Russell Brand was always toxic. We just didn’t care when he was on our side

Résumé détaillé

When we see predatory behaviour and cruelty, we should call it out – especially if it comes from our side The political implications of Russell Brand aren’t really about sexual…

The political implications of Russell Brand aren’t really about sexual assault. That’s a criminal matter, for which he’s now experiencing a richly deserved punishment. The political implications are about how we treat people who are useful to us when we can see that they’re morally reprehensible. They’re about what we put first: our moral standards or our personal advantage.

Russell Brand was initially an asset. TV stations wanted to work with him and political movements wanted to be aligned with him. He worked for MTV in 2000, then on Channel 4 in 2004. Afterwards, he became a leadership figure on the left – marching against austerity, going on Newsnight and Question Time, writing radical polemics about the elites. Progressives proved just as enthusiastic about him as TV producers were. He guest edited the New Statesman. Labour leader Ed Miliband appeared on his online show during the 2015 election.

It was, at this stage, already clear what kind of man Brand was. We did not know that he was a rapist, but we did know that he belittled women and that he was cruel. We know this because he wrote about it at length.

In his excruciatingly titled 2007 memoir My Booky Wook, Brand describes how he brought home a woman for a sexual encounter. At some point, events became heated and she slapped him. He responded by bundling her out the front door and spitting in her face. “Yes that’s right, I spat in the face of a beautiful woman,” he wrote. “I was convinced that it was the only course of action and that there’d be no consequences.”

All this was written down in black and white, but no-one seemed to care. The book was praised by the Observer (“puts most other celebrity memoirs to shame”), the Telegraph (“the most talented stand-up comedian to emerge in Britain this decade”) and others.

In his own accounts of his life, Brand had two main responses to women. Those in positions without authority he treats cruelly.

In 2006, when he was doing a Radio 2 show, he repeatedly mocked a…

In…

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