When Sexual Assault Is Schtick
· The Atlantic
The criminal trial of Russell Brand took less than four weeks, at the end of which the comedian turned spiritual influencer was found guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. (The jury in London declared him not guilty of three other charges, two of rape and one of attempted indecent assault.) The accounts detailed by Brand’s accusers were harrowing. The Christianity-themed podcast episodes broadcast by Brand and his wife, Laura, before and during the trial—their regular series is titled Sunday Service With the Brands—were so audacious that they were hard to process. In one installment, Brand interrupted his own monologue on how a Bible passage from Ephesians helped him prepare for court each day (“Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled round your waist”) so that he could read a sponsored ad for Polymarket.
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Still, what shocked me most during the trial was how many of the women detailed assaults that they said happened to them while they were at work. One complainant testified that while she was employed at MTV in 2001, Brand had tried to drag her into the office bathroom for sex, becoming a “wild-eyed maniac,” in her words. (Brand was found not guilty on this charge.) Another complainant stated that Brand had squeezed her breasts and kissed her in broad view of his entourage while she was working at the radio station Choice FM in the mid-2000s, a charge on which he was convicted. A woman working for the British national TV broadcaster Channel 4 in 2009 testified that Brand had refused to film one day unless she gave him a massage, and when she’d acquiesced, he’d buried his face in her crotch while two of his associates watched and laughed. (Brand was also found guilty of this charge.)
In court, Brand’s accusers were asked whether they’d told anyone else what had happened to them at the time (yes, they had told colleagues, two out of three of the above women said), and what had happened in response (nothing). The line of questioning was perhaps necessary in a court of law but seemed ironic given that Brand’s entire career throughout the 2000s was built on transgressions very like the ones detailed in court, broadcast as national entertainment.
[Read: The unspeakable, enabled]
It’s easy to forget, deep into Brand’s third and fourth professional reincarnations as an online conspiracy theorist and an evangelist, that he became famous for relentless provocation. His persona—a mix of lolloping Dickensian scoundrel, glam-rock dandy, and grinning sexual deviant—was unique when he broke out as a comic in 2000. In a moment when the cheerful sexism of 1990s British culture was edging toward a darker mode, Brand’s willingness to violate every moral and social code was the core of his identity.
In 2001, the day after 9/11, he was fired by MTV after showing up to work dressed as Osama bin Laden, with his own drug dealer in tow. In 2002, he filmed scenes for his satellite-TV show, Re:Brand, during which he took baths with an unhoused person and masturbated a man in a pub bathroom. (In his defense, he later specified, he was on crack and heroin at the time.) That year, Brand was also fired from his XFM radio show for reading pornographic material on the air. But every time he lost a job, he gained a better and more prestigious one.
One woman testified in court that at a party in Soho in 2004—the same year that Brand was hired for his most high-profile gig yet, as the host of a show spun off from the smash reality series Big Brother—he’d grabbed her breasts and forced his penis into her mouth (he was convicted of only the former act). In 2006, the same year that he began hosting a BBC Radio Six show, Brand asked the TV presenter Vanessa Feltz, on another of his shows, whether he could “have it off” with her daughters, and harassed the singer Dannii Minogue so committedly that she described him as a “vile predator” who “wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
All of this—the ritualistic diminishment of women doing their jobs, the ironic cruelty, the swaggering priapism—was so much a part of Brand’s schtick that it must have been what producers and commissioners liked about him. British culture was deeply confused about sex at the time: The waning anxiety of the AIDS era and the nascent force of the internet meant that sexual imagery was suddenly everywhere, and no one seemed to know the rules anymore. As a teenager in 1999, just home from school, I watched the pop stars Geri Halliwell and Kylie Minogue arm-wrestle and then make out on camera for the Channel 4 series TFI Friday, while the host, Chris Evans, cheered them on and replayed the footage, eyes darting out of his head like a cartoon coyote. In 2008, the BBC TV presenter Jonathan Ross simply told Gwyneth Paltrow on his talk show that he “would fuck her.”
Brand could only have emerged in this postfeminist moment, when people were still sanguine about objectifying women for sport, and not yet jaded by the extremities of the internet. What do people commonly do when they’re shocked? They laugh. Brand’s body of comedic work is made up of so many offenses, detailed by Brand himself in baroque and head-spinning verbiage, that to try to take stock of them all now feels like trying to compile the dictionary. In his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook (supposedly titled after the Nadsat dialect spoken by the rapist marauders in A Clockwork Orange), Brand describes, during high school, badgering a teenage girl named Penny for sex: “I painted verbal pictures and begged until she kissed me, I lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till reluctantly she removed her bra, I used tears and emotional blackmail to secure the immolation of her knickers.”
[Read: No, women aren’t the problem]
Early in the days of his BBC radio show, Brand called a female newscaster “erotic,” saying, “We’re going to get under that desk and we’re gonna unleash hell on your thighs, woman.” (The woman complained to colleagues, causing Brand to further mock her on the air. “The producer just told me that we’ve upset her,” he said on another show. “They go, ‘She ain’t got the right to reply.’”) To Piers Morgan, in a 2006 GQ interview, Brand said that although he’d likely slept with close to 2,000 women, “I resent the word ‘predator.’ I like to think of myself as a conduit of natural forces. After all, the most natural thing in the world for people to do is f*, isn’t it? And people want to do it, so all you have to do is remove all the reasons why women don’t actually go through with it.”
Brand’s defense lawyers, and his own testimony in court, maintained throughout that although he’d been an admitted—and eventually repentant—philanderer during the height of his fame, he had never had sex with a woman without her consent. The jury disagreed. The judge said yesterday that Brand will likely face “significant” time in prison, given the gravity of the offenses of which he was found guilty.
It’s notable that in the years following 2010, as Brand’s acting roles puttered out and rumors circulated about what he was like to work with, he had to constantly reinvent himself to try to keep people’s attention. But his role at the beginning of the 21st century as the glinty-eyed, chaotic, intensely self-obsessed purveyor of sexual discomfort made him a mascot for his era, and he was enabled by far more people than will ever admit to it. “There was a culture of fear,” one of the complainants said in court about Channel 4, her workplace when Brand assaulted her. “Russell Brand was an A-lister star, it was Big Brother, people were watching it, we all watched it.”