A Predator Stalks British Light Entertainment Shielded By An Entourage Of Enablers And Contemporary Culture. The Case Of Russell Brand As A Chronicle Aftertold
On Monday 9th November the celebrity comedian, presenter, actor and addict Russell Brand was sentenced to a prison term of ten years and six months after his conviction of the rape of one woman and the sexual assault of three other women after the launch of a police investigations into allegations of sexual offences against him published by the Times and Sunday Times newspapers and broadcast by the Channel 4 documentary Dispatches in 2023.
At least ten more women are expected to come forward with similar accusations against Brand raising the spectre of a Jimmy Saville type tsunami of cases. Mention of another monster sexual predator raises the question of what exactly has changed within British broadcasting environments since Saville stalked the land in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The uncomfortable reality for such august institutions as the BBC, Channel 4 and The Guardian (for whom Brand wrote weekly florid reflections on being a West Ham United supporter) is that he continued to operate despite such red flags as his requests to runners (the lowest rung in the broadcasting and film food chain, invariably young women looking for their foothold in the industry) to bring back contact details for young women) and his explicit jokes about “flashing” on radio.
When one compares the environment in which Saville operated and that in which Brand moved around, then disturbing parallels are revealed. The era of the Swinging Sixties with its radical deconstruction of the class ridden and sexually oppressive social orthodoxies had the unfortunate side effects of facilitating Saville, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter and the other notorious predators of that time because of the lack of awareness of child sexual abuse the actual meaning of consent in sexual relationships.
Because of their enormous cache to the BBC, Saville et al could operate with impunity because of the lack of sexual harassment laws to protect women at work and also because Saville could deploy his mixture of charisma and men to ward off any prying queries. One has to ask if the Cool Britannia culture of the 1990s and the noughties; the risqué content of TV shows like Men Behaving Badly; the proliferation of lads mags like Loaded and FHM and even the iconic rock band Oasis created the zeitgeist that Brand (and maybe others, pace David Walliams) exploited?
Mercifully free of racist and homophobic content, this contemporary pre-manosphere form of masculinity emerged at the time where the material gains of feminism were now clear and also paralleled the emergence of the “laddette” culture. However, despite the advances in legal protection for women at work; in legislation against rape, violence against women and harassment, light entertainment and the media generally remained institutionally sexist industries in which the complaints of women about the behaviour of top male celebrities continued to be brushed aside by executives too focused on the bottom line of audience popularity. The reality in that it has taken the #MeToo movement to out the unsavoury underbelly of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and other totemic symbols of fame and celebrity. When histories and analyses of 21st feminism are written, then #MeToo may well be cited as the transformative moment for women. Where legislation proved insufficient to bring down Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, it was the courage of their women victims allied to the investigative journalistic prowess of Ronan Farrow that delivered justice. On this side of the Atlantic, it was similar cooperation between Russell Brand’s courageous victim and good old “mainstream media” journalistic enquiry which ultimately brought him to book.
The Russell Brand case is certainly a chronicle aftertold of sexism and sexual abuse in the media industries repackaged for the first decades of the 21st century. The comedian Katherine Ryan warned of a “predator” in the entertainment industry.[1] Other female comedians such as Shappi Khorsandi and Kate Smurthwaite have recalled since Brand’s conviction their discomfort of being in his presence. Bob Geldof certainly seemed to have the measure of him as evidenced by their spat at the 2006 New Musical Express (NME) awards which has just resurfaced online when, on being presented by Brand with the NME hero of the year, Sir Bob brushed past him to tell the audience, “Russell Brand, what a c__t”. Brand had announced that he had won by saying “Of course, the winner is Live 8 so please welcome to the stage Sir Bobby Gandolf”. In typically tasteless style, Brand later joked the reason Bob Geldof was “such an expert in famine” is that “he had been dining out” on “I don’t like Mondays for 30 years”.[2]
It is not as if there had not been evidence of Brand’s disgusting attitudes towards women and their rights to bodily integrity on the public record. It is there in his memoir The Booky Wook published years before his arrest. In it a teenage Brand recounts a crush in the early 1990s on a fellow student at the Italia Conti theatre school (from which he was expelled for poor attendance) which led to his pursuit of her through the streets of London and then boarding ticketless on a train to her hometown of Wigan where, despite his admission that she did not want him accompanying her never mind coming to her family home, he did so anyway and bedded her. There, he “lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till she reluctantly removed her bra” before deploying “tears and emotional blackmail to secure the immolation of her knickers.”[3]
Anecdotes such as that and the description of how Brand spat in the face of a lap dancer and smashed the phone of a sex worker did not dissuade critics from showering the book with praise; it reached No.1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list and won biography of the year at the 2008 British Book Awards.[4] I have to personally admit to reading The Booky Wook and not having copped onto those offending passages possibly because, like presumably many other readers, I was mesmerized by his portrait of a seeming eccentric written in his typically florid prose. The content of this autobiography graphically prefigures the bedroom scene of the rape for which he was convicted; the forcible penetration of his victim’s anus and the horrific patina of bodily fluids on the bedsheets which, ever the control freak, he ordered her to clear up in the manner that a powerful politician or business figure would speak to a chambermaid.
Further examples of the career of this sexual monster abound. He was labelled “shagger of the year” by The Sun three times (can one imagine a similar accolade for women transgressors such as Bonny Blue). He enjoyed rock star status (no doubt enhanced by his weird sartorial sense) that propelled him to a sell out standup your and an eponymous show on BBC Radio 2. Audiences laughed as he regaled them with stories of how he enjoyed watching women choke during oral sex. Few questions were asked of his spell in “winky nick;” a rehabilitation clinic that his managers had enrolled him in, and which is used as an alternative to jail for convicted sex offenders. Why were no eyebrows raised when he said in a 2010 follow-up memoir “If this is what I’m telling you, can you imagine what’s being left out?”. Even after the notorious “Sachsgate” affair in October 2008 when he and his guest Jonathan Ross left voicemail messages for the Fawlty Tower actor Andew Sachs boasting of how Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter and the welter of national condemnation it drew including the then PM Gordon Brown, Brand was able to keep his job while Ross was suspended for three months and Radio 2 controller, Lesley Douglas, resigned. He regularly made sexual comments about the station’s newsreader and, rather than taking on board advice from the producer that the newsreader was upset, improvised a song about her reading the bulletins in her underwear.[5]
There are others who have questions to ask, though not those relating to the reputational damage caused to the media institutions. Why did - during his supposed reinvention on his return to the UK in 2014 after the breakup of his marriage to Katy Perry during his time as an actor in the USA - did so many “labour luvvies” such as Owen Jones, Jemima Khan, Ed Miliband and even, as came to light last week, PM Andy Burnham, fawn over him as some sort of progressive icon; somebody who as leader of the Labour Party, felt compelled to be interviewed by Brand on his You Tube channel in order solicit his backing for Labour in the 2015 General Election? Why did George Monbiot and Owen Jones feel compelled to write fawning reviews and introductions to his 2014 book Revolution a menage of faux anti-establishment populism and pop psychology slop on “consciousness”. Who deemed him a suitable authority on drugs to be invited to a parliamentary sub-committee to share his insights? Who deemed him to be a suitable panellist on Question Time or an interviewee with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight where he expounded on his reasons for not voting (a position which he reversed in 2015 when he urged a Labour vote in the General Election of that year.
Despite a concerted campaign since the end of his trial by the Daily Mail to frame the afore mentioned figures on the left as being complicit in the cover up of Brand’s crimes, perhaps the worst they can be accused of is naivety (although Owen Jones has in his condemnation of The Sun for its “persecution” of the disgraced BBC News anchor Huw Edwards has shown himself to be a poor judge of character), no such latitude can be shown to the motley crew of far right “anti-establishment” conspiracist groupies which have surrounded Brand since his move to the USA and reinvention as born again Christian and alternative health guru and to the hundreds of thousands of social media followers he has racked up since the start of his trial attracted like moths to the fire of his anti-WEF, anti-Covid lockdown and vaccination, anti-Ukraine and climate change denial agenda cocktail. The following reaction from Restore UK councillor Owain Clotworthy to Brand’s conviction may be beyond, even in these conspiratorial times, may be beyond the pale of acceptable opinion but judging from the uptick of Brand’s social media followers from the start of his trial, the Overton Window may be shifting, if ever more slightly, in online space.
Posting on X, Cllr Clotworthy claimed Brand was the victim of a “witchhunt” by the elites and urged him to “stay strong.” He wrote “Funny how the real pressure only kicked off once he questioned the elites, rejected the COVID narrative, and publicly found Jesus as his Lord and saviour.” He jibed that his accusers had “dug up old claims from decades ago when he was living a very different life,” dismissing the case as a “show trial.” Brand was “speaking truth,” he insisted.[6]
Unfortunately, such sentiments and accompanying misogynist tropes about “why these women have waited so long?” or that women were to blame for their fate for “throwing themselves at famous men” appeared with depressing regularity on my X feed. Such ancient notions about women’s behaviour before and after the incidence of rape were front and centre of the defence case at Southwark Crown Court. However, in what is surely a landmark moment in English jurisprudence, the trial judge in the sentencing hearing in decisively refuting such arguments explicitly endorsed the “No Means No” principle. The woman’s behaviour did not matter; whether she had drunk to excess or whatever signals she transmitted to the man. Women have the right to wear whatever clothes they wished. The length of time it takes a women to take to bring a rape or sexual assault allegation does not matter (no statute of limitations in other words). He recognised the factors that prevent immediate reporting of rape such as fear of the rapist; the psychological power that her abuser continues to hold over her; the long-lasting effects of trauma and of previous adverse experiences of the judicial process.
Ideally Brand’s involvement with the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, where he has used his star status to criticise vaccines and vaccine mandates, junk food and pharmaceutical companies, should sound the death knell for this movement and all its world. He has heaped praise on MAHA’s figurehead and US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), Jr and Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services and who has been criticised for his promotion of pseudoscience including promotion of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid 19 during the pandemic. During his trial, he took two MAHA Action calls in which he did not address the charges against him but spoke experiencing “the ceremonial pressure of a trial.” True to form, when Brand was a moderator for a segment at the MAHA summit in September (just before the start of his trial), a day-long event that featured RFK, Jr, JD Vance and other Trump administration officials, he and Mehmet Oz kicked off their joint appearance by making a joke about Brand hugging the Secretary of Agriculture backstage which in the words of Oz “took MAHA to a new level.” Brand quipped in reply, “She initiated that contact, I should make that clear, doctor.” An epitaph for Brand Russell.[7]
And the saga continues. As I write this, another of Brand’s former girlfriend, Jemima Khan, has posted details of her experience of his violence and coercive control. But this is Britain’s #MeToo moment. Never before has an entertainer of the public profile like Russell Brand been adjudicated as a sexual predator who displayed stunning levels of arrogance, narcissism, and entitlement in his career in the way in which he was excoriated in Southwark Crown Court today. The victim impact statements of Brand’s prey are vivid testimony to the decades long effect of rape on its victims from feeing useless; fear of and mistrust in relationships; almost physical sickness at the sight of their abuser on TV and loss of confidence.
The Russell Brand case is certainly a chronicle aftertold of sexism and sexual abuse in the media industries repackaged for the first decades of the 21st century. The comedian Katherine Ryan warned of a “predator” in the entertainment industry.[1] Other female comedians such as Shappi Khorsandi and Kate Smurthwaite have recalled since Brand’s conviction their discomfort of being in his presence. Bob Geldof certainly seemed to have the measure of him as evidenced by their spat at the 2006 New Musical Express (NME) awards which has just resurfaced online when, on being presented by Brand with the NME hero of the year, Sir Bob brushed past him to tell the audience, “Russell Brand, what a c__t”. Brand had announced that he had won by saying “Of course, the winner is Live 8 so please welcome to the stage Sir Bobby Gandolf”. In typically tasteless style, Brand later joked the reason Bob Geldof was “such an expert in famine” is that “he had been dining out” on “I don’t like Mondays for 30 years”.[2]
It is not as if there had not been evidence of Brand’s disgusting attitudes towards women and their rights to bodily integrity on the public record. It is there in his memoir The Booky Wook published years before his arrest. In it a teenage Brand recounts a crush in the early 1990s on a fellow student at the Italia Conti theatre school (from which he was expelled for poor attendance) which led to his pursuit of her through the streets of London and then boarding ticketless on a train to her hometown of Wigan where, despite his admission that she did not want him accompanying her never mind coming to her family home, he did so anyway and bedded her. There, he “lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till she reluctantly removed her bra” before deploying “tears and emotional blackmail to secure the immolation of her knickers.”[3]
Anecdotes such as that and the description of how Brand spat in the face of a lap dancer and smashed the phone of a sex worker did not dissuade critics from showering the book with praise; it reached No.1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list and won biography of the year at the 2008 British Book Awards.[4] I have to personally admit to reading The Booky Wook and not having copped onto those offending passages possibly because, like presumably many other readers, I was mesmerized by his portrait of a seeming eccentric written in his typically florid prose. The content of this autobiography graphically prefigures the bedroom scene of the rape for which he was convicted; the forcible penetration of his victim’s anus and the horrific patina of bodily fluids on the bedsheets which, ever the control freak, he ordered her to clear up in the manner that a powerful politician or business figure would speak to a chambermaid.
Further examples of the career of this sexual monster abound. He was labelled “shagger of the year” by The Sun three times (can one imagine a similar accolade for women transgressors such as Bonny Blue). He enjoyed rock star status (no doubt enhanced by his weird sartorial sense) that propelled him to a sell out standup your and an eponymous show on BBC Radio 2. Audiences laughed as he regaled them with stories of how he enjoyed watching women choke during oral sex. Few questions were asked of his spell in “winky nick;” a rehabilitation clinic that his managers had enrolled him in, and which is used as an alternative to jail for convicted sex offenders. Why were no eyebrows raised when he said in a 2010 follow-up memoir “If this is what I’m telling you, can you imagine what’s being left out?”. Even after the notorious “Sachsgate” affair in October 2008 when he and his guest Jonathan Ross left voicemail messages for the Fawlty Tower actor Andew Sachs boasting of how Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter and the welter of national condemnation it drew including the then PM Gordon Brown, Brand was able to keep his job while Ross was suspended for three months and Radio 2 controller, Lesley Douglas, resigned. He regularly made sexual comments about the station’s newsreader and, rather than taking on board advice from the producer that the newsreader was upset, improvised a song about her reading the bulletins in her underwear.[5]
There are others who have questions to ask, though not those relating to the reputational damage caused to the media institutions. Why did - during his supposed reinvention on his return to the UK in 2014 after the breakup of his marriage to Katy Perry during his time as an actor in the USA - did so many “labour luvvies” such as Owen Jones, Jemima Khan, Ed Miliband and even, as came to light last week, PM Andy Burnham, fawn over him as some sort of progressive icon; somebody who as leader of the Labour Party, felt compelled to be interviewed by Brand on his You Tube channel in order solicit his backing for Labour in the 2015 General Election? Why did George Monbiot and Owen Jones feel compelled to write fawning reviews and introductions to his 2014 book Revolution a menage of faux anti-establishment populism and pop psychology slop on “consciousness”. Who deemed him a suitable authority on drugs to be invited to a parliamentary sub-committee to share his insights? Who deemed him to be a suitable panellist on Question Time or an interviewee with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight where he expounded on his reasons for not voting (a position which he reversed in 2015 when he urged a Labour vote in the General Election of that year.
Despite a concerted campaign since the end of his trial by the Daily Mail to frame the afore mentioned figures on the left as being complicit in the cover up of Brand’s crimes, perhaps the worst they can be accused of is naivety (although Owen Jones has in his condemnation of The Sun for its “persecution” of the disgraced BBC News anchor Huw Edwards has shown himself to be a poor judge of character), no such latitude can be shown to the motley crew of far right “anti-establishment” conspiracist groupies which have surrounded Brand since his move to the USA and reinvention as born again Christian and alternative health guru and to the hundreds of thousands of social media followers he has racked up since the start of his trial attracted like moths to the fire of his anti-WEF, anti-Covid lockdown and vaccination, anti-Ukraine and climate change denial agenda cocktail. The following reaction from Restore UK councillor Owain Clotworthy to Brand’s conviction may be beyond, even in these conspiratorial times, may be beyond the pale of acceptable opinion but judging from the uptick of Brand’s social media followers from the start of his trial, the Overton Window may be shifting, if ever more slightly, in online space.
Posting on X, Cllr Clotworthy claimed Brand was the victim of a “witchhunt” by the elites and urged him to “stay strong.” He wrote “Funny how the real pressure only kicked off once he questioned the elites, rejected the COVID narrative, and publicly found Jesus as his Lord and saviour.” He jibed that his accusers had “dug up old claims from decades ago when he was living a very different life,” dismissing the case as a “show trial.” Brand was “speaking truth,” he insisted.[6]
Unfortunately, such sentiments and accompanying misogynist tropes about “why these women have waited so long?” or that women were to blame for their fate for “throwing themselves at famous men” appeared with depressing regularity on my X feed. Such ancient notions about women’s behaviour before and after the incidence of rape were front and centre of the defence case at Southwark Crown Court. However, in what is surely a landmark moment in English jurisprudence, the trial judge in the sentencing hearing in decisively refuting such arguments explicitly endorsed the “No Means No” principle. The woman’s behaviour did not matter; whether she had drunk to excess or whatever signals she transmitted to the man. Women have the right to wear whatever clothes they wished. The length of time it takes a women to take to bring a rape or sexual assault allegation does not matter (no statute of limitations in other words). He recognised the factors that prevent immediate reporting of rape such as fear of the rapist; the psychological power that her abuser continues to hold over her; the long-lasting effects of trauma and of previous adverse experiences of the judicial process.
Ideally Brand’s involvement with the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, where he has used his star status to criticise vaccines and vaccine mandates, junk food and pharmaceutical companies, should sound the death knell for this movement and all its world. He has heaped praise on MAHA’s figurehead and US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), Jr and Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services and who has been criticised for his promotion of pseudoscience including promotion of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid 19 during the pandemic. During his trial, he took two MAHA Action calls in which he did not address the charges against him but spoke experiencing “the ceremonial pressure of a trial.” True to form, when Brand was a moderator for a segment at the MAHA summit in September (just before the start of his trial), a day-long event that featured RFK, Jr, JD Vance and other Trump administration officials, he and Mehmet Oz kicked off their joint appearance by making a joke about Brand hugging the Secretary of Agriculture backstage which in the words of Oz “took MAHA to a new level.” Brand quipped in reply, “She initiated that contact, I should make that clear, doctor.” An epitaph for Brand Russell.[7]
And the saga continues. As I write this, another of Brand’s former girlfriend, Jemima Khan, has posted details of her experience of his violence and coercive control. But this is Britain’s #MeToo moment. Never before has an entertainer of the public profile like Russell Brand been adjudicated as a sexual predator who displayed stunning levels of arrogance, narcissism, and entitlement in his career in the way in which he was excoriated in Southwark Crown Court today. The victim impact statements of Brand’s prey are vivid testimony to the decades long effect of rape on its victims from feeing useless; fear of and mistrust in relationships; almost physical sickness at the sight of their abuser on TV and loss of confidence.
But at least Brand did not evade justice as Saville did before him. The story of Russell Brand is the story of how unequal power relationships in the entertainment industry facilitated this evil predator’s casual disrespect for women and the norms of civilised behaviour and of, in general, the fear and aura wielded by powerful men, be it in business, the media, sports or politics. The call by the Culture and Media Secretary Lisa Nandy for media industries to sign up to the Creative Industry Standards Authority, an industry body that protects whistleblowers, as part of her candid admission on the Laura Kuenssberg Show that women have not been protected in unregulated media environments is certainly a significant step in the right direction. Legal reforms to tackle the pervasive myths about rape which the judge so effectively took apart may also be in the pipeline.
Lastly a message to those who claimed that Russell Brand was targeted because he was anti-vax or anti-Ukraine such as Max Blumenthal, Jimmy Dore, George Galloway, Jackson Hinkle, Tucker Carlson, and Briahna Joy Gray: Fuck You!
Lastly a message to those who claimed that Russell Brand was targeted because he was anti-vax or anti-Ukraine such as Max Blumenthal, Jimmy Dore, George Galloway, Jackson Hinkle, Tucker Carlson, and Briahna Joy Gray: Fuck You!
References
[1] Brand suspected of carrying out attacks on at least 10 more women. The Guardian. 7th November 2026 p.6
[2] Throwback to Bob Geldof’s famous foul-mouthed exchange with Russell Brand.” The London Economic. 6th November 2026
[3] Geraldine McKenzie. Hiding in plain sight. How star got away with predatory behaviour. The Guardian. 6th November 2026 pp.2-3
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Aaron Newbury, Outrage as rapist Rusell Brand defended by Reform councillor. Daily Express 7th November 2026.
[7] Michelle R. Smith Brand appeared with allies of Trump during rape trial. The Guardian. 7th November 2026 p.8
[1] Brand suspected of carrying out attacks on at least 10 more women. The Guardian. 7th November 2026 p.6
[2] Throwback to Bob Geldof’s famous foul-mouthed exchange with Russell Brand.” The London Economic. 6th November 2026
[3] Geraldine McKenzie. Hiding in plain sight. How star got away with predatory behaviour. The Guardian. 6th November 2026 pp.2-3
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Aaron Newbury, Outrage as rapist Rusell Brand defended by Reform councillor. Daily Express 7th November 2026.
[7] Michelle R. Smith Brand appeared with allies of Trump during rape trial. The Guardian. 7th November 2026 p.8
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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