Brand

by Michael Patrick O'Leary

Brand

I have been putting off writing about Russell Brand. I did not want to get involved but the nonsense has reached such a pitch that I have to do something. I am finding it depressing that so many people whose support  for  Johnny Depp I admired last year are now foolishly accepting Brand’s own account of himself as a hero and a victim. It seems that because Depp was falsely accused, Brand must also be falsely accused, because that is what evil women do to men. Some of the people taking this line are women. Brand is Weinstein not Depp. More  Jimmy Savile. Interesting to see that Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have supported Brand.

I do not propose to go into the gory details of the allegations . You will be able to find that material in many  places. I do want to look at some of the issues raised by Brand’s defenders. I have studied the testimony of many people who encountered him on the comedy circuit or  interviewed him for the dreaded “mainstream media.”

Why so long?

Some of the alleged behaviour goes back to 2003. Why are the Sunday Times, the Times  and Channel 4 only bringing up these allegations twenty years later? You could look at this another way  –  they conducted a long, painstaking, patient, thorough investigation and restrained themselves from publishing until they were sure that they had a strong case. Journalists investigating Brand interviewed hundreds of sources and seen private emails, texts, medical and therapists’ notes as well as submitting freedom of information requests, scrutinising Brand’s books, interviews and broadcasts to corroborate allegations. Britain has notoriously strong libel laws. Brand has engaged lawyers well-versed in the art of “reputation management.’’

Developments in UK privacy laws in the last 25 years have made it more difficult to publish critical material. Catherine Belton’s book Putin’s People shows how KGB men created the world’s most dangerous rogue state. Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea football club, three other Russian billionaires and Putin’s energy company Rosneft sued Belton and her publishers, HarperCollins. The lawyers they employed to destroy Belton and prevent her book from being published included Hugh Tomlinson QC. Tomlinson has generally been regarded as one of the human rights good guys. HarperCollins paid £1.5m to settle in private. HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the villain Hacked Off was established to fight.

Bill Browder had large investments in Russia but became a crusader against Russian corruption. Sergei Magnitsky was a young lawyer working for Browder. Magnitsky accused Russian officials of a massive tax fraud but was himself arrested and accused of the crime. While in custody he was tortured and died in 2009. Browder pointed the finger at Lieutenant Colonel Karpov, of the Russian Ministry of the Interior. In 2013, Karpov hired a top legal team to sue Browder for libel through the High Court in London. Karpov’s legal team was led by top QC Andrew Caldecott, but he was instructed by the high-profile media lawyer Geraldine Proudler, who previously sat on the board of the Guardian’s regulators the Scott Trust, which, in the words of CP Scott, the Manchester Guardian’s great editor, exists to promote ”honesty, cleanness, courage, fairness and a sense of duty to the reader” at the Guardian.

Journalists investigating Brand knew that he had accepted “substantial” libel damages from the Sun on Sunday over the false claim that he cheated on his girlfriend Jemima Khan. The couple were granted an anti-harassment injunction against a masseuse, after police said there was no case to answer over her claims that Brand had assaulted her. Suzanne Moore received a lawyer’s letter for merely suggesting that Brand used a ghost writer.

Victims have little financial backing if they decide to tell their stories. One London law firm uses the ploy of suing the individual whistleblower rather than the journalist or the newspaper.Is it any wonder that women remain silent?

Why did the accusers not go to the police?

Anybody  heard of Wayne Couzens or David Carrick or Charing Cross Police Station?

On the evening of 3 March 2021, 33-year-old Sarah Everard was kidnapped when  walking home to Brixton Hill from Clapham Common. She was stopped by off-duty Metropolitan Police constable Wayne Couzens who identified himself as a police officer, handcuffed her, and placed her in his car before driving her to Dover where he raped and strangled her, before burning her body and disposing of her remains in a nearby pond. Couzens’s appalling  behaviour had long been known to colleagues. No action was taken after an alleged incident of indecent exposure in 2015, and  there were at least two other accusations of indecent exposure that had not been properly investigated.

In February 2023, David Carrick was  jailed for life for a 17-year rampage  of crimes against women. Carrick  had correctly thought that being a  Metropolitan police officer made him “untouchable”. He raped and assaulted  at least 12 women and  intimidated them into silence. Carrick, a firearms officer, like Wayne Couzens, was trusted to guard parliament and diplomatic sites. The Met missed clue after clue about the danger he posed. He was eventually caught and  will spend at least 30 years in prison.

An  inquiry was launched in March 2018 into nine linked independent investigations concerning serving police officers from the Met. Investigations began after an officer allegedly had sex with a vulnerable woman in a room inside Charing Cross police station. Of the 14 officers investigated, two were dismissed for gross misconduct and put on the barred list, preventing future employment with the police. Another two resigned and several others faced disciplinary action. Nine continued to serve with the force, while another  worked as a contractor in a staff role. The officers were bullying, racist, sexist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, homophobic, and used derogatory words to describe people with disabilities. The inquiry found evidence of messages exchanged between officers that were often highly sexualised, violent and discriminatory, and which were defended as “banter” by police officers. Banter is often used as an excuse. A trawl of police databases found  that 161 Metropolitan Police officers – roughly one in 200 – have criminal convictions, including three who committed sex offences while employed by Britain’s largest force.

Imagine going to a police station to report any sexual assault let alone an assault by a famous person known for his sexualised banter.

As Stephen Bush wrote in the Financial Times: “Yes, being a police officer is demanding, but between the inquiry into the killing of Daniel Morgan, the murder of Sarah Everard, and the bungled investigation into the serial killer Stephen Port, there is plenty of evidence that the Met Police requires root-and-branch reform, and that pabulum statements about the difficulty of policing won’t cut it.”

Chances of conviction

Only 5% of rapes that were given an outcome by the police in the year ending December 2021 resulted in a charge.

The process of reporting a  crime at  a police station can be quite harrowing. Way back in the early seventies my pocket was picked and I was threatened with a knife. I had intended to try to forget the matter but was advised by a friend whose father was a senior police officer to report it. I went to Moss Side police station and was treated with contempt. There was a lot of humiliating banter. It must be so much worse for a woman who has suffered the trauma of a violent sexual assault. She will have to go through all the embarrassing details, endure a physical examination, hand over her knickers and her phone and prepare to be slut-shamed by the defence (and the police).

In her 2021/22 Annual Report, Dame Vera Baird, the Victims Commissioner, wrote: “Campaigners have coined the phrase ‘digital strip-search’ to describe the routine requests for a rape complainant to hand over their mobile phone almost immediately upon making a complaint. Historically, the phone’s contents have been comprehensively downloaded and fully scrutinised. Independent Sexual Violence Advisers are clear that a failure to hand over the phone frequently results in the investigation almost immediately being closed. Victims are effectively being forced to choose between justice and their right to a private life.” An unpublished inquiry by the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) reported that 60% of demands for phone downloads were “irrational and over-intrusive”. There seems  more concern for the accused than for the victim. “The victim’s credibility is put under the microscope by the police and CPS in a way that would not happen with any other kind of complainant. This intrusion is in contravention of most established legal frameworks, which require such requests to be ‘reasonable and proportionate’ in pursuit of content which forms part of a reasonable line of enquiry.” Information gleaned from this process is routinely used by defence lawyers to demolish the reputation and good character of the accuser.

In her report, Dame Vera continues: “For victims, reporting rape is effectively a lottery and the odds are rarely in your favour. In the year to December 2021, there were 67,125 rape offences recorded – an all-time high. Yet the number of completed rape prosecutions plummeted from 5,190 in 2016-17 to just 2,409 in 2020-21. The numbers of convictions almost halved (2,689 in 2016/17 compared to 1,409 in 2020/21). Only 5% of rapes that were given an outcome by the police in the year ending December 2021 resulted in a charge.”

Reporting the rape is enough of an ordeal but the brave accuser then has to endure the Kafkaesque nightmare of the law’s delay. If she is lucky she will get a trial as soon as three years from the date of reporting the crime. There will be many cancellations and postponement, often just hours before a scheduled court hearing. Dame Vera:” You will have lost sleep dreading re-visiting what happened at the trial only to have to get over it and draw your resolve together again. You will be tested at every juncture.”

Dame Vera writes: “ Some victims tell me they find their experience in court worse than the offence itself.”

They are cowards for being anonymous.

See above about Wayne Couzens and David Carrick.

Someone who has encountered sexual harassment on the comedy circuit said that she is often challenged: “‘Well tell us the other names.’ But no, I’ve done it before, I’ve described these incidents and people don’t hear me, they don’t believe me. They say: ‘That’s a very serious allegation, I hope you’ve taken it to the police,’ and ultimately I lose work. And I can’t do that over and over again.”

The system has let victims down. They have not been listened to and now those brave enough to speak are being called cowards for remaining anonymous. These accusers are not anonymous. They have not told their stories and run away with a bag over the head. Their identities are known to the investigators  (and have been passed on to the police) but names are being withheld in the interests of  safety and privacy.

This is a conspiracy by the msm to bring Brand down because he is a threat.

The thing that really sticks in my craw is that people are regarding Brand as some kind of messiah who has earned the wrath of the rich and powerful because he is somehow a threat to them. What infantile arrogance! Remember when GW Bush reinvented himself as a cornball dumbass hick fighting against the elites  when he was from the American aristocracy and plutocracy himself? Trump appeals to the dispossessed masses even though he would never have got where he is if he had not had a rich crook for a father.

Brand rails against the “mainstream media”. On the Dispatches documentary, he was accused of rape, assault and emotional abuse between 2006 and 2013, when he was at the height of his fame working for the BBC, Channel 4 and starring in Hollywood films. He was nurtured by the Guardian, the BBC, Channel 4, Prospect. He was guest editor of the New Statesman (that organ also gave a home to child sex abuser Peter Wilby). Brand is part of the msm. He has 6.6 million followers on YouTube. Is Google a small independent truth teller? Surely YouTube is owned by one of the biggest, most influential corporations on the planet!

Readers of Prospect magazine voted Brand the fourth most influential thinker in the world in 2015. I am more in agreement with the reviewer who criticised Brand for his “constant changes of tone from whimsical memoir to sombre pseudo-philosophic discourse”, describing his book as “unpleasantly jarring” and “gratingly predictable”.

Some YouTubers who were in the Johnny Depp camp are beginning to see that Brand is not Depp Brand is not actually addressing the allegations against him in the videos he has put out. He  did claim to have witnesses to refute the allegations but there is no indication that there was a third party present at the time of the alleged assaults. When he made the first video he had not seen the documentary. He must merely mean that he can find a few people who will say that he is not the kind of chap who would do that kind of thing. He spent many years boasting about doing that kind of thing. In the second video, he did not bring forward any new evidence but merely waved his arms about and went through the usual rant about msm, big pharma, war sucks etc.  How much like Trump and Netanyahu or Dave Spart!

Why did he change direction?

It is not so much that mainstream media found him a threat, but more that he became  a liability. There are those on the comedy circuit who suggest that his work was drying up because his misogynistic and bullying behaviour was an open secret and people were avoiding working with him. John Gapper writing in the Financial Times saw Brand’s behaviour and the behaviour of other male “talent” as similar to “hazing” in American universities or “ragging’’ in Sri Lankan colleges. Gapper writes: “Many industries used to tolerate abuse of women, and even encourage it as a hazing ritual. Many men took advantage of that to push their sexual luck. But television, in the UK and many other places, enabled it in a particular manner.” There has been a suggestion that he found out that he was being investigated (he talks about hearing that contacts were being asked questions about him) and   that he left “polite society” and decided to gather  a new group of fans who were anti-feminist and would rally around him when it all hit the fan.

Someone on the comedy circuit said: “He’s not a ‘valuable voice’. He spews lying rightwing agitprop. That’s why the other rightwing propagandists (the Really Bad People) are enthusiastically supporting him. He actually is a Really Bad Person.”

A female comic was quoted by the  Guardian. “If you’ve created a society where we all laugh at that behaviour, or are expected to laugh at that behaviour, you’re going to make people feel like their feelings don’t matter, that their interpretation of the event is flawed or they’re being oversensitive.”

Trial by media

Anyone is innocent until proven guilty. Evidence is important. There are different standards of proof for civil cases and for criminal cases. We have “on the balance of probabilities” and we have “beyond a reasonable doubt.” There is a different standard for the court of public opinion. Some are claiming that the court of public opinion encourages witch hunts. Are we not allowed to discuss a case until we have sufficient evidence to satisfy the Crown Prosecution Service? It is clear that discussion cannot be stopped. It is what it is. We have seen that very few rape cases ever get to court and even fewer result in a conviction. If it were not for the efforts of the media, Harvey Weinstein would never have been convicted.

Suzanne Moore puts Brand’s defenders in their place: “The ‘truth’ he tells is always going to be more important to them than the truth that a few damaged women tell. It was ever thus.”