He faces seven charges involving six women between 1999 and 2009: three of rape, three of sexual assault and one of attempted indecent assault, the last reduced from indecent assault by the judge after he found there was insufficient evidence for the original count. Brand denies them all. On Monday his barrister made his final speech to the jury. As soon as Tuesday, after the judge, Mr Justice Bennathan, has summed up, eight men and four women will retire to decide whether he is guilty.

The jury has not yet reached its verdicts, and the law of contempt, quite rightly, forbids me from telling you what I think they should be. What I can tell you is what was said in court, as fully and fairly as I can manage.

Begin with the defendant, since it was his week.

Brand told the jury, under questioning from his own counsel, Ian Winter KC, that the 2023 Channel 4 Dispatches programme and the Times reports that triggered all this had been “devastating”. “My entire life has been consumed by these events, these allegations, these accusations,” he said, at the expense of his marriage, his children and his health. He said Great Ormond Street Hospital had barred him from staying with his baby son during open-heart surgery, citing “the material published”. Asked whether he had persuaded anybody with relevant evidence to speak for him, he said: “I have not.” Asked whether any of them would “touch you with a bargepole”, he said: “No.” For a man who once sold out arenas, it was a bleak little exchange.

He did not pretend to have been a choirboy. “I’ve been persuasive, seductive, begging and flirting,” he said, “and dedicated a lot of my life to what seems now beyond reckless philandering, and idiocy.” He agreed he had been “obsessed with sex”. “As I became more successful and famous,” he said, “I was very comfortable allowing that to facilitate sexual access.” He accepted that was wrong. His marriage to Katy Perry in 2010 brought “staggering fame”. Of his ambition, reported by a former friend, to sleep with 5,000 women, he said he did not remember it, but that “it’s entirely possible it’s the kind of badinage I would have engaged in when I was 24”. And on consent, the one word that matters in this case, he was emphatic. “Consent is fundamental, essential, necessary, and indeed in many ways more important than sex itself.”

He then went through the women. Of the woman who says he raped her in a hotel in Bournemouth during the 1999 Labour Party conference, he said he remembered her as “loquacious” and “interesting”, and that when he went back to her room he thought there was “at least the possibility of sex”. Asked whether he raped her, he said no. Asked whether he thought “no” meant “yes”, he said: “I know what no means.”

Of the 2004 Soho party, where a woman says he grabbed her breasts and forced her to perform oral sex in a lavatory cubicle, he recalled a friend introducing them with the words: “There’s a bird here who really wants to meet you, mate.” He said he told her: “You are really, really beautiful, understand you’re really looking forward to meeting me.” She had “very prominent eyes”, was “wide-eyed”, flirting enthusiastically, and “happy” to “fool around”. He denied grabbing her breasts, which would have been “disgusting behaviour”. Asked whether she might not have consented to going into the cubicle, he said: “There’s absolutely no question.” He ended the encounter, he said, with the words “let’s wrap this up”. And to the suggestion that someone would have noticed, he offered a line that will haunt the media industry for years: “In media, in the early 2000s, people going in and out of bathrooms didn’t attract a huge amount of attention.”

Of the young MTV worker who says he tried to drag her into the men’s toilets at work in 2001, he said he had “absolutely not” intended anything non-consensual. Of the 21-year-old fan from his 2009 Hammersmith Apollo show, he said they had a “memorable” encounter in his dressing room, that he had been “excited and enthusiastic” to see her again, and that the sex at his Hampstead home a week later was consensual. He denied that she had asked him to stop.

Then the prosecutor, Riel Karmy-Jones KC, stood up, and it was not an easy afternoon. She asked whether his only hobbies were sex and comedy. “West Ham, animals, veganism,” he replied. She asked whether all he cared about was “getting yourself off”. “I had a variety of complex concerns like any human being,” he said. She took him to his phone. A “T” next to the Hammersmith woman’s name, he explained, stood for “tart”, his code for casual hook-ups. “AP” stood for “anal play”, which, he said, she had performed “upon first meeting me”. Two asterisks meant: “Never, ever forget this individual, this is a memorable encounter.” She read from his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, including a caption announcing that he had decided “to act gay to attract girls”. It was, he said, “a joke”. She suggested he had “never asked” one woman “if she was up for it”: “You just did it.” “It’s not true,” he said, “that’s not what happened.” She suggested that his account had grown far more detailed since his police interviews, in which he had said he could not remember several of the women. He accepted that some details were inconsistent, and said that reading the evidence and revisiting the places had brought memories back. At one point the judge intervened: “You knew consent was the million dollar question.” Brand replied: “I can tell the truth that I wasn’t looking at sex talk in that way.” At the end, asked once more about the charges, he said: “Not guilty is my plea in every single case.”

The defence called two more witnesses, after a fashion. Two of Brand’s former partners provided written statements saying that he had been “unfaithful” and “promiscuous”, but had never done anything intimate with them without their consent. And his wife, Laura, told the jury that he was “caring and kind”, that “I feel very seen by him”, and that he had never made her do anything sexual she did not want.

That was the evidence. Now to the contradictions, because every case has them and this one has plenty, on both sides.

The defence put a series of inconsistencies to the women, and it is only fair to list them. The Bournemouth complainant told police Brand had been in his underwear, “budgie smugglers” jumping about “like an ostrich”, in Mr Winter’s account of her evidence; her own photographs from that night show him in trousers. She also kept a photograph of him blowing her a kiss, which the defence called “completely inconsistent” with an allegation of rape. The Soho complainant told friends and her sister at the time that Brand had tried to force himself on her but that she had got away; she first described it as rape after the 2023 documentary. Her explanation: “I didn’t want people to judge me. I felt ashamed.” The Hammersmith complainant, under cross-examination, agreed she had been a “huge” fan who “completely adored him”, that she went to his house expecting sex, that she had a partner at the time, and that going had been a “huge mistake”. In her texts afterwards she told Brand he had treated her “like an animal”, but not that he had raped her. “I didn’t consent to what happened to me,” she told the court. Brand’s former personal assistant, called by the Crown, described his “insane sexual appetite” but said she never saw him break the law. And none of the six women went to the police until after the documentary.

But the inconsistencies do not all run one way, and the jury has heard evidence that the defence has had to work much harder to explain. The Channel 4 complainant, who says Brand put his head in her lap and demanded a massage in 2009, reported it to her line manager the next day, and a colleague backed up her account of his associates urging her on. The radio station complainant’s texts at the time survive: “He was a superstar,” she wrote, and “I thought nothing would happen to him.” The Soho complainant’s sister described Brand’s eyes, as she was told of it, going “completely blank”, as if he had “been possessed”. The Hammersmith complainant told friends and her parents at the time, and Brand did, on her evidence, text her afterwards (“Because you are dirty and I want to push you further”) and then apologise. Brand himself admitted the phone codes, the use of fame for “sexual access”, and that his memory had improved markedly between the police station and the witness box. None of this is proof of guilt; it is what the jury must weigh against the defence’s points, and it would be dishonest to report one list without the other.

Then came the closing speeches, and they were as stark a contrast as you will hear in an English court.

Ms Karmy-Jones went first, on Friday. The six women, she said, did not know each other, had sought no limelight and had nothing to gain “apart from perhaps some closure”. Each described the same pattern: a charming man who then “snapped, from charming to frightening to nasty”. “He didn’t listen when I said no, he didn’t listen, he didn’t care,” she said, summarising their accounts, “pulling, pushing, tugging, thrusting.” “In the rape cases he just kept on going until he achieved his ultimate aim and ejaculated.” Brand’s habit of handing women his contact details afterwards was, she suggested, what “today… might be known as gaslighting”. Women, she said, “were disposable; they didn’t matter to him. He didn’t even need to know their names. They were just a means to an end,” the “amusements” in what Brand himself had once called his “playground of orgasms”. “So long as they had a vagina and a heartbeat,” she said, “he could get what he wanted.”

On what the women could or could not remember wearing: “Ultimately does it really matter? The defence, I’m sure, will tell you it does.” The experience of being raped, she suggested, “may be something that looms a little bit larger in your mind” than “the intricacies of outfit changes”. Of the Bournemouth complainant she asked: “Is that woman some sort of lunatic who would make this story up, reimagine this event after watching a documentary?” The documentary, she said, was no “magic force”; the women had simply “realised they are not alone”. Brand “couldn’t really remember anything when he was interviewed”, she said, “in stark contrast to now when he suddenly seems to remember all sorts of details”. His defence was “a lot of half-truths” that had been “spun into lies”. She read from My Booky Wook (“I will determinedly, resolutely, remove anything that’s in the way”) and suggested that consent, to Brand, was “just an obstacle to be removed, or perhaps to ignore”. Then she asked the jury to sit in silence for twenty seconds, the length of the MTV encounter. “Pulling, not just a gentle grab of the arm and a ‘come in’,” she said. “Twenty seconds of this.” “There really shouldn’t be any doubt in your mind that Russell Brand knew full well this was not consensual. We invite you to find him guilty on all counts.”

On Monday, Mr Winter replied, and he went for the documentary with both barrels. Journalists, he said, had “poisoned the well of justice”, and done so deliberately. “They poisoned the wells in the hope and intention that other people come forward and make allegations against him.” The women, he said, were “not random, not independent” but “thoroughly contaminated”, and that “they all came forward for reasons connected to the TV programme”. They might sincerely believe their accounts now, but that was “the precise consequence of the poisoning of the well”. The delays, of up to 24 years, were “monstrous”, and left the jury in “a quagmire of doubt and inaccurate recollection”. And none of the women, he noted, had come forward during the #MeToo movement, when “it could not have been more publicised”.

Then he turned to Brand’s behaviour. Every complainant, he said, had described Brand behaving “normally” afterwards. “That, we suggest, is something that simply cannot have occurred if he is guilty.” “He obviously genuinely believed that they were consenting.” There was “no evidence he is some sort of psychopath who rapes people and thinks it’s normal”. “You would have to be a psychopath,” he said, “to be raping someone and asking them if they were enjoying it.” Brand had left his real email address, posed for photographs, kissed women goodbye. “Rapists do not leave their address.” He respected it, Mr Winter said, “when a woman says no, so that makes him someone who is not a rapist”. What Brand had wanted from sex, he said, was “approbation and adoration”. And then the line that will be on the front pages. “Living a highly promiscuous life is entirely lawful however morally distasteful you may find it. Disgusting, distasteful, immoral, who cares? It’s irrelevant to your consideration.” Brand “had an immense amount of sex and none of it was unlawful”. “Why is it,” he asked, “that only three rapes in 10 years?”

He told the jury that Brand’s wife “fell in love with that man in full knowledge of what he was doing” and had married him and had three children with him, which she would hardly have done if he were “guilty as charged”. The prosecution’s use of My Booky Wook was a “bid of desperation”; the line about acting gay to attract girls was obviously a joke. “The joke is that it didn’t work.” And the details, he reminded the jury, are everything: “When they add up, they make you sure; when they don’t, they are the doubt.”

On Tuesday, Mr Justice Bennathan is expected to sum up the evidence and give the jury its legal directions: that the burden of proof lies entirely on the prosecution, that they must be sure of guilt before they convict, that they must consider each count and each woman separately, that delay in reporting is not in itself a sign that a complaint is false, and that they must put out of their minds everything they have seen, read or heard outside that courtroom, the documentary included. Then the jury will go out. For now the judge has said he will accept only unanimous verdicts. If, after a substantial period, the jurors cannot all agree, he may later tell them he will accept a majority of at least ten to two. If they still cannot agree on a count, the Crown can seek a retrial on it. If Brand is convicted of rape, he faces a long prison sentence. If he is acquitted, he walks out of Southwark a free man, into a world that long ago made up its mind about him.

Which brings me to the only thing I am allowed to say about all this, and the thing that matters most. In this country, a man is innocent unless, not until, he is proven guilty. That one little word is the whole of English justice. “Until” assumes the verdict and merely waits for it. “Unless” means what it says.

If the jury is sure that Russell Brand is guilty, then let them throw the book at him. The booky wooky, even. Forgive me; I could not resist. But until twelve people who have heard every word of the evidence tell us otherwise, he is entitled to exactly the same presumption as you or I would be. Ignore the headlines, ignore the hashtags, and ignore the people who decided this case three years ago on the strength of a television programme.

So it is perhaps worth asking an unfashionable question. Not “Is Elizabeth Holmes guilty?”, because a jury has answered that, at least in part, and the appeal courts have agreed with it. But this: is the Elizabeth Holmes of popular legend the same woman who was actually convicted? Or has Silicon Valley, an industry that has made a religion of “fake it till you make it”, found itself a convenient sacrificial lamb, or perhaps a sacrificial unicorn, to carry its sins into the wilderness?

First, the facts, as stubborn as ever.

Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 in 2003 to found Theranos, which promised to run hundreds of blood tests from a single drop pricked from a finger, using a machine she eventually named the Edison. By 2014 the company was valued at around $9 billion and her stake at roughly $4.5 billion. She had a board that looked like a state funeral: George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, William Perry, Sam Nunn. She had a deal with Walgreens. She had investors including Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family and Betsy DeVos. What she did not have was a machine that did what she said it did.

In October 2015 John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal revealed that most of Theranos’s tests were in fact being run on modified commercial machines, mostly made by Siemens, and that the Edisons were unreliable. The company collapsed. Theranos voided two years of Edison results. Holmes settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018, and that year she and her former partner and company president, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were indicted.

Now here is the bit that the legend tends to skip. Holmes went on trial in San Jose in 2021 on eleven counts. In January 2022 the jury found her guilty on four: one of conspiracy to defraud investors and three of wire fraud against investors. It found her not guilty on four others: the conspiracy to defraud patients and the wire fraud counts relating to patients and doctors. On the remaining three investor counts it could not agree, and the government later dropped them. In other words, the jury that heard every word of the evidence did not convict Elizabeth Holmes of defrauding a single patient.

Read that twice, because if you have watched The Dropout, or the evening news, or listened to anybody at a dinner party since about 2018, you will almost certainly believe the opposite. The popular image of Holmes is of a woman who knowingly handed sick people false results that put their lives in danger. There was harrowing evidence about inaccurate results, and nobody sensible would call a faulty blood test a trifle. But on the specific charges of defrauding patients, twelve Californians, having heard every word, said: not guilty. Somewhere along the line, that verdict got lost in the edit.

What was proven was serious enough, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. The jury heard that Holmes told investors Theranos’s technology was being used by the military in the field, when it was not. It heard that she sent investors validation reports bearing the logos of Pfizer and Schering-Plough, which those companies had not written or endorsed. It heard about financial projections that were, to put it charitably, fantastical. That is fraud, and the jury called it fraud, and in February 2025 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld both the convictions and the sentence. Her bid for a fresh trial was rejected. In November 2022 Judge Edward Davila had sentenced her to eleven years and three months, and she and Balwani were ordered to repay some $452 million. Balwani, tried separately, was convicted on all twelve counts against him and got nearly thirteen years. Nobody can say she got off lightly.

But consider who her victims actually were. Not pensioners in Ohio. Not widows with their life savings. They were some of the richest and best-advised people on earth: Murdoch, who put in about $121 million; the Waltons; the DeVos family; private equity funds and family offices with whole departments whose sole job is to check that the thing they are buying exists. Several of them, it emerged, never saw independent validation of the technology, never asked for it, and invested largely because Henry Kissinger was on the board and the founder had a nice line in turtlenecks. I have every sympathy for anybody who has been lied to. But one does wonder how many of those billionaires would have read past the first page of the prospectus for a second-hand Vauxhall.

And this is where the “scapegoat” question bites. Silicon Valley is built on promises that have not yet come true. Founders routinely tell investors their product is further along than it is, their user numbers are about to explode, and their technology will change the world by next Tuesday. Some of them are right and become gods. Others are wrong and become footnotes. Holmes was wrong, spectacularly and expensively, and some of what she said crossed the line from optimism into lies. But she was hardly the only founder in that valley whose pitch outran her product. She was, however, young, female, photogenic and alone at the top, which made her a far better story than the blokes in fleeces who burned through billions and simply failed. The Wall Street Journal broke the story; Hollywood made it a parable.

She even told us where she got the idea. Holmes named her machine after her hero, Thomas Edison, and the choice is more revealing than she perhaps intended. In September 1878 Edison told the newspapers that he had cracked the problem of the electric light and would have it lighting lower Manhattan within weeks. He had done nothing of the sort. He had not yet produced a bulb that would burn for more than a few minutes. But the announcement sent the shares of the gas companies tumbling, and the money of J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts came pouring into the new Edison Electric Light Company on the strength of a promise. It took him more than a year of frantic trial and error before a carbon filament glowed for some thirteen hours at Menlo Park in October 1879. Edison faked it, and then, just in time, he made it. Nobody calls him a fraudster. They put his face on the history books, and on the side of a blood-testing machine.

Since going to prison, Holmes has, if anything, become a stranger figure still. She reported to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas, a minimum-security facility outside Houston, in May 2023, two years after giving birth to her first child and months after the second. The Bureau of Prisons has repeatedly moved her release date forward, and in March this year Judge Davila granted a further reduction under a retroactive change to the sentencing guidelines, while observing that “the hundreds of millions of dollars in losses caused by Holmes’s fraud speak for themselves”. She is now due to move to a halfway house in Austin on 23 August 2027, with a projected release date of 22 February 2030. In December 2025 she asked President Trump to commute the rest of her sentence. The request is listed as “pending”. Given this President’s enthusiasm for pardoning people who annoyed the Justice Department, I would not bet the Edison against it.

Meanwhile an account in her name on X has posted thousands of times since she rejoined the platform last year, about books, free speech, her children and her innocence. Its biography reads, rather beautifully, “Mostly my words, posted by others.” Since prisoners cannot use the internet, one assumes that others are doing a great deal of the posting. Who they are, the Bureau of Prisons cannot say. According to the new film, the man with the keys is her partner, Billy Evans, who holds her power of attorney.

Which brings me to somebody I know rather better than I know Elizabeth Holmes.

Earlier this year I spent a few weeks staying with and her family at their home in California. Jessica, for those few who have not come across her, writes the Substack House Inhabit, and she is quite simply a machine. I have met a great many journalists/writers in my time, most of whom are idle, some of whom just jump onto stories, essentially rewriting articles to cash in. Jessica is neither. She is writing when you go to bed and writing when you get up, chasing sources at all hours, and somehow the house is still full of laughter. Her husband, Mike, and their four children are among the warmest, funniest, most intelligent, interesting and genuine people I have ever had the pleasure of being imposed upon by. I went for a visit and left feeling like part of the furniture. A bout of depression was eased considerably through a time out in their writing room that comes fitted out with a huge bunkbed, sunset viewing at the beach, and even a trip to Mexico (I suspect that my out-of-character negative mind at the time may have been draining, even annoying for her - but I’m grateful for how much my time in her and her family’s company helped to reset my mind).

What makes Jessica remarkable is that she goes to the heart of a story when everybody else is content to circle it. She covered the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, the Depp and Heard circus and the Weinstein case, and she has done more than almost anybody to drag the Holmes story out of the Hollywood edit and back into the light. She has visited Elizabeth in prison, which is not a thing one does lightly. Federal prison security, it turns out, has firm views on metal, and so Jessica, on what she describes as “a blistering Sunday in Texas”, took a pair of scissors to the underwire of “my only good supportive designer bra so I could pass through security to visit Elizabeth in federal prison”. She called it “entirely worth the destruction of expensive French lingerie”. There are journalists who would not sacrifice their lunch break for a story. Jessica sacrificed her best bra. That is what I call support journalism.

I mention Jessica not only because I didn’t really thank her enough, but because her reporting is not hagiography, and because, when it comes to the Holmes case, I truly believe you need to head over to her Substack and read her extensive coverage. She quotes investors who say Holmes was never controlled by anybody and has shown no remorse, alongside former colleagues who believe her real crime was “failure, not deceit”. She points out that Holmes never sold her shares, at a time when they were worth billions, which is a curious thing for a woman supposedly planning to take the money and run. And she argues that “much of what we think we know about Elizabeth Holmes is the product of repetition”. If you want the inside story, rather than the miniseries, go and read her at jessicareedkraus.substack.com. You will not agree with all of it. You will learn something on every page.

And so to the film.

You Can See Everything is not a documentary in the usual sense; it is a Nathan Fielder production, which means it is part documentary, part social experiment and part very long, very awkward silence. In April 2023 Holmes and Evans invited Fielder and Oppenheim to live with them and their children in their San Diego beach house for the 34 days before she went to prison. The title is her promise: there would be nothing hidden. The film runs nearly three hours, and the first half consists largely of Fielder sitting opposite Holmes and asking her, with the deadpan of a Methodist undertaker, the questions everybody else has been too polite to ask.

Her answers are extraordinary. “All I know is my truth,” she says. She tells him the Edison “wasn’t a lie”, because the technology would have worked once the science caught up. She tells him she has never told a lie in her life, not even a white one. And in the moment that has already become a meme, she holds his gaze with those great unblinking blue eyes and asks: “Why would I ever deceive you?” Fielder shows her Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” and she concludes, gravely, that the two men are “talking past each other”. Which, in fairness, is a very good summary of the entire Theranos affair.

Then the film turns. Two years into her sentence, Evans begins to limit the crew’s access, to interject on her behalf and, according to Fielder, to seek money from the production. He is developing a laser blood-testing device of his own called Haemanthus, which he insists is “not Theranos 2.0”, a phrase I suspect will be carved on his tombstone. With Holmes now behind bars, Fielder brings in Amanda Seyfried, who played her in The Dropout, to act out the scenes he could no longer film, and the whole thing becomes a hall of mirrors: an actress playing a woman who many believe was always playing a part, directed by a comedian who plays himself. Fielder has since said that Holmes “seems so genuine at times” but that he came away thinking, “Okay, I know she’s a liar.”

Is it any good? Mostly, yes. Critics have fallen over themselves; it sits at 97 on Metacritic, and Variety called it a “one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus”, which is a mouthful but about right. The first half is funny, queasy and brilliant. The second sags under the weight of its own cleverness, and Time’s critic was not wrong to say it sometimes feels “more like a product they’ve brought to market” than art, which, given the subject, is almost too neat. Its great achievement is that it refuses to tell you what to think. Holmes emerges as either a woman so convinced by her own story that she cannot see the gap between what she believed and what was true, or the most accomplished performer in America. Possibly both. The film, wisely, does not pretend to know.

Nor do I. Elizabeth Holmes lied to investors and was rightly convicted of it. But she was acquitted of defrauding patients, the charge that most people still believe she was found guilty of. She was surrounded and endorsed by some of the most powerful men in America, almost none of whom have suffered for it. And she was turned into a symbol of everything that is wrong with Silicon Valley by an industry that has carried on doing many of the same things without her.

A fraudster? By the verdict of a jury, yes. A scapegoat? Quite possibly that too. The two are not mutually exclusive. And in a valley where everybody fakes it until they make it, the unforgivable thing Holmes did may have been not faking it, but failing to make it - or perhaps running out of time to make it.

Which leaves the question that nobody can answer, and which haunts every frame of Fielder’s film. Had she been given more time, more money, a few more years before the Wall Street Journal came knocking, could she have done it? Could the girl who idolised Edison have found her filament, a way to run a full battery of tests from a single drop of blood and change medicine for good? Many scientists will tell you that the physics was always against her, that a drop from a finger is simply too small and too messy for what she promised. Edison’s doubters told him much the same. The difference is that he got to the finish line before his investors ran out of patience, and she did not.

Somewhere in a prison camp in Texas, Elizabeth Holmes still insists that the Edison “wasn’t a lie”, that it simply arrived before the science did. She may be deluding herself. She may be right. We will never know, because the light went out before the bulb was lit.

Every morning for three weeks a car has drawn up outside Southwark Crown Court, and out has climbed a man with the hair of a disgraced Regency poet and the vocabulary of a thesaurus that has been left out in the rain, holding his wife’s hand. The photographers bellow. He says something gnomic: “Today is the day for truth and justice.” Then he goes inside, sits in a glass box and listens while strangers describe, in close and harrowing detail, things they say he did to them twenty years ago. In the evening, as often as not, he and his wife sit on a porch and talk to the internet about Jesus.

This week he came out of the glass box and into the witness box, and the trial of Russell Brand moved into its final act.

Brand, 51, faces seven charges involving six women between 1999 and 2009: three of rape, three of sexual assault and one of attempted indecent assault. He denies every one of them. That last charge is not the one he went into court facing. The original count of indecent assault has gone, replaced by a lesser one, and I shall explain why in a moment. A jury of eight men and four women, sworn in on 13 October after six prospective jurors were excused because they could remember the 2023 Channel 4 documentary that set all this in motion, will hear the defence’s closing speech on Monday. Mr Justice Bennathan expects them to retire to consider their verdicts on Tuesday, 3 November, and he will accept only unanimous verdicts.

Let me say at once what I can and cannot do in this column, because it is rather the point of it. I can tell you what the jury has heard. I can tell you what each side has said. I cannot tell you which of the women I believe, or which of the allegations I think will stand up, because the law of contempt forbids it while the jury is still out, and quite right too. What I can tell you is that Southwark has produced, over three weeks, some of the most extraordinary evidence heard in an English courtroom in years, and that almost none of it resembles the story the rest of us were told in 2023.

First, the case for the Crown.

The prosecutor, Riel Karmy-Jones KC, opened on 14 October by calling Brand a “ruthless, calculated and manipulative sexual predator” whose desire for sex was “indiscriminate and voracious”. “To the defendant,” she said, “women were simply a means to an end.” She reminded the jury that he had once told a live audience he was attracted to women aged “16 to death”. The first witness, Mark Pinheiro, a former cabaret partner and housemate, said Brand had told him he hoped to sleep with 5,000 girls. The defence, in the person of Ian Winter KC, suggested his evidence was inconsistent.

The first complainant says Brand raped her in a hotel room in Bournemouth in 1999, during the Labour Party conference, after they met at a cabaret event. “I thought he was a gay man,” she told police; she had felt “sexually safe with him”. She described his tongue as “lizard-like” and said he turned “monster-like”. “He did rape me, he did push me on the bed.” She said that afterwards he dressed and wrote down his email address as if nothing had happened. Mr Winter suggested she had “fallen under his spell”, that the encounter was consensual and that she had come to regret it. “I did not fall under the spell,” she replied, “and I did not find him attractive.” He pressed her on whether she had resisted or said no; she said she had said no, had told police so, and had been unable to struggle or breathe properly. Photographs she took of Brand that night were shown to the jury. She had told police he was in his underwear; the pictures show him in trousers. The defence also put to her that the 2023 documentary had coloured her memory of the night, which she rejected. Counsel and witness then argued about the precise meaning of the word “flirting”, the sort of exchange that only happens in an English courtroom, and which would have had Jane Austen reaching for her smelling salts.

The second complainant, then working at MTV Europe in London, says that in 2001 a “wild-eyed” Brand grabbed her arm in the office and tried to pull her into the men’s toilets. “Come on, come in with me,” she recalled him saying. She freed herself in about twenty seconds. Mr Winter called it “a minor incident”.

The third, also at MTV, says that at a Soho birthday party in July 2004, within a minute of meeting her, “he literally just grabbed my boobs in the middle of the conversation”, then pulled her into a toilet cubicle and forced her to perform oral sex, saying “come on, come on, don’t be a spoilsport”. “It happened so fast,” she said. “I just froze.” Her sister told the court that, as she later described it, Brand’s eyes went “completely blank”, as if he had “been possessed”. Mr Winter told her: “Let’s be clear, he did not do that to you,” and called what she described “physically impossible”. He suggested she had gone into the toilet willingly, and that if she had been groped in the middle of a bar, somebody would have seen it. She denied being star-struck: “I wasn’t a giddy schoolgirl.” The defence pointed out that at the time she had told friends and her sister that Brand had tried to force himself on her but that she had got away, and that she first described it as rape only after the 2023 documentary and the newspaper reports. Her explanation: “I didn’t want people to judge me. I felt ashamed.”

The fourth, who worked at a London radio station in 2004 or 2005, says Brand pressed her against a corridor wall, gave her “sloppy” kisses and groped her breasts and bottom while his entourage stood by. She begged them to intervene; nobody did. She gave evidence in tears, said she had nothing to gain, and described a “culture of fear” in which women were rated on their looks by colleagues and a complaint would have been met with the observation that she was “lucky”. Text messages she sent at the time read: “He was a superstar,” and “I thought nothing would happen to him.” Asked why she had not come forward sooner, she spoke of a toxic workplace, of the fear of not being believed, and of her mortgage.

The fifth, a Channel 4 employee, says that in 2009, while recording a radio advertisement, Brand laid his head in her lap and demanded a massage, his face moving towards her groin until she could feel his breath on her. Two of his associates, she said, told her he would not carry on recording unless she did it, and shrugged and gestured to urge her on; others laughed. She said she was “repulsed”. She reported it to her line manager the following day, and a colleague backed up her account of the associates’ behaviour. Of all the complaints, hers is the one made at the time, to somebody in authority, which is worth remembering the next time someone asks why none of these women spoke up.

The sixth was 21 and a fan. She says Brand picked her out after his Scandalous show at the Hammersmith Apollo in February 2009; a friend recalled him telling the audience, in effect, that if they fancied him and he asked them up to his dressing room, they should come. Security staff took her backstage. A week or so later she went to his house in Hampstead expecting consensual sex, and says it turned into anal rape. Estate agent’s photographs of the bedroom and bathroom, taken about eight months later, were shown to the jury, and she identified them as the rooms where it happened. Months afterwards, she said, she ran from him at the Edinburgh Fringe. He later texted her: “Because you are dirty and I want to push you further.” She replied that he had treated her “like an animal”. He apologised.

Her cross-examination was the most revealing of the whole Crown case. She agreed she had been a “huge” fan who “completely adored him”, that she had gone to his house willingly expecting sex, that she knew of his reputation (The Sun had named him “Shagger of the Year” three years running) and that she had a partner she loved at the time. Going there, she said, had been a “huge mistake”. Mr Winter put it to her that, young and infatuated, she “went along with” what Brand wanted, and that he had “pushed you and probably had treated you like an animal, but he didn’t rape you”. When she said Brand “didn’t act like he’d done something criminal” afterwards, Mr Winter replied: “That’s because you consented.” He noted that in her texts she had told Brand he had treated her like an animal, not that he had raped her. She agreed. “I didn’t agree to do that,” she said. “I didn’t consent to what happened to me.” She said she had been in pain and terrified she had contracted HIV, that she had told friends and her parents at the time, and that the questioning made her feel she had brought it on herself. She went to the police in 2025, because, she said, she no longer wanted to carry the guilt and the shame.

The Crown’s final witness was a former personal assistant, whose statement was read to the jury. She called Brand “a peacock” with an “insane sexual appetite”, who loved wandering around in his underpants and would ask, “May I go and have sex now?” Women came to his flat and his dressing rooms, often women he did not know. She was once told not to take his mother or his girlfriend to the dressing room because he was having sex in it. He “never seemed happy after sex, more so depressed”. She left because she was “sick of him and feeling burnt out”. She had seen bad behaviour normalised before, she said, but “this was on another level”. And then, the line the defence will no doubt be quoting on Monday: she never saw him break the law, and nobody ever told her that he had.

Which brings us to the charge that was dropped.

On Tuesday 27 October, at the close of the prosecution case, Mr Justice Bennathan ruled on the 2001 MTV allegation. “In respect of count 2,” he told the jury, “I have reached the decision there is insufficient evidence of indecent assault.” Because the incident pre-dates the Sexual Offences Act 2003, Brand was charged under the old 1956 law, under which an indecent assault requires an assault in circumstances of indecency. On the complainant’s own account, Brand grabbed her arm and tried to pull her towards the men’s lavatory, and she broke free within twenty seconds. Nothing indecent actually happened; the question was what he intended to happen. So the judge directed a formal verdict of not guilty on indecent assault, delivered by one juror in what he candidly called a “slightly artificial process”, and the Crown added a new count of attempted indecent assault on the same facts, to which Brand pleaded not guilty. It is not quite the acquittal some of his supporters online have been celebrating. It is, however, the first time in three years that any part of the case against Russell Brand has been tested by a judge and found wanting, and it is the only result anybody has yet had in a courtroom.

The same day, the jury heard the prepared statements Brand gave to police in four interviews between November 2023 and July 2025. In each he said he had “never engaged in any non-consensual sexual activity”. He described a life of kissing hundreds of fans, having sex in lavatories and ending encounters abruptly, a lifestyle he called “very promiscuous”, which he said had been “unfavourably reframed” as crime. Of several of the women he said he had no memory at all.

Then, on Wednesday, Brand went into the witness box himself, for more than four hours, which is three hours and fifty minutes longer than most people have ever heard him be serious.

He began by answering “no” to each charge as his barrister read it out. “Consent is fundamental, essential, necessary, and indeed in many ways more important than sex itself,” he said. He told the jury the allegations had been “devastating”, that “my entire life has been consumed by these events, these allegations, these accusations”, and that they had cost him his health and very nearly his marriage. He said Great Ormond Street Hospital had barred him from staying with his baby son during open-heart surgery, citing “the material published”. Asked whether he had persuaded anybody with relevant evidence to testify on his behalf, he said: “I have not.” Asked whether any of them would “touch you with a bargepole”, he said: “No.” It is a measure of how far a man can fall that the most famous comedian of his generation could not find one old friend willing to walk into Southwark and say a kind word for him.

He then went through the women one by one. The Bournemouth woman he remembered as “loquacious” and “interesting”; asked whether he had raped her, he said no, and asked whether he thought no meant yes, he said: “I know what no means.” He denied pretending to be gay to get women into bed. Of the 2004 Soho party, he said a friend had introduced the woman by saying “there’s a bird here who really wants to meet you, mate”; that he would have told her she was beautiful; that he spoke to her for less than a minute and went into the lavatory with her to “fool around”; and that grabbing her breasts would have been “disgusting behaviour” that did not arouse him. Asked whether she might not have consented to going into the cubicle, he said: “There’s absolutely no question.” Asked whether she had performed oral sex on him there, he said no. Of the MTV office, he said he had “absolutely not” intended anything non-consensual.

The Hammersmith fan he did remember, eventually. He told police he could not recall her; in court he said he had refreshed his memory, and described a “memorable” sexual encounter in his dressing room, after which he had been “excited and enthusiastic” to see her again. He confirmed that he used to “pick out people” from the audience to invite to the upstairs bar. He said they had later had consensual sex at his house in Hampstead, and denied that she had asked him to stop. Asked whether his memory was “a little selective”, he said no.

Then Ms Karmy-Jones stood up, and the afternoon turned into something nobody who was there will forget. She read the jury passages from his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, including a caption in which he says he decided “to act gay to attract girls”. It was, he said, “a joke”. She asked him about his phone. He explained that a “T” beside one woman’s name stood for “tart”, his code for casual hook-ups; that “AP” meant “anal play”; and that two asterisks meant: “Never, ever forget this individual, this is a memorable encounter.” The 5,000 women he did not recall, but it was “entirely possible it’s the kind of badinage I would have engaged in when I was 24”. He agreed that much of his early life had been “beyond reckless philandering and idiocy”; that he had been obsessed with sex, though not so desperate that he could not function without it; and that “as I became more successful and famous I was very comfortable allowing that to facilitate sexual access”, which, he accepted, was wrong. He described himself as “moderately famous” in 2004, “very famous” by 2009, and, after marrying Katy Perry in 2010, possessed of “staggering fame”.

She put it to him that he had “never asked” one of the women “if she was up for it”: “You just did it.” “It’s not true,” he said, “that’s not what happened.” She suggested his account had grown more detailed since his police interviews, and he accepted that some details were inconsistent, explaining that reading the disclosed evidence, watching the interviews and revisiting the places had brought memories back. He denied tailoring his evidence to fit the women’s. At one point the judge himself intervened. “You knew,” he said, “consent was the million dollar question.” Brand replied: “I can tell the truth that I wasn’t looking at sex talk in that way.” At the end of the day he was asked once more whether he had committed any of the crimes. “Not guilty,” he said, “is my plea in every single case.”

On Thursday his wife, Laura, gave evidence. She first went out with Brand in 2006, when she was 19 and he was 31, and their relationship became sexual “at my own pace”. They split in 2007, when she discovered he was seeing other women; she was “a little heartbroken”. They reconnected in 2015 and married in 2017. She described him as “caring and kind”, a wonderful father and an attentive husband: “I feel very seen by him.” Under cross-examination, Ms Karmy-Jones produced a 2020 podcast, Made By Mammas, in which Mrs Brand had said she had “not seen [Brand] for years” when they met again; she insisted they had remained close. When Mr Winter asked her what she thought of the truth of the allegations, the judge stopped him, observing that she was not an expert witness. When he tried again by way of a question about her husband’s character, Ms Karmy-Jones called it “wholly unacceptable”, and the jury was sent out.

And on Friday the Crown closed. Ms Karmy-Jones told the jury the six women did not know each other, had sought no limelight and had nothing to gain “except perhaps some closure”. Each, she said, described the same pattern: a charming man, then “a personality change, a pivot”, then a man who “didn’t listen when I said no, he didn’t listen, he didn’t care”, who in the rape cases “just kept on going until he achieved his ultimate aim”. They were not “jealous women spurned”, and it did not matter that they could not remember what they had been wearing. The documentary, she said, was no “magic force” that had planted false memories; the women had simply “realised they are not alone”. Brand, who had remembered so little in his police interviews, now seemed to “remember lots”: his defence was “a lot of half-truths, but spun into lies”. She quoted his line about consent being “more important than sex itself” and asked whether it rang true, then read from My Booky Wook: “I will determinedly, resolutely, remove anything that’s in the way.” Consent, she suggested, was to him “just an obstacle to be removed, or perhaps to ignore”. Mrs Brand was “undoubtedly lovely”, she said, but she was not there. And then she asked the jury to sit in silence for twenty seconds, the length of one of the alleged encounters. They did.

On Monday, Mr Winter will reply. On Tuesday, the jury goes out.

Notice what almost every one of these accounts has in common. In most, nobody disputes that Brand and the woman met, or, in some, that there was sexual contact. The fight is over consent: whether it was given, whether it was withdrawn, whether it was communicated, and whether a woman who went somewhere willingly, or said nothing at the time, or described events differently to friends than she later did to police, can be sure twenty years on where the line was crossed. The defence has pointed to underwear that turned out to be trousers, to a first account of escape that became an account of rape, to a text that said “animal” rather than “rape”, to a former assistant who never saw a crime, and to a documentary that came before every one of the complaints. The Crown has pointed to six strangers telling strikingly similar stories, to a contemporaneous complaint to Channel 4, to texts and sisters and friends, to a defendant whose memory improved markedly between the police station and the witness box, and to a phone in which women were catalogued with letters and asterisks. Those are precisely the questions twelve jurors must now answer. It is not only Russell Brand on trial at Southwark. It is the very nature of consent itself.

That is the case. The jury will decide it. I will not.

But notice one thing about that summary. I have been able to tell you the defendant’s name, his age, his hairdo, his wife’s name and her podcast, his memoir, his phone codes, his former addictions, his religious conversion and the precise wording of his denials. I have been unable to tell you a single identifying detail about any of the six women, and if I tried, I would be committing a criminal offence. Since the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992, complainants in sexual cases have enjoyed lifelong anonymity from the moment they make an allegation. The accused enjoys nothing of the sort. He is named on arrest, sometimes before, and his name is then carried around the world like a severed head on a pike.

There are good reasons for complainant anonymity, and I want to be fair to them, because they are serious. Sexual offences are among the least reported crimes there are. Few women would walk into a police station if they knew their name, and the most intimate details of the worst night of their lives, would be on the front of the Daily Star next morning. Victims who are named are hounded. Victims who are not named are more likely to come forward. And the law is right to tell juries, as it does, that a delay in reporting is not in itself a sign of a false complaint, because people who have been assaulted very often say nothing for years.

All true. But consider the other side of the ledger, which our legislators have tended to leave blank.

When the accusers are anonymous and the accused is not, the scrutiny runs only one way. A journalist may dig into the defendant’s past, his old stand-up routines, his ex-girlfriends, his radio show, his bizarre politics, his baptism in the Thames and his views on vaccines, and publish the lot. A journalist may not, by law, so much as hint at who the complainants are, and therefore cannot scrutinise them at all. Inside the courtroom, both sides are tested. That is what cross-examination is for, and as the past three weeks have shown, it is a brutal and necessary business. Outside it, where most of the public actually forms its views, only one person is ever on trial.

And in Brand’s case, the public verdict arrived long before this one. In September 2023 Channel 4’s Dispatches, together with The Times and the Sunday Times, broadcast and published anonymous allegations against him. YouTube cut off his advertising revenue. His agent dropped him. His publisher paused his books. Great Ormond Street, if Brand’s evidence is right, barred him from his own baby’s bedside. Brand, who had been described in the press as a “comedian” for fifteen years, was by the end of that week described almost exclusively as an “alleged rapist”. None of this was done by a court. And here is a curious detail that emerged at the trial and has received remarkably little attention: according to Reuters, none of the six women whose allegations the jury is now considering was among the anonymous women in that original programme. They came forward afterwards. The documentary that made Brand a pariah is, in the strict sense, not the case he is facing at all.

Mr Justice Bennathan has been admirably blunt about it. He told jurors that the documentary was “one-sided and dramatic in manner”, that the allegations in it had “never been tested in any court”, and that they must try the case on the evidence before them and nothing else. The defence is entitled to argue, as it has, that the film shaped how the women remembered things. The prosecution is equally entitled to argue that the film simply gave six women the courage to speak. That is precisely the sort of question twelve people in a jury box are there to answer. It is not a question a television producer, or a man on X with a frog for an avatar, is equipped to settle.

We have been here before, and it did not end well. In 2014 the BBC filmed a police raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s home from a helicopter. He was never arrested, never charged, and won substantial damages for breach of privacy. Paul Gambaccini spent a year on police bail for nothing. Harvey Proctor and the late Lord Brittan were accused of monstrous crimes by Carl Beech, a fantasist who enjoyed complainant anonymity right up until the day he was convicted of perverting the course of justice and jailed for eighteen years. The men he smeared had their names in every paper in the land. His was protected by law.

Parliament once understood this. Between 1976 and 1988, men accused of rape in England and Wales were also entitled to anonymity unless convicted. The protection was scrapped, largely on the argument that naming a defendant can encourage other victims to come forward, which it sometimes does. That is a real argument and I do not dismiss it. But it is an argument for naming people when they are charged, not for naming them on the strength of a documentary, and it does nothing to answer the basic unfairness of a system in which one party is shielded from the gaze of the entire world and the other is stripped naked in front of it.

There is a further absurdity, and it is this very column. While the trial runs, the newspapers that did more than anyone to turn Brand into a pariah must behave like Trappist monks, reporting only what is said in court. Meanwhile Brand himself has spent the trial broadcasting a weekly show called Sunday Service with the Brands to an audience larger than most national newspapers, opening one episode with a prayer asking God to “guard my lips”, and promising not to “refer to the events in the trial, so that truth and justice is served for everyone”. “Truth and justice,” he said, “are the only things that can save me.” His wife has told viewers they pray every morning before court and read psalms in the car on the way in. I make no comment on the sincerity of any of this; a man is entitled to pray, and his wife is entitled to stand by him. I merely observe that it would once have been thought odd for a defendant in his own rape trial to be releasing hour-long devotional videos, and that it is a curious state of affairs when the accused has a larger platform than either the prosecution or the press. The modern trial takes place in three rooms at once: the courtroom at Southwark, where the rules are strict and ancient; the newspapers, which are muzzled; and the internet, where there are no rules at all, and where Brand’s supporters and detractors reached their verdicts years ago and are now merely shouting them at each other.

Look at how this trial has been reported, and how trials like it are always reported. The juiciest line of the day goes in the headline, wrapped in a pair of quotation marks that are doing more work than any barrister at Southwark: “BRAND FORCED ME INTO TOILET”. “STAR’S ‘TART’ CODE”. The quotation marks are the newspaper’s legal fig leaf. They mean “somebody said this”, not “this happened”. But nobody reads the quotation marks. They read the words, and the words read like a verdict. The cross-examination that followed, in which the same account was picked at, questioned and occasionally contradicted, turns up in paragraph fourteen, if it turns up at all, below the photograph of the defendant looking shifty on the court steps. Everybody looks shifty on court steps. It is the steps.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a business model. An allegation of rape against a famous man sells newspapers; the words “the defence suggested she was mistaken” do not. A complainant’s evidence, given on a Tuesday, gets the front page. The defendant’s denial, given three weeks later, gets a few lines on page nine, by which time the reader has long since made up his mind. And a sexual allegation, by its nature, is almost always one person’s word against another’s, about something that happened behind a closed door with nobody else watching, years or decades ago. That is precisely why we have juries, rules of evidence and cross-examination. It is also precisely the nuance that a tabloid headline is designed to strip away. The headline cannot say “one woman says this happened and one man says it didn’t, and twelve people will have to work out which of them to believe”. So it simply prints what she said, in capital letters, and lets the reader do the convicting.

The presumption of innocence is supposed to be the golden thread running through English criminal law; that is how the House of Lords described it in 1935, and it is written into Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It means that a man is innocent until twelve of his fellow citizens are sure he is guilty. It does not mean innocent until a newspaper decides otherwise, or innocent until a hashtag starts trending, or innocent until his agent stops returning his calls. But that is what it has quietly come to mean. By the time a famous man walks into a crown court today, the presumption has been reversed in every forum except the one that counts. He has lost his job, his income, his friends and, in Brand’s case, apparently his place at his son’s hospital bedside. The jury is told to put all that out of its mind. The rest of the country is told nothing of the kind.

And the mob does not wait. Social media has given every man with a phone a seat on the jury and none of the obligations: no oath, no evidence, no duty to listen to both sides, and no requirement to be unanimous, or even literate. Remember Christopher Jefferies, the retired Bristol schoolteacher arrested in 2010 over the murder of his tenant, Joanna Yeates. The tabloids monstered him for his eccentric hair and his fondness for poetry, and published every piece of lurid gossip they could find. He was entirely innocent. Another man was convicted. Eight newspapers paid him libel damages, and two were found guilty of contempt of court. Nobody paid for the thousands of people who had convicted him in pubs and comment sections in the meantime, because nobody ever does. The mob never apologises. It simply moves on to the next name.

None of this is an argument that the women in this case, or in any case, should not be heard. They should, and they have been, at length, in a courtroom, under oath, which is exactly where allegations belong. It is an argument that a newspaper, a television documentary and a mob on X are not courts, and that every time we treat them as if they were, we weaken the one protection that every one of us, famous or otherwise, would want on the day the knock came at our own door.

So here is my modest proposal, which I offer without expectation that anyone in Westminster will read it. Keep complainant anonymity, because the reasons for it are good. But restore pre-charge anonymity for suspects, so that a man is not destroyed by an accusation that may never reach a court. And let us all, journalists most of all, rediscover the old-fashioned habit of waiting for the jury before we hang a man from the lamp post of public opinion. If Brand is guilty, he will go to prison, as he should, and the women will have been vindicated in the only forum that counts. If he is not, then a great many people owe him an apology that he is unlikely ever to receive.

Either way, from Tuesday the twelve people in that jury room are the only ones whose opinion actually matters. The rest of us, myself included, should have the humility to admit that we were not in the hotel room in Bournemouth, or the cubicle in Soho, or the bedroom in Hampstead, and that we do not know.

Which is, after all, why we have trials.

Storage units are where Americans keep the things they cannot bear to throw away and would rather not look at. Row upon row of corrugated-steel boxes on the edge of town, holding a broken exercise bike, a late mother’s crockery and twelve years of tax returns. The 5ft by 10ft unit in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, three miles from the gated community where Thomas Markle lived for the best part of fourteen years, held, according to the Daily Mail, rather more than that.

The Mail, which has spent most of the past decade acting as the Markle family’s unofficial notice-board, says it has now reported the Duchess of Sussex’s father to the FBI. Its reporter went down to Rosarito, ten miles south of the US border, heard that Markle had rented a unit and stopped paying for it, and was let in after two years of missed payments. Receipts, the paper says, show he rented it in 2017. Among the family mementoes, letters and photographs, the Mail says, were magazines printed in Asia that depict children being sexually abused, books about paedophilia, and loose photographs of naked Asian girls, some of whom look conspicuously young.

Let me be clear about two things before we go on. The first is that possessing images of children being sexually abused is not a lapse of taste or a family embarrassment. It is among the vilest crimes a human being can commit, because every one of those images is a crime scene with a real child in it. If Thomas Markle Sr is guilty, his age, his missing leg and his famous daughter should count for precisely nothing.

The second is that he has not been charged with anything, let alone convicted. He denies all of it. Nobody yet knows what is on any of the devices, and a newspaper reporter rummaging through an abandoned locker is not a forensic examiner. I have spent much of this saga urging everybody to wait for the evidence. That still applies. But it would be dishonest to pretend that the evidence, or at least something that looks a great deal like it, has not started to arrive by the boxful.

First, the man. Thomas Wayne Markle was born in Pennsylvania in 1944 and spent four decades lighting American television. He lit General Hospital and Married… with Children and won two Daytime Emmys, which is two more than most of the people now passing judgment on him. He had Samantha and Thomas Jr with his first wife, Roslyn Loveless, and Meghan with his second, Doria Ragland, whom he divorced in 1987, when he was 43. By most accounts, once including Meghan’s, he was a devoted father, helped along by a $750,000 lottery win in 1990. By 2016 he had filed for bankruptcy for the second time, which may go some way to explaining his later career as a supplier of photographs.

He moved to Rosarito in 2011 and lived in a rented house in the gated community of San Antonio del Mar, which is now being rebuilt. Locals told the Mail he was rarely seen, apart from the odd trip to an expat bar, a minimarket and Walmart. “Frankly, he seemed to live like a hermit,” said one. “Nobody in all the years he was here really got to know him.” It was from there that he wrecked his relationship with his youngest daughter. Days before the royal wedding in May 2018, he was caught secretly working with a paparazzi photographer to stage supposedly candid pictures, at the very moment Prince Harry was begging the press to leave his future father-in-law alone. Then came two heart attacks, he missed the wedding, and the then Prince of Wales walked the bride down the aisle at Windsor. Mr Markle never got back in the room. He gave interviews to anybody with a microphone, and in 2019 let the Mail on Sunday print a private letter from his daughter, which he called “a dagger to the heart”. She sued the paper and won.

In January 2025 he moved to Cebu in the Philippines, where his son Thomas Jr looked after him. That December his left leg was amputated after a blood clot turned it black. In May he was flown back to America, leaving his belongings with his son, and he now lives in a rehabilitation centre in central Florida, learning to walk again.

Then, last week, the Sun published Thomas Jr’s account. In July, he says, while looking through four boxes of his father’s things for a phone for his fiancée, Rose, he found “hundreds, if not thousands” of images and videos of child sexual abuse on hard drives and phones, including, it is alleged, videos of girls no older than ten or eleven involved in sex acts, a 15-minute video of naked girls on his father’s old phone, and pictures of children as young as toddlers. One 35mm photograph reportedly shows a bearded man resembling his father having sex with a young Asian girl.

“When I found this material I was horrified and I had no option but to report my dad,” he said. “I have supported, cared for him and helped him for years, but that stops now. I won’t speak to my father ever again unless I’m called to give evidence against him.” He went further. “I’m so, so sorry Meghan. I now know I have been protecting the wrong person for the past nine years. Having seen what I’ve seen, I believe the man I’ve been defending and caring for is a monster.”

The father’s response, delivered from Florida to the Daily Mail (where else?), was unequivocal. “Sick lies.” “I have never downloaded anything like that in my life.” The accusation was “the worst thing anyone could accuse me of.” Of the photograph, he said: “I have never been in a photograph like that.” He said he would do “whatever it takes” to clear his name, and that the computers had not been in his hands since he left Mexico with his son in 2025.

Then, two days later, in a further interview with the same paper, he volunteered that he had paid for sex in the Philippines when he was single. “I never had sex with anyone under the age of 18,” he said. “I like Asian women but that is not a crime.” It is not. Paying for sex with adults is grubby, but it is not what he is accused of. As a defence strategy, however, it has the air of a man who has been told by his lawyer to stop talking and has taken it as a challenge.

Samantha, never knowingly understated, called her brother’s claims “disgusting lies” with “no merit whatsoever”. She took to X to claim, without a shred of evidence, that he had been paid $80,000 to do this to their father, and that he had turned on the old man only after being caught out over money. When the Mail knocked on her door this week to ask about the Mexican locker, Samantha could be seen in the background, but it was her boyfriend, Mark Phillips, who did the talking. “The only statement that you’re going to get is that Thomas Markle doesn’t even have fingerprints on the stuff in the Philippines,” he said. “He didn’t even ever touch it the whole time it was there, he can’t be charged. Markle never had it in Mexico either… The FBI has no jurisdiction in Mexico. Thomas Markle Sr hasn’t lived in the States in 10 years. Even if there was bad [material] then the statute of limitations ran out five years ago. This is all bulls**t.”

Whether any of that is good law, I leave to the lawyers. As public relations, it is a catastrophe. When a family’s defence moves, in a single breath, from “he never had it” to “even if he did, you can’t touch him for it”, it has rather lost the thread.

Now to the locker, because what the Mail says it found there changes the shape of this story.

There are 20 boxes. Among them are 31 black-and-white prints, roughly ten inches by eight, most of which appear to date from when Markle was in his forties or fifties. Nearly half appear to show the same girl. In one, a bearded Markle, in a polo shirt and jeans, sits on a hotel bed beside her, cigarette in hand, staring into the camera; she is smiling, in a white lacy top and dark jeans, clutching a small bag. In another, taken in what looks like the same room, she is naked, leaning forward, a heart-shaped pendant around her neck. Sixteen more prints show various other naked girls. The Mail is careful to say there is no evidence that Markle had sex with any of them, and we do not know how old any of them were. That will matter.

There are 35mm negatives that show, in the Mail’s words, apparently random, voyeuristic pictures of children on a beach, and others of a woman bound and “hogtied” while a man directs the shoot. There are more than 50 videotapes, with titles such as “Boys – Brother and Sister – Russian XX” and “Manila Nites”. Nobody yet knows what is on them.

There are the books, which deserve a moment, because they are not all of a kind. Some would be found on the shelves of any second-hand bookshop. The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, by Irving and Amy Wallace, was a bestseller in 1981 and sat in many a downstairs lavatory, though its index, with headings such as “incest”, “baby fetish” and “men who enjoyed girls 16 years old or younger”, reads rather differently in this context. The Invisible Children, by Gitta Sereny, is a serious, campaigning piece of investigative journalism about child prostitution, written by one of the great reporters of the last century, and owning it proves nothing except an interest in the subject. Stews and Strumpets, from 1961, is a history of prostitution.

Others are much harder to explain away. Victorian Children, published in 1972, is full of pictures of semi-naked youngsters in suggestive poses, and was co-authored by the English photographer Graham Ovenden, who was jailed in 2013 for abusing children as young as six in the 1970s and 1980s, and whose personal collection a judge later ordered to be destroyed. There is David Hamilton’s Private Collection, the work of the photographer whose soft-focus pictures of young girls were once sold in every high-street poster shop, and who killed himself in 2016 after several women accused him of raping them when they were teenagers, which he denied. There is Young Aphrodites, the photographic companion to a 1963 Greek film about a 12-year-old girl raped by a shepherd. There is Forbidden Sexual Behavior and Morality, a 1962 book by the sexologist Robert Masters with a whole chapter on paedophilia, since criticised for brushing aside the harm done to victims. There is Le Fairy, a soft-cover book printed in the Far East containing naked photographs of girls who appear to be pre-pubescent. And there is Hollywood Lolitas: The Nymphet Syndrome in the Movies, of which Markle apparently owned at least two copies. The other, the Mail says, was in one of the boxes the police took away in the Philippines.

That last detail matters more than it might seem. It links the hoard in Mexico, which he rented, paid for and visited, with the boxes in Cebu, which his family insist he never touched.

Then there is the hardware. Seven hard drives, stripped out of computers. Four pen drives. Two digital cameras from the early 2000s and two cameras made for children. An old Apple computer. An old computer tower bearing a paper note reading “Overheated… Virus!”, together with instructions for running WinCleaner, a program that wipes hard drives clean, and an activation code. And a paper plate on which somebody has written “DARK WEB” in red ink, alongside a list of web addresses. What is on any of these devices, nobody yet knows. That, again, is for the forensic examiners. But it is not, you would have to concede, the usual contents of a pensioner’s lock-up.

Who had access? The Mail is told that Markle visited the unit a couple of times a month in the early years, bringing things in and taking others away; that he was last seen there in March 2024, when he renewed the lease for three months; and that neither Thomas Jr nor anybody else ever went there. If that is true, it rather complicates the theory, which I was prepared to entertain and which his defenders have pushed hard, that the whole thing is a stitch-up by a vengeful son. It is one thing to imagine a man planting material in boxes in his own house in Cebu. It is quite another to imagine him planting it, years earlier, in a padlocked unit in another country that he never visited.

There is a proper caveat, though, and it is not a small one. The material in Mexico was not found by police. It was found, handled and photographed by a newspaper. Whatever else that is, it is not how evidence is supposed to be gathered, and any defence lawyer worth his fee will spend a happy afternoon asking a jury who touched what, and when. That the Mail, which only last week was Thomas Markle’s favourite confessional, is now the one reporting him to the FBI tells you something about how this family’s relationship with the press works. It also tells you something about how well the actual investigating authorities have been doing their job, if the newspapers keep getting there first.

So what are the authorities doing? In the Philippines, quite a lot. Police seized the boxes and a laptop, and on Thursday a court in Cebu granted them a warrant to open the devices and examine what is on them, who owned them and who used them. The regional prosecutor says it will not take long to establish whether a crime has been committed. If Markle were charged and convicted, he could face ten to twelve years in prison. The Interior Secretary, Jonvic Remulla, has already announced that “all signs point to a possible sex offender of the grossest kind”, which is a remarkable thing for a politician to say about a man who has not been charged, before the forensic results are in. One does not have to have any sympathy for Thomas Markle to think that a government minister ought to wait for his own detectives. The FBI says it is aware of the allegations and will support the Philippine authorities, and is said to be poised to join the investigation.

And then there is London, where the story stops being merely sordid and turns into a British farce.

It is now understood that the letter the Metropolitan Police received in January 2019 was written by Roslyn Loveless, Markle’s late first wife, the mother of Samantha and Thomas Jr. Let that sink in for a moment. The woman whose children are now at war over these allegations appears to have been the first to raise the alarm, seven years ago. Her granddaughter, Noelle Rasmussen, who is, of all people, Samantha’s daughter, told the Telegraph last week that her grandmother “would go to the ends of the earth to protect you”, that she herself had felt uneasy around Markle as a child because “your body tells you when something’s off”, and that she supported both her uncle’s decision to go to the police and Meghan’s decision to keep her children away. She has not said that he ever abused her.

What did the Met do with the letter? Commander Adam Slonecki, who runs its Protection Command, has now explained. It was addressed to the Fixated Threats Assessment Centre, the unit that deals with stalkers and obsessives who pose a danger to public figures. “The author of the letter suggested they were writing to raise concerns relating to the security of the Duchess of Sussex,” he said. “While the letter did not actually contain any information specifically related to security matters, it did contain a number of claims about alleged offending outside the United Kingdom. The letter was assessed and subsequently passed to the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for their awareness. The details of the allegations in the letter were not shared with other law enforcement agencies.”

Read that twice. Britain’s most famous police force received a letter from a man’s former wife accusing him of serious offences abroad. It concluded, correctly, that the letter had nothing to do with anybody’s security. And then, instead of passing the allegations to the FBI, or the Mexican police, in whose jurisdiction Markle was living, it posted them to a royal private office “for their awareness”, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug. The Met has now referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, and the IOPC has confirmed that it will carry out an independent investigation into the force’s “failure to pass on allegations of serious offending… to relevant overseas authorities at the time”. It has also sent back to the Met, to deal with itself, a second matter, “relating to an alleged data breach where information was passed on to a third party”. The third party being the Sussexes.

So, in a single envelope, Scotland Yard managed to fail to tell the people it should have told and to tell the people it should not have. It now says that “a number of referrals to relevant overseas law enforcement agencies” will be made “in the coming days”. In the coming days. Nearly eight years after the letter arrived. If the allegations in it turn out to be true, the failure to act on them will be a scandal in its own right, and it will not be a Markle scandal. It will be Scotland Yard’s.

Which brings us to the Duchess.

On 23 October she issued a statement. “I am deeply distressed at the news that has come to light in the last 24 hours, and my thoughts are with any children who may have been harmed,” she said. “I hope it can now be understood that, despite certain media publications’ distortion over the years, any distance from my father and my choice to not allow him to have contact with our children, was for one reason: to protect them. I trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families. Although the breadth of what has now been uncovered is more sickening than one could ever imagine, my sincerest hope is that justice will be fully served and that the priority remains the safety and protection of innocent children.”

She said she had been given assurances that the “troubling and disturbing” allegations were being investigated and had been advised that speaking out might jeopardise a legal case. She originally dated the letter to 2018. It was in fact 2019, and her camp now says she simply misremembered, which is plausible and does not much matter.

What matters more is this. I have been as rude about the Duchess of Sussex as anybody, and I dare say I shall be again. But if what was in that locker is what the Mail says it is, then on the central question she may well turn out to have been right, and the rest of us, who spent years casting her father as a lonely, wronged old man frozen out by a heartless daughter, wrong. That is worth saying plainly, because it is the sort of thing columnists rarely say at all.

It does not, however, make the questions go away. The first is the obvious one. “I trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families,” she says. But if you genuinely believed, in 2019, that your father might be a danger to children, and seven years went by without a knock on his door, did nobody in the Sussex household think to ask the Met why? Did anybody pick up the phone to the FBI? Perhaps they did. If so, now would be a very good time to say so.

The second is the story we were told in the meantime. In 2021 the Duchess sat opposite Oprah Winfrey, before an audience of tens of millions, and explained that she had cut off her father because he had lied about the paparazzi pictures. In December 2022, in the couple’s Netflix series, she described herself as having “been a daddy’s girl my whole life”, and Prince Harry, reflecting on her estrangement, said: “She had a father before this and now she doesn’t have a father.” According to People, he went further, blaming himself: “If Meg wasn’t with me, then her dad would still be her dad.” By then, nearly four years had passed since the Met posted the letter to the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. His office. Either Harry knew and chose to tell the world a different, rather more self-flattering story, or Meghan never told him, which would be a remarkable thing to keep from the man whose office received the letter and whose children she says she was protecting. There may be an innocent explanation, such as lawyers’ advice or a reluctance to accuse a man publicly of crimes nobody had proved. But neither of them has yet offered one.

The third is last December. When her father lay in a hospital bed in the Philippines with his leg freshly amputated, the world was told, via a Sussex spokesman, that Meghan had “reached out”. It was a tender little phrase, and most of us pictured a get-well card. What she actually reached out with, it turns out, was a letter, delivered to his bedside by hospital staff while he was photographed and filmed receiving it. The letter reportedly told him that she, and the authorities, knew he had abused young girls, and that he would never meet Archie, now seven, or Lilibet, five. His response this week: “If Meghan says that’s what she wrote, then she’s probably right.” Two things strike me about this. If that account is accurate, the authorities knew nothing of the sort; by the Met’s own admission, they had done nothing at all. And a letter of that kind, served on a hospital bed in front of a camera, may have been entirely justified, but it was not “reaching out”. It was a writ with a ribbon on it. Allowing the world to believe otherwise is precisely the kind of spin the Sussexes complain about when newspapers do it.

And then there is the accuser, Thomas Jr, who until last week was the weakest link in this whole story. He is 60, a former window fitter from Grants Pass, Oregon, with a colourful record. In January 2017 he was arrested after a drunken row with his then fiancée, during which, it was reported, he held a gun to her head; I can find no report of a conviction. In January 2019 he was arrested for drink-driving. Weeks before the royal wedding he wrote an open letter to Prince Harry calling his sister a “jaded, shallow, conceited woman”, and he spent the next several years firmly in his father’s corner, nursing him after his 2022 stroke and briefing the Mail from the hospital corridor. He reported his discovery to the FBI in July and heard nothing for three months, then turned up in Cebu with a man from the Sun at his elbow. Samantha says it is all about money. None of that makes him a liar. It made him an accuser whose word needed testing, and I said so. What has changed is that, if the Mail is right, his word is no longer all there is.

So where does that leave us? Exactly where it should have left us all along: with the evidence. In Cebu, the forensic examiners now have a warrant and a timetable. In Mexico, there is a locker full of hard drives that somebody with a badge, rather than a press card, needs to look at. In London, the police watchdog is investigating the police. And in a rehabilitation centre in Florida, an 82-year-old man with one leg insists that none of it is what it looks like.

He may yet be right. The devices may contain nothing. The girls in the photographs may all have been adults. The magazines may be less than the Mail says. The books, after all, are only books. If so, a great many people, in Florida, in Cebu, in the Sussex household, at Scotland Yard and in more than one newsroom, will have a great deal of explaining to do.

But I would not put money on it. When this story broke it smelled like a kipper left on a radiator: a tabloid splash, an accuser with an axe to grind, a family that has turned the public feud into a cottage industry. It still smells. The trouble is that the smell is now coming from a storage unit in Rosarito, and it is not the Sussexes who rented it.

Thomas Markle stopped paying for that unit two years ago. Things put into storage, it turns out, have a way of outlasting the excuses.

And then there is the other, perhaps more conspiratorial yet not impossible explanation.

Could the items found in the storage unit have been planted there?…

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