The Sunday Times

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From The Times and The Sunday Times, this is The Story.

I'm Manveen Rana.

Last week, news broke that an unnamed male celebrity had filed an injunction to prevent some astonishing claims from being published.

Emineh Simmez, you're a senior reporter at The Guardian and you've been in court for much of the last month.

We've just heard about Russell Brand's heyday, but I think for many people, he probably slipped off their radar until this shocking joint investigation published by The Sunday Times and the Channel 4 Dispatches team.

I've never, ever spoken publicly about this before.

Russell seems untouchable.

He sometimes suggests you can't trust Silicon Valley, but he's quite clever with that.

So he's sort of hedging his bets with Silicon Valley and the Trump lot, I think.

So in 2023, the joint Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatch's investigation comes out.

It details allegations of sexual misconduct by multiple women, which Russell Brand denies.

And today I am joined by Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling, a Sunday Times bestseller, which I would say is required reading for anyone who listens to this podcast.

He's an award-winning journalist who's appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

And his books include Selfie, The Status Game, A Story is a Deal, on how to use stories to lead, motivate and persuade.

I saw him speak at Present to Succeed in Sophia over the summer, and I knew immediately that I had to get him on the show.

Back in September, he was on stage at the Maha Summit in Washington, D.C. with Dr. Oz, Tony Lyons, and several Maha political committees that supported Brand during his trial.

The investigation into Brand's sexual misconduct followed reporting from the Times of London, the Sunday Times, and Channel 4.

The Wall Street Journal, where I'm getting this story from, is owned by the same company as the Times of London and the Sunday Times.

Brand called the allegations a coordinated attack.

He claimed that he was being persecuted for his political beliefs.

Here it is.

The Sunday Times, The Times, and Dispatches.

These are three investigations that were done by these three newspapers that were able to take these allegations and kind of organize them.

Because as much as I know our police department wants to do all this, sometimes they only have limited resources.

Here it is.

The Sunday Times, The Times, and Dispatches.

These are three investigations that were done by these three newspapers that were able to take these allegations and kind of organize them.

Because as much as I know our police department wants to do all this, sometimes they only have limited resources.

Can you take us back to those women and their initial conversations with you at what point did you and the dispatches team begin to think that there was a documentary that could be made and that should be made in respect of Russell Brandt?

Well, it was obviously a long process, a long investigation, and a slightly unusual one in the sense that we decided to partner with colleagues from The Times and The Sunday Times who were also looking at, I think it's fair to say, widespread allegations that have been sort of in the background of the TV and media industry for some years.

But of course, you know, that's nowhere near the point of satisfaction to broadcast very serious allegations against a living person I think it was an accumulation of talking to a very high number of sources reading and listening to all his broadcast and written material and of course you know hearing these stories and then doing an absolutely nth degree of cooperation of what the sources were alleging.

In the program that we broadcast, one of the complainants had some quite significant text message exchange after she alleged that she'd been raped between Russell Brand and herself.

That investigation is ongoing, but there is that possibility of further charges that could come down the line.

And of course his barrister, after the hearing today, went outside the court and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say verbally attacked the Sunday Times journalist who was one of the instigators of uncovering what Russell Brand had been doing.

I think she was visibly shocked by this and it's not something a barrister normally does.

No, it's not.

And throughout the trial, there's been a lot of focus on that 2023 expose that came out against Russell Brand, you know, the Times, the Sunday Times and Channel 4 dispatches.

And coming out of the court, Ian Winter, KC, when he saw Rosamund Irwin, who was one of the lead journalists who did that investigation.

he approached her and said i hope you're pleased with yourself now she responded saying i'm pleased that justice has been done and then he swore at her saying well it hasn't you've messed it up but in much stronger language there have been a lot of you know questions and comments about some of the lines of questioning that he used during the trial.

Well, it was, as my colleague Fraser Knight said, a predator hiding in plain sight.