Mia Latter Waives Anonymity to Campaign for Staggered Age of Consent Law
Mia Latter, who accused Russell Brand of rape when she was a 16-year-old schoolgirl, waived her right to anonymity to campaign for a staggered age of consent law.
Government Considers Law Change
The UK government said it will consider calls to change the age of consent following the campaigner’s public interview, The Guardian reported.
Latter, now 37, alleged she was orally raped by the comedian when she was a teenager and he was 30 years old. She was referred to as Alice in previous reporting by the Sunday Times, the Times, and Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary.
She was 16 when she first met Brand in Leicester Square, central London, while on her way home from a shopping trip. Brand was working at MTV at the time.
“That really doesn’t seem like a gigantic leap to take,” Latter said of introducing a staggered age of consent that would address relationships between adults and teenagers aged 16 and 17.
Brand denied all allegations made against him by Latter when they were first reported in 2023 by the Times. Latter spoke to the police after the documentary, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to include her case in Brand’s trial at Southwark Crown Court.
Brand Serves Prison Term for Rape and Sexual Assaults
He is currently behind bars, serving a sentence of 10 and a half years encompassing three sexual assaults and one count of rape.
For the rape conviction, Justice Joel Bennathan handed down a nine-year sentence, while the additional time for the sexual assaults brought the overall imprisonment period to 10 years and six months. The Metropolitan Police said Brand will remain on the sex offenders’ register for life.
“Whatever women wear, wherever they go, indeed whatever they drink, they retain the right to say no,” Bennathan said during the sentencing remarks, Yahoo reported.
“It was tiresome, it was lonely, it's hard to build rapport,” Brand said when looking back on his own run-ins with the law and joking about how lonely it could get in a police cell. “Sometimes they would leave me in police cells for a while, I didn’t like that very much,” he said.
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