A joint investigation by British media outlets the Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatches has concluded that actor/comedian Russell Brand engaged in the rape and sexual assault of four women. The alleged incidents took place more than a decade ago when Brand was at the height of his fame. The Sunday Times article goes into each allegation in detail.

Nadia met brand when he was living in LA around 2012. They texted and eventually she went to his house in Hollywood and they had consensual sex. Some days later, Brand asked her to come back to his house and when she arrived he was naked:

“When I walked in — the door was unlocked and I just walked in,” Nadia says. “He comes running out of the bedroom naked. And I’m kind of taken aback. I’ve got a bag on my shoulder, a little dress and a coat on top.”

Nadia says Brand took her to a wall and kissed her and made a comment, something along the lines of: “I’ll keep you safe.” He then told her that “a friend” was already in the bedroom and that he wanted her to join them, according to Nadia.

“I’m like, no, that’s not happening, I don’t care, that’s not happening, we’re not doing that,” she says. “I tried to get away from him and I slipped away from the wall. And then I went to another wall that had a painting on it. A huge painting. And my bag got actually stuck underneath that, and it’s still on my arm. And at this point he’s grabbing at my underwear, pulling it to the side.”

Nadia alleges that she told Brand to get off her and that she wanted to leave, but he carried on. “I’m stuck underneath the painting and he’s pushing up against me,” she says. “He’s a lot taller than me. And he has that glazed look in his eye again. And I can’t move. And I told him, ‘Get off, get off.’” Nadia claims that Brand pushed her up against the wall and raped her, without a condom.

Afterwards, Nadia claims Brand blocked the exit and tried to get her to calm down. Eventually he stepped away and she ran out and got in her car.

At 3.29am, Brand sent Nadia a text message. He wrote: “I’m sorry. That was crazy and selfish. I hope you can forgive me, I know that you’re a lovely person. X.” He tried phoning her at 3.51am, but the call went unanswered.

Nadia says she was up most of the night. She did not reply to Brand’s text until 10.59am. She wrote that he had taken advantage of her and “scared the shit out of me”. She wrote in her text to Brand: “Do you know how scary [you are] when that glaze look comes over. When a girl say[s] NO it means no. Do I have to go and get myself tested?”

A screenshot of the actual text exchange is included in the story. Nadia told a friend about the assault and that friend convinced her to go to a rape crisis center at UCLA in Santa Monica that same day. She provided those records to the Sunday Times and they note that the underwear she’d worn during the incident was frozen as evidence. However, she chose not to make a police report.

After five months of therapy at the crisis center, she wrote Brand a letter which said in part, “You scared the shit out of me on July 1st, I thought in any situation I would be strong enough to fight someone off . . . You completely broke me down.”

Apparently it was well know around this time of his career that he had a sex addiction and was sleeping with as many women as possible. The story notes “he once said he could sleep with 80 women in a month — saw him crowned ‘Shagger of the Year’ by The Sun three times.”

There’s another story involving a 16-year-old who Brand met in the street in London a bit earlier in his career. Her mother had her text brand to inform him she was 16 (he was 30 at the time) but this apparently didn’t put him off. The age of consent in England is 16 so unlike here in the US this would not be considered statutory rape. The two did have a consensual sexual relationship but the girl claims it eventually turned abusive.

Towards the end of the relationship, Alice says that Brand sexually assaulted her. She says: “I was sat up in the bed up against the headboard, and he forced his penis down my throat and I couldn’t breathe. It was just choking me and I couldn’t breathe, and I was pushing him away and he wasn’t backing off at all.”

She says: “I ended up having to punch him really hard in the stomach to get him off.

In retrospect, she believes she was too young to consent to the relationship and that UK laws should be more like US laws in that regard. She considers they ways in which Brand coached her to lie to her parents about what she was doing a form of grooming.

Two of the women mentioned in the article describe a disturbing glazed look coming over him at times as if he were on auto-pilot. One of the accusers says his eyes seemed to turn black during an attack.

The news outlets gave Brand eight days to respond to a list of questions about the four incidents included in the story. His lawyers said they couldn’t respond, in part because the names of the women involved had been changed.

Yesterday, Brand posted a video on his YouTube channel announcing that some very serious allegations were about to be published and denying that they were true. Brand admits that there was a time when he was “very, very promiscuous” but adds, “During that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual.” From there, Brand goes on to say that it feels to him “like there is a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces and these kind of voices.” Finally, Brand claims there are witnesses who can “directly contradict” the claims being made by the media outlets, but he doesn’t go into any details in this clip.

If he has witnesses who can contradict some of the serious allegations he’s probably going to have to provide them. Support for some of these claims, especially Nadia’s, seems pretty solid. There’s also a clear pattern here. All of these allegations seem to involve him being charming and having what were initially consensual relationships which later crossed a line into something non-consensual.