The complainant told jurors on Friday she met Brand in 2001 when she worked at MTV.<\/p>\n
She said she recognised him straight away and said there was “banter” between them initially.<\/p>\n
After noticing his “distinctive T-shirt” with the words “I am Spartacus”, she told Brand she “loved it” and wanted it.<\/p>\n
“He said, ‘you can have it'”, the woman told the jury, to which she said she replied: “Make sure it gets a good wash first.”<\/p>\n
Brand then asked her for directions to the bathroom.<\/p>\n
The woman, who was in her thirties at the time, said she offered to show him the way because she was going in the same direction.<\/p>\n
Prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC asked her what happened next.<\/p>\n
She said his “demeanour changed” when they got to the bathroom door.<\/p>\n
“He grabbed my forearm, he was leaning into the door and he was quite forceful,” she said, adding that it took her “unaware”.<\/p>\n
Asked by the prosecutor what she meant by his demeanour changing, the witness said: “He grabbed me by the arm, started to pull me in.”<\/p>\n
She said Brand then said to her “come on” while still holding her forearm.<\/p>\n
The woman said while Brand was trying to pull her into the bathroom, she was trying to pull herself away.<\/p>\n
“I said to him, ‘What are you doing, are you mad, let me go’… and then he started to… plead almost,” she said.<\/p>\n
The woman told the court she managed to “wrench” herself from Brand’s grip because of her own strength.<\/p>\n
She told jurors Brand went from “jovial, affable, friendly to suddenly turning into this wild-eyed manic so I was quite confused this was happening, as anyone would be”.<\/p>\n
Asked by the prosecutor why she did not report what had happened to her employer, she said: “I was scared… I thought it would be my word against his.”<\/p>\n
But she did tell two of her colleagues, she said. <\/p>\n
Jurors heard that she reported the allegation to the police in 2023 after watching a Channel 4 documentary about Brand.<\/p>\n
“I thought it was the right thing to do to come forward,” she told the court.<\/p>\n
Brand’s barrister challenged the complainant on the fact that she did not report Brand for what he had allegedly done until after watching the documentary.<\/p>\n
“You didn’t think there was any need to report him,” Ian Winter KC said.<\/p>\n
“It would have been my word against his,” she replied. “He didn’t manage to rape me. I managed to get out of the situation.”<\/p>\n
The defence barrister said: “It was only after you saw the television programme that you think he was trying to rape you in the toilet.”<\/p>\n
The woman responded: “Why else would you drag someone into the toilet if you weren’t going to assault them.”<\/p>\n
Winter KC continued: “Twenty-two years before that, you hadn’t thought he was trying to get you in there to rape you…”<\/p>\n
The woman denied that, adding: “You don’t grab someone by the arm. You don’t grip someone and try to drag them in, that’s not consensual.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The complainant told jurors on Friday she met Brand in 2001 when she worked at MTV. She said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":804548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-804547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/804548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}