Prosecution Closes Against Russell Brand, Defence Has the Last Word Today, Jury Out Tomorrow, Plus Christa Pike’s First Statement

0:07 Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Monday, November 2nd, 2026. On Friday, the prosecutor in the Russell Brand trial stood in front of the jury and went quiet. For 20 full seconds, she said nothing. The courtroom sat in silence. It was, she explained, about how long one of the women said Brand struggled with her outside a toilet. Then she spent the rest of the day turning Brand's own words, from his memoir and a TV interview, against him, ending with, We invite you to find him guilty of all charges. Today, the defense gets its last word. Tomorrow, the jury goes out. So, here's the question for this episode. When the evidence is 20 years old, what does a jury actually decide on?

0:56 Let's get into it. This segment discusses allegations of rape and sexual assault. I'll keep it to what was said in court without graphic detail. The essentials. Russell Brand, 51, is on trial at Southwark Crown Court on seven charges. Three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault, and one count of attempted 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 proceedings in open court, as reported by Sky News. And remember, closing speeches are not evidence. They're each side's argument about what the evidence shows. Friday began with the last pieces of evidence. The defense read the jury two agreed facts. First, police forensic examiners had found the contact on Brand's old iPhone 5 among thousands of contacts, confirming the code he described on the stand. The letter T, the woman's name, two more letters, and two asterisks. Second, Brand's criminal record, one conviction in April of 1995 for possessing cannabis. He paid a fine, nothing else. That's the case of Russell Brand, his barrister said. Then the judge, Mr.

2:17 Justice Benethen, gave the jury their written legal directions. 19 pages, which the jurors followed along with, making notes. Brand, with his hair pulled up in a topknot, leaned forward to read his copy, then sat back and folded his arms. Some of those directions matter a lot in a case like this. On delay, every one of these complaints came to police years after the events, and the judge told jurors they must not assume that makes them untrue. But he also told them that the delay may have seriously disadvantaged Brand, making it hard to find evidence to defend himself, and if they found it did, they should hold that in his favor. On inconsistencies, experience shows, he said, that they happen whether a person is telling the truth or not.

3:02 On character, in English law, someone with no significant criminal record has what's called good character. The judge told jurors to ignore Brand's 30-year-old cannabis fine and explained that good character helps him in two ways. It suggests he's more likely to be truthful and less likely to commit a serious crime. He pointed to the evidence of Brand's ex-girlfriends and his wife, who said he respected their wishes. And on Brand's silence in his police interviews, he was warned back then that it might harm his defense if he didn't mention something he later relied on in court. The judge told the jury those failures may count against him if they conclude he didn't have an answer at the time or invented his account afterward. Finally, the judge told the jury, for now, the only verdicts he can accept are unanimous ones. You may have heard about majority verdicts, he said, but if so, put them out of your mind.

3:56 The jury is eight men and four women. Then the prosecutor, Riel Carmi Jones, began her closing argument. She told the jury that six women who don't know each other came forward, that none of them sought the limelight or publicity, and that none of them has anything to gain except, perhaps, some closure. She said their stories share a pattern. Brand was nice, then something changed. His eyes changed, she said. He snapped from charming to frightening to nasty. And he didn't listen when they said no. She took on the defense's central argument directly, that the 2023 Channel 4 documentary caused these women to recast happy consensual fun as something sinister.

4:40 There's no magic force in this documentary, she said. Instead, she argued, it made them realize they weren't alone. Would anyone, she asked, want to come to Southern Crown Court to be cross-examined about the most intimate details of their life because of a TV show? She spoke about Laura Brand calling her Brand's undoubtedly lovely wife and said it was brave of her to testify. But she pointed out Laura wasn't with Brand for most of these years. And these women, she said, were a very different category, lowly employees or just girls in the audience. Then she went count by count. On the first, the 1999 allegation in Bournemouth, she said it became the Russell Brand Show. He undressed while the woman was in the bathroom and started prancing around the room, as she put it, ostrich-like, then kissed her, lizard-like, and didn't stop. And she accused him of gaslighting the woman afterward by leaving her what was supposedly his email address.

5:40 On the second, the MTV allegation, that's when she paused for 20 seconds of silence, to let the jury feel how long the woman said the struggle lasted. On the third, the Soho allegation, she rejected the defense's suggestion that the woman was jealous of the women from the adult TV channel Brand met later that night. On the fourth, at the radio station Choice FM, she addressed the woman telling police Brand was about 5'10, when he's actually 6'2. Was she supposed to say, the prosecutor asked, can I take out a tape measure and check your height? On the fifth, the most serious allegation, she said that whatever happened in Bran's dressing room the week before, it didn't make it open season for him to do whatever he liked later.

6:25 She suggested the demand that the woman shower and brush her teeth was about Bran getting off on control. And she used a phrase from Bran's own memoir, his Birthright Orgasm, to argue that was all he cared about. That to him, she was just another number to add to his 5,000 notches. Then she turned Brand's own words against him again. On the stand, he'd said consent was more important than sex itself. Does that ring true? She asked. She read the jury a line from his 2007 book, My Bookie Wook. Now, if I want something, whether it's a job or a woman, I will determinedly, resolutely remove anything that's in the way until I possess the object of my desire. For Brand, she said, consent was just an obstacle to be removed.

7:15 And she quoted a 2017 interview Brand gave to the talk show host Wendy Williams, in which he said that at one point in his life he'd thought the world was an amusement park made out of orgasms. The women, she said, were the amusements in his playground. Women were disposable to him. He didn't even need to know their names. She finished on his memory. He remembered almost nothing in his police interviews, she said, and remembers a great deal now. He chose to keep his cards close to his chest until he knew what we knew, she said, calling his account half-truths spun into lies. And her final words, we invite you to find him guilty of all charges on the indictment as charged. One light moment for the record.

8:00 At one point during her speech, a member of the public in the gallery fell asleep and began snoring loudly. until someone nudged them awake. Today, Brands barrister Ian Winter gives the defense his closing. He'll have the last word before the judge sums up. And then, likely Tuesday, the jury goes out. So, back to the question. With no forensic evidence, no video, and memories as much as 27 years old, the jury is deciding, in the end, who to believe. Six women who say they never met, or a man who admits a reckless past and denies every crime. The judge has given them the tools. Now it's up to them. Russell Brand denies all charges. When we come back, Krista Pike speaks, and the defense begins in Boston. Healing is not the same as being okay. For the first time since Tennessee tried and failed to execute her on September 30th, Krista Pike has spoken publicly. She dictated a statement to her lawyers, who released it on Friday. There hasn't been a moment since that night when I haven't been in pain, she said. My body hurts. My arms hurt.

9:21 My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn't just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul. She said she hadn't contemplated life beyond that night, and that she's deeply hurt by what she called the incompetence that put so many people in that position. She said she continues to think about her victim's family and the terrible pain they've endured, and she ended with this, I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger, but healing is not the same as being okay. According to the Daily Mail, which published the full statement, she also said she's been largely isolated in the prison's medical ward since she returned.

10:04 Two days earlier, Tennessee's Governor Bill Lee was asked the question everyone's been asking, will the state try again or commute her sentence to life? His answer to WSMV in Nashville. She's still incarcerated under the laws of Tennessee and quote, I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts. Lee has paused executions through the end of the year while an independent review looks at what went wrong. His corrections commissioner, Frank Strada, was due to step down at the end of October with a replacement expected to be named soon. And there's a timing detail here that matters. Lee is term limited.

10:45 Tennessee elects a new governor tomorrow. Whoever wins will inherit Pike's case, the clemency petition from her lawyers, and the decision of whether to try again. Expect that to be one of the first hard questions for the new administration. If you heard our special episode on Pike, you'll remember there's almost no modern law on this. In 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Louisiana to try again after its electric chair failed to kill a teenager named Willie Francis. In 2009, Ohio called off an execution when it couldn't find a vein on Romell Broom, and its Supreme Court later said the state could try again, though it never did. Pike's case is different from both. She received the drugs, the full dose, twice. Her lawyers have said they'll argue that a second attempt would be cruel and unusual punishment, and they're asking for her sentence to be commuted to life without parole. Meanwhile, executions elsewhere continue. On Thursday, Florida is scheduled to execute Jesse Guardado, convicted of killing a woman during a robbery in 2004. If it happens, it would be Florida's 19th execution this year, tying the state's own annual record. Krista Pike's statement is careful to mention Colleen Slemmer's family. So should we. Colleen Slemmer was 19 years old when she was killed in 1995. 31 years later, her family is still waiting for an ending. Someone has to say her name. In Boston, the prosecution has rested

12:15 in the federal trial of former Stoughton police detective Matthew Farwell, accused of strangling Sandra Birchmore, who was 23 and pregnant, in February of 2021 and staging her death as a suicide. Farwell has pleaded not guilty. If he's convicted, the charges carry a mandatory life sentence. The prosecution's case ended strong. Last week, Dr. William Smock told the jury Sandra was the victim of a homicidal act pointing to a fractured hyoid bone in her neck, which he said was very unusual for a young woman in a seated hanging and calling her apartment an altered crime scene. The original medical examiner agreed she couldn't recall another case like it. Jurors also heard from Farwell's twin brother, William, a former Stoughton officer himself, who testified under immunity that his brother told him he'd wiped his phone before handing it over to state police. Now it's the defense's turn, and its case is that Sandra took her own life after Farwell, who was married, ended their relationship. On Thursday, the defense called one of Sandra's former boyfriends and the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts, focusing on Sandra's mental health and on how the scene was documented in the first hours, including a necklace found broken in the apartment, which prosecutors say is a sign of a struggle. Earlier in the trial, the defense also raised a prior suicide attempt and a past note.

13:39 The defense's key expert is still to come, Dr. Thomas Andrew, the former chief medical examiner of New Hampshire. According to court papers, he couldn't determine Sandra's manner of death, but said he can't rule out that she took her own life. In a federal criminal trial, that may be all the defense needs. Not proof of suicide, but reasonable doubt about murder. The defense says it has about a week of witnesses. Closing arguments could come next week. Sandra Birchmore was 23. Someone has to say her name. When we come back, the week ahead. That's the show for this Monday. Here's my question for the Spotify crowd. If you were on the Brand jury, which of the judges' instructions would weigh most on you? That delay doesn't make an allegation untrue, or that delay may have made it impossible for Brand to defend himself. If you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment.

14:41 If you know someone who's been following any of these cases, 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 this week, the Russell Brand jury is expected to begin deliberating tomorrow, and a verdict could come any day after that. The moment it does, we'll bring it to you. Tennessee elects a new governor. The defense continues in Boston. And on Thursday, Florida's scheduled execution. 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. 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. Krista Pike's convictions stand. On Russell Brand. Proceedings are as reported by Sky News from Southwark Crown Court. Closing speeches are argument, not evidence. Our description of the judge's legal directions is a summary. Under the Sexual Offenses Amendment Act 1992, complainants in sexual offense cases in the United Kingdom are entitled

16:12 to lifelong anonymity. On Krista Pike, her statement is as released by her attorneys and reported by the Associated Press as, ABC News, and others. One portion is as reported by the Daily Mail. Governor Lee's comments are as reported by WSMV. On Sandra Birchmore, testimony is as reported by the Boston Globe, CBS Boston, WJAR, WHDH, WBUR, Boston 25 News, and NBC Boston. If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, you can call RAINN at 800-656-4673. 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.