Russell Brand has spent the past decade telling the world not to trust the mainstream media industry. Now the comedian will find out whether the wider public has bought into this scorched-earth narrative – or if they believe the claims of rape and sexual assault reported in the Sunday Times and on Channel 4 over the weekend.
The allegations against Brand – which he denies – once again leave the British media industry reeling from claims that a prominent man was able to misuse his position for sexual pleasure.
What’s different from previous cases is that the prominent man has already largely stopped working with the big media institutions. Instead, Brand largely exists in a parallel world where his income comes from podcasting, YouTube advertising revenue, and selling membership of his online community to become one of Russell Brand’s “awakened wonders”; fans gain access to interviews with the likes of the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and anti-vaccine US Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy.
As a result, although he has been dropped by his agents and could find it a challenge to attract mainstream advertisers, the damage to Brand’s current career may be limited by his decision to spend recent years building a fanbase based around rightwing talking points and Covid vaccine scepticism. Brand’s own denial suggested “there’s a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces and these kind of voices” – implying that he is being targeted for getting close to the truth.
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, sent a supportive message to Brand suggesting journalists were writing the story because “they don’t like competition”. Andrew Tate, the misogynistic influencer facing human trafficking charges, sent a message of solidarity. The Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson said her first thought on reading about such claims “is to wonder why They are trying to silence the person”.
Yet there are still questions for mainstream British broadcasters to answer, even if Brand has not appeared on their programmes in recent years. The BBC and Channel 4, who employed Brand at the peak of his fame in the 2000s, have said they do not have records of complaints against Brand during that era or have failed to answer questions, citing privacy concerns. They also say they now have much improved processes for reporting sexual harassment in the workplace.
At the same time, the Sunday Times reports that staff who worked with Brand in that period claimed that his sexual behaviour was well known – less an open secret and more just open. Hypersexualisation and graphic descriptions of sexual desire were part of his public persona – which is not illegal, but may have been considered red flags by those hiring him to present shows.
One junior staff member on a programme claims they used to be asked to pick up audience members for Brand to sleep with, describing how they felt as if they were “acting like pimps to Russell Brand’s needs”. Television executives who worked on those shows are still active in the industry.
The BBC – who let Brand go in 2008 after he left sexual messages on the phone of the actor Andrew Sachs – will be reviewing its notes relating to that scandal. That investigation was led by the current BBC director general, Tim Davie.
Brand was clearly aware of the power he had in the media at the height of his fame. During Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary, there is a clip of the comedian telling Lorraine Kelly: “If you’re in a position of some success, people will let you be a nutter as long as they’re making money out of it.”
The allegations also raise questions for the agents and advisers who worked with him during that era, such as John Noel Management. The well-established celebrity agency told the Sunday Times that for legal reasons they were not in a position to respond to questions. There is also the unnamed legal representative who, one of the alleged victims claims, wrote an aggressive letter on Brand’s behalf when she tried to raise the issue of her alleged sexual assault in 2020.
Multiple newspapers and broadcasters had looked into various allegations against Brand in recent years, but several failed to get their stories to a position where they could be published. In the end it took teams of journalists working for three separate outlets – the Sunday Times, The Times, and Channel 4’s Dispatches – to combine their reporting to get the story to the public.
According to the Sunday Times, their initial inquiries began almost five years ago, while some of the staff who worked on the Dispatches part of the investigation moved on to other careers because of the time it took to finish the show. The public appetite for the reporting is there: the Dispatches documentary was watched live by 1.8 million people on Saturday night, a large audience for Channel 4 in this era.
After the #MeToo movement came to global prominence because of reporting about the film producer Harvey Weinstein, many high-profile men lost their careers when women came forward with allegations of sexual impropriety. In the intervening years, many have questioned the depth and scale of change in the industry. In 2019, one comedian declared themselves on board with this reckoning, calling #MeToo “a really positive change” and “a sign of real awakening”. That person was Russell Brand.
