The rich are, as the old saying goes, different from you and me. And not just because they have more money.

Take, for example, a surreal chapter in Russell Brand’s life story that involves his ex-girlfriend Jemima Goldsmith, along with a voluptuous Hungarian masseuse and an alleged heated dispute involving a white Alsatian by the name of Brian.

The saga, which unfolded in 2014 and 2015, returned to the news pages this week amid widespread soul-searching over Brand’s use of expensive lawyers to keep awkward incidents out of the public eye.

Given what we now know, aspects of how it played out look very questionable indeed.

At the centre of the whole thing is a ‘full-figured, curvy BBW [Big Beautiful Woman]’ therapist who undertook a two-hour car journey from her home in Wimbledon, south-west London, to Ms Goldsmith’s Cotswolds mansion, ostensibly to provide Brand with a birthday rubdown. There followed a short but heated argument over (among other things) money, plus a police investigation into claims of physical abuse and counter-claims of racial harassment.

A long campaign of litigation then ensued, resulting in a draconian (and now hugely controversial) gagging order being issued by the High Court, preventing the therapist, who claimed that she had been assaulted by Brand, from ever again discussing her alleged experience, even with detectives.

Russell Brand and Jemima Goldsmith, who dated between between 2013 and 2014, at a charity event for Palestinian refugees in London in 2014

The pair have always denied Hungarian masseuse Szilvia Berki’s allegations of a heated dispute involving a white Alsatian by the name of Brian

There things would perhaps have been forgotten, were it not for Brand’s fall from grace, culminating in his conviction last week for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others in the 2000s.

On Monday, when the comedian was jailed for ten years and six months, the whole thing became the subject of a 1,534-word social media post by Ms Goldsmith, the heiress daughter of Right-wing tycoon Sir James, seeking to correct ‘misleading reports and speculation’ about her role in the bizarre affair.

So, what really went on? How did a simple birthday gift go so badly wrong? And who, exactly, was to blame?

Our tale begins on Friday, June 6, 2014, when a masseuse named Szilvia Berki received an email from Ms Goldsmith asking if she would be prepared to travel to Oxfordshire the following night to see a male client.

Ms Berki was at the time advertising her services on a number of internet pages, including classified site Gumtree, the beauty directory Wahanda, and a somewhat amateur homepage on the internet in which she described herself as ‘a full-figured, curvy BBW lady in my late 20ies [sic]’. She agreed to Ms Goldsmith’s request and a fee of £500 was negotiated.

Ms Goldsmith, then 40, arranged to send a car and driver to south London to pick up Ms Berki the following day and take her home after the session had concluded.

Ms Goldsmith (pictured at the Baftas in 2023) says she is willing to vary the injunction to enable Berki to speak to the police, and maybe even the Press, about her experience

The idea, it seems, was for Brand, who’d turned 39 that week, to be given a massage as a birthday present.

On paper, other, more local, therapists would of course have charged considerably less to provide an ostensibly similar service. But none had space in their diaries. ‘She ended up Googling for an outcall local massage and Ms Berki came up, even though she was based in London,’ says an informed source.

Whatever led to Ms Berki being hired, there is no suggestion that either party involved in the transaction wanted Brand to receive anything other than a standard massage.

In a later interview, the Hungarian masseuse went so far as formally to deny being a sex worker, claiming: ‘People call up and they say, “I want to have a full service, I want to have a happy ending, I want to have this and that.” And this is usually when I hang up the phone on that client.’

Fast-forward to Saturday, June 7, and Ms Berki found herself crunching up the gravel outside Kiddington Hall, a nine-bedroom, 17th-century mansion built from Cotswold stone and surrounded by ornamental gardens.

She recalled that Ms Goldsmith had walked up the driveway to meet her: ‘She came to the car. She was wearing a summer dress, white, with some kind of colour on it. She asked me if I was German because of my accent. She was really very nice, very, very nice.’

Things would quickly sour, however, when Ms Berki was taken to meet Brand. He appears to have quickly decided that he didn’t like the cut of the eastern European’s jib, because he swiftly asked her to leave. Perhaps understandably, Ms Berki seems to have taken offence.

Both sides accept that an uncomfortable discussion ensued, although memories of what exactly happened next differ.

Ms Berki subsequently claimed things quickly became heated, resulting in her being pushed in the back by Brand, as she exited down a staircase. She further alleged that she was set upon by Brian, the Alsatian, in an ‘attack’ which involved her face being licked. ‘There is CCTV evidence showing that the dog attacked me,’ she said.

Ms Goldsmith and Brand have always denied these allegations, maintaining that there was no physical contact whatsoever, and that Brand simply asked her to leave. ‘I was present the whole time he [Brand] was with her, and I did not see anything untoward,’ said Ms Goldsmith this week, adding that the CCTV footage of proceedings later provided to police merely ‘showed my overly exuberant but totally unaggressive dog jumping up’.

Whatever the truth, it is generally agreed that the driver then took Ms Berki home, roughly half an hour after she had arrived. Ms Berki later said that Ms Goldsmith emailed to apologise politely for any misunderstanding.

Although the agreed £500 fee was paid via bank transfer the following Monday, Ms Berki remained so upset that she eventually called the Metropolitan Police to report an allegation of assault. The complaint was forwarded to the Thames Valley force, who opened an investigation into ‘an alleged assault near Woodstock on June 7’.

By then, she had already emailed several newspapers seeking to bring her allegations to wider public attention. She also sent an email to Unicef, for which Ms Goldsmith is a UK ‘ambassador’, making a string of allegations including claims of serious criminal misconduct related to the encounter.

Brand wasn’t about to take that lying down. He swiftly hired solicitors to write to Ms Berki seeking an apology, damages and costs for defamation.

He and Ms Goldsmith also instructed a law firm, Archerfield Partners, to seek to keep the story out of print. Several titles, including the Daily Mail, received a series of threatening letters.

The police inquiry concluded on July 25, with detectives deciding that no further action would be taken. Angered by this development, Ms Berki filed a professional standards complaint against the force, whom she accused of corruption (it was later dismissed), again contacted a string of newspapers about the events of June 7, and also published a change.org petition insulting Brand and Ms Goldsmith.

Eventually, in early August 2014, the Daily Telegraph dipped its toe into these troubled waters via a news story revealing that Ms Berki’s claims of ‘assault’ had sparked a police investigation. Yet more letters were sent from Brand and Ms Goldsmith’s lawyers.

One, dated August 2, insisted that there was ‘no public interest’ in covering Ms Berki’s ‘inaccurate and defamatory’ claims and accused the masseuse of having ’embarked on a course of conduct that is designed to harass my clients and during which she has made a series of untrue and defamatory allegations’.

On August 12, 2014, the celebrity couple took Ms Berki to court, obtaining an emergency injunction on grounds of harassment stated to concern ‘extremely private and sensitive matters’. She has not been allowed to speak publicly since. The following month the order was extended, and in October 2015 it was made permanent.

The judge in the final case made a summary judgment, meaning it never went to trial. It concluded that Ms Berki – who had represented herself in court – had not only harassed the pair but made claims that were ‘inconsistent’ and had made ‘extremely unsavoury threats’.

It was concluded that, if the case were to go to court, Ms Berki would have no reasonable prospect of successfully defending it.

She was ordered to pay £50,000 in legal costs and told that the couple could launch bankruptcy procedures if she did not stump up.

The terms of the October 2015 injunction seem particularly severe. For Ms Berki wasn’t just forbidden from communicating with Brand and Ms Goldsmith. She was specifically banned from talking about the events at their house to absolutely anyone, aside from a few of her named medical professionals, and solicitors involved in the case.

It further banned her from making ‘any allegation or insinuation’ that Brand or Ms Goldsmith ‘committed any criminal offence’ against her or ‘behaved towards her in a manner which may amount to a criminal offence’.

Fast-forward 11 years, and aspects of this look very troubling indeed. As the campaigner Dan Neidle pointed out last week in a blog entry that quickly went viral, the ruling has had the effect of preventing Ms Berki from being able to make further complaints to the police or to discuss the encounter privately with friends or family for the rest of her life.

‘None of this seems necessary or proportionate to a harassment injunction,’ he said. ‘The police are asking more of Mr Brand’s victims to come forward, but Ms Berki can’t: if she even answered the phone, she’d be prohibited from speaking to them.’

Media lawyer Mark Stephens called the order a ‘gross breach of freedom of expression’.

Ms Berki, this time assisted by a barrister, tried to appeal the ruling as recently as this year, but a court of appeal judge rejected her application.

On Monday, amid mounting controversy, including calls for MPs to torpedo the restriction by calling Ms Berki to give evidence before a select committee (where she would have parliamentary immunity), Ms Goldsmith took to social media to, as she put it, ‘describe some painful and personal things in relation to Russell Brand’. 

Her lengthy post threw fresh light on her roughly year-long fling with the comedian, which had first become public in late 2013 when they had been seen to ‘make out on a sofa in full view of the whole room’ at a GQ magazine party hosted by PR man Matthew Freud who, according to one witness, told them to ‘break it up and get a room’. The relationship had been famously unpopular with the socialite’s friends and family (Jemima’s half-brother Robin Birley, who owns the Mayfair members’ club 5 Hertford St, banned him from the premises).

However, it was previously assumed to have ended amicably in September 2014. Ms Goldsmith’s post revealed that to be untrue. Instead, it said she’d actually ‘had to call the police to have him removed from my house in 2014 during a violent incident. I chose not to press charges at the time and not to go public with this, as I was worried about the impact of the Press attention on my then-teenage children’.

She went on to reveal that she had assisted the journalists who eventually exposed Brand’s predatory behaviour, saying she ‘undertook to testify in court to his abusiveness if the newspaper that published the victims’ accounts were ever to be sued’.

That version of events has since been confirmed by Dorothy Byrne, who was responsible for the Dispatches documentary detailing Brand’s abuse, which was broadcast in 2023.

‘It was Jemima who alerted me to Russell Brand when I was head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 because she believed, based on her own experience, he was a danger to other women and must be exposed,’ Ms Byrne said on Tuesday. Ms Goldsmith’s post also shed valuable light on her dealings with Ms Berki, including a selection of unhinged messages that the masseuse allegedly sent to her in the aftermath of the incident.

Some hinted at death threats – ‘Happy birthday (Jemima). I hope you have more. In other words I hope you don’t die this year’ – while others contained vile anti-Semitic abuse against Ms Goldsmith, who is of Jewish heritage.

‘What is going on in Britain is a dictatory of J evils. English Jewish Evil dictatory,’ read one.

Another said: ‘Would like to see justice, and I do not think that I should do it myself but what can I do when every organisation is scared of Jevils!’

Friends say this provides valuable context to the whole saga. ‘Jemima was on the end of some horrific abuse, much of it racist and highly aggressive, and was understandably concerned about her safety. Her only motivation was to try and get that harassment to end,’ said one.

Be that as it may, some aspects of Monday’s post nonetheless seem a touch confusing.

At one point, for example, Ms Goldsmith stated ‘according to the police, at no time did Ms Berki ever state to them that she had been assaulted, threatened or falsely imprisoned’.

That conflicts with the judgment from her harassment case, which reads ‘according to the police disclosure notice, the Defendant reported to the police that the First Claimant had assaulted her during her visit’.

Elsewhere, Ms Goldsmith claimed that at the time they went to court to seek the injunction she was ‘no longer in contact with Brand’ and had merely ‘agreed to the suggestion by his lawyer of a harassment order’.

That might be said to conflict with a judgment issued the day after the September 2014 hearing which states that the duo ‘have at all material times been in a personal relationship together’.

Despite those wrinkles, the overall effect of Ms Goldsmith’s statement is to cast her involvement in the Russell Brand affair in a considerably more sympathetic light than it previously appeared.

As for the ‘full-figured, curvy BBW’ she once hired to massage her disgraced ex-boyfriend, Ms Goldsmith – who in September married Irish-Australian financier Cameron O’Reilly – says she is now willing to vary the injunction to enable Ms Berki to speak to the police, and maybe even the Press, about her experience.

‘In fact,’ adds Ms Goldsmith’s friend, ‘she’s been trying for almost a year to get the terms of the injunction altered. Unfortunately, Brand needs to agree, but so far there has been no response from his lawyers.’

We are, in other words, at an impasse. Only time will tell whether the masseuse who was paid £500 to travel from London to the Cotswolds to give the disgraced comic a birthday rubdown will ever be allowed to reveal any remaining secrets.