One of Russell Brand’s accusers said she would have been told “you’re lucky” if she had tried to report the A-List star for kissing and groping in a radio station corridor.
Brand, now 51, is accused of a “violent” attack on the woman at Choice FM in central London in the mid-2000s, when he was shooting to fame as a Big Brother presenter and TV star.
The woman, who worked at the radio station, broke down in tears as she insisted to Southwark Crown Court that she had no ulterior motive to lie about the incident.
“There was a culture of fear,” she said, recalling the atmosphere at the time as “people-pleasing”.
“Russell Brand was an A-lister star, it was Big Brother, people were watching it, we all watched it.”
Questioned by Brand’s barrister Ian Winter KC why she had not reported the incident and suggesting she had a professional “obligation”, the woman hit out at workplace “banter” at the time.
She said: “Women were rated by colleagues on what we were wearing, how we looked.”
“It wasn’t an environment where management were coming to talk to us about workplace behaviour, that didn’t exist.”
Talking about what may have happened had she raised the alleged assault with her line manager, she told jurors: “I think they probably would have said something along the lines of: ‘Oh, you’re lucky.’”
She insisted that Brand “wasn’t my type of person”, and defended calling him a “stranger” in her evidence because she had met many celebrities – naming Beyonce and Samuel L Jackson – but insisting they are “not people that I say I know”.
The woman said she had been “triggered” to come forward to police after seeing a 2023 Dispatches documentary on sexual misconduct allegations about Brand.
“I had buried it so deep for so long,” she told the court.
The woman has told jurors she was pinned against a wall by Brand in a corridor, before being groped and kissed “hard” while three men and a woman looked on without intervening.
She broke down in tears in witness box as she insisted: “I don’t gain a single thing” by reporting the incident and giving evidence.
“This was a situation that I don’t need to be in, I don’t gain a single thing by saying Russell Brand did that to me,” she said.
She told the court part of her motive for coming forward was seeing a video of Brand addressing the allegations against him from Dispatches and saying that his past sexual encounters were all consensual.
The woman said: “I was shocked, I was disgusted that he said it was consensual, that really upset me, it triggered in me that anger.”
She also told the court that she struggled to understand why the men and woman who witnessed the incident “didn’t do anything to stop him”.
The woman added: “I wonder if I was alone with him what would have happened.
“There is a man who is mauling me in front of people.”
She told jurors that she “locked eyes” with the other woman and was “pleading with her” to stop it.
At the end of his cross-examination, Mr Winter suggested that the woman had not known it was Brand at the time, but her allegation “became Brand after Dispatches”.
The woman replied: “No, it didn’t. Definitely not.”
Brand denies three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault, and one count of indecent assault.
The trial continues.
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