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The war over California’s elections intensified late this week after three Los Angeles County officials were slapped with criminal grand jury subpoenas related to their handling of thousands of state ballots, which the Justice Department has demanded be set aside amid claims they could be cast by noncitizens.

Labor unions and voting rights groups hit back, sending a fresh wave of action into the tempest of federal lawsuits already swirling around the ballot clawback order. The storm surged back through the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday morning and appeared on a path to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would decide whether to hear the case.

Voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare, law enforcement experts and elections officials say. Yet the Trump administration has doggedly pursued claims to the contrary. Under the subpoenas, L.A. County officials are being ordered to hand over troves of internal documents — emails, text messages and other material — related to their handling of the administration’s demand to sequester 20,000 contested ballots.

The subpoenas also order them to produce any evidence they may have collected “which tends to indicate an alien has voted.”

Prosecutors charge that widespread noncitizen voting disenfranchises Americans by diluting their lawful votes.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters Dean Logan and hundreds of workers who report to him are heading into Tuesday’s election under the cloud of criminal investigation, with department bureaucrats ordered to appear in federal court in Santa Ana on Wednesday morning.

“Threats and intimidation have no place in elections,” Logan said.

Who has been subpoenaed and what do the orders seek?

So far, at least three workers from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s Office have been summoned as part of the probe, though the Associated Press reported that prosecutors in all four of California’s federal districts were sending out similar orders.

The Justice Department already subpoenaed thousands of voter records from state and local officials related to claims that noncitizens were voting en masse in California. Now, prosecutors are seeking virtually any written communication from within local election offices about how they responded to those demands to identify and remove such voters, including lists of employees who were told of the directive.

Courts have questioned the reliability of the Justice Department‘s list of potential noncitize voters.

Additionally, the workers must hand over any communications — including self-deleting texts from apps such as Signal — related to the office’s efforts to block noncitizen voting.

The subpoena also demands any evidence the city might have collected indicating even a single noncitizen has voted in an election, as well as details about anyone who might have “aided and/or abetted” them.

“When California has actual knowledge of noncitizens in their voter rolls, if they help them vote, they are now aiding and abetting a criminal offense,” California Central District First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli told Fox News this month.

He doubled down with a post on social media this week, saying his office “will hold accountable anyone who unlawfully participates in our elections and those who aid them.”

Is the Los Angeles County registrar of voters under criminal investigation?

Maybe.

Logan has not been subpoenaed, but the subject of a criminal investigation typically is not subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury because the Constitution’s 5th Amendment protects people from having to testify against themselves.

The Justice Department declined to comment on whether or not Logan might be prosecuted.

“While DOJ maintains that a civil remedy is still available, all agree that noncitizen voting is properly addressed through criminal law,” a spokesperson said.

Instead, the threat of prosecution hangs over virtually any worker who processes ballots the Justice Department might seek to contest.

“They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” President Trump posted on social media as the fight ramped up this month.

A lawsuit filed Thursday on behalf of workers by the Service Employees International Union and its partners called the subpoenas part of “a coordinated campaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce state and local officials and employees who are engaged in the hard and important work of administering the ongoing midterm 2026 election.”

The union’s suit also alleged that thousands of California voters could be disenfranchised if courts don’t block the federal government’s efforts “to coerce them into halting the processing and counting of ballots.”

“Threatening these election workers with criminal prosecution for faithfully executing their responsibilities in accordance with federal and state law is plainly illegal and, unless enjoined, risks disenfranchising tens of thousands of lawfully registered voters,” the suit said.

Elected officials also rushed to condemn the move.

“The Trump Administration’s escalating attacks on our hardworking elections officials in California are unacceptable,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta wrote on social media.

Can the subpoenas be blocked?

That depends.

An expected order from the Supreme Court could neuter much of the Justice Department’s demand, as the bulk of what officials have been asked to hand over relates to the 20,000 contested ballots whose fate will be decided in Washington, D.C.

The union suit also asks the court to shield election officials from prosecution for counting ballots, which effectively could block the underlying criminal investigation.

Will my vote be counted?

State and local officials have vowed to run the election as usual. The courts have so far supported their effort, with a panel of 9th Circuit judges writing Friday that they “decline the United States’ invitation to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution’s plain text.”

The judges — two Trump appointees and one nominated to the bench by President Biden — ruled 2-1 in favor of California.

“If the United States believes different procedures are necessary for vote-by-mail ballots, we believe it should take that suggestion to Congress, not the courts,” the panel held.

That decision, handed down just before noon Friday, all but ensures the issue will reach the Supreme Court and be decided there before polls close Tuesday.

But with hundreds of thousands of ballots already returned and hundreds of thousands more moving through the mail over the weekend, the legal fight still could cause delays. And a ruling for the Justice Department from the Supreme Court could snarl the process further.

“Major concerns remain that granting the United States’ requested relief might result in immense hardship to Defendants and harm the public interest by risking the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and putting the entire tabulation process in jeopardy,” the 9th Circuit panel wrote.

Dolores Huerta, the fiery and resolute activist who helped launch and guide the nation’s first enduring labor union for poor farmworkers and later became an inspiration to women and liberal true believers, has died. She was 96.

Erik Olvera, a spokesman for Huerta’s family, told The Times on Wednesday that Huerta died in Bakersfield, surrounded by members of her “huge family.” The cause, he said, was cancer.

“It’s a tough time,” Olvera said. “She was incredibly beloved, and not only was she beloved, but she was an icon to so many people around the country and around the world, really. If anything, her family is clinging to memories and clinging to each other as they mourn.”

Huerta never gave up on her dream of a more equitable distribution of wealth in America, campaigning for working people for years beyond standard retirement age.

The emotional compass of the United Farm Workers of America for decades, the petitemother of 13 attained singular stature as a rule-breaking proto-feminist, godmother of the Chicano power movement and doyenne of American labor.

Huerta’s fervent crusading for the dispossessed made her the potent alter ego to her union co-founder, the soft-spoken and methodical César Chávez, though the full complexity and pathology of their relationship only became apparent late in her life.

The duo’s history took an unexpected and dark turn in March 2026, when two women came forward to say they had been sexually assaulted by Chávez when they were teenage girls, with Huerta telling the New York Times that the venerated labor leader also had twice forced sex on her, resulting in a pair of pregnancies.

Nearly 96 at the time, Huerta said she had remained silent for six decades to protect the farmworker movement. But she added: “I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Some wished Huerta had spoken out earlier, at least within the insular union, in order to prevent others from being victimized. But her many champions insisted the late-life revelation reflected badly only on Chávez, who for decades before his fall from grace had been an American civil rights icon and a virtual secular saint to the political left.

Some historians insist that Huerta be given full recognition for teaming with Chávez during much of the early foundational work that produced the UFW, from its founding in 1962 in the San Joaquin Valley farm town of Delano through her leave from full-time work with the union in the late 1980s.

It was Huerta who hurried from pickup truck to back stoop to pool hall, to recruit many of the union’s first members; Huerta who stormed up and down the picket lines to keep striking workers out of the fields; Huerta who helped negotiate one of the first contracts ever for farmworkers in North America; and Huerta who struggled to keep the union relevant, as its membership and clout faded. She turned the phrase “Sí, se puede!” into a chant that animated rallies and marches well into a new century.

Complications and byzantine controversies helped stymie the union in its adolescence, with Huerta usually supporting Chávez, even as he became distracted from the union’s central work and demanded absolute power. Their obsession with loyalty and often-imagined conspiracies ended with purges of some of the UFW’s most dynamic leaders and organizing stagnation, even as field hands continued to labor under abysmal conditions.

Huerta later devoted much of her time to women’s rights, Democratic Party politics and community organizing.

In 1999, the 69-year-old great-grandmother helped obtain extra government benefits for workers who lost their jobs in a citrus freeze and stared across the contract bargaining table at lawyers for the giant Gallo wine company. Even late in life she still toured the nation as a public speaker and used her foundation to register voters and campaign for progressive causes. Liberal groups clamored to have Huerta at the front of their marches. Often sporting a jaunt red beret, she locked arms with activists one-quarter her age.

Her Dolores C. Huerta Foundation supported endeavors as diverse as a performing arts camp for children, higher education mentoring for high school students and food distribution to victims of floods that inundated the Central Valley in 2023. The foundation became something of a family business — headed by her daughter, Camila Chávez, and supported by legal advice from her son, Emilio Huerta, while four other relatives served on the board.

In another step to cement Huerta’s legacy, one of her nonprofits broke ground in 2025 for the Dolores Huerta Peace & Justice Cultural Center in Bakersfield, the San Joaquin Valley city she called home. The $35-million project, paid for largely by the state of California, will include an academy to teach future generations how to become community organizers. “They are the ones who are going to guide us forward,” the 95-year-old told a crowd, which stood under a scorching sun for the groundbreaking.

Through it all, Huerta insisted her primary loyalty remained la causa — the struggle to win better wages, working and living conditions for poor people, particularly farmworkers.

Beginning with the early organizing days in the 1960s, Huerta inspired passions almost as intense as her own. She won almost breathless admiration from followers for the way she faced down sometimes violent anti-union forces, worked for days with little rest and negotiated late into the night, while others faded. She alienated others with a waspish temper, an unwillingness to forgive even small slights and inattention to some of the details that make a union work.

To the union faithful, she was the “Madonna of the Fields.” Some said Huerta reminded them of the soldaderas, a handful of women warriors who followed Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa into battle during the Mexican Revolution. The growers, whom she almost always scorned, had another name for her: “the dragon lady.”

A woman of frenetic energy who lived in a world of myriad contradictions, Huerta was one of the only women in many board rooms and union halls full of men. She was a jet-setting, president-schmoozing pragmatist, who in unguarded moments spoke mystically about her two youthful encounters with UFOs. She was the devout Catholic who had the last four of her children with a man she never married, Richard Chávez, Cesar’s younger brother. (Only in 2026 did she acknowledge having two other daughters, given to others to raise, fathered by César Chávez.)

Her relationship with Cesar Chávez was as complex as it was volatile — a fact acknowleged by UFW regulars long before Huerta’s charges about his sexual misconduct.

The two met through their work for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a progressive group that sought better government services and equal rights for poor and minority people. Both were called to the cause by the organization’s founder Fred Ross Sr. — Huerta in Stockton and Chávez in San Jose — and later united over their common concern for farmworkers. But even when he became statewide leader of the CSO, Chávez could not persuade the group to focus its energies on organizing field workers.

It was 1961 and Chávez was living in East Los Angeles when he called Huerta to his home one day and said, “We have got to start the union. If we don’t do it, nobody else will,” Huerta once recalled. He left the CSO, and Huerta followed.

Both soon moved their families to the Kern County farm town of Delano. Chávez relied on Huerta for nearly everything. When she wasn’t going door-to-door to recruit new members, Huerta negotiated with growers and created union hiring halls. She formed farmworker ranch committees and moved to the East Coast for months to promote the union’s national grape boycott.

But Chávez and his right hand also clashed routinely during their decades-long collaboration. The two would explode in shouting matches over strategy, while other union leaders shrank from the room. In audio recordings of one 1979 confrontation reviewed by the New York Times, Huerta fought back and demanded respect as Chávez called her a “stupid bitch” and accused her of stealing. Huerta might quit, or be fired. Inevitably, she would be back in the fold within a few days or weeks.

“Their commitment to the cause trumped all else and grew into a mutual dependence that survived decades of discord,” wrote Miriam Pawel, a former Los Angeles Times editor, in the biography “The Crusades of Cesar Chávez.” Asked by ABC News if she tried to protect Chávez, Huerta replied, “Always. Always.”

During a wine grape strike in the Central Valley, Huerta and other UFW women once locked arms in a human blockade between the union’s male picketers and replacement workers wielding two-by-fours. She blocked one worker’s car with her own, to prevent him from going to work and breaking a 1965 strike against rose growers in McFarland.

Chávez never doubted Huerta’s resolve. He once called her “totally fearless, both mentally and physically.”

Her years of community organizing in Stockton taught Huerta how to inspire even the most humble of her poor constituents.

In the union’s founding days, Huerta helped recruit a 19-year-old grape picker named Eliseo Medina to perform a one-man picket at the Port of Los Angeles — supposedly to stop the loading of a shipment of non-union grapes. The grapes never materialized. But Medina recalled how Huerta’s spirit and determination galvanized him.

“Dolores had a gift for making you believe in yourself,” Medina said. “She has an ability to inspire you and urge you to do things you could not think were possible. She is one of those life-changers.”

An Echo Park mural features Dolores Huerta alongside artist Frida Kahlo.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Medina left the Chávez-Huerta led union, believing it had strayed from its core work. He went on to become the international secretary treasurer of the more than 2-million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — just one of many UFW acolytes who fueled the labor movement as it staged a modest resurgence in the 21st century.

Huerta was at the center of many of the union’s landmark achievements, including the negotiation of a contract in 1966 with the Schenley Wine Co. It was the first labor agreement obtained by farmworkers themselves with an agricultural company, according to the union’s history.

But the UFW’s fortunes would rise and fall. One low ebb came in 1973 with the loss of many contracts to the Teamsters Union, which struck sweetheart deals with growers. But some union insiders also complained that the UFW had failed by not winning enough concessions for the workers it represented. The union’s membership plummeted.

Two years later, momentum swung again, as the union helped persuade California Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. to impose the toughest farm labor regulations in the nation.

The union’s membership would spiral downward until Chávez’s death, at 66, in 1993. There was a sense among many insiders that the union became overly insular, with repeated purges designed to promote absolute fealty to Chávez.

In one incident, students graduating from English classes at the union’s headquarters, La Paz, ended a slide show with the words: “The Union is not César Chávez, the Union is not La Paz, the Union is the farmworkers.” Huerta, fuming, demanded to know which of the teachers had planted this message, which she viewed as an act of treason against Chávez — an episode detailed by one of the teachers, Jeffrey W. Rubin, who went on to become a history professor at Boston University.

“Confronted there by Huerta, Richard Chavez, and Cesar Chavez himself, we were accused of being part of a subversive plot, railed at, called ‘chicken s—’ by Cesar, and thrown out of La Paz and the union,” wrote Rubin, who kept the episode quiet for years.

At the same time, the UFW lost contracts and sometimes failed to provide the benefits it promised to workers. Huerta was one of many union leaders unable to set Chávez, and the UFW, on a better path.

Dolores Huerta at rosary, standing next to the body of labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez (1927 – 1993) at rest in the pine coffin in Delano, Calif., on Wednesday, April 28, 1993.

(Jose Galvez/Los Angeles Times)

As Chávez’ son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez took control of the union in 1993 and began clawing to regain members and clout, Huerta remained the UFW’s most public persona.

At hundreds of marches across the nation that she attended with regularity throughout her life, parents would push forward, telling their children they were witnessing a historic figure. Asked for an autograph, she would boldly scrawl: “Sí, se puede.”

The phrase — “Yes, it can be done” — had been part of the union’s fabric since 1972, when some doubters suggested the union would fail in its campaign against an anti-union law in Arizona. Huerta responded, “Sí, se puede,” creating a mantra for the American left.

Born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, a small mining town in the mountains of northern New Mexico, Dolores Clara Fernandez moved to Stockton when she was 3, along with her mother, two brothers and two sisters. Her father and mother had divorced, but Juan Fernandez’s legend had been fixed — a brawling union leader and New Mexico state legislator. Her mother, a hotel operator, believed in public service and would not let the poorest guests go hungry.

Dolores thrived on a middle-class upbringing of Girl Scouts, violin lessons and tap dancing, describing her mother’s generosity as a guiding force. She was bright and popular and even founded a teen center where she and other kids hung out.

But Dolores would recall her high school years as a time of slights and rewards not received — injustices she linked to her Mexican American heritage. When police ordered her teen center shut down, it became clear it was because they did not like whites socializing with Mexican American, Black and Filipino kids.

Those setbacks would not be forgotten.

Dolores Huerta in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2019.

(Associated Press)

After community college in Stockton, Huerta became a teacher. But she left after just a year, because, she said: “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

Soon she met Ross and Chávez and her life’s path would be set. Even her name seemed to brand her for the work. When she divorced her second husband, Chávez advised her to hold on to her last name. Dolores Huerta means Sorrows of the Orchard.

Along the way, there would be great personal heartache.

In 1968, she was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot. The Democratic presidential front-runner had just finished his California primary victory speech — thanking Chávez and Huerta — when an assassin gunned him down.

Twenty years later, her politics thrust Huerta even more directly in the path of violence. A television camera captured the images of a San Francisco police officer clubbing her as she and others peacefully picketed an appearance by Vice President George H.W. Bush. The blows ruptured Huerta’s spleen and nearly killed her.

She later won an $850,000 settlement from the city for the attack. Some in the union said that Chávez‘s insistence that Huerta give the money up to the UFW created another rift that caused her to leave the union.

Huerta would struggle, as well, to find time for her expansive family — which in the end included 13 children, counting the two fathered by César Chávez.

Among her greatest heartaches grew out of the struggles of her oldest daughter, Celeste, a schizophrenic who, on occasion, would leave the institutions where she lived and wander the streets.

Huerta’s union zealotry would inspire a range of emotions from her other children.

“We understood very quickly she wasn’t ours to have,” said son Emilio, the lawyer, a Central Valley activist.“She sort of belonged to the farmworker movement. And it was our job to support her.”

He and several other of the Huerta offspring devoted their lives to the UFW and related causes, basking in a sense that their family played a part in history. That did not always make up for the personal slights — the times their mother would fob them off on union allies or neighbors, or miss a birthday.

In a bittersweet essay, Dolores’ daughter Juanita once recalled how her mother forgot to pick her up from junior high school. She compared Huerta to a train “rattling all the windows behind me, blaring out its horn, announcing its simultaneous arrival and departure with an incredible clamor, but rushing constantly forward.”

At a 69th birthday party in 1999, Huerta told a large dinner gathering that her own sacrifices had been overblown.

“It was our families who sacrificed,” she said. She then told a story about driving a carload of children to school one day in an automobile limping along because a tire had been slashed by union opponents. “That,” she said, “was kind of how we made it through life.”

Approaching her 90th birthday in 2020, Huerta spent a day that might have been more typical for someone half her age. She protested at the Fresno County Board of Supervisors for increased pay for home healthcare workers, who made just $12 an hour. Huerta hadn’t planned on being arrested that day, but when she felt police used excessive force on one of the protest leaders, she changed her mind. Take me too, she said, according to USA Today. Officers cinched a plastic zip-tie around her wrists and led her away.

More typically in her later years, she supported her foundation. In one moment, she might be campaigning for a bond measure for a middle school gym in the poor San Joaquin Valley community of Weedpatch; in seemingly the next, she would be stumping via Zoom for Joe Biden, during his fight to take the White House from President Trump.

In 2020, USA Today named Huerta one of the 100 women “who’ve made a substantial impact on our country or our lives over the past 100 years.” By then, at least half a dozen schools across America bore her name. Others considered taking her name after they removed Chávez’s following the sexual abuse revelations.

President Obama presented Huerta with the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2012; the one-time community organizer, who made his way to the White House, honoring a woman still doing the work.

“The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized and took direct action,” Huerta said in accepting the honor. “It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today.”

Olvera, the family spokesman, said Wednesday that Huerta’s relatives would be announcing the details of a public memorial in the coming days.

The brilliant Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong is a suffering protagonist’s best friend, exploring the buried pain in people like no other filmmaker. But he’s never been so delicately novelistic, and so accessibly human, as with his latest movie, “Possible Love,” even when Lee is spinning the enigmatic vibes he’s known for.

A marriage story weighty enough to bear two fascinatingly complex couples, it explores a web of isolation and desire knotted with the divisions and woes of society today: class, labor, media. The film fairly vibrates with ominous tension even in scenes in which seemingly nothing happens. (Which, admittedly, is a Lee staple if you remember his last film, 2018’s eerie psychological thriller “Burning.”) Astonishingly acted, intricately written, with nary a shot out of place and never insulting to its audience, “Possible Love” is a masterpiece of everyday struggle — essentially, who bears it and who doesn’t — and easily among the year’s best films.

At the funeral for a colleague who committed suicide in the wake of a disastrous labor strike, out-of-work Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu, of Lee’s “Peppermint Candy”) would rather brood in the car alone and let his patient, grasping-for-connection wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon, a Cannes prize-winner for her turn in Lee’s “Secret Sunshine”) be around others. With these blue collar parents’ grade-school-age son a tangibly quiet presence, a seemingly impassable unhappiness oozes from the opening scenes. The appearance inside the funeral home, however, of a documentary crew interviewing laid-off workers spurs Mi-ok to engage with the outgoing director, Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), whose reserved, well-to-do husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) is in tow. When Mi-ok agrees to participate in Ye-ji’s film, a friendship forms.

Is it friendship, though, or a mutually useful rapport? The women couldn’t be more unalike in terms of background and status. Mi-ok has to tell Ye-ji that her expensive clothes don’t jibe with someone championing labor issues. But they have a breezy, even jokey openness, fed by the stories Mi-ok tells on camera as well as soju-fueled double dates with their spouses. They also have in common husbands who are remote, albeit for vastly different reasons. Hedge-fund-rich Sang-woo has an air of cool privilege, while the gloomy, taciturn Ho-seok harbors unprocessed trauma about what happened during the strike, the details of which are judiciously doled out to us in flashbacks. (Lee drew the background for his scenario from a real-life labor protest met by a government crackdown that shocked the country.)

But underneath what seems promising, the beginnings of empathy and maybe healing, there’s something performative and calculated in this fast bond. There are Ye-ji’s filmic needs — “I’m trying to love these people,” she says privately to Sang-woo after he calls her behavior with them “Method acting” — and Mi-ok’s swirl of intentions, hoping to save her husband with not ignoring the allure of her new pal’s quietly confident and wealthy man. Right at the moment when more cracks materialize, Ye-ji invites this broken family for a shared weekend at Sang-woo’s vacation mansion.

You may be forgiven for anticipating a potboiler climax when a lush hideaway with a private beach is concerned, and what occurs there is indeed juicy. But that’s only because Lee, in his finest screenplay to date, has laid out precisely where his vectors of hardship, exploitation, pent-up anguish and hidden desire are going to converge. Just add more alcohol and more reminders of these couples’ experiential chasm, and Lee’s command of irony in a simmering atmosphere is in a league all its own.

The documentary angle, of course, is this great director probing the ethics in his own vocation as an intrusive force, one that shapes lives, emotions and, in this case, the weight of a genuine tragedy. In much the way he finessed a truth about art facing evil in “Poetry,” the camera here is both predatory and a tool for catharsis. In one scene, the confluence is literally breathtaking.

Best-of lists were made for performances like Jeon’s. With tear-swollen eyes and an anxious intelligence that imbues Mi-ok’s mission of repair with heartbreaking energy, she is this movie’s restless soul of want: a wife, lover, worker and mother trapped between the balm of recollecting better times and worry for the future. Alongside Sul’s deftly handled, physical characterization of a proud man swallowed by hurt he could never imagine, “Possible Love” stands as one of the more sensitively wrought depictions of a wounded marriage you’ll ever see.

And when it’s over, it somehow doesn’t feel over. Maybe no scene better embodies Lee’s exquisite communion with his characters than his last one, which supplies them with a hint of grace. “Possible Love” hovers over the moment’s sublimity like the moonlight and I haven’t stopped thinking about its elemental beauty since.

“LAUGHING” Russell Brand sexually assaulted a radio worker in a “violent, sloppy and frenzied” attack as his entourage stood by and watched, a court heard.

The comedian, 51, is accused of forcing six women into sexual acts and kissing and groping them in an “obsessive” campaign to sleep with 5,000 women.

On the fifth day of his trial, jurors heard from a woman who was in her 20s working at a radio station in the mid-2000s when Brand allegedly sexually assaulted her.

She told Southwark Crown Court Brand was a “perfect stranger” to her at the time and said his alleged assault was “violent”, “sloppy” and “frenzied”.

Describing the alleged attack, she added: “It was hard, I would say it was sloppy, he kissed my mouth, he just was kissing me and it was hard, it was very hard.

“He was kissing me all down my neck, his hands at the same time were all over me.”

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Asked about where his hands were, she said: “He touched my bum, he touched my breast, he had his hand on my waist and his other hand was just pinning me against the wall, and his body was just pressed up against me.”

The woman added: “It was rough, it was very, very rough. It was hard, I would say that his whole body was pressed against me, the kisses were hard and sloppy, going down my neck

“The reason I used the word frenzied is because it was just, it was violent.”

She said four members of Brand’s entourage including a woman were in the room at the time but “did nothing”.

The woman wept as she told jurors: “I wonder why those people didn’t do anything to stop him.”

She also told the court she had locked eyes” with the other woman and was “pleading with her” to stop what was allegedly happening.

The woman said she was “stunned” and “in a haze” but managed to push Brand away and told him to “f*** off”.

She added: “I remember he made like a sound, that was like funny – ha ha – like that.”

Jurors heard Brand allegedly preyed on the complainants between 1999 and 2009 in a bid to satisfy his “voracious” sexual appetite.

One of the women was allegedly raped in a hotel room in Bournemouth in 1999 after a Labour conference.

The woman said Brand had suddenly “changed” from being “camp, friendly, and effeminate” to “monster-like”.

Jurors were also shown pictures that Brand allegedly made one of the women take moments before he raped her.

The images – released by police – show the comedian topless in a pair of white trousers blowing a kiss to the camera.

She told police she remembers feeling “frightened” after Brand forced her to take the pictures of him on her camera.

She added: “I took pictures of him on my camera – he made me take them.

“I was frightened. I remember feeling ‘what on earth have I got myself into’ – and then he did rape me.

“He pushed me onto the bed. He did take my trousers off.”

She previously claimed he emerged topless from the toilet and “was prancing around the room, a bit like an ostrich, doing silly walks like Basil Fawlty”.

The woman later added: “I found his body quite snake-like and disgusting. It made me feel sick, if I’m being honest.”

Another alleged victim who claimed she was targeted by Brand while working at MTV in 2001 also gave evidence.

At the time he was the flagship presenter at the video music channel, jurors heard.

The woman said Brand was “pleading” for her to join him in the toilet before he “grabbed me by the arm and started to pull me in, saying ‘come on, come in with me’.”

She described Brand as a “wild-eyed maniac” during the alleged assault and said she was left “bewildered” and “confused”.

Prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC dubbed the comedian a “sexual predator” who was “ruthless, calculated and manipulative”.

She also said women have told police he was “childlike in his expectation that his every desire should be met”.

The court heard the alleged offences took place when Brand’s “public profile was taking off”.

He allegedly prayed on women in a number of locations – including workplaces, a toilet cubicle in a bar and at his home address.

The fifth alleged victim met Brand after seeing his show at the Hammersmith Apollo in London with a friend in 2009.

He allegedly told her his age range was from “16 to death” before she was invited to a backstage bar where they kissed and had a threesome.

The woman claims she went to his home the next day where Brand told her: “Your hair smells funny”.

He then made her take a shower and wash her hair while he watched through a glass shower cubicle, it was said.

Ms Karmy-Jones said once in the bedroom, they had consensual sex but afterwards Brand “flipped” the woman on to her front and on all fours and allegedly penetrated her anally.

Afterwards, jurors heard the comedian told her to “clean up the mess you have made”.

The sixth woman worked for Channel 4 when she met Brand while he was filming a project.

She said she was informed Brand was “unhappy” and the situation would not improve unless she gave him a massage, jurors were told.

The woman claimed he walked up to a chair she was sitting on and placed his head directly into her groin area.

Brand has denied three counts of rape, three of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault against six women.

The trial continues.