Russell Brand’s wife Laura Gallacher is standing by her husband as he faces years in prison, the disgraced comedian’s sentencing hearing has been told.

Ms Gallacher, 38, was in the public gallery for the convicted sex attacker’s sentencing at Southwark Crown Court on Monday, where he was jailed for 10-and-a-half years for the offences.

Brand was found guilty last week of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault following a high-profile trial. He was cleared of two counts of rape and one count of attempted indecent assault.

During the hearing, the court heard Ms Gallacher was devastated by the guilty verdicts but that she is “standing by him”, Brand’s barrister Ian Winter KC told the court.

“Words are completely inadequate… to convey the total devastation she’s experiencing,” he said.

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“They are wrestling with how to explain to a child who’s just turned 10 what has just happened here and the consequences of this conduct to totally innocent people who have been caught up in it.”

The former comedian, aged 51, spent the weekend in a cell after he was found guilty at Southwark Crown Court of raping a woman in 2009, as well as sexually assaulting female TV and radio workers between 2004 and 2009.

A jury of eight men and four women took around nine hours to deliver their verdicts for each of the seven allegations against him.

Brand met Gallacher, the daughter of former golfer Bernard Gallacher and sister of TV presenter Kirsty Gallacher, in 2006 at the Edinburgh festival when she was a 19-year-old art student and he was 31.

He took her number and they started a relationship soon afterwards.

The pair remained friends while he was married to singer Katy Perry from 2010 to 2012 and got back together in 2015.

She married Brand in 2017 and they have three children.

In October when the trial had started, Brand and his wife continued to publish weekly episodes of their religious podcast, Sunday Service with the Brands.

One hour-long episode showed the couple sitting in their pyjamas with their cat in the window seat of their riverside UK base near Henley-on-Thames.

Wearing a leopard print dressing gown, Brand addressed the ongoing case.

He said: “We are of course in the middle of a very, very unusual time in our marriage and for legal reasons which you be aware of if you follow what I would call old media, traditional media, at some points I would call it corrupt media, hypocritical media, deceptive - empire media, that’s the term,” he said.