud.” His answers are monosyllabic, as if he has been told to keep them succinct.

“Did you marry Katy Perry, who I believe is a popular music singer?” the barrister inquires (implying that he himself is too important to know anything about such matters), asking him to add “in just two words” how this changed his life.

“Staggering fame,” Brand replies.

We hear an analysis of whether Brand pranced around the hotel room of one complainant, topless, in the manner of an ostrich. We hear how Brand has clear memories of one evening at a nightclub because he met a group of “attractive women” from the X-rated TV channel Babestation. We also hear he saved the number of one of the complainants in his phone, with the letter T next to her name and two asterisks. The T stood for tart, he says. “That was what I used to denote casual hookups.”

We hear about the speed with which he moves to the lavatories with a woman, whose name he does not know, for what he terms “kissing, touching, fondling”, “canoodling”. He concedes: “It is possible that I could have taken my penis out of my trousers.” But he adds: “I recollect that the environment was unsuitable for the goal that I went in there with, which was getting off.”

The judge is uncertain if he has heard correctly, questioning “getting off”.

“I did say that, my Lord, but I could have said ‘achieve an orgasm, climax’.”

He tells the court that he believes “consent is fundamental, essential, necessary, and indeed in many ways more important than sex itself”.

In the afternoon when the prosecutor, Karmy-Jones, takes over, she questions whether Brand has really lost all his friends as a result of the televised allegations.

“It’s not the case that because of Dispatches, you have been rejected by everyone you know.”

There is a long pause, so she asks: “Is that a difficult question?”

“I’m not sure I understand it,” Brand says.

“This is not a case of ‘poor Mr Brand’. You have a platform of 6 million followers.”

Brand says nothing. He becomes increasingly truculent as the afternoon progresses; his answers sound sulky and surly, he pauses after many of the questions, thinking at length about what to reply, then just asking for the question to be repeated. Brand is normally a dominant presence in the room, so tall his head is a hand span from the top of the courtroom door, but he seems suddenly diminished. His answers become harder to hear; he moves his hands from behind his back, and shoves them in his trouser pockets; his shoulders sag.

Sometimes his answers are a bit unclear, and the judge intervenes to clarify: “Are you saying you don’t drag people to lavatories who don’t want to go?”

“Thank you – yes, that’s right.”

He is no longer the articulate star who opens his mouth to deliver 1,000-word orations. He becomes like Michael, just another defendant in a rape trial.

Karmy-Jones asks him whether it’s true he used to say that he never liked to leave any interaction with a woman without a conquest. He affects to be offended.

“The way that has been characterised is so nefarious, unpleasant and ugly that it is difficult to answer in earnest,” he says. Later, he says that what he probably meant was just a version of a Woody Allen line: “… when he said the only advice my dad ever gave me on his deathbed was ‘Always try and fuck the waitress’. It was a joke.” It is interesting that Brand reaches for Allen, another cancelled comedian, to justify himself, as he leans on the just-a-joke defence.

Before he leaves the witness box, he makes an acknowledgment, as Michael did, that his behaviour doesn’t look so great in hindsight, but insists he has done nothing illegal.

The final stages of the rape trial seem the most fraught for the defendants. The judges sum up the evidence, and give the jury a series of questions they need to work through in order to get to a verdict. (Are you sure the complainant did not consent? Are you sure the defendant did not reasonably believe she was consenting?)

In the last days, Brand has looked increasingly withdrawn, sitting unmoving, trancelike, listening to the closing arguments, so pale that he looks as if he is drawn in black and white, black hair and eyebrows, greying beard, grey skin. He sits bolt upright for hour-long stretches. As he moves between courtrooms, he seems robotic. A friend greets him with an enthusiastic: “Hi, Russell.” He pauses, disconcerted, and then responds: “Blessings,” before turning away. He and Laura have stopped doing their podcasts.

Concluding her case, Karmy-Jones notes that the complainants had no hidden ulterior motive, but were “six women who have nothing to gain, who have not sought the limelight, who have not looked out for some form of publicity, who have not taken part in a documentary, not made claims for compensation”.

Winter makes his closing statement to the jury on the Monday morning of the fourth week of the trial. He reiterates that Brand is a promiscuous man. “So what.”

Down the road, Michael’s lawyer’s defence covers some of the same ground. “You may think this was deeply unattractive behaviour by Michael. But this case is not about morality; it’s not about whether older men should be sleeping with younger women, or should have sex with younger women having known them for a short period of time. This is not a court of morals. It is a case of consent,” he says. “Sex on the sofa with a young girl may be shameful, but it is not a rape case.”

Giving directions to the jury, the judge, recorder Samantha Presland, says it is important to dispense with preconceptions about how someone ought to behave after being raped. “Any person who has been subjected to any form of sexual assault will have undergone trauma. Some people will show obvious signs of distress. Others will not. Some will be angry and display their anger, whilst others will remain completely calm. Every person has their own way of coping.”

She adds that “experience has shown that different people can respond to unwanted sexual activity in different ways. Some may protest and physically resist throughout the event. But others may be unable to protest or physically resist. This may be out of fear or because they are not a very forceful person.”

She is addressing standard rape myths, hard-to-shift preconceptions that people hold about how a victim should behave during and after a rape. The jury retire to deliberate for a couple of hours, before being sent home. The next morning the judge says, if need be, she will accept a majority verdict, since they have indicated that they are struggling to come to a unanimous conclusion.

Michael, and his father and friends have been told they can leave the court building, but no further than Starbucks, a two-minute walk up the road, but it is raining so a couple of friends offer to go out to bring him a takeaway.

What is going on inside Michael’s head as waits for the jury to decide? Mostly, he is worrying about the large number of women on the jury.

“I think it’s stacked against me because of how many females there are. Some of them might have daughters that age. They might be mums. Nine females. That’s just not fair. Men, they might have children, too, but men might understand where I’m coming from more. Obviously, I can’t do anything about the composition of the jury. If God wants it to go well, it will go well.” He is exhausted because he has been having difficulty sleeping and can barely bring himself to eat because the stress has made him lose his appetite.

How do I know this? Again, I’m not telepathic, but this time the defendant has come to talk to me, during a break. He is curious about why I’m covering his case, and makes a special plea for his name not to be mentioned in the article. He is worried that his children, a seven-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy, might be targeted at school if his name appears in the paper. “I don’t care about myself. I don’t want them to be bullied.” I agree not to print his surname.

I ask if he has spoken to his son about the case. He says he has. I wonder if he has talked to him about the notion of consent; I’ve been reading about the Cornell fraternity case and the allegations of gang rape at the US university, and am thinking a lot about parents’ responsibility to teach their children about consent. But Michael is not inclined to talk to me about this and just says: “He’s a smart kid. He knows no means no.”

Instead, he wants to say that he has thought hard about his own behaviour, by which I assume he means the wisdom of an older man organising things so he can have sex with a teenager he has only just met on the street. “I’m very changed. If this goes well for me … my life will change for the better. I will focus on my work, and my kids and my missus.” He says he is a devout Catholic. “I’m praying in my head all the time. I’m praying while I’m in court.”

He wants to be feel confident that the jury will find in his favour. “They have to be 100% sure in order to find me guilty. If there is a slight thought that I’m not guilty, then I’m not guilty … My lawyer is confident. What’s your opinion? You’ve listened through it all.”

I say I find it impossible to know, and he returns to his friends, who are chatting, laughing and scrolling on their phones. He hunches over his knees, holding one arm across his stomach, as if the stress of waiting is causing him physical pain.

I am the last woman he speaks to before being sent to prison for a number of years.

After six hours and two minutes of deliberation, a majority of the jury has found him guilty of two of the four rapes and of assault by penetration (fingers/vagina). He is found not guilty of oral rape and another rape. It is a confusing verdict, suggesting that the jury have believed both the defendant and the complainant’s accounts in part but not in full. I feel shaken at being present at such a critical moment in both their lives. The jury gather their coats and bags and file out of the court without making eye contact with the defendant.

The corridor outside is full of the hot smells of his uneaten takeaway, which a friend brought back just as the jury returned their verdict. Another of his friends disappears to find a large, unzipped Sports Direct carrier bag with some belongings and hands it to his lawyer to take to him.

One of his friends turns to the dock to ask: “Are you OK, bruv?” Michael says nothing.

Brand’s jurors take eight and a half hours to find him guilty of one charge of rape, and three charges of sexual assault; they find him not guilty of two counts of rape and one count of attempted indecent assault. Metropolitan police Det Supt Andy Furphy says outside court that this marks a “watershed moment”, a final reckoning for the laddish culture of the 90s and 00s (an era that saw Brand named “shagger of the year” by the Sun three times in a row).

But the trial down the road, relating to events from just last year, suggests that if laddishness has become unfashionable, it is only because a new manosphere-driven era of male entitlement has replaced it.

Only 9% of adult rape allegations that are reported to the police ever make it to court. There is a high level of attrition because of the psychological toll for the complainants, and the challenge of gathering sufficient evidence to convince the Crown Prosecution Service that there is a realistic prospect of conviction, especially in “he said, she said” cases. Around 3,000 rape cases are heard every year in England and Wales; for those adult rape cases that get to court the conviction rate is around 53%.

Brand closes his eyes as the first guilty verdict is announced. His lawyer asks if he might be given bail over the weekend, until sentencing, as “an act of humanity” to allow him to say goodbye to his wife and children. The judge declines the request. He tells Brand that he is likely to receive a lengthy custodial sentence.

“Yes, my Lord,” Brand replies.

On Monday, Russell Brand was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.