Russell Brand had a loyal UK entourage. Where are they now?

At Russell Brand’s rape trial, the 51-year-old comedian told the court that he could not find anyone to testify on his behalf. His wife, Laura, was the only person to appear as a witness in his defence. Brand said that since the 2023 allegations emerged, his former friends and colleagues won’t “touch him with a bargepole”. It’s a world away from the 2000s, when Brand was one of the most famous people in Britain, and he had an entourage of collaborators and friends supporting him. Now, he has been found guilty of one count of rape, and three of sexual assault after a trial at Southwark Crown Court. “There are legitimate questions to be asked about what people surrounding Brand saw or knew at the time, and some of it feels quite uncomfortable,” Detective Superintendent Andy Furphy told PA on Thursday. “But we’ve looked at it from an evidential threshold, and at this time, we’re not meeting the threshold for an investigation.” These key figures – the managers, agents, creative collaborators, bodyguards and flunkies – who surrounded Brand during his meteoric ascent from digital TV presenter to Hollywood star, have been unwilling to testify on Brand’s behalf. Now, this cohort must be asking themselves questions about their time with Brand. One of the names mentioned in court was Jack Bayles, who spent five years as Brand’s creative collaborator on projects, including radio, stand-up and TV shows. Bayles went on to be successful in the TV world, producing Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s Catastrophe and, until this week, was head of comedy for Various Artists Limited (Sam Bain & Jesse Armstrong of Succession’s production company). All mention of working with Brand has recently been scrubbed from Bayles’ biography on his company website, the timeline skipping the Brand years entirely.Jack Bayles spent five years as Brand’s creative collaborator (Photo: Joe Maher/Getty) In the trial, a Channel 4 worker, referred to as “woman 6”, testified that during a 2009 recording project, Brand became unhappy and refused to continue unless she gave him a massage. She stated in court that Bayles and another collaborator, producer Gareth Roy, told her Brand wouldn’t carry on working unless she complied. When Brand leaned into her lap, she said she looked to Bayles and Roy, “hoping someone was going to help me”, but she added: “They just, arms up, as if to say: ‘Come on.’ They were shrugging and gesticulating, to say: ‘Are you going to do it?’”. The woman said she thought: “Oh my god, I have got to do this”. Both men allegedly laughed during the incident. The woman said she reported what happened the following day to her line manager at Channel 4, and she believes it was passed on to the head of her department. In 2017, Bayles was employed by Channel 4 as a comedy commissioner, before moving on to Various Artists Limited (VAL). Since Brand’s guilty verdict, Bayles has been asked to “step back” from his role at VAL while it considers the events surrounding the trial. In a statement to The Times, Bayles said: “I am appalled and sickened by Brand’s actions and have co-operated fully and voluntarily with the investigation and endeavoured to assist as best I can. However, I do not remember the incident that took place 17 years ago in 2009. But I acknowledge that I clearly missed something at the time and did not see nor recognise that it caused distress. For that I am sincerely sorry. “At the time of the offence, I was in the early stages of my career, and it was a frantic, pressured and toxic working environment. Brand was chaotic, dismissive and manipulated the people around him. It was due to that, that I made the decision to stop working with him in 2010 and have not had any contact with him since. During my time working with Brand, no complaints were made to me about his behaviour, and I am unaware if any were raised to anyone else more senior to me. “I would never willingly or proactively wish to make anyone feel uncomfortable, unsafe or unsupported at work. If I was ever present when Brand acted inappropriately and I failed to spot it and step in, then I sincerely apologise.” Various Artists Ltd said: “We have asked Jack Bayles to step back from the company while we consider the verdict and events surrounding the trial. Our thoughts, though, are primarily with every one of Brand’s victims at this time.”Gareth Roy, one of Brand’s main collaborators, was also mentioned in the trial. He produced many of his TV and radio shows, and was co-hosting a football culture podcast with Brand until 2023, sticking by him as he pivoted to evangelical Christianity, and aligned himself with right-wing, MAGA commentators in the US. Roy now works in editorial at Unherd, the news and opinion website founded by hedge fund manager Paul Marshall (owner of The Spectator and co-owner of GB News) and former ConservativeHome editor Tim Montgomerie. Gareth Roy works at Unherd (Photo: LinkedIn) Brand writes in his 2007 memoir My Booky Wook (which has now disappeared from amazon.co.uk) that he never had “yes-men” surrounding him, he has “f*ck off men”, yet the evidence heard in court suggests otherwise. A media executive who was in Brand’s orbit at the time tells The i Paper that Brand was surrounded by an entourage who appeared unable to rein in Brand’s outrageous public behaviour. As Brand himself said during an interview with Lorraine Kelly: “If you’re in a position of some success, people will let you be a nutter as long as they’re making money out of it.” “At the time he was probably the most high-profile person in the country, they were definitely yes-men, ambitious young guys mainly, whose careers depended on him. They were relying on him for success; they were along for the ride. Nobody seemed to be able to stop him, or tell him he’d crossed a line, whether it was just the culture at the time, or Brand’s powers of persuasion. In a way, though, he was hiding in plain sight, the way he talked about his sexual exploits, but it was accepted, and treated as part of his thing.” The executive recalls some of Brand’s sexual exploits. “Members of Brand’s entourage felt unable to go home after stand-up gigs until Brand had found someone to have sex with.” They would, says the exec, have to wait around, while Brand found a woman, or women. “And that was just how things were.” One of the young men in Brand’s circle was Matt Morgan, a British comedy writer and radio presenter, with whom he hosted The Russell Brand show on Radio 2 between 2006 and 2008. “He was just an intern there when I met him [at MTV]”, Brand wrote in his memoir. “We’ve got in all sorts of sex adventures together over the years… Matt would never go and get drinks for me, ’cos he was too lazy, but I did make him score heroin for me a couple of times later on (he refused initially, but I bullied him into it).” Russell Brand and Matt Morgan in 2007 (Photo: BBC/Nancy Ericsson) In 2008, Brand was said to have laughed as his co-presenter on his BBC radio show, Morgan, said Brand “showed his willy to a lady”. In his statement, Morgan added he stopped working with Brand “several years ago” and “was never aware of any allegations of serious sexual misconduct against him”. He expressed his regret at the impact of the show and said the coverage in 2023 had been “very distressing to read and I reiterate my absolute condemnation of any form of mistreatment of women”. It was on The Russell Brand show in October 2008, that he and his guest Jonathan Ross left a series of voicemail messages for the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs, boasting of how Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter. Brand and the station’s controller, Lesley Douglas, resigned and Ross was suspended for three months. Yet some remain incredulous that Brand – “a predator, live on air on Radio 2” in the words of the former BBC executive Lorraine Heggessey – was able to keep his job for as long as he did. A review published in 2025 found complaints about Brand were not appropriately dealt with by the BBC and staff were scared to voice further concerns about him in the belief he was untouchable. As his career grew, so did the feeling from those around him that he was not someone who should be challenged. One of the men who shaped Brand’s career was his agent John Noel. The comedian refers to Noel (whose name was originally Linnen) as “a big, kind, lovely, vicious bastard” who successfully forced him to go to rehab for drug addiction, and later used “threats, bullying, love and blackmail” to make Brand go to a centre for sexual addiction centre in Philadelphia in 2005. Brand credits him with saving his life, and says Noel would regularly give him money to keep him afloat, during times when he had no work, and was too involved in his drug addiction to retain a job if he did get one. “A substantial portion of that limited budget was allocated to the crack-houses of Bethnal Green,” writes Brand in his memoir, “but… John kept on giving me these odd bits of money – £500 here and there – to go on these little quests, often with no end in sight other than keeping me out of trouble.” In 2023, Noel he told Channel 4 News that he was “very surprised” to hear about the sexual assault allegations and that he had parted company with Brand in 2014, although they still officially had businesses together. Brand was still listed as co-director of their Mayfair film production company until 2023, after which Noel remained on the board. Noel also said that he had never received any complaints about him apart from him turning up late. Noel’s son Nik Linnen, was also Brand’s manager, and best man at his 2010 wedding to Katy Perry. If Brand’s TV career was soaring in the noughties, so was his literary one. He had several memoirs, and a self-help book, and his literary agent Angharad Wood, was in charge of publishing his works from 2005 until 2023, when the allegations were first published in the press. In 2023, a woman alleged that Brand assaulted her when he was in his early 30s and she was 16 and still at school. The woman, who said she was 16 when she met Brand, told the Times she took her allegations to Wood, the co-founder of talent agency Tavistock Wood, owned by Curtis Brown, in 2020. The woman says that in response she received an “aggressive” and “insulting” message from Brand’s lawyer, who denied the claims and implied she was trying to get money or blackmail him. Tavistock Wood told the BBC: “Russell Brand categorically and vehemently denied the allegation made in 2020, but we now believe we were horribly misled by him. Tavistock Wood has terminated all professional ties to Brand.” Brand’s guilty verdict has been referred to as a potential “watershed moment” in questioning laddish culture in celebrity circles during the early 2000s, a senior detective has said. The police investigation into Brand remains ongoing, and he has been questioned over rape allegations made by two more women, it can now be reported. Detectives are said to be “pursuing all reasonable lines of inquiry wherever they take us”.