Jemima Goldsmith says Brand assaulted her and she called police in 2014
Jemima Goldsmith has said she suffered Russell Brand’s “violence, coercive control and abuse” during their year-long relationship and “had to call the police to have him removed from my house in 2014 during a violent incident”, choosing not to press charges to shield her teenage children from press attention. Writing on X hours after his sentencing, she said she was “in awe of the courageous women who came forward” and “glad and relieved that Russell Brand has finally faced justice”.
Ms Goldsmith, who was with Brand from around September 2013, said she had “neither seen nor spoken to Brand since that period in 2014” and that “whilst my pain in relation to this pales in comparison to what the women have testified in court have suffered, this was a difficult period in my life which has had a lasting impact”. She had undertaken to testify to his abusiveness if the newspaper that published the victims’ accounts was sued; Rosamund Urwin said she had spoken out “with immense bravery”. The statement also explained a harassment injunction she and Brand obtained against a masseuse, Szilvia Berki, after a booking in June 2014: Ms Goldsmith said she was present throughout and “did not see anything untoward”, that Brand “later physically assaulted me”, and that she agreed to his lawyer’s suggestion of an order only “to stop Ms Berki targeting me and my family”; police found no case to answer. Reports date the injunction to 2014 or to October 2015. Brand began a ten-and-a-half-year sentence at Wandsworth on Monday; the Met’s investigation “remains ongoing”. Watch whether Ms Goldsmith’s account becomes part of that file.