Episodes

A jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted Russell Brand, 51, on Thursday of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, and acquitted him of two further counts of rape and one of attempted indecent assault. The rape conviction concerns a woman he met after a 2009 stand-up show and later raped at his London home. All seven verdicts were unanimous, from a jury of eight men and four women, after deliberations across three days. Mr Justice Bennathan told him: “You’ve been convicted of a nu...

Sandra Birchmore joined the Stoughton Police Explorers program as a young teenager. Prosecutors say Matthew Farwell, one of the officers who ran it, began a sexual relationship with her when she was 15 and he was 27, and that nearly a decade later, when she was 23 and pregnant and a friend had reported the relationship to his own department, he strangled her and staged it as a suicide. Farwell has pleaded not guilty; the defence says she took her own life after he ended the affair. Before closin...

The jury in Russell Brand’s trial retired at Southwark Crown Court just before 2:50 p.m. on Tuesday, after Mr Justice Bennathan finished summing up more than three weeks of evidence. “I can only accept a verdict from all 12 of you that is a unanimous verdict,” he told the eight men and four women, directing them to a bundle of photographs and diagrams and telling them to take their time — they would not be criticised for taking too long. Brand, 51, denies three counts of rape, three of sexual as...

Ian Winter KC closed the defence case for Russell Brand at Southwark Crown Court on Monday, opening with an 1864 passage from John Henry Newman and telling jurors that 2023 media reporting had “poisoned the wells” of justice by prompting the complainants to come forward — that they did not make the “independent decision” to speak out. He said Brand is not a psychopath who rapes people and thinks it’s normal, that he respects it when a woman says no, and that “living a highly promiscuous life is ...

Riel Karmy-Jones KC closed the prosecution case against Russell Brand at Southwark Crown Court on Friday, telling jurors he treated women as a disposable commodity and a means to an end, that he exercised control and felt disdain toward them, and that “women as a whole were disposable who didn’t matter to him — he didn’t even need to know their names.” She ended: “We invite you to find him guilty on all counts.” Earlier, Mr Justice Bennathan gave the jury 19 pages of written legal directions, in...

Laura Brand gave evidence for her husband at Southwark Crown Court on Thursday, telling jurors he is caring and kind, a wonderful father, and that she feels very seen by him. She was 19 and he was 31 when they met at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006; she said she had had one previous partner, that on their first date she did not want to have full sex and he did not push, and that she felt entirely cared for. She also told the court he slept with other women while they dated, which is why they spli...

Russell Brand gave evidence for more than four hours at Southwark Crown Court on Wednesday, denying each of the seven charges in turn and telling jurors that consent is “fundamental, essential, necessary and indeed more important than sex itself.” He said the 2023 Channel 4 Dispatches programme had a devastating effect, that he could not find a single friend or former colleague willing to give evidence for him, and that he had been barred from staying with his son after the boy’s open-heart surg...

Mr Justice Bennathan directed the jury in Russell Brand’s trial on Tuesday to return a not guilty verdict on count two, indecent assault, telling them: “In respect of count two, I have reached the decision that there is insufficient evidence of indecent assault. That is my decision, not yours.” A male juror was selected to deliver the verdict formally. The judge then added a lesser charge arising from the same 2001 allegation — attempted indecent assault — calling it a slightly artificial proces...

Chris Brown, 37, was sentenced Monday at Southwark Crown Court to eight months in prison, suspended for 12 months, after pleading guilty in July to affray over a February 2023 attack on music producer Abraham “Abe” Diaw at Tape nightclub in Mayfair. Judge Tony Baumgartner called it serious public violence and said the repeated use of a glass bottle aimed at the head was plainly dangerous; CCTV played in court showed Brown striking Diaw four times with what prosecutor Heidi Stonecliffe KC describ...

A Durham County jury convicted Miguel Salguero-Olivares, 33, on Friday of first-degree murder, first-degree rape, first-degree sexual offense and first-degree burglary in the 2012 killing of Faith Hedgepeth, a 19-year-old UNC-Chapel Hill sophomore and citizen of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe, found beaten to death in her Chapel Hill apartment. The case went unsolved for nine years until a 2021 traffic stop produced a DNA sample that matched the scene. Superior Court Judge Keith Gregory sentenced him t...

The prosecution in Russell Brand’s trial called the people the fifth complainant says she told — her parents, a sexual health nurse who treated her in 2009, her then-manager, friends and a former boyfriend — in what English courts allow as evidence of a consistent account. The defence used the same witnesses to probe inconsistencies: a message she sent years later saying she was young and stupid and probably as much to blame, a police statement in which her ex-boyfriend said she had “come round”...

The fifth complainant in Russell Brand’s trial was cross-examined at Southwark Crown Court on Wednesday, completing the evidence of all six women. Ian Winter KC put to her that she had been a massive fan, that she went to Brand’s home knowing sex would happen, that she agreed to what took place, and that Brand “had pushed you and probably had treated you like an animal, but he didn’t rape you.” She replied that she did not consent to what happened to her, and told the court: “We are not here to ...

All six complainants have now given evidence in the trial of Russell Brand, 51, at Southwark Crown Court. On Tuesday the jury heard from the fourth complainant, who alleges he assaulted her at a London radio station in the mid-2000s in front of his entourage; from the sixth, who worked at Channel 4 in 2009 and says colleagues suggested she give him a massage before he put his head in her lap, and who told the jury she reported it to her line manager at the time; and from the fifth, whose recorde...

Sandra Birchmore was 23, roughly eight to ten weeks pregnant, and found dead in her Canton, Massachusetts apartment in February 2021, hanging from a duffel bag strap. The state medical examiner ruled it a suicide. Testimony began Oct. 13 in the federal trial of former Stoughton police detective Matthew Farwell, 38, charged with killing a witness — prosecutors allege he began sexually abusing Birchmore when she was 15 and he was 27, through a police Explorers program, and strangled her when she b...

A New Mexico judge threw out the indictment against actor and director Timothy Busfield on Friday, finding the prosecution failed to act in a fair and impartial manner before the grand jury. Judge Joseph Montano ruled that grand jurors asked three times to hear from additional witnesses — who were waiting in the hallway — and that the prosecutor used an unexplained procedure and an incomplete explanation of the subpoena rules, with the practical effect of unilaterally withholding them. Only two ...

Duane "Keffe D" Davis, 63, was sentenced Tuesday in Las Vegas to 40 years to life for the Sept. 7, 1996, murder of Tupac Shakur, who was 25. Clark County District Judge Carli Kierny told Davis that saying he had changed fell short, and that he does not get to take a man from his family — especially when that man is Tupac Shakur. Davis, a former Southside Compton Crips leader convicted Aug. 31 of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon, was never accused of firing the shots; prosecutors h...

Colleen Slemmer was nineteen. She grew up in Orange Park, Florida, went shrimping before dawn with her stepfather, gave up her lunch break to feed classmates who needed help, and loved computers enough that her grandfather told her to make a career of it. That's what brought her to a Job Corps center in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1995. She never came home. On January 12, 1995, Christa Gail Pike, 18, and two other students lured Colleen to a secluded spot near the University of Tennessee's agricul...

Actress Selma Blair, 54, pleaded not guilty Monday in Queens Criminal Court to two counts of second-degree assault under New York Penal Law 120.05(3), after an incident on Delta Flight 938 from Los Angeles to JFK on Sunday night. According to charging documents, a Port Authority officer securing Blair to a stretcher said she freed a leg and kicked her repeatedly, and a nurse at Jamaica Hospital said Blair kicked her in the chest — the state charges concern what happened after the flight, not dur...

Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle has set the execution of Nidal Hasan, 56, for Dec. 3 at 1 p.m. at Fort Hood, Texas — the same post where he killed 13 people and wounded 32 in November 2009, and close to the hour the shooting began. It would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the Army's first firing squad since 1945. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said this week the public will be able to watch, and the Pentagon confirmed Thursday it will be livestreamed, without saying where it...

Bryan Kohberger, 31, who pleaded guilty in July 2025 to murdering University of Idaho students Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin and is serving four consecutive life sentences, now says he was convinced to falsely confess and that his court-appointed lawyers failed him. On Oct. 15 at 1:30 p.m., Judge Steven Hippler will hear a motion asking him to disqualify himself from the post-conviction case, filed Aug. 27 by Kohberger's new court-appointed attorney Greg Rauch, ...

Christa Gail Pike's attorneys believed she was brain dead Monday night and expected her to be taken off life support Tuesday. Instead, attorney Randy Spivey said, she woke up and began talking — "to the shock of everyone," including her medical team. She has pneumonia, a blood clot, and no function in either arm, remains handcuffed and shackled, and her lawyers say there could be permanent damage. On Wednesday, Davidson County Chancellor I'Ashea Myles ordered Tennessee to preserve all evidence f...

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed Attorney General Letitia James special prosecutor on Oct. 1 in the Cornell University case, saying she had lost faith in Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten's handling of it. A former student identified in court papers as Jane Doe has filed a civil suit against seven then-members of Chi Phi, the university, the national fraternity and others, alleging she was pressured into taking ketamine and assaulted over several hours in October 2024. All...

The Pentagon announced Monday night that President Trump approved Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's recommendation to execute former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, 56, by Army firing squad for the 2009 Fort Hood shooting that killed 13 people and wounded 32. The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place; it would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the Army's first firing squad since 1945. No date has been set, and presidential approval does not guarantee an execution — Ronald Gra...

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles granted parole Thursday to Amber Guyger, 38, the former Dallas officer convicted of murdering Botham Jean, 26, in his own apartment in September 2018 — seven years to the day after her conviction, and seven years into a ten-year sentence. The board cited the absence of a documented pattern of violent arrests or convictions, a satisfactory institutional adjustment, and completed programming; no release date has been set, and the Texas Department of Criminal ...