It was a secret code that would only be solved some 17 years after the crime.

Hidden among thousands of phone contacts, Russell Brand saved the number of his youngest rape victim under T – for 'Tart'.

In a sickening twist, he added two stars to her name in an apparent rating of the 21-year-old fan whom he brutally attacked, sending her into a spiral of depression and alcoholism that threatened to wreck her life.

It was just one of the repellent details jurors heard during Brand's trial at Southwark Crown Court.

The man who proudly referred to his world as an 'amusement park made out of orgasms' treated his victims as mere playthings. 

In fact, he told friends that his goal was to 'bed 5,000 women in his lifetime', insisting: 'All you have to do is tell them what they need to hear'.

But in truth, his tactics were far more sinister. Brand ordered security staff to line up women for his roving eye at gigs where the comedian issued an open invitation to the audience: 'If you see me in the foyer and you think, I really fancy him and I'd like to have sex with him, but I can't because it's Russell Brand, you probably can have sex with me – my age range goes from 16 to death.'

For one fan who accepted that invitation in 2009, the consequences were lifelong.

The starstruck 21-year-old was selected along with a teenager for a threesome after Brand pointed at her in a line of fans in the Hammersmith Apollo foyer, saying: 'You.'

Giddy with excitement, she went for drinks with the comic before he invited her backstage where she performed oral sex, before the 33-year-old had sex with the 19-year-old. 

Afterwards, she said: 'I came out feeling f****** awful. The scenario was not something I had been in before, it was kind of disgusting.'

The woman confessed to her boyfriend afterwards and they split up.

Brand then began texting 'T', promising: 'I will hold you and help you.'

But his pledge to help her mend a broken heart melted away when she went to his £2.3million Hampstead mansion.

There, she was raped by Brand, who pushed her face-down into the pillow of his bed beneath a framed crucifix. The bleeding victim was then ordered to 'clean up the mess you have made' as Brand watched TV.

'I felt like I could not speak and breathe. The amount of pain. I was not aware that he was going to do that, there was not any conversation,' she recalled. 

'I asked him to stop quietly then I said it a few times more loudly. 'He said "I want you to feel my c***".'

She told police she was treated 'like an animal' adding: 'In the years that followed, I tortured myself because it was one of the most painful experiences I have ever gone through.' The victim was ushered out of his house by staff before being handed tissues by a driver who remained silent as she sobbed on the journey home.

Feeling 'small and powerless', the woman stopped eating, sleeping and later developed an addiction to alcohol. 

As for Brand, when asked on the stand about stains on his sheets after the rape, Brand shrugged: 'I have a vague recollection but nothing I considered remarkable at the time.'

Five years earlier, Brand groped a woman within seconds of meeting her in a West End bar.

Then, in 2005, he groped a stranger in a 'frenzied' and 'violent' attack at a radio station.

He also pinned a journalist against a wall and kissed her 'sloppily' while fondling her breasts in a cramped radio booth with three other men and a woman. Chillingly, Brand's entourage merely watched.

It was a common and disturbing theme throughout the trial.

Whether the attack took place in a TV studio, radio station or bar, no one was prepared to stop him. As victims gave evidence, a pattern emerged of a sexual deviant prepared to pursue his own sexual gratification at any cost.

Pouncing on women he had often just met, Brand was not prepared to take no for an answer.