Кэти Перри, Рассел Брэндийн “шуурга” мэт үерхлээс мессежээр төгссөн гэрлэлт

There’s a scene from Katy Perry’s 2012 tour documentary Part of Me that is unforgettable for anyone who sees it – for all the wrong reasons. A pink-haired Perry, riding high on the success of her multi-platinum album Teenage Dream and due to perform in front of thousands of screaming fans that night, is lying crumpled in a chair, weeping. Moments before, she had received a text from Russell Brand, her husband of just over a year; in the message, he had told her that their marriage was over.

“You can cancel the show, or you can do your best,” one of Perry’s team tells her, clutching her hand. She chooses the latter, but there is a horrible dissonance between her cartoonish performance gear – a dress with a bodice adorned with whirling candy wheels – and her obvious heartbreak. Before she rises onto the stage through a trapdoor, we see her arrange her face into a popstar-perfect smile, but the happiness doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

It has always been a wrenching moment, a reminder of how stratospheric fame can’t cushion you from the anguish of a relationship breaking down – especially when that relationship ends in such brusque fashion. But in light of Brand’s conviction for one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, charges dating back to the height of the comedian’s fame in the Noughties, troubling details of his relationship with Perry are under fresh scrutiny. He has now been sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison.The Independent has contacted Perry’s representatives for further comment.

Over the weekend, disturbing footage of the couple arriving at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party in 2010 circulated online, suggesting an uncomfortable dynamic between the pair, who had then only been dating for a few months.

In the clip, a reporter from ITV’s morning show GMTV asks Perry for her thoughts on the Academy Awards ceremony, only for Brand to hold up and tap a badge that reads “Obey”. Perry then falls silent, and it is Brand’s views that the journalist ends up hearing.

Prosecutors had initially tried to make references to Perry while opening their case, as part of the background for the rape trial, but these were removed after submissions from his legal team. The Crown Prosecution Service has also confirmed that Perry, who is now in a relationship with Canada’s former prime minister Justin Trudeau, was not asked for a witness statement during the investigation into her former husband, who has been married to author Laura Gallacher, the mother of his three children, since 2017.

But although it has been many years since Perry has spoken about her marriage in public – aside from one allusion to Brand during a performance at Blenheim Festival earlier this year, when she told the crowd, “I hope my ex isn’t here. He should be in jail” – her interviews from the aftermath of the break-up speak volumes about a possible dark side to a relationship where the respective levels of fame rapidly diverged, like a twisted version of A Star is Born.

Perry and Brand’s paths first crossed in the summer of 2009, when the singer recorded a cameo appearance in Get Him to the Greek, the sequel to the hit comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The movie was the high watermark of Brand’s Hollywood success, ushering in the brief era when he was considered a leading man across the Atlantic. A few months later, they’d meet again at the MTV Video Music Awards, when Brand was hosting and Perry was performing. She threw a half-full water bottle at his head to get his attention, “like Cupid in a riot”, Brand would later recall.

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He was 10 years her senior; Perry, riding high on the success of “I Kissed a Girl” and “Hot N Cold”, was still the bigger star, but hadn’t quite reached the stratospheric levels of fame that would soon come. She was smitten by this fast-talking, self-consciously loquacious Brit, who she described – perhaps unintentionally ominously – as “Oscar Wilde meets Dudley Moore meets Jim Morrison meets a little Elvis Presley meets Charles Manson”. The relationship, she would later reflect, was “like a tornado”.

In October 2010, the couple married in a Hindu ceremony at a tiger sanctuary in Rajasthan, India, attended by famous friends including David Walliams and Jonathan Ross. But not long after the celebrations, the public received an inadvertent insight into the couple’s strange dynamic when Brand posted a photo of his wife, make-up free and apparently barely awake, on Twitter to almost two million followers. Following a backlash, he swiftly deleted the picture – a mere 48 minutes after sharing it.

At the time, Perry framed it as a joke. “He thought it was hilarious, but as you can imagine, I wasn’t too impressed,” she said, adding that she was “currently plotting [her] payback”. But with more than a decade and half’s distance, the incident can’t help but feel like a betrayal of trust at best, a humiliation ritual at worst.

Attending his comedy gigs incognito, Perry was also surprised to hear her husband referring to her in his stand-up routine. “He was hysterical in some ways,” she would later tell Vogue. “Until he started making jokes about me and he didn’t know I was in the audience, because I had come to surprise him at one of his shows. So. Hysterical to a point.”

The release of Perry’s album Teenage Dream in 2010, with its utterly ubiquitous run of singles “California Gurls”, “Teenage Dream” and “Firework”, would supercharge her career, making her one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. Meanwhile, the release of Brand’s movie Arthur, supposed to be his star vehicle, was a flop.

This disparity, it seems, grated on Brand, who apparently wanted his wife, who’d just embarked on a major world tour, to settle down and start a family. “He just couldn’t cope with her star eclipsing his – he would mock her, and be mean behind her back,” one source told The Times over the weekend. In her Part of Me film, Perry admits she is “fighting to keep my marriage alive”, while Brand refuses to fly out to visit her.

And then came the text message that ended things, landing on Perry’s phone in the winter of 2011, moments before she was due on stage; the timing surely wasn’t lost on the sender. “I think a lot of times strong men do want an equal, but then they get that equal and they’re like, ‘I can’t handle the equalness,’” she told Vogue in 2013, after the dust had settled on their divorce, which was formalised in July 2012 after amicably reaching a settlement in February. “He didn’t like the atmosphere of me being the boss on tour. So that was really hurtful, and it was very controlling, which was upsetting.” The couple reportedly did not have a pre-nuptial agreement, meaning that Brand was entitled to half of Perry’s earnings under California law; however, Brand chose not to take any of her money.

In another interview with Marie Claire, Perry suggested that Brand’s desire for the couple to start a family, when she “knew [she] wasn’t ready” was “a way of control. “I think it was part of, if I have a kid, then I would have to sacrifice – I’d have to be home more,” she said. Initially, she reflected, she “felt a lot of responsibility for it ending”, but she later “let go”, realising “this is beyond me”.

Brand, for his part, later appeared to take the responsibility in an interview with the American broadcaster Megyn Kelly earlier this year. “It was my fault because I pushed to get married early because I felt inadequate and insecure and like I wasn’t enough and that if I was married to her that I would somehow be a better person and more important,” he said, noting that this “put her under an unnecessary amount of pressure and strain”.

The broadcaster Piers Morgan would later recall that Perry apparently had an unusual nickname for Brand, one which only seems more sinister from our current vantage point. She’d call him Rasputin, Morgan claimed, a nod to the manipulative, magnetic and promiscuous monk who inveigled his way into the confidences of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, the last emperor and empress of Russia.

All the way back in 2013, Perry hinted that she had “found out the real truth” about Brand and their relationship, “which I can’t necessarily disclose because I keep it locked in my safe for a rainy day”. Now that his trial is over, perhaps that “rainy day” might come sooner than we think.