In a London courtroom, a barrister rose to describe a career as a series of rooms: a conference fringe event, a television station corridor, a party, a toilet down a hallway. The circumstances of the alleged offending, she told the jury, were "as wide and as varied as the defendant's career", and the common thread, in her telling, was not the women but the man. Whoever they were and whatever they said or did, the prosecution argued, Russell Brand was not deterred. The portrait she painted was deliberately double-edged.

Brand could be funny, undoubtedly, charming and likeable "when he wanted something in return", the prosecutor said, yet also demanding and entitled, "childlike" in his expectation that every desire be met. Afterwards, jurors were told, he would often seem untroubled, sometimes leaving quickly with an excuse, sometimes carrying on as though nothing had happened. It is a striking argument, because it asks twelve people to see the warmth that made a celebrity and the conduct alleged by the Crown as parts of a single personality. On Wednesday the jury heard the detail.

One woman says she met Brand in 1999, before he was famous, at a Labour Party conference, and that he later raped her; the court heard that, when questioned by police, he said he did not remember the incident or her name, and that he had never engaged in non-consensual activity. A second woman, then working at MTV, says he grabbed her forearm outside a toilet and pleaded, wild-eyed, for her to come in. A third alleges that in 2004 he grabbed her at a party within a minute of meeting her, and later orally raped her. Brand has pleaded not guilty, and nothing the jury has heard so far is proven.