A joint investigation by UK media outlets the Sunday Times, the Times, and Channel 4 Dispatches said Russell Brand has been accused of rape, sexual assault, and emotional abuse during a seven-year period.
The reports emerged after the 48-year-old actor had already issued a video Friday night to deny what he called “very serious criminal allegations.”
He insisted his relationships had always been consensual.
“The relationships that I had were absolutely always consensual,” Brand said. “I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent. And I’m being transparent about it now.”
He claimed that this openness was being “metastasized into something criminal” and suggested that it was a “serious and concerted agenda” to silence him.
Brand has in recent years reinvented himself as a counter-culture guru, who questions mainstream media reporting and endorses conspiracy theories.
“It’s been clear to me, or at least it feels to me, like there’s a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces and these kind of voices,” he continued.
“I don’t mind them using my books and my stand-up to talk about my promiscuous consensual conduct in the past. What I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations.”
Brand claimed that he was aware of witnesses whose evidence “directly contradicts the narrative that these two mainstream media outlets are trying to construct.”
According to the reports, Brand entered into a relationship with a 16-year-old schoolgirl. In another instance, he was accused by a woman of raping her in his Los Angeles home,
A third woman said Brand sexually assaulted her while she worked with him in Los Angeles
The reports said several others had accused Brand of physical and emotional abuse, sexual harassment and bullying.
Most of the women wanted to remain anonymous. A documentary will be released today on Channel Four’s Dispatches series.
