British podcaster Russell Brand, 49, has been charged by the principal public agency for conducting criminal prosecutions in England with rape and sexual assault for alleged acts committed between 1999 and 2005.

The British Metropolitan Police Service announced they had been authorized by the Crown Prosecution Service to charge Brand in connection with the offenses of one count of rape, one count of indecent assault, one count of oral rape, and two counts of sexual assault.

“Detectives began investigating in September 2023 after receiving a number of allegations, which followed reporting by Channel 4’s Dispatches and The Sunday Times,” the Metropolitan Police stated.

The accusations stem from four alleged incidents; one in 1999 in which a woman said she was raped in the Bournemouth area, one in 2001 in which a woman claimed she was indecently assaulted in the Westminster area of London, one in  2004 when a woman said she was orally raped and sexually assaulted in the Westminster area of London, and one between 2004 and 2005, in which a woman claimed she was sexually assaulted in the Westminster area of London.

Brand will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on May 2.

“The women who have made reports continue to receive support from specially trained officers,” Metropolitan Police Detective Superintendent Andy Furphy said. “The Met’s investigation remains open and detectives ask anyone who has been affected by this case, or anyone who has any information, to come forward and speak with police.”

“Five women — four who remained anonymous and one who [was] 16 years old [at the time of the alleged assault in 2006] — previously came forward to accuse Brand in a joint investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4 current affairs show Dispatches in September 2023,” People Magazine reported.

In September 2023, Brand issued a statement on YouTube in which he said:

I’ve received two extremely disturbing letters, or a letter and an email, one from a mainstream media TV company, one from a newspaper, listing a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks, as well as some stupid stuff, like my community festival should be stopped, I shouldn’t be able to attack mainstream narratives on this channel. But amidst this litany of astonishing, rather baroque attacks are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute.

These allegations pertain to the time 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 books, I was very, very promiscuous. Now, during that time of my promiscuity, the relationships 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 metastasized into something criminal, that I absolutely deny, makes me question: Is there another agenda at play? Particularly when we’ve seen coordinated media attacks before like with Joe Rogan, when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn’t approve of and we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same language.