The ‘truth’ about Russell Brand

By now, everyone is aware that Russell Brand has been accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse – allegations that he strongly denies.

While these are serious matters for the police and other professionals to investigate, something I find curious is what Brand has said about them publicly, in his own defence.

In his very first video – released a day before the news broke of a joint investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4 Dispatches – Brand said the allegations “make me question is there another agenda at play?” He goes on to say, “I’m aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while ‘watch out Russell they're coming for you’, ‘you're getting too close to the truth’.”

Which begs the question – what truth? 

Just before the investigation was published on 16 September, Brand’s most recent videos were on the Covid vaccine, Big Pharma, the war in Ukraine, the JFK assassination, an interview with “Hitler was OK until he tried to globalise” Candace Owens, and one about Bill Gates doing something with fruit. 

To me, that sounds less like someone who is getting “too close to the truth” and more like someone who is mining topics they know are catnip for fans of conspiracies. 

Fortunately for multimillionaire Brand, numerous other multimillionaires – and at least one billionaire – have leapt to his defence. Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump Jr, Steven Crowder – the list seems to grow by the day. In fact, if Brand has many more ultra-wealthy people and oligarchs defending him there won’t be much of an establishment left to threaten. And one might think, with friends like those, who needs the deep state as an enemy? 

To me – and I might be wrong – all this talk of being “too close to the truth” sounds like bulls***. 

Brand is not a threat to any elites – not now and not when he was at the height of his fame. He’s not that important.

The allegations (so far) range from 2006 to 2013, during which time Brand had his first major film role in the British comedy St Trinian’s (2007), then went to Hollywood to make Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), Get Him to the Greek (2010), Arthur (2011), and Rock of Ages (2012). He also voiced characters in the first two Despicable Me films, as well as an animated feature called Hop, about the son of the Easter bunny who runs away to become a drummer. 

Then, in 2013, Brand did an interview with Jeremy Paxman where he said he never votes, and that same year released his stand-up special, Messiah Complex, in which he describes getting arrested for masturbating on top of a police van.

Yes, I imagine the deep state were terrified. 

If the allegations are proven to be true and there is shown to be contemporaneous evidence (such as texts, rape treatment centre admission, months of therapy notes, etc), will we then be expected to stretch our imaginations even further and entertain the possibility that a nefarious shadowy elite planted those things on the off-chance they would need them in the future? Sowing useful seeds – over a decade before – just in case the guy who was doing the voice of a cartoon rabbit started questioning a vaccine that hadn’t yet been invented?

If so, God only knows what secret files of kompromat are still being held on the surviving cast of Watership Down.

Brand can rail against the corporate media as much as he likes, but a very simple and provable truth is: he’s part of it. His show is on Rumble, a media platform backed by (you probably guessed) a huge Wall Street corporation – Cantor Fitzgerald – and has in the past few years been receiving investment from a group of prominent conservative venture capitalists, including JD Vance and the tech billionaire Peter Thiel. You know, the little guys. The underdogs who fight against the elites.

“But why are we just hearing about all of this now?” ask people who seem to have never heard of NDAs, super injunctions, libel laws or a suite of other legal tools that might keep someone from being able to speak out publicly – for years.

Another grim truth is, if you were an all-powerful deep state and wanted to cancel someone because they posed a serious threat, you wouldn’t accuse them of rape, because not enough people care about it.

Last year alone almost 70,000 rapes were recorded in England and Wales. (Figures from Scotland and Northern Ireland are in addition to that.) Of those recorded rapes, only 1.9 per cent resulted in a charge that year – that’s a charge, not a conviction. 

Five in six women who are raped do not report it. The same is true for four in five men. So now we are looking at multiples of 70,000 – just in the UK and just in 12 months.

As one rape survivor recently said: “It is hard to think of these statistics getting any worse. If they did, then that would be tantamount to admitting rape was effectively legal in the UK.”

So why didn’t these women go to the police? The statistics suggest that in all likelihood you wouldn’t either.

In addition to this, within 48 hours of the Brand Sunday Times article being published, another headline made the news – “Met Police investigating 1,600 officers and staff over alleged abuse against women” – which might indicate the police are perhaps not the most approachable organisation.

Sometimes it is worth taking people at their word – if only for a short time – just to see what picture of reality emerges. 

Brand’s picture doesn’t match up with anything I recognise. Whereas – to me – the four women who bravely came forward in spite of the odds are describing something that is all too real and unaddressed in this country. They’re receiving plenty of hate about it online – maybe they’re the ones getting too close to the truth.

Clint Edwards is a stand-up comedian and writer