The nasty noughties: Russell Brand and the era of sadistic tabloid misogyny
The allegations against Russell Brand that surfaced at the weekend and which he has denied – that he is a rapist, a groomer, possessed of a nihilistic sense of impunity – appear concrete and specific, and could terminate in criminal proceedings. In the end, as fellow hero of the conspiracist manosphere Andrew Tate has discovered, the law doesn’t care about your YouTube rebuttals or how many cheerleaders you have on TikTok.
The media context that created and rewarded Brand doesn’t alter his accountability, minimise any of the accusations or even carry much weight in the establishment of his culpability, but it does demand examination.
When we talk about “hiding in plain sight”, we often understand that to mean a celebrity was protected and enabled by others in the industry, because that is easier to swallow than the material we all watched, all enabled. Brand’s 2006 tour Shame, for example, featured a routine about choking someone during oral sex that had no components of humour. It was only “funny” because we were watching: the humour was created by our collusion, in much the same way as his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, dressed up audacity – “I just described spitting on a
