Russell Brand’s response to allegations of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse has been “insulting”, one of his accusers has said, as she claimed he sent a BBC car to bring her to him from the gates of her school when she was a 16-year-old pupil.
Alice, who spoke under a pseudonym to protect her anonymity, has told the Sunday Times that Brand started a relationship with her when she was a teenage schoolgirl and he a 31-year-old man with fame and influence.
Since he was informed by reporters that those allegations – and others made by several other women – were to become public, Brand has denied them and sought to portray them as part of a mainstream media attack on him. He has cast himself as an outsider and a threat to media interests in a video posted on his YouTube channel, in keeping with much of the recent content there and on his accounts on other social media outlets.
Hours after the reports emerged on Saturday, he appeared onstage for a scheduled performance at the Troubadour Wembley Park theatre in London, thanking his audience for their applause and telling them: “There’s some things I cannot talk about and hopefully you appreciate that. I’m going to give you everything I’ve got.”
“It’s insulting,” Alice told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on Monday. “And it’s laughable that he would even imply that this is some kind of mainstream media conspiracy. He’s not outside the mainstream – he did a Universal Pictures movie last year, he did Minions, a children’s movie.
“He is very much part of the mainstream media, he just happens to have a YouTube channel where he talks about conspiracy theories to an audience that laps it up. And, it may sound cynical, but I do think that he was building himself an audience for years of people that would then have great distrust of any publication that came forward with allegations. He knew it was coming for a long time.
“And then, as for him denying that anything non-consensual happened. That’s not a surprise to me. These men always deny any of the allegations brought to them – I knew he would. What he didn’t deny was that he had a relationship with a 16-year-old.”
Alice added that Brand would send a car to collect her. She said he had two accounts that she knew of – one with the BBC, and one independent of his work for the broadcaster. She said she recognised at the time the difference between the two and could, therefore, be confident one of those sent to collect her from school to go see Brand was provided to him by the BBC.
A BBC spokesperson said: “The documentary and associated reports contained serious allegations, spanning a number of years. Russell Brand worked on BBC radio programmes between 2006 and 2008 and we are urgently looking into the issues raised.”
