The Times has published a piece of almost 7,000 words outlining detailed and extensive allegations from women about the behaviour of Russell Brand. The article and the accompanying documentary by Channel 4 are the result of four years of investigative journalism by The Times.
Unlike other public rape and abuse accusations, I developed an opinion on the Brand issue very quickly, and engaged in online discussion about how the allegations matched the way certain predators operated, and if the allegations are true, what the cost may be to those who came in contact with Brand and those who continue to align themselves with him.
As the story emerges and more people come out with testimony, the allegations levelled at Brand are not that he has overstepped a boundary or two, but that he is allegedly a violent sexual predator who has sought out the kind of victims he can hide in his excessive promiscuity and naughty boy image. All the women who claim to have been assaulted by Brand admit to having a consensual sexual relationship with him. One was 16 and a virgin when she met Brand – Brand was 30 at the time of the alleged incident.
In talking to women online in the wake of the Brand story, I listened to women tell their own rape stories in relation to men they had a sexual relationship with and with whom they had developed a level of trust. Almost always women will talk of the signs they missed and chastise themselves for being stupid or unwise in ‘getting themselves’ into a particular situation.
Women are handed a sh*t-sandwich in the public discourse surrounding sexual assault and rape by both sides of politics, but currently it is the centre-right that are outdoing themselves in the game of overt rape apology and misogyny regarding the Brand issue.
Women are being told they must extend the presumption of innocence to men generally in society, and Brand specifically, but if they do so in a sexual relationship and they are raped, they get what they deserve. If they don’t go to the police, they are cowards, and if they go to the media, they are liars.
The expectation that women would extend the presumption of innocence to Brand in public discourse, in the face of what appears to be reasonably robust and substantiated accusations, is an altogether unreasonable one. If the police presumed innocence, they would never investigate crime. If the courts always presumed innocence, the accused would never be held in custody before trial. The presumption of innocence is only enacted in a trial as the exercise of the rights of the accused. In many other contexts, the presumption of innocence is not just stupid but dangerous.
‘One in five women over the age of 15 have experienced sexual assault in their lifetime … over 85 per cent of these assaults are not reported to police.’ When women do report, the conviction rates are low, and that is due to a complex range of reasons, partly because of the nature of the crime and the dependence on the evidence of conflicting testimony.
Even if women don’t report sexual assault, they talk to each other. Anecdotally, women understand that sexual activity with men holds danger, often life-threatening danger. Being lectured to on this issue by men is getting very boring.
The reality is that a lot of men get away with sexual assault, in fact almost all men who commit sexual assault get away with it. Men who enjoy committing sexual assault make quite an art of it, and they are often prolific in their offending. Women talk amongst themselves of how to spot such men, the signs of grooming, and how to make themselves safe from being targeted by these men. These public discussions can be life-saving for young women and validating for victims of sexual assault.
The way the free speech, freedom-loving, political commentators and podcasters have circled the wagons around Brand to shut down discussion has been startling. According to the prevailing wisdom of the heavily subscribed to men of YouTube, we are to extend an eternal state of presumed innocence to all men accused of rape, right up until the judge’s gravel hits the block. The same rule doesn’t apply to women who make accusations, they are freely being called sluts and liars in the public square.
Right-wing podcaster Carl Benjamin has gone on a bizarre rant about ‘decent women’ and ‘promiscuous women’, claiming that, ‘Promiscuous women who engaged with Brand on terms they enjoyed are being weaponised against decent women.’ When challenged, Benjamin claimed that women who ‘take actions which garner moral disapproval’ are to be considered to be ‘bad people’.
Konstantin Kisin of the popular Triggernometry, lamented on X that ‘no one understands what innocent until proven guilty actually means’. ‘Why is everyone so dumb?’ he asked.
Among a new set of male podcasters, the top performers are not just informative, articulate, and entertaining, they usually have a brand of politics and cultural commentary that the consumer wants to hear. For your subscription, you will not just get additional content, you get a sense of being part of a resistance. You can take your podcaster merchandise to work and mark yourself as someone who is part of the rebel alliance.
Russell Brand packages his message of free-thinking politics with the ever-present story of a man who has rescued himself from the edge of ruination. He carries his past depravity as a badge of honour hiding, Victoria Smith argues, in a field of red flags.
But the brand of Brand goes a little further, as all boundary violators do. Brand sells a spiritual lifestyle and wellness package. Recently a video has been circulating of Brand comparing his current situation to the persecution of Christ.
Amongst the Brand controversy, the sensible centre is platforming the kind of opinions about women that even religious conservatives were slowly moving away from. Most telling has been popular rapper and commentator Zuby, who has gained online fame with a product of fitness and motivation advice along with mainstream opinions about the disintegration of morality and political discourse.
In response to The Times article, Zuby tweeted: ‘When people report ‘crimes’ to the media but not to the police, I don’t believe them.’ By people, he appears to imply women, and by ‘crimes’ he means rape. So, we don’t just have the presumption of innocence for Brand, but the presumption that women are lying if they can’t handle a court trial but are willing to talk to the media in an attempt to stop a prolific and violent sexual offender.
The rape culture narrative emerging on the centre-right is that women are required to give men the presumption of innocence as a general principle in society. Decent centre-right women are expected to agree that it is a tiny proportion of men who are guilty of sexual and physical violence toward women, and these are not men who would be really nice, good guys who agree with each other about the Roman Empire.
In the wake of The Times article, Elon Musk pledged his support for Brand saying, ‘That man is not evil.’ A man who is likeable, it seems, cannot be given to recreational rape. We know this is not true.
One of the worst of the takes, I’m sorry to say, was from Jordan Peterson, who has played into the conspiracy theory that The Times article is an effort to have Brand ‘destroyed’.
Andrew Neil, seasoned journalist and chairman of the Spectator in London, has come out with a warning about falling into conspiracy theory around the Brand story. Neil revealed that the investigation into Brand was undertaken over four years and used extensive and expensive domestic and international resources of the paper to conduct the investigation. The investigation put both the paper and Channel 4 at legal risk. The idea that this was done to stop Brand’s opinions on his YouTube Channel, seems a stretch.
When asked about the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ cry of the independent podcasters, Neil said, ‘Of course he is innocent until proven guilty, but that’s not the purpose of newspapers to be judge and jury of this.’ He went on to say that there is ‘an incredible amount of stupidity around about this’ largely because of the democratisation of public commentary on social media.
Although I have mixed feelings about the democratisation of media, it is hard to disagree about the stupidity. Andrew Neil said that revealing the kind of information The Times have about Brand, is the duty of mainstream media.
Because of The Times article, more women are coming forward. It is only with the strength and support that these numbers bring that we are likely to see women supported enough to get some cases to a criminal trial.
The attempt to shut down discussion by lecturing raped women about court principles is a cruel form of rape culture that the centre-right needs to rid themselves of immediately.
Brand hid his behaviour in plain sight, in an over-sexualised porn-soaked culture. Many conservatives, like Rachel Wong from Women’s Forum Australia, have warned that our ‘sex positive’ culture is physically and mentally taxing on women and girls. The more constructive approach of some conservatives has been to turn traditional moral discourse into an empirical analysis of the toll that degenerating sexual culture has on the bodies of women and girls.
The only reason I can think that the broader conservative movement is not taking up this more professional approach in mainstream discourse about sexual assault, is that a surge of anti-feminism from the right has allowed many in the centre right to fall into men’s rights narrative of blaming the sexual behaviour of men on women. If the Brand story turns Cosby or Saville in scale, the men who have chastised women for speaking, who are mostly free speech advocates, will receive the public scorn they richly deserve.
If what is true about Brand that has been alleged, not just by women, but by industry insiders, serious questions will have to be asked of the culture that could allow this behaviour to continue and to escalate. We will have to ask again, why a man was given the presumption of innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Edie Wyatt writes on culture, politics, and feminism. She tweets at @msediewyatt, blogs on Substack and you can catch her on Welcome to the Dollhouse
