Brand appeared to still be engaged with the prosecutor’s opening as she continued to outline the allegations made by the first alleged victim.

She told the court: “During that time, the defendant eventually admitted that it was not, as was suspected, an audition that had caused him to depart Bournemouth so swiftly.

“He told Mr Pinheiro that the night before they made their hasty departure, he had had sex with a woman in Bournemouth and that things ‘might have got a little out of hand’.”

The prosecutor said Brand burst into a flat the morning after the alleged rape in Bournemouth and told the group he was with to “pack up their stuff” and that they “had to leave town immediately”.

Ms Karmy-Jones said: “Once in the car, the defendant behaved oddly, shrinking down in the back seat to hide his head beneath the window.

“When pressed about where he had been the night before, and why they had to leave so abruptly, he said he had forgotten he had an audition.”

Ms Karmy-Jones said Mark Pinheiro recalls that Brand was “desperate” to have sex before they left the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth.

The prosecutor said: “As you will hear, the defendant did achieve his objective.

“He found a victim, engaged with her, told her ‘exactly what she needed to hear’, and then manipulated the situation so as to have sex with her.”

The celebrity bragged to friends that he was a ladies' man who wanted to bed 5,000 women in his lifetime on the way to a Labour Party conference where he is accused of raping a woman, the court heard.

He allegedly told them “all you have to do is tell them what they need to hear”, Ms Karmy-Jones said.

She told the jury that he raped a “naive and inexperienced” woman in a hotel room at the event in Bournemouth in 1999.

Friends said the morning after the alleged attack he told them they needed to leave in a hurry and disclosed at a later date that he had sex with a woman and things “might have got a little out of hand”, but later changed his story, the court heard.

Ms Karmy-Jones first took the jurors through the first allegation against Brand, in which he is alleged to have raped a woman in a hotel room during a Labour Party conference in Bournemouth in 1999.

She told the court about a witness named Mark Pinheiro whom she said “remembers that in the car on the way to Bournemouth Mr Brand was ‘bragging’ that he was ‘a ladies’ man’, a womaniser and an expert pick-up artist.”

The prosecutor went on: “The reason the trial is taking place in 2026 is because the women in this case, each for their own different reasons, did not take matters to the police at the time.

“They chose to live with what had happened to them – until something happened in 2023, which made them all individually, quite separately and for different reasons feel that they had to come forward, that they must.

“That thing that happened was that a TV programme was broadcast and some press that occurred after it was broadcast, in which anonymous allegations about the defendant were made.

“Those are allegations that he has denied and this trial is not about those allegations.”

Ms Karmy-Jones KC said the TV programme “played its part” in causing the complainants in this case to come forward.

She went on: “In due course, you will hear from them and they will tell you their reasons for coming forward when they did, reasons that are individual and different to each complainant and reasons that you will of course consider carefully.

“It’s important because there is no typical response to rape or sexual assault, there is no typical method of reporting and there is no typical time frame to this kind of reaction, the reaction to this kind of offending.

“In the same way that there is no typical victim. This case is a typical example of that.”

Ms Karmy-Jones told the court Brand told one alleged victim to not be a “spoil sport” as he allegedly orally raped her.

She told the court: “She questioned what he was doing and told him that she ‘didn’t want to do this,’ he said to her, ‘Oh come on, come on, don’t be a spoil sport’.”

Brand continued to listen intently to the prosecutor’s opening as she said his “insatiable desire to get what he wanted with whomever he wanted it with” was “uppermost in his mind”.

Ms Karmy-Jones KC said: “He cared not who the woman was, what state she was left in or how he had left her feeling.

“Uppermost in his mind was his insatiable desire to get what he wanted with whomever he wanted it with.”

The prosecutor said Brand would “act as if nothing wrong had happened” after the alleged incidents.

She told the court: “After the event, he would appear indifferent, normal and untroubled by what had just occurred, sometimes leaving promptly after the incident, sometimes making an excuse to get away or sometimes simply continuing as though nothing wrong had happened.”

Brand looked at the prosecutor with a tilted head as she continued her opening of the case.

Ms Karmy-Jones said he would “tell women what they wanted to hear”.

She told jurors: “Sometimes he might even have made sexual advances within minutes of meeting them, but every time he had identified his target, identified someone young and impressionable, he was intent on trying to fulfil his sexual desire.”