Ian Winter KC stood at the podium in Court 12 of Southwark Crown Court on Monday morning, the weight of ten years of allegations hanging in the air behind him. The defence barrister did not open with the facts of the indictment. He opened with a theologian.
John Henry Newman, 1864. Winter recited the passage slowly, deliberately, letting the Victorian cadence settle over the jury. “This I call poisoning the wells.” The quote, he argued, was the only framework through which to understand how six women came to accuse Russell Brand of rape and sexual assault decades after the fact.
The comedian, 51, sat in the dock in a dark suit, his face unreadable. He has pleaded not guilty to seven charges — three counts of rape, three of sexual assault, and one of attempted indecent assault — involving six complainants between 1999 and 2009. The trial, now in its closing stages, has heard evidence spanning the breadth of Brand’s ascent from fringe performer to global celebrity.
The ‘Poisoned Well’ Argument
Winter’s central thesis was straightforward: the 2023 media investigation — a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary jointly reported with The Times and The Sunday Times — did not uncover a pattern of abuse. It manufactured one.
“They poisoned the wells in the hope and intention that other people come forward and make allegations against him,” Winter told the jury. He described the reporting as a “monstrous delay” mechanism, arguing that the publicity acted as a siren call, drawing women into a collective narrative that recast consensual encounters as criminal acts.
The prosecutor, Riel Karmy-Jones KC, had anticipated the argument. In her closing on Friday, she dismissed the notion that six “perfectly rational women” had been hypnotised by newspaper headlines into inventing, reimagining, or recasting their experiences. She urged the jury to look at the consistency of the accounts, not the calendar of their disclosure.
Winter was unmoved. He characterised the allegations as a statistical anomaly. “It is an extremely curious feature of this case that out of the many, many women that Mr Brand had sex with during this period only three of them say they did not consent to anal, oral or vaginal sex.”
A Life ‘Entirely Lawful’
The defence did not shy away from the volume of Brand’s sexual history. Winter described it as an “immense amount of sex” — promiscuous, perhaps morally distasteful to some, but legally unimpeachable.
“Living a highly promiscuous life is entirely lawful however morally distasteful you may find it,” he said. “Disgusting, distasteful, immoral — who cares? It’s irrelevant to your consideration.”
He painted a portrait of a man driven not by violence but by a desperate need for validation. Brand sought “approbation and adoration” from women, Winter argued. The “yes” was the prize. “He respects it when a woman says no so that makes him someone who is not a rapist. He was seeking the approval in the sex, it’s the approval, it’s the ‘Yes I will have sex with you’, and that’s what he said in his evidence.”
The Absence of Resistance
It was the defence’s handling of the alleged victims’ behaviour that drew the sharpest intake of breath in the public gallery. Winter went through each complainant methodically, asking why none had screamed, kicked, slapped, or fled.
Of the woman who alleges anal rape: “Didn’t just roll over and kick out in any way… didn’t scream or resist or call out.”
Of the woman who alleges oral rape: She did not “slap [Brand] in the face” and had not “sufficiently” resisted.
“Not one of them resisted or screamed or even tried to leave,” Winter summarised. The implication was clear: the absence of physical struggle equated to the presence of consent.
He returned to the earliest allegation, dating to 1999. A fringe cabaret show at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth. The complainant told the court Brand raped her, then left his email address, asking if she was enjoying herself.
“You would have to be a psychopath to be raping someone and asking them if they were enjoying it,” Winter said. “He said he was trying to please her but he wasn’t successful.” Rapists, he insisted, do not try to please their victims.
The #MeToo Silence
Winter pressed the timeline. The #MeToo movement exploded in 2017. The allegations on the indictment span 1999 to 2009. “How is it that it’s only three out of the many, many women, how is it that not even these ones, not even these allegations on this indictment came to light during #MeToo?”
He described a cultural moment where “many women were questioning whether they had a bad experience sexually at the hands of a famous person. It could not have been more publicised.”
The question hung there. If these were crimes, why did the reckoning not arrive when the world was listening?
The prosecution will have its rebuttal. The judge will sum up. The jury will retire. But as the court rose for the day, the defence had laid its cards on the table: a man of voracious appetite, yes. A man of questionable morals, perhaps. But a rapist? The defence says the evidence simply does not support the label.
The trial continues.
Why it Matters
This case sits at the volatile intersection of celebrity, historical allegation, and the evolving jurisprudence of consent. The defence’s strategy — attacking delay, questioning victim behaviour, and framing media exposure as contamination — tests the limits of how courts evaluate “credibility” in the absence of contemporaneous complaint. A conviction would signal that juries can look beyond the myths of the “perfect victim” — the one who screams, fights, and reports immediately. An acquittal risks reinforcing those same myths, sending a message that certain types of power, and certain types of men, remain effectively unaccountable. The verdict, whenever it comes, will reverberate far beyond Court 12.