Netflix to release Brand film after 10-year sentence

Netflix will release Russell Brand: Open Secret on Nov. 13, Rolling Stone reported in a Nov. 12 news article, days after the comedian received a 10-year prison sentence in London.

The release follows a Nov. 5 verdict in which Brand was convicted on four counts and acquitted on three others, putting the film beside an unusually current criminal case.

According to a press release cited by Rolling Stone, the Olivia Isaacs-directed film “charts the story of Russell Brand’s meteoric rise and steep fall following allegations of sexual offenses.”

A teaser for the documentary calls Brand a “shapeshifter” and a “grifter,” and says the journalists involved did not initially expect their reporting to lead to criminal charges.

The film includes archive material and people close to the story, Rolling Stone reported. It also focuses on the investigation by The Times and The Sunday Times, including work by reporters Rosamund Urwin and Charlotte Wace.

Brand was found guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault after a London trial, according to Rolling Stone. He was found not guilty on two further rape counts and one count of attempted indecent assault.

The sentence included nine years for the rape conviction. The three assault counts carried terms of nine months, 18 months and eight months, to run concurrently with each other and consecutively to the rape sentence.

Rolling Stone reported that the case involved claims by six women covering the period from 1999 to 2009. Police began investigating Brand in 2023 after women made allegations in a Channel 4 documentary and a Sunday Times report; prosecutors filed five charges in April 2025 and two more in December.

Urwin later discussed a post-verdict confrontation with Brand’s attorney Ian Winter on a Times podcast. “I thought he’s talked about me a lot, I’ll go and introduce myself and that is a legitimate thing to do,” she said. “I was surprised to be confronted and spoken to in that way.”

Separately, Atlas360 reported on Nov. 12 that Netflix planned to keep a Russell Brand stand-up special on its platform while removing it from recommendation algorithms. That gives Open Secret a comparison point inside Netflix’s own Brand-related catalog decisions: one older special remains available with reduced promotion, while the new documentary gets a scheduled release.

The immediate check is whether Russell Brand: Open Secret appears on Netflix on Nov. 13 as scheduled. The Metropolitan Police are also assessing information received during and after the trial, a spokesperson told the BBC, according to Rolling Stone.

Brand will become eligible for parole only after serving two-thirds of his sentence, meaning at least seven years in prison before any supervised release.

Source: news article, Rolling Stone, Nov. 12, 2026; Atlas360 background, Nov. 12, 2026