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Russell Brand once bragged about kissing Meghan Markle on the lips before she married Prince Harry.
On Saturday, the 48-year-old actor and comedian was accused of rape, sexual assault and physical abuse, in a Channel 4 special episode of Dispatches airing in a joint investigation with The Times.
Brand, who denied the ‘very serious allegations’ in a video shared on Friday night, has been accused by multiple women, including one who claimed she was 16 years old at the time.
In a resurfaced interview on Loose Women from 2018 – one week before the Duchess of Sussex’s wedding to Prince Harry – the comedian boasted about kissing the Suits actress on a film set.
She played the role of partygoer Tatiana in Brand’s 2010 movie Get Him To The Greek, and in the video he is asked about their smooch.
‘She was in a film that I was in, Get Him to the Greek, it was a good film. Meghan Markle, didn’t know at the time because she wasn’t married to a Royal person so I weren’t paying attention,’ he said at the time.
‘I don’t remember the film that much, I think I planted one on her in the scene. It was scripted in the scene. I only know this because I think I saw a clip of it somewhere. Meghan Markle, there we go!
‘They should bring that up [at the wedding]… if anyone has any reason… “Yeah Russell Brand snogged her in the film!” ‘
The bombshell piece by The Times and Channel 4 investigation reveals four women making the allegations against Brand, with one saying he raped her up against a wall at his home in Los Angeles and he later allegedly apologised over text after she told him: ‘When a girl say[s] no it means no.’
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A second woman alleges that Brand assaulted her when she was 16 and at school, and he was 31, and she says she had to punch him in the stomach to make him stop after he ‘forced his penis down her throat’.
Another woman claims Brand ‘forced a finger inside of her’ after becoming angry when he found out she had spoken to an ex-boyfriend, and says that he forced her to brush her teeth so hard and make her gums bleed so she would taste ‘anonymous’ to him.
Russell Brand says he ‘absolutely refutes very serious allegations’ being made against him
On Friday night, Brand said he had been approached by a mainstream TV network and a mainstream newspaper with ‘extremely disturbing’ correspondence listing ‘a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks.’
Amid some ‘stupid stuff’ in the correspondence, including, he said, that he ‘shouldn’t be able to attack mainstream media narratives,’ were ‘some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute.’
Brand said: ‘These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies.
‘As I’ve written about extensively in my book, I was very, very promiscuous. Now during that time of promiscuity, the relationships that I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent, and I’m being transparent about it now as well.
‘And to see that transparency metastasise into something criminal that I absolutely deny makes me question is there another agenda at play.’
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He said there had been ‘coordinated media attacks’ in the past against people like controversial podcast host Joe Rogan, and that he himself had previously been labelled a conspiracy theorist.
Brand went on to claim media outlets had been trying to contact people he knows ‘for ages and ages,’ but ‘what I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations.’
He claimed he had ‘witnesses whose evidence directly contradicts the narratives that these two mainstream media outlets are trying to construct, apparently in what seems to me to be a coordinated attack.’
‘Now, I don’t want to get into this any further because of the serious nature of the allegations, but I feel like I’m being attacked and plainly they are working very closely together.
‘We are obviously going to look into this matter because it’s very, very serious.’
The Metropolitan Police force has encouraged anyone who ‘believes they have been the victim’ of sexual assault following the accusations against Brand to come forward.
The force has said it will speak to the Sunday Times and Channel 4 after their investigation about Brand.
Russell Brand: In Plain Sight is available to watch on Channel 4.
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