Russell Brand’s barrister has reported himself to his professional regulator after being accused of a tirade at a journalist shortly after the comedian had been found guilty of rape.
Ian Winter KC confronted the Sunday Times journalist Rosamund Urwin, whose investigation led to Brand’s victims coming forward, telling her: “I hope you are pleased with yourself.”
Urwin responded: “I’m pleased justice has been done”, to which Winter replied: “Well, it wasn’t. You fucked it.”
“Congratulations,” he added, in an incident that happened on Thursday afternoon outside the courtroom door at Southwark crown court, with a group of journalists watching.
In a statement issued on Friday lunchtime, Winter said he had referred himself to the Bar Standards Board, his professional regulator.
He said: “Having seen the ways matters have been characterised in today’s press, I consider my professional duty requires me to self-report those allegations to the Bar Standards Board so the matter can be subject to proper scrutiny.
The incident at court happened moments after Brand had been found guilty by a jury of rape and three counts of sexual assault, at the conclusion of a four-week trial. He was cleared of two further charges of rape and one allegation of attempted indecent assault.
Brand had denied all the charges against him, and argued through his lawyer that he had been wrongly accused and was the victim of a media conspiracy.
In an interview on Times Radio after the exchange, Ben Taylor, the editor of the Sunday Times , defended Urwin, his newspaper’s chief news correspondent. He said: “I found what Mr Winter did quite extraordinary. I have never seen or heard of a barrister behaving in this way. There’s a really serious point here, which is that it was not Ros who found Russell Brand guilty at Southwark crown court.
“It was a jury of eight men and four women who have sat through this case. They’ve listened to the evidence, they’ve listened to the defence, and they have gone away and they’ve come back with some very considered verdicts.
“By impugning Ros’s integrity, what Mr Winter is doing, and he should really be called to account for this, he’s impugning the integrity of the entire case.
“He’s impugning the integrity of a jury, a system that we support massively at the Sunday Times, and we have actually campaigned to protect, who have sat there solemnly and done their duty, and the judge who oversaw the case and everybody else involved. I think what he did was reprehensible.”
During the trial, Winter had argued that reporting of allegations against Brand by Urwin and others had “poisoned the well”, and rendered it impossible for him to have a fair trial.
The trial judge, Mr Justice Bennathan, dismissed an attempt by Brand to block his trial from taking place because of negative media coverage.
In a pre-trial argument, Brand, through Winter, had also accused the journalists who first exposed Brand as a sexual predator of being “criminals”, suggesting their reporting in 2023 had made a fair trial impossible and venturing that they may have committed the crime of perverting the course of justice.
But the judge rejected that attempt to stop the trial, ruling that Brand could simply be tried by people who had not seen the previous media reporting.
Brand, 51, was convicted of raping a 21-year-old fan in 2009 as well as sexually assaulting three women in separate incidents between 2004 and 2009.
He is in custody and due to be sentenced on Monday.
