In courtroom number one at Southwark Crown Court, a television screen is angled toward the dock, and on Thursday a man who has spent a quarter of a century being watched sat watching someone else. Russell Brand, 51, followed a recorded police interview almost without blinking, rarely shifting in his seat, while a woman's voice, captured in 2023, described an evening that she says began in friendly ease and ended in something she could scarcely name at the time. Brand denies all seven charges against him: three counts of rape, three of sexual assault and one of indecent assault, brought on the testimony of six women and covering the years between 1999 and 2009. The complainant in this part of the trial, whose identity is protected, told the jury that she met Brand before he was famous, at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth in 1999.

She said she took him for gay, camp and harmless, and so did not feel he was pursuing her. Back in a hotel room, she alleged, the tone changed. She described a man prancing about in his underwear, asking her to photograph him shirtless, and then becoming someone else entirely. Prosecutors showed the jury those photographs.

She also told police that she had doubted, at first, whether to call what followed rape, because it had felt so ordinary, a hesitation familiar to many who report such accusations years later. It is her description of a transformation that lingers, because it touches the strange economy of celebrity. Brand built his career on theatrical excess, on a persona so elastic that audiences from London to Los Angeles learned never to ask where the costume ended. The woman told the court he was suddenly the centre of the show, as if back on stage, and no longer the person she had been chatting to.