When Russell Brand was scheduled to speak at New College of Florida’s Socratic Stage in April 2025, the topic of his conversation was titled “Thinking Without Permission: A Conversation with Russell Brand on Free Speech, Censorship, and Cultural Power.” On Nov. 5, 2026, in a high-profile criminal case, a U.K. court convicted Brand of rape and sexual assault. This week, a judge sentenced him to more than 10 years’ imprisonment.

Until last week, Brand, a British comedian-actor-turned-conservative-political-commentator, was still expected to speak at New College as part of its Socratic Stage Dialogue Series—one of the new administration’s event programs to “advance free speech, civil discourse and fearless dialogue,” according to the college’s website. But after Brand’s conviction, the college released a statement that the talk was now permanently canceled.

“Obviously, New College has moved on,” New College's deputy chief of staff and interim VP of communications and marketing Virginia Zimmermann told us in an email this week.

But why was Brand, with numerous allegations of sexual assault that had been swirling around him for years, selected in the first place?

Brand’s selection was first announced by the college in February 2025. He was part of an assorted list of speakers from varied ideological backgrounds. The promotional poster for the 2025 spring lineup included border czar Tom Homan and the highly regarded queer and feminist scholar Judith Butler. Directly facing Brand on the poster was legendary legal scholar Alan Dershowtiz.

The initial announcement was met with shock and disappointment in the community. Brand had already been the subject of a September 2023 BBC documentary called Russell Brand: In Plain Sight, which spent 78 minutes detailing Brand's many sexual assault allegations and deviant behavior. A letter to the editor in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune last year said, “Inviting Brand to [New College of Florida] is an affront to women.” 

On April 4, 2025, when London police charged Brand with rape and sexual assault, New College announced—five days after the charges—that after talking to Brand’s team, it would be rescheduling the event at a later date to accommodate an expected large audience. According to New College’s news release, rescheduling the event “follow[ed] changes in event logistics, including the unavailability of the previously planned venue, the Sarasota Opera House.” 

Initially, New College doubled down on moving forward with the Brand talk, saying the college wanted to address cancel culture. But in a statement four days after the charges, New College director of public policy events Alexandra Nicole Islas said, "While the conversation remains important, and possibly never more relevant, it is clear the current media climate is a distraction from the deeper purpose of the event—to explore free speech and civil discourse through open dialogue." The statement went on to say that the school looks "forward to welcoming Brand to the campus at a future date under conditions that allow for thoughtful and topical engagement from both the public and our academic community." There was no mention of the allegations.

When Gov. Ron DeSantis set out to remake New College of Florida in January 2023, he appointed six conservative trustees to transform the small, historically unconventional institution into a college aligned with his conservative political agenda, targeting diversity initiatives, the teaching of race and gender, and faculty members whose views often conflicted with the new leadership's vision. David Rancourt, the former dean of students at New College and now VP of advancement and the NCF Freedom Institute, wrote an essay in First Things—a journal dedicated to "advanc[ing] a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society"—titled “Restoring Virtue in Higher Education,” in which he emphasized that students needed to do more than read books to become virtuous, and that “higher education no longer incentivizes students to practice virtue” because they have “replaced the honor system with political correctness and ‘safe spaces’ where ideas are regulated. And the appearance of virtue, as seen from the phenomenon of virtue-signaling, is prized above true virtue.”

Does courting a figure like Brand fit the mission of pursuing virtue? Zimmermann would only write in the email to us that “the Socratic Stage hosts speakers that are controversial and from all walks of life. We maintain New College as the most pro-free-speech campus in the country.”

When Brand is released from prison, or if the conviction is overturned, we asked if the school would consider having him as a speaker again. The school did not answer any more questions. Our dialogue with New College ended there.