Jemima Goldsmith Accuses Russell Brand of Abuse After 10-Year Sentence
Jemima Goldsmith, who dated Russell Brand around 2014, said in a statement on X that he subjected her to violence, coercive control and abuse. She posted it hours after he was sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison.
Russell Brand's Jemima Goldsmith, the TV producer who dated him around 2014, has accused him of "violence, coercive control and abuse" in a statement posted on X. She published it hours after he was sentenced in the United Kingdom to 10 years and six months in prison.
Brand, 51, was convicted of rape and sexual assault involving four women between 2004 and 2009. He was acquitted of two other counts of rape and one count of attempted indecent assault.
What Goldsmith said
Goldsmith, 52, said she was "strongly and unequivocally on the side of all of Brand's victims". She added: "I have had my own personal experience of his violence, coercive control and abuse."
She said she had to call the police to have him removed from her home in 2014 during a violent incident. She did not press charges, she said, because she was "worried about the impact of the press attention on my then teenage children".
She has neither seen nor spoken to Brand since that period. Her pain, she said, "pales in comparison to what the women have testified in court have suffered", but it was a difficult time that had a lasting impact.
Goldsmith said she helped the journalists who exposed Brand. She also said she was prepared to testify to his abusiveness if the newspaper that published the accounts were ever sued. She said she was "glad and relieved" that he had "finally faced justice".
The 2015 injunction
Her statement also addressed reports of an injunction she and Brand took out in October 2015. It banned a woman, Szilvia Berki, from harassing them, including by alleging an assault by Brand at Goldsmith's home the year before.
Goldsmith said Berki visited her house for roughly 30 minutes on June 7, 2014, to give Brand a massage that did not take place. She said Berki later told police that Brand had pushed her in the back and that Goldsmith's dog had attacked her.
Goldsmith said she "did not see anything untoward". After she provided a statement and CCTV footage, she said, police concluded there was no case to answer.
She accused Berki of then sending "vicious antisemitic and threatening" messages and posting "wild and untrue allegations" about her on social media. She said recent media reporting of the injunction had exposed her "to vile hatred and abuse online".
Rosamund Urwin, the Sunday Times chief news correspondent who worked on a 2023 investigation into Brand, said Goldsmith helped her "a lot". "I have seen the abuse she's been getting online and I did try to tell people that part of the story was much more complicated than they realise," Urwin said.
The sentencing
Judge Joel Bennathan described Brand as a serial predator. He told him: "The whole episode reeks of casual disrespect and your belief that fame meant you could act how you liked, when you liked, unhindered by the rules by which decent people live."
Brand's rape conviction relates to a fan who was 21 when he met her after one of his London shows in 2009. He later raped her at his home. His sexual assault convictions involve a woman in a bar in 2004, another woman at a radio station and a third woman he worked with in 2009.
Goldsmith was once married to former Pakistani cricketer and prime minister Imran Khan. Brand married his current wife, Laura Brand, in 2017.
Brand will not be eligible for release from prison until he has served two-thirds of his sentence, or at least seven years.
