Russell Brand took the stand in a London court on Wednesday, giving evidence for the first time in a trial in which the popular YouTuber faces seven charges, including rape and sexual assault.
Mr. Brand’s appearance, at Southwark Crown Court, comes in the third week of a trial in which prosecutors have described the onetime comedian and actor as a “ruthless” sexual predator who either raped or assaulted six women, in episodes that prosecutors say occurred in Britain between 1999 and 2009, when he was 24 to 34 years old.
Mr. Brand, now 51, has pleaded not guilty to the seven charges and on Wednesday told the court that he had never had nonconsensual sex.
“Consent is fundamental, essential, necessary,” Mr. Brand said, adding that for him it was “in many ways more important than sex itself.”
For most of the trial’s first two weeks, the jury heard testimony from the six women who say that Mr. Brand either assaulted or raped them. The women’s original video interviews with the police were played to the court, and lawyers from the two sides questioned each woman under oath in the courtroom.
In Britain, anyone who makes sexual assault accusations is granted lifelong anonymity outside the courtroom, and news outlets are not allowed to report any information that might identify them.
On Wednesday, Ian Winter, Mr. Brand’s lawyer, asked Mr. Brand about each of the accusations.
One woman had told the court that Mr. Brand raped her in 1999 after she invited him to her hotel room during a British political party conference. The woman said she had initially thought Mr. Brand was gay. “I felt sexually safe with him,” she said.
Mr. Brand testified that he went to her hotel when he was 24 and had “hoped and thought there was a reasonable possibility of sex.” They did have sex, Mr. Brand said, adding that he would have asked questions throughout such as “Do you like this?”
Another woman said in her police interview, which was played to the jury earlier in the trial, that she and Mr. Brand had met at a party in a bar in 2004. After a minute of regular conversation, she said, he suddenly groped her breasts and then “dragged” her into a bathroom stall, locked its door, stood on the toilet seat and forced her to give him oral sex.
Mr. Brand testified that he had recently visited that bathroom to jog his memory of the event. He said that he had invited the woman “into the lavatory to fool around” and had never grabbed any woman’s breasts without consent, because that was a bad idea “if your intention is to charm and seduce.”
He said that although it “was possible” that he took his penis out of his pants during that encounter, the pair did not have oral sex.
A third woman, a comedy fan, told the court that she had group sex with Mr. Brand after a show and then met him again, expecting to have consensual vaginal sex. But she said Mr. Brand had anally raped her despite her pleas for him to cease. “I said, ‘Can you stop?” she recalled in a police interview played to the court: “I said it repeatedly.”
Afterward, the woman said, Mr. Brand told her to “clear up the mess” she had made on his bed and soon left for a gig.
The woman told several friends, colleagues and family members about the episode in the days and weeks afterward, and some of them were called as witnesses or gave statements in the trial. One friend relayed to the court that the woman said Mr. Brand had left her bleeding and in severe pain, adding, “She couldn’t sit down.” A former colleague told the court that she had advised the woman to report the episode to the police, but the woman declined to, saying, “No one will believe me.”
Mr. Brand said that he remembered first meeting the woman, and that at another point they had consensual anal sex. Mr. Brand said that the woman had told him it was her first time, and that she never told him to stop during the encounter.
In a procedural note on Tuesday, the judge said he had decided there was insufficient evidence for the jury to consider one of the charges, of indecent assault. The judge said the jury would instead consider a charge of attempted indecent assault for the same episode in which Mr. Brand is accused of trying to drag a woman into a restroom for sexual contact.
Throughout the trial, Mr. Brand has continued posting videos to his YouTube channel. In one, on Oct. 18, he discussed how his Christian faith was helping him. “I believe in you, God,” Mr. Brand said: “I believe in your truth and justice.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Brand said the accusations against him had taken a “devastating” toll on his life, and he agreed when his lawyer said that former friends who could have spoken in Mr. Brand’s defense would now “not touch him with a barge pole.”
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