I saw Russell Brand up close. It’s the people around him I keep coming back to

Detailed summary

Lurid allegations about David Walliams’s “predatory” behaviours are now filling the pages and screens. His lawyers tried and failed to get an injunction to stop such coverage. The…

One of those was in 2013, to a party thrown by Jemima Goldsmith at some posh venue. It was to celebrate one of the first TV documentaries she’d produced. She was with Russell Brand, her partner at the time. I have always thought he was brash, his manner and behaviours repulsive. Why was this graceful woman drawn to him?

I admire Jemima and had interviewed her about her abiding love for Pakistan, where she’d lived as Imran Khan’s wife. It was for my book, Exotic England, published in 2015.

She and Brand were gliding easily around the room, packed with monied and famed folk, including Mick Jagger, to whom I was introduced. I realised this was a tribe with shared cultural understandings, loyalties and lifestyles.

Sometimes pressures build and break the codes of silence. Jemima Goldsmith has now revealed that she had called the police in July 2014 during a violent incident. She broke up with Brand and now accuses him of “violence, coercive control and abuse”. This follows revelations about a harassment injunction Goldsmith and Brand obtained in 2015 against a woman who, Goldsmith says, had sent threatening and antisemitic messages. The woman had been booked to give Brand a massage at Goldsmith’s house and alleged that he had assaulted her.

Goldsmith, who helped journalists investigating Brand’s historic abuse of young women, is being unfairly, viciously slated online.

Lurid allegations about David Walliams’s “predatory” behaviours are now filling the pages and screens. His lawyers tried and failed to get an injunction to stop such coverage. The allegations, at present, are legally untested and unproven, and Walliams denies them.

But some stars in the comedy circuit and women working in his publishing house are speaking out. The comedian Lucy Beaumont told Sky News and the Guardian about her suspicions. She claims no one else in the comedy business is prepared to take that risk. They turn a blind eye, because “… you’re seen as you might be a trouble causer”.

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