With all the sanctimony a born-again Christian rapist can muster, Russell Brand paused on his way into court last week to address reporters. Britain was, he told them piously, “blessed” to have a legal system capable of accommodating truth and justice. Well, amen to that: the former comedian learned today that he will now serve a substantial jail sentence, after being convicted of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, in what looks like a genuinely landmark victory for the understanding of consent.

Back in the days when comedy was the new rock’n’roll, and he would casually cherrypick girls from the crowd at his gigs, Brand could surely have had all the willing sex he wanted. Yet he seemingly got his kicks from the unwilling, who were forced over boundaries they did not want to cross. “You’re dirty and I wanna push you further,” he texted one victim, months after raping her anally and callously saving her number in his phone under T for “Tart”. The woman – who was in her early 20s when she first gave him oral sex backstage after a gig, and had gone a few days later to his house for what began as consensual sex but soon became something very different – responded angrily via text that he’d treated her “like an animal”.

For too long, cases involving young women alleging rape after going initially willingly to the bedrooms of rich or famous men have ended in sour, uneasy acquittals. Well, not any more. This verdict upholds the vital principle that consent to one thing is not consent to absolutely everything; that women still absolutely have the right to say no,........

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