In a high-windowed courtroom at Southwark Crown Court, beside the grey sweep of the Thames, a barrister rose on Monday to deliver the kind of closing speech that every trial lawyer rehearses and few get to give before the whole world is listening. Ian Winter KC, defending the comedian and actor Russell Brand, did not merely ask the jury to doubt the women who have accused his client; he asked them to doubt the way their accusations came to exist at all. Brand, who denies all seven counts against him, faces three charges of rape, three of sexual assault and one of attempted indecent assault. His defence rests partly on timing.

A Channel 4 documentary and reports in the Times and Sunday Times in 2023, Winter argued, had "poisoned the well of justice", prompting people who had never thought of going to the police to make criminal complaints, in some cases decades after the events described. The jury was also reminded of Brand's testimony about the personal cost of the publicity, including his claim that Great Ormond Street Hospital had refused to let him stay at the bedside of his infant son after heart surgery. Winter's second argument was moral rather than procedural. A promiscuous life, he said, is lawful; unkindness, rudeness and "crazy idiot" behaviour are not crimes.

Pointing to one 1999 allegation, he noted that Brand had left the woman his real email address, and asked whether rapists behave that way. Prosecutors will answer, and the jurors, not the commentators, will decide. Yet the argument travels beyond one courtroom. From Hollywood to Seoul to Lagos, accusations that surfaced through journalism have forced societies to ask whether the press reveals harm that institutions ignored, or whether it can distort the very process that is meant to test it.