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So, Russell Brand….

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Keep pushing boundaries, and eventually you breach a few and forget they are were for a reason. Mostly he was acting legally and had consent, and you often can be a cnut and remain inside the law. But some of his activities transcended consent, and I suspect others will be exposed by young women who got more than they wanted from him. The folk who are supporting him in his current hour of need are hardly ones I’d want defending my actions. Would he want someone treating his daughters the way he has treated women? I suspect not. He seems a very damaged person, and his guru schtick deeply sinister, given how good he clearly is in manipulating people. Views?

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  1. – “Why are OTHER PEOPLE so stupid that they can’t see he’s being targeted by the establishment because of his views?”
    – “Why are OTHER PEOPLE so immoral that they defend a rapist?”
    Those seem to be the two main reactions on Twitter. Like so many controversial issues, Twitterers have managed to turn it into an opportunity to proclaim their moral/intellectual superiority and hurl insults at the opposing faction. Forget about Brand, let’s make this about US (yay!) vs THEM (boo!).

    Anyway, the courts will decide whether he’s an evil scumbag or just an annoying twat. My money’s on the former.

  2. Not so sure he’s “damaged” (other than the damage he did to himself according to his terribly titled autobiography).
    Would certainly benefit from an “action/consequence” filter
    His comedy was refreshing for about 5 minutes, and strayed towards the unsayable, all dressed up in big words. Ultimately though, he wasn’t that funny.

    • “Damaged”?

      Wiki says:

      “Brand’s parents separated when he was six months old, and he was raised by his mother.[13][14]. When Brand was 8, his mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer and then breast cancer one year later. While she underwent treatment, Brand lived with relatives. When he was 14, he developed bulimia nervosa. When he was 16, he left home because of disagreements with his mother’s partner. Brand then started to use illegal drugs such as cannabis, amphetamines, LSD, and ecstasy.[15] Brand was sexually abused by a tutor.[16]

      Brand says he had a “strange relationship” with his father, whom he saw sporadically and who took him to visit prostitutes during a trip to Thailand when Brand was a teenager.[13][17] ”

      The references are mostly newspaper interviews in which a journalist encourages him to talk about himself.

      • Hmm … a little bit of cursory research may have helped my comment.
        Still, no defense or mitigation is it.
        Then again, innocent until proven guilty.
        Still a bit of a nob though

        • I don’t agree with the innocent until proven guilty argument. You are either innocent or guilty. If you’re guilty, and a case goes to court, and the jury reaches the correct decision, then that’s not when you become guilty. Any other variation of this doesn’t make you innocent imo.

          • Innocent until proven guilty is a legal convention meaning he’s not in jail unless or until certain legal burdens of proof are met. It’s not an obligation on anyone else to suspend moral judgement until a court case has happened: having read the extremely and upsettingly detailed Times piece and watched the doc, we’re allowed to think what we like about the fucking scumbag. Legalism as outsourced morality is a bit of a modern plague, to go with all the others.

              • Getting rid of the “Not Proven” verdict option is under serious consideration up in Scotland, I seem to recall reading somewhere.

                None of what is alleged about Russell Brand would surprise me, from my very limited knowledge of him, but I suspect he’s utterly convinced he has done no wrong.
                I’m not acquainted with the full story and I don’t really wish to be. There’s more than enough depressing stuff going on in the news already.
                A formal complaint about him has now been made to the police by someone and is being actively investigated.

                I’m inclined to think these sort of pile-ons are not a good thing for our blog and should be refrained from.

  3. Anyone want to start a list of those – who’ve gone very, very early – to be ‘on his side’.

    Frankly…
    1. Yikes…
    … or,
    2. Everything IS indeed a complete conspiracy against people who think everything is a complete conspiracy!
    What are the chances?

  4. Never really cared much either way about RB or his poor man’s Kenneth Williams
    schtick until he and Jonathon Ross rang up Andrew Sachs and cruelly left a message
    that Brand had had it off with his grand daughter.

    Pretty disgusting thing for a 78 – year old man to hear and even worse for his daughter who was all over the papers for the next week.

    Bit sad to see that in working on what is essentially a tabloid-style expose with C4, the Sunday Times has finally completed its 42-year metamorphosis into The Sun.

    Assuming the speculation is more than tabloid tittle-tattle, be interesting to see the identities of the five other comedians the papers are talking about

  6. I could never stand him (based on his appearances in the press and once on Question Time which was a new low for the programme) and can’t now. I’ve managed to largely avoid him so I may be missing something but I strongly doubt it.

  8. Whoever would employ such a monster? Which media organisations would give someone like that the oxygen of publicity? Oh yeah, it was Channel 4, the BBC and every national newspaper.

    • Of course they employed him. He attracted viewers and readers. He was extremely popular, selling out tours and having a number one best-selling book. Even now, his “following” is huge.

      • Quite, and we’re hearing what sounds like blatant sexual harassment of the news reader and Brand’s assistant who was being offered to be sent to Jimmy Savile naked. Also a TV company’s response to concerns being raised about his behaviour was to keep women employees away from him.

        We’ve heard similar stories about Westwood and employers being keen not to upset the talent. This is what they’re able to publish. I’d love to know what else they heard, but can’t publish.

        I find it massively hypocritical that media companies are now acting shocked and surprised.

  9. What’s guaranteed is that this will send him, and particularly the seemingly millions of deluded numpties who follow him, ever further down their paranoid conspiracy theory rabbit hole.

  10. I found him very funny. I enjoyed his radio show, his books and the live show I went to about 5 years ago. At that time he was doing really good community-based things and challenging the economic model that causes poverty. And then he went quiet.

    And then, in the COVID era, he started to get a bit boring with all the spirituality and mindfulness and being a parent. I could see he was gathering an enormous amount of followers and I assumed he’d gone into the Yogic blue yonder with Californian types.

    It was only when I saw a post on Twitter saying “It’s Happening” that I heard about the Dispatches piece. Brand said that this was inevitable, because he’s been annoying Big Pharma etc with his views. I think a better approach would be NOT to say that. He could have simply denied the allegations and say he is available for any questioning at any time and would fully cooperate.

  11. I’m in the “always disliked him” camp, so am in that tricky position of recognising that one’s own view is encumbered by a large serving of schadenfreude.

    There’s an interesting debate to be had here on the presumption of innocence. On the one hand, it’s a central pillar of our criminal justice system, and we undermine it at our peril – I think there’s a danger that people are increasingly starting to dismiss it as some sort of inconvenient obstacle in favour of the sugar rush of mob justice. We should bear in mind that, as of the time of writing, we have essentially heard only one side of the story (or stories, in this case), and that it is virtually impossible to defend against accusations of this sort in the public realm. Any attempt to do so will be immediately picked apart as further evidence of guilt and bad faith. Public opinion is the ultimate kangaroo court.

    On the other hand, the entire thrust of the MeToo movement is (quite correctly) that our criminal justice system is failing to deal with crimes of this type. Too often, they come down to one party’s word against the other, and the deck is just as stacked against the accuser as it is against the accused in the sphere of public opinion. That goes double when the accused is rich and powerful.

    I can understand the concept that if justice cannot be achieved in the courts, it will be sought on the streets, but if that’s our direction of travel we do need to accept that it’s going to lead to a good degree of collateral damage along the way. Is that a price we’re willing to pay? Or do we think we can improve our investigation and hearing of sexual offences to the point where the courts are trusted? I sometimes wonder about moving the requirement for rape/sexual assault convictions to a balance of probabilities, rather than beyond reasonable doubt, although god knows what the implications of making that change would be.

    So, we need to form some sort of view on Brand, recognising that it’s probably not sufficient to simply state that he’s innocent until proven guilty (given the stacking of the deck in that department), while also recognising our own biases (the jumped up little prick), the all too human delight in being in a crowd giving someone a good kicking, the propensity of the Internet to get these things wrong, and that we have heard only from the prosecution at this stage.

    Personally, where there are multiple independent accusers and their claims have been investigated to the extent these have I am inclined to take the view that there is likely to be some fire to go with all the smoke. The fact that Brand’s entire public persona over the last two decades has been to act as the national sex pest probably doesn’t help either.

    What I will say is that I am glad to see a critical eye being retroactively run over Brand’s “act”. The leery laddishness, the “I’ll shag anything, me” stuff, the jolly tales of fucking Thai prostitutes and hilarious prank phone calls to pensioners. All of it was rank 15 years ago and it stinks to high heaven now. Back-combing your hair, slapping on a bit of eyeliner and consulting the thesaurus never made it any less so.

    For the purposes of our own community, I hope this is a kind of death knell for the tired old trope of the rock and roll wild man. Brand leant heavily on that iconography throughout his career, and – let’s be honest – a lot of the behaviour we’re reading about this week is straight out of Rock Star 101. All of this bullshit has been glorified for far too long, because we’ve done a brilliant job of hiding from sight the people on the receiving end of it.

    From that perspective, I can only say well done to the women who have come forward and told their stories. It cannot be easy, and it is unbelievably valuable for the public to hear the fine detail of (for example) what it’s like for a 16 year old to be groomed by a famous man twice her age. The car driver begging her not to go inside and offering to take her home. The parents, powerless to intervene and afraid of losing her entirely. All that pain and humiliation, just collateral damage in the path of someone far too selfish to care about any of it. If we want to talk about “damaged”, I think that conversation really begins and ends with the victims.

    If guilt is established or assumed, I think there are also some lessons to be learned here on the political front. Brand currently makes his home on the right, surrounded by credulous nutters ripe for his cult of personality, but before he got there he played exactly the same trick on the left – for several years, in fact. It was interesting to read a Guardian op-ed yesterday condemning the “institutions which harboured Brand”, while quietly admitting that the same paper had in fact been one such institution. Let’s face it, if Brand was still a good socialist, rather than an anti-vax nutter, we’d have people crawling out of the woodwork on the other political flank to parrot his claims about MSM conspiracies. He knew full well what he was doing pitching his tent where he did.

    This guy appears to have been hiding in plain sight. He was utterly open about treating women like shit. And no one cared. And they cared even less when he was saying things they agreed with politically. We need to be more alert to red flags in people we agree with. We spot them easily in our opponents, but we’re wilfully blind to them in our own allies. Which is why we end up with articles like this, quietly ageing like milk: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/04/russell-brand-endorsed-labour-tories-should-be-worried

    So, what do I think of Russell Brand? I think I’m trying very hard to avoid rushing to judgement, and probably failing woefully.

      • Yep. Very good observations there Bingo and probably all that can be said now until he ends up in court (if he ends up in court).

        Can’t stand the bloke personally or his “act”

        • Given the huge outpouring of public disgust following the press/TV revelations, RB’s vastly skilled (and expensive) team of KCs will surely argue that there is no way he can hope to receive a fair trial.

          It woutd be horribly ironic if the media that first sustained and then exposed Brand was also the reason he escaped justice

      • Thanks, Tigger – I hadn’t seen that, but I agree with it.

        If Marina would like to continue her sobering reflections she may also want to take a gander at Frankie Boyle and some of the things he said before being rewarded with a regular Guardian column. They make Sachsgate look like The Female Eunuch, but – again – he does have all the correct political views.

        • I’ve never taken to FB. He strikes me as aiming for disgust. Besides, I struggle with his accent and low voice. I lose the thread and miss the punchline, if there is one. I couldn’t tell you if he is misogynistic or not.

          • I can’t tell you whether he’s a misogynist either. But – per my point above – if we’re genuinely not going to tolerate this behaviour we shouldn’t wait until there’s a massive internet dogpile to say so.

            Here are two quotes. One of them is from Russell Brand on a podcast. The other is from Boyle on a TV show.

            “I raped someone once. I killed her after, she’ll never tell.”

            “Victoria (Pendleton) can lift twice her own bodyweight. Sexy, as it means she still wouldn’t be able to throw me off.”

            Obviously, the crucial difference is that one of these individuals is now an alleged rapist. But Marina’s piece above doesn’t trade on that; it laments a failure to properly interrogate Sachsgate as an incident in isolation. So what’s the real difference?

            Only last year, Boyle stood onstage in front of an audience and said of Holly Willoughby: “I’d obviously kill her and rape her afterwards. I’m joking – I’d rape her first”.

            When asked about the incident, Boyle said “Can I just say, my routine about raping and f*****g Holly Willoughby was part of a very long routine about whether or not it’s OK to do a joke about that, and I look at it from both sides, there are pluses and minuses.” 🙄

            You have to wonder if a couple of months later, when Boyle interviewed Hyde onstage to promote her book launch, there was any discussion about how Holly Willoughby might have felt about that very complicated and nuanced-sounding joke. Or, for that matter, why she needed to be named in it at all.

            • I saw Frankie tell that joke at a work in progress show a couple of years ago. There is indeed a wider context, though the point is obviously to make the punch line feel like it’s been delivered directly to your solar plexus. We’re going to seem him again tomorrow, so we’ll see if it remains in the full set. I doubt it because the set up is someone else choosing to kill Philip Scofield and that narrative has changed.

    • It’s also interesting to note that more than one woman has said that that Brand is far from an outlier and that there are seemingly a very significant number of male comics guilty of predatory behaviour. Given that the number of right wing comics is tiny, one can only conclude that a fair number of supposedly liberal men have nothing to be proud of. ( Although, in truth, this wouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone who has spent much time in trade union circles).

      • That’s a couple of sweeping generalisations there.
        Are we now in the game of castigating the unaccused on the basis of the law of averages?
        I have spent a lot of time in trade union circles over the last 17 years and I don’t recognise what you suggest. I’m aware of the problems at the top of one sister railway union recently, but that has been the exception to my knowledge. Too busy drinking and playing cards.

  13. There must be a snappy term for the always-useless observation along the lines of :

    “I notice those who are up in arms about X are the same people who kept quiet when Y was in trouble for the same thing!”.

    That kind of thing. Anyone know?

  14. I found Brand funny for a short while, I think there’s a place in comedy-land to test the boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable. Think Lenny Bruce, think Billy Connolly’s famous joke on Parkinson.
    Very quickly I found his schtick repulsive, demeaning and very very unfunny. I too watched the Channel 5 doc by accident and was truly shocked. Not a court of law of course but damning nonetheless.
    There’s always been coarse vulgar humour and sometimes that can be very funny coarse vulgar humour but surely it’s time for male comics (for at least, say, the next hundred years) to refrain from saying anything remotely insulting to women?

  15. I distinctly remember being made to to feel a bit prudish and like I was buying into the tabloid hysteria when I was shocked by the whole Sachsgate thing. And — ready Black Celeb — it was the VERY SAME PEOPLE who are now rushing to condemn him.

    • I remember a thread on The Old Place where The Mail and their ilk were blamed for the fuss for drawing attention to it. My take, then as now, was that I was surprised how many people blamed the producer which suggest the problem was that the call was broadcast and that the people who should be offended were the listeners, whereas I thought the problem was that the call was made and the person being offended was Sachs (I didn’t give the impact on Georgina Baillie the consideration I should have).

  16. I don’t like Russell Brand – never have.
    However commenting on this post – the frequent question asked is why these victims take so long to come forward. The truth is the investigations of allegations are demeaning and also physically intrusive with results not always going the way of the victims. It must be very traumatic to put oneself through that and come out the other end without any closure.

    Just to balance things I also believe that the accused should not be named until any investigation has proven guilt. This to apply to celebrities equally as much as ordinary mortals.

    • I agree with your point Steve, “not always going the way of the victims.”
      But I’d go further, in that very, very rarely does it go their way.
      Only 1% of rapes or sexual assaults are reported and go onto result in a charge.

          • Ok, I don’t doubt that perhaps a large majority go unreported, but 1% seems excessively low. What’s the source of that figure? Staggering if that is the case

            • The BBC says:

              “Many rapes are never reported but, of the 70,633 offences recorded by police in the year to September 2022, just 1.6% led to someone being charged. Of those charged, only a proportion will be convicted – when someone is found guilty of a crime.”

              • I’ve mentioned this before – my cousin is a high-ranking police detective in Southend. She told me that “6 out of 10” reports of rape that she deals with are swiftly disproved. I have absolutely no idea of how representative that is of the rest of the country. It’s sad to think false accusations might be responsible for genuine accusations being doubted.

                • Research by the Home Office suggests that only 4% of cases of sexual violence (including rape) reported to police are either found or suspected to be false. Equivalent studies in the US and Europe show figures of between 2 and 6%. I don’t believe any wide scale study has even suggested an instance rate of above 10% for false accusations of rape.

                  • As I said, i have no idea how representative Southend is of other parts of the country.

                    I doubt that’s what they’re “focusing on”, but I don’t doubt my cousin.

                    I asked her how cases were “swiftly disproved” and she just said that in 6 out of 10 cases the man has a watertight, corroborated alibi.

                    • Oh and I should also add that our conversation was at least ten years ago. Maybe even 20. Can’t remember when, tbh.

            • Charity Rape Crisis, figures from 2021:
              …only 1 in 100 rapes were reported to the police and resulted in a charge.
              5 in 6 women who are raped don’t report it and the same is true for 4 in 5 men…

            • FWIW, I think it’s potentially worth disambiguating data for rape from sexual assault. The gravity and nature of the two offences can be sufficiently different that the reasons for not reporting will be highly dissimilar.

    • The lead story on BBC news on Monday was about Russell Brand. The lead story yesterday was that over 1,000 Met officers were either suspended or on restricted duties because of misconduct. I don’t think anyone has to take too long considering why someone might be wary of reporting something which will involve a long and intrusive investigation by the police.

      • Here in Italy, rape has been in the headlines a lot recently. Firstly the President of the Senate’s son was accused (the President of the Senate, Ignazio La Russa is one of the most vile fascists in Italian politics, a big fan of Mussolini. Not to be confused with the President of Italy, who is a man I admire very much). Then there was the gang rape of a drunk teenager in Palermo by seven men between the ages of 18 and 22, about which a. television journalist, Andrea Giambruno, said “you go dancing, you have every right to get drunk … but if you avoid getting drunk and losing your senses, you might also avoid running into certain problems because then you risk finding the wolf,” Giambruno is the partner of Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni. She claims his words have been “misinterpreted”.

  18. A side question. What exactly is it that Russell Brand has been saying over the last few years that the mainstream media are allegedly trying to silence? I don’t follow him so I don’t know. Is he a covid denier, a climate change denier, a basic anarchist or is it something else? I knew he had went a bit loopy in recent years but I always thought he was still basically seen as a comedian?

    • His main contentious claim is that Covid vaccines make their recipients want to go to Taylor Swift concerts.

      I dunno, all the usual bollocks, isn’t it? Covid, lockdowns, the deep state, stolen elections, population control, don’t forget to hit subscribe. The internet is just full of this stuff now. One of my parents’ friends visited them this weekend and confidently informed them that global warming is a hoax and the UK government can control the movement of clouds. 🙄 This person is an accountant – when the accountants start to go for this gubbins you know you have problems.

    • All of the above as I understand it. Throw in 15 minutes cities, the new world order/great reset too, and for all I know contrails and lizard people.

          • I wouldnt belive any of this could happen to people but my ex sister in law went from being a succesful professional to running her own conspiracy website. Started with yoga and horoscopes. Moved on to covid, masks and vaccine denial and is currently on flat earthing. Last time I saw her she banged on about the great reset and quoted David Icke at me (so he’smade it to Spain). Sad and disturbing.

        • @Gary

          Surprised the papers haven’t had a piece about poor old Russell Grant
          having had his windows kicked in.

          The rotund soothsayer obviously had advance warning from Doris Stokes and made himself scarce.

    • Thanks to a toxic combo of social media and a world leader who understood its power (Trump, or his handlers) we have passed the tipping poin where truth is no longer immutable. Horrible and real, no doubt.

  20. TV companies have a lot to answer for. They put young girls in awkward positions and disregarded their safety and discouraged complaints

    I know this for an absolute fact from someone I know who got harassed by a recently charged TV personality, who it was clear to everyone for years was a dodgy fucker yet still got away with it. She was told not to complain and blamed herself..

  21. If there were more male role models in the mainstream media Russell Brand wouldn’t have the appeal that he has. It’s a shame that in the current culture that someone with a little edge will inevitably gain traction.

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