Jemima Goldsmith said Russell Brand was violent, coercive and abusive during their relationship and said she called the police to have him removed from her house in 2014 during what she described as a violent incident. She made the allegations after Brand was sentenced to prison for more than 10 years for rape and sexual assault.
Goldsmith said she had not seen or spoken to Brand since 2014. In a statement posted on X, the executive producer of films including The Voice of Hind Rajab and The Bibi Files said she was “in awe of the courageous women who came forward at Brand's trial, told their stories, testified and ensured justice was done.”
Her comments matter because they add a personal account from someone who was once close to Brand and who says the impact of his behavior reached into her home. Goldsmith said she did not go public at the time because she was worried about the effect of press attention on her then teenage children, and she said she chose not to press charges in 2014.
She also said she had helped Channel 4, The Times of London and The Sunday Times with reporting on Brand in 2023, and that she had undertaken to testify in court to his abusiveness if the newspaper that published the victims' accounts were ever sued. She said that reporting was influential in women deciding to pursue criminal proceedings against him.
Goldsmith also addressed a separate episode in June 2014, saying a woman came to her house for roughly 30 minutes after she booked her to give a massage to Brand. She said Brand decided he did not want the massage and asked the woman to leave, and that she was present the whole time and did not see anything untoward, even though she later said he physically assaulted her. The same account adds a wider contradiction: Goldsmith said Berki reported Brand to the police, but officers concluded there was no case to answer and no criminal offence had been committed.
She said she agreed to a harassment order to stop the woman targeting her and her family, and described the related reporting as creating an untrue narrative that opened her up to vile hatred and abuse online. Goldsmith said the injunction was upheld by the High Court and Court of Appeal on several occasions. Her public intervention now closes the gap between a private account of abuse and a broader record that, by her telling, was already known to lawyers, police and journalists long before this week.
