Chris Brown Avoids Prison With a Suspended Sentence for the London Bottle Attack, Russell Brand’s Defence Begins, the Birchmore Autopsy

0:09 Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Tuesday, October 27th, 2026. Yesterday at Southern Crown Court in London, two famous men walked through the same security line on the same mornings. One was Russell Brand, beginning the third week of his rape trial with a large silver crucifix hanging at his waist. The other was Chris Brown, there to be sentenced for smashing a bottle over a man's head in a London nightclub. By the end of the day, Chris Brown was free to go. Russell Brand was back in the dock, listening to his former personal assistant describe what she called his insane sexual appetite. And today, the prosecution is expected to rest, and Russell Brand's defense begins. So here's the question for the day. When a jury hears that a man had a wild sex life, how much does that tell them about whether he committed a crime? Let's get into it.

1:10 This segment discusses allegations of rape and sexual assault. I'll keep it to the facts the jury heard without graphic detail. The essentials, as always. Russell Brand, 51, is on trial at Souther Crown Court on seven charges. Three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault, and one count of indecent assault, involving six women between 1999 and 2009. He has pleaded not guilty to all of them, and he denies all of the allegations. Everything here comes from evidence in open court, as reported by Sky News. First, the scene. Brand arrived in a dark gray suit, an open white shirt and sunglasses, with his wife Laura back at his side after missing court on Thursday. His father was in the public gallery, along with his minder and other supporters. Brand wore a large silver crucifix, the chain tucked under his shirt, and the cross hanging outside near the top of his trousers.

2:06 As reporters filed in, one journalist dropped a bundle of court papers, and they landed at Brand's feet. He stopped, picked them up, handed them back and walked into the glass dock where he sat alone, ramrod straight. And the courthouse was even busier than usual because Chris Brown was in the building. His fans had joined the security lines with rolled up posters, all of which had to go through the x-ray machine. More on him in a few minutes. The morning was about the third complainant. If you're just catching up, she's the woman who says that at a party in a Soho bar in 2004, Brand grabbed her within a minute of meeting her, then pulled her into a toilet and orally raped her. Yesterday, the jury heard from the people around her. Her sister's statement was read to the court. She said that one day in the summer of 2004, her sister seemed subdued and distant, upset, almost in shock. At the time, her sister told her that Brand had pulled her into a toilet, locked the door, and tried to assault her. Then the statement jumped forward almost 20 years. In 2023, when the documentary about Brand came out, the sister said her sister called her crying and struggling to catch her breath and said she hadn't been completely honest about what happened in that toilet. She said she had been orally raped, and she described Brand's face in that moment. His eyes, she said, had gone completely blank. It was like he was possessed or had become a completely different person. She said she'd been afraid that if she went to police, she would be blamed

3:37 or not believed. Her father's statement, given in early 2024, said she called him and told him she had been one of Russell Brand's victims, that he had forced himself on her, and that she'd reported it to police. She didn't give him the details. And two friends gave statements that the prosecution and defense agreed to read as undisputed facts. One said the complainant sent her a Sky News article about Brand and wrote, I was going to tweet about my experience, but I'm not sure I can handle the storms. The friend encouraged her to speak out, saying it might give her a sense of control. The other friend said that although the complainant had made comments about Brand in the past, she'd never suspected anything at this level had happened to her. You can already see how each side will use this. For the prosecution, a sister saw her shaken in 2004, long before any documentary. For the defense, the account she gave her sister back then was an attempted assault, and the allegation of rape came nearly 20 years later, after the documentary. And for the prosecution again, it's well established that people often disclose the worst of what happened to them gradually. That's for the jury. Next, two former colleagues of the sixth complainant, the woman who says Brand put his head in her lap and demanded a massage during a Channel 4 project in 2009. One said she was told Brand's two male producers sat and watched.

5:02 The other said the session was chaotic because Brand had changed the script and that her colleague told her Brand lunged at her crotch and made sexual innuendo. And then came the final witness of the day and the most colorful. Helen Berger, who was Brand's personal assistant from June of 2006 to February of 2007. Her statement was read to the jury. She said working for Bran was one of the hardest jobs she ever did. He had endless energy and was non-stop. He loved walking around his small flat in Camden with no shirt on, and she said he once did an entire interview with the actress Sadie Frost wearing an open robe. And she described what she called his insane sexual appetite. He was, in her words, sleeping with people day and night. When he was up against a deadline, he'd get antsy and joke, can I go and have sex now? Women would come to his flat during the day, she said, and it was obvious what for, so she'd let herself out. He met women on MySpace and after his shows where she said he was like a peacock and women always approached him. She told the jury he once asked her to approach women and get their numbers for him. She did it and then told him she wouldn't do it again, and he never asked again.

6:15 She said that once, while she was bringing his mother and his then-girlfriend to see him, she was told not to take them to the green room, because he was with another woman in his dressing room. And she said that on another occasion, she was in a restroom and realized Bran was in the next cubicle with a woman. She knew it was him, she said, by his voice and his cowboy boots. And she said something that surprised me, that he never seemed happy afterward. He seemed, she said, depressed. But here's the part of her evidence that matters most, legally, and it cuts the other way. She told the jury, I never witnessed Russell Brand doing anything against the law, and no one ever told her he had. What she did see, she said, was him treating people poorly and a culture around him where everyone normalized his behavior. She'd worked with plenty of celebrities, she said, but this was on another level. She quit, she said, because she was sick of him and burned out. So back to the question I asked at the top. The prosecution says this is a picture of a man who saw women as interchangeable and didn't take no for an answer. The defense will say a busy, consensual sex life in the 2000s is not a crime, that Brand has never hidden it, and that his own former assistant just told the jury she never saw him do anything illegal. Both of those can be true at the same time. The jury has to decide what happened in specific rooms with specific women.

7:42 At the end of the day, the judge told the court the trial is very, very ahead of schedule and that the prosecution should finish its case swiftly this morning. The defense is expected to begin this afternoon in London, and Sky's reporters say we may not get any advance notice of the biggest decision in this trial. The first sign of whether Russell Brand will testify could be the moment his barrister, Ian Winter, stands up and names his first witness. Russell Brand denies all charges. When we come back, Chris Brown's day in the same courthouse and the medical fight about to begin in the Sandra Birchmore case. Chris Brown has spent most of his adult life in and out of courtrooms. Yesterday at Southwark Crown Court, he walked out of one without a jail sentence again. Here's what happened.

8:42 On February 19th, 2023, at Tape, an exclusive nightclub in London's Mayfair neighborhood, Brown approached a music producer named Abraham Diao, known as Abe, who'd once been part of his circle. Security video, which was played in court, shows Brown striking Diao four times with a bottle, connecting twice with his head and once with his shoulder. The judge said it was a tequila bottle and that Brown was holding Diao by his hood as he swung. Brown's vocal coach, a rapper named Omololu Akinlolu, who performs as Hoodie Baby, joined in and punched Diao in the head. The whole thing took about 20 seconds. Diao needed hospital treatment. It took two years to reach Brown. In May of last year, Metropolitan Police detectives arrested him at 2 in the morning at a hotel in Manchester as he arrived for his European tour. He was charged with attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent, which in England carries anywhere from 2 to 16 years. He spent a week in custody, then was released on bail of £ 5 million, about $ 6. 7 million, so he could keep touring. His first public comment on Instagram was, from the cage to the stage. He pleaded not guilty. and was set to go on trial, by coincidence, this very week. Instead, in July, he and Akinlolu pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, a fray, which essentially means using or threatening violence in a way that would make

10:13 a reasonable person fear for their safety. The maximum for that is three years. Yesterday, Judge Tony Baumgartner sentenced Brown to eight months in prison, suspended for 12 months. That means he doesn't go to prison unless he commits another offense in the next year. Akinlolu got four months, also suspended. The judge said Brown played the leading role and he didn't minimize it. He said that the repeated use of a glass bottle that way especially aimed at the head, was plainly dangerous and carried the risk of a much more serious injury than the one Daya suffered. If you're wondering how this squares with Brown's history, so are a lot of people. In 2009, he was convicted of assaulting his then-girlfriend, Rihanna. In 2014, he pleaded guilty to hitting a man outside a Washington hotel. and he's currently suing Warner Brothers Discovery for defamation over a documentary that called him an abuser. Here's the fair way to look at it.

11:14 In England, sentences for a fray after a guilty plea are often suspended. The judge didn't invent a special rule for a celebrity, but it's also true that he was originally charged with something far more serious, and the plea took that off the table. Whether that's justice is a question I'd ask Abe Dioff first. Abe Diao was hit in the head with a bottle on a crowded dance floor. Someone has to say his name. In Boston, the federal trial of Matthew Farwell, the former Stoughton, Massachusetts, police detective accused of killing Sandra Birchmore in 2021, is about to reach the question the whole case turns on. Did Sandra take her own life, or was she strangled? Quick refresher.

12:01 Sandra was 23 and about two months pregnant when she was found dead in her apartment in February of 2021. Prosecutors say Farwell had been sexually exploiting her since she was 15 and killed her to stop her from exposing him. He's pleaded not guilty. His defense says she took her own life after he ended their affair. The person at the center of this week is Dr. Maria Capo-Martinez, the Massachusetts medical examiner who performed Sandra's autopsy. She originally ruled the death a suicide. In April of this year, she changed it. The cause, asphyxia. The manner, undetermined. She's expected to tell the jury why. The prosecution's version from its trial brief, the medical examiner called it suicide largely because local and state police told her that's what it was, and because the state police investigators gave her almost no other information. Prosecutors say she changed her mind when she saw the full evidence. The defense's version is very different.

13:02 In a pretrial motion, Farwell's lawyers accused federal officials of pressuring her to change the death certificate. And they've said they'd seek a mistrial if she isn't available to testify. That tells you how important her answers are to both sides. After her, the prosecution's key expert is Dr. William Smock, an emergency physician and strangulation expert you may remember from the Derek Chauvin trial. According to the Boston Globe, he'll testify that a small U-shaped bone in Sandra's neck, the hyoid bone, was fractured, an injury he says is much more common in strangulation, and that he measured a piece of hardware on the strap around her neck and found it matched her injuries. The defense will answer with its own expert, Dr. Thomas Andrew, the former chief medical examiner of New Hampshire. And there's one more fact from the case that I haven't told you, and it's hard to hear.

13:55 According to the Boston Globe, Farwell's youngest child was born the morning after the night prosecutors say he strangled Sandra. Whatever this jury decides, the medical testimony is where it'll be decided. We'll bring it to you as it happens. Sandra Birchmore was 23 years old. Someone has to say her name. When we come back, the week ahead. That's the show for this Tuesday. Here's my question for the Spotify crowd. Should a jury in a rape trial hear about the defendant's sex life in general or only about the specific allegations? If you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment.

14:43 If you know someone who's been following the brand trial or the Chris Brown case, send them this episode. That's how we grow. And on Apple Podcasts, tap listen uninterrupted at the top of your screen. $ 5 a month, no ads. This show plus thousands of other Calaroga Media shows. And the first 30 days are free. To everyone already subscribed, thank you. Coming up. Russell Brand's defense begins in London, and we'll find out whether he takes the stand. In Boston, the medical testimony in the Birchmore trial. And next week, Florida is scheduled to carry out its 19th execution of the year, which would tie its own record. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. This episode of Daily Crime and Justice is produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and is intended for news and commentary purposes only. It is not legal advice.

15:37 Everyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. Russell Brand has pleaded not guilty to all charges and denies all of the allegations against him. Matthew Farwell has pleaded not guilty. Chris Brown pleaded guilty to a fray. On Russell Brand, accounts of evidence are as reported by Sky News from Southwark Crown Court and are testimony and statements, not findings of fact. Under the Sexual Offenses Amendment Act 1992, complainants in sexual offense cases in the United Kingdom are entitled to lifelong anonymity. On Chris Brown, sentencing details are as reported by PA Media, the BBC, TMZ, NBC News, and CBS News. Our description of English sentencing practice is a general summary and not legal advice. On Sandra Birchmore, details are as reported by the Boston Globe, NBC Boston, and LA Magazine. The defense's claim that the medical examiner was pressured is an allegation in a court filing and has not been established. If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, you can call RAINN at 800-656-4673.

16:46 In England and Wales, you can reach Rape Crisis at 0808-500-2222. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, call or text 988.