Russell Brand to moderate panel at MAHA summit

Comedian Russell Brand on Tuesday will moderate one of the panels scheduled for the second Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) summit in Washington, D.C.

Brand, who has been part of and supported the MAHA movement launched by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is set to moderate a discussion about reforms to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The comedian is one of the few celebrities to speak at the summit. Former boxing heavyweight champion Mike Tyson will be part of a panel discussion on the “MAHA athlete.” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Cheryl Hines, Kennedy’s wife, will give an “exciting announcement” before Kennedy holds a “fireside chat” with Vice President Vance to close out the event.

Brand’s attendance comes before he is expected to go to trial in London next month. He has pleaded not guilty to three counts of rape, three charges of sexual assault and one allegation of indecent assault — all in connection with allegations made by six women about incidents that took place between 1999 and 2009, The Hollywood Reporter wrote in March.

Brand was granted conditional bail during a court appearance in May 2025.

The trial was initially set to start in June before Justice Joel Bennathan announced that it was delayed, Sky News reported. The outlet added that the trial is expected to last two months.

London’s Metropolitan Police began investigating Brand in September 2023 after several women came forward following the release of an installment of “Dispatches” on Channel 4, where a woman told filmmakers that she was in a relationship with Brand when she was 16 and he was 31. She alleged that the now 51-year-old comedian was “emotionally abusive and controlling.”

Police said Brand allegedly raped one woman in the Bournemouth area in 1999, indecently assaulted a woman in 2001 in London’s Westminster area, orally raped and sexually assaulted a woman in 2004, and sexually assaulted a woman between 2004 and 2005.

Another woman accused Brand of raping her in his Los Angeles home in 2012, according to an investigative report in The Sunday Times.

Brand denied the charges in April 2025. He said in a video on social media that he was “a fool before I lived in the light of the lord.”

“I was a drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile,” he added. “But what I never was, was a rapist. I’ve never engaged in nonconsensual activity. I pray that you can see that by looking in my eyes.”

A year later in April 2026, Brand admitted in an interview with Megyn Kelly on her YouTube show that he had “exploitative” consensual sex with a 16-year-old girl when he was 30. He noted that the United Kingdom’s age of consent is 16, whereas it is 18 in the U.S., and said he was “a very different person” and “immature” at the time.

“It is exploitative,” he said. “Consensual sex with a lot of people, when there is a strong power differential, as there is when you are a famous man who has the ability to attract women that I had at that time, I think involves exploitation.”