Celebrity Gossip: Trump Jr. Defends Russell Brand
The celebrity gossip story of the week has a London courtroom at its centre. Donald Trump Jr. has publicly defended British comedian Russell Brand, days after Brand was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for rape and sexual assault. The president’s eldest son argues the conviction was political, and that Brand was targeted because he embraced Christianity and conservative politics. His remarks, made on his Rumble show Triggered and clipped across X on November 10, have turned a British criminal case into a transatlantic argument about justice, fame and belief.
Brand, 51, was sentenced on Monday, November 9, 2026, at Southwark Crown Court in London. A jury convicted him on November 5, after a four-week trial, of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault involving four women. The offences took place between 2004 and 2009, when Brand’s television, radio and film career was at its peak. The jury acquitted him of two further rape charges and one charge of attempted indecent assault, after hearing evidence from six women. The judge, Mr Justice Joel Bennathan, called Brand a sexual predator who showed staggering arrogance.
Celebrity gossip erupts after the London courtroom verdict
The sentence that set off the row is built from several parts. For the rape conviction, the judge imposed nine years in prison. For the three sexual assault convictions, he imposed terms of nine months, eighteen months and eight months. Those three terms run at the same time as each other, but they run after the nine-year term, producing a total of ten years and six months. Brand must serve two-thirds of that overall term, seven years, in custody before he becomes eligible for release on licence, and he will remain subject to indefinite sex offender notification requirements.
The case did not begin in a courtroom. The allegations first surfaced publicly in September 2023, when Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, The Times and The Sunday Times published a joint investigation into claims of sexual misconduct against him. The reporting prompted a police investigation, and the charges that followed led to the trial that ended on November 5. Brand has denied the allegations from the start. At the sentencing hearing, he listened in court as victim impact statements were read. His wife, Laura Brand, was present in court and had given evidence in his defence during the trial.
The case is about four women whose accounts a jury believed, and about offences committed more than fifteen years ago that were only brought to trial after the women came forward. The split verdict, convictions on four counts and acquittals on three, shows the jurors weighed each charge on its own evidence rather than accepting every allegation put before them.
What Trump Jr. said on his streaming show
Trump Jr.’s defence of Brand rested on three claims. The first was about the evidence. “He was convicted, by the way, with no forensic evidence, no DNA, no police report from the time,” he said on Triggered. The second was about timing. He spoke of allegations dating back to 1999, and of a prosecution that arrived only after Brand changed his politics. “They charged him because he’s a conservative,” he said. The third was about fairness. “A two-tier justice system is not just an American problem,” he said, and he put it most bluntly in a line that has been replayed ever since: “He finds God, I guess, changes his ways, sees some aspects of conservative life, and talks about them, and now he’s going to spend 10-and-a-half years in prison for rape when no one had a problem with it in the prior 27 years.”
Each of those claims has a counterpoint in the record. On the timing, Trump Jr. spoke of allegations going back 27 years, but the four offences that produced the convictions took place between 2004 and 2009. On the evidence, the absence of forensic material or a police report from the time is not unusual in cases of this kind, where the alleged crimes happened years before a complaint was made and the prosecution’s case rests on the testimony of the people involved. Juries are regularly asked to decide sexual offence cases on witness evidence alone. On the fairness claim, the judge’s sentencing remarks made no reference to Brand’s religion or politics. They tied the crimes to his fame and to the arrogance the judge said came with it.
Trump Jr. also argued that Brand had received a harsher sentence than defendants in other high-profile British abuse cases, a comparison critics dispute, noting British sentencing guidelines weigh the seriousness of each offence, the victims and the harm caused. The rape of one woman and the sexual assault of three others, committed over five years, is a serious pattern of offending by any measure. He has backed Brand since September 2023, when the investigation was first published, and his comments this week were the latest step in a defence he has been making for more than three years.
Hollywood news: Brand’s rise, reinvention and reckoning
To understand why this story has travelled so far beyond Britain, it helps to remember who Russell Brand was at the height of his fame. In the 2000s he became one of Britain’s best-known entertainment figures, a stand-up comedian and television and radio presenter, before moving into Hollywood films. The offences for which he was convicted took place in that period, at the peak of his career.
The second act of Brand’s career is the one Trump Jr. keeps returning to. Around 2023, Brand embraced Christianity and began speaking publicly about his faith, and in 2024 he was baptised with the help of the television adventurer Bear Grylls. At the same time, he moved closer to conservative politics, building a large online following. That transformation is the foundation of Trump Jr.’s argument: that a man who was celebrated when he was a liberal celebrity became a target the moment he changed sides.
The record complicates that telling. The allegations against Brand were published in September 2023, in the same period as his public conversion, but the investigation behind them had been under way before the reporting appeared, and the offences dated back to 2004 to 2009, long before his change of politics. The investigation, the charging decision and the trial followed the ordinary course of British justice, with a jury deciding the verdicts. Nothing in the sentencing judgment suggests that Brand’s religious conversion or his political views influenced the investigation, the prosecution or the sentence.
Celebrity couples news: the Katy Perry years
One line from Trump Jr.’s defence has travelled further than any other, and it reaches back to the most famous chapter of Brand’s personal life. “When he was married to Katy Perry, no one seemed to think he was a rapist then,” he said, using Brand’s former marriage to the pop star as evidence that the comedian’s reputation only became a problem after his politics changed. The line captures the argument in a single image: the celebrated husband on one side, the convicted prisoner on the other.
The marriage itself was one of the most watched celebrity unions of its time. Brand and Perry, one of the biggest pop stars in the world, married in a blaze of publicity and divorced less than two years later. But Trump Jr.’s use of it is rhetorical rather than evidential. The fact that nobody publicly accused Brand of rape during his marriage does not tell us anything about what happened between 2004 and 2009, and the women who testified at trial described offences that took place before and during that period of his life. The argument only works if the absence of a public accusation is treated as proof that nothing happened, and that is not how criminal cases are decided. The line shows how Trump Jr. frames the case: as a story about public identity rather than private conduct.
Kelly, Musk and the backlash
Trump Jr. was not the only prominent voice to defend Brand this week. On the November 9 episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, the broadcaster Megyn Kelly described the case as a “political witch hunt”, echoing Trump Jr.’s claim that the prosecution was motivated by Brand’s beliefs rather than by the evidence. Hours before the sentence was handed down, Elon Musk called it “unjust” on X. Together, the three voices have turned a British court case into a test of loyalty in the conservative movement.
The backlash has been just as loud. Critics on X and across the media have accused Trump Jr. of defending a convicted rapist, with one widely shared post expressing disbelief that the president’s son would speak up for Brand. Others have pointed out that the jury acquitted Brand on three counts, which shows the jurors did not simply believe everything they were told, and that the four convictions they did return were the result of evidence they found credible. Lawyers note most sexual offence cases are decided on testimony, and the absence of forensic evidence years after the event is expected rather than suspicious.
There is an important limit to what the defences can achieve. Trump Jr.’s comments, Kelly’s framing and Musk’s post amount to a political defence of Brand and an attack on the fairness of the prosecution. They do not alter the findings reached by the jury following a four-week trial, and they do not change the sentence imposed by the judge. Brand is a convicted man, and the legal consequences of that conviction stand regardless of what is said about him on a streaming show or on social media. The clip also spread rapidly across X, drawing attention for his slow, heavy delivery as he spoke close to the camera.
What happens next for Russell Brand
The immediate future for Brand is set by the sentence. He will serve two-thirds of his ten-and-a-half-year term, seven years, in custody before he becomes eligible for release on licence, and he will remain subject to indefinite sex offender notification requirements. Those requirements will follow him long after he leaves prison. For a man who built his career on being seen and heard, the years ahead will be defined by absence.
The wider argument his case has set off is unlikely to end with the sentencing. The claim of a two-tier justice system, that conservatives are punished more harshly than others, has become a central theme in British and American political debate, and Brand’s case will be cited by those who believe it for years to come. It will also be cited by those who reject it, as a jury doing its job on the evidence. Whether Brand’s lawyers challenge the verdict or the sentence remains to be seen. What is certain is that the case has already left a mark on the public conversation in both countries, and that the intervention of Donald Trump Jr., Megyn Kelly and Elon Musk has ensured it will not be remembered simply as a court case. It will be remembered as a moment when celebrity, faith, politics and justice collided.
Source: New York Post