Something smells rotten in the state of the media consensus on Russell Brand. When public condemnation is thoroughly hegemonic, without a dent in its sexually sensationalist scribbling and opinionating—contrast how not every public persona could bring themselves to condemn Hamas’s mass rapes of October 7, and how many a pearl-clutching woman in a TV studio branded it “racist” to talk about the UK rape gangs —then I have questions.
“Downfall of the swaggering sex predator fawned over by the Left” proclaimed a hopelessly out-of-the-loop Daily Mail on November 6 (Brand hasn’t been a darling of the Left for six years at least). “RAPIST” was the Sun’s all-caps title on the same day. “Rapist Brand caged” wrote Metro —“caged” like a dangerous animal. In a public statement on X, the Crown Prosecutor David Roberts declared that Brand was a “manipulator with an insatiable desire to get what he wanted”—perhaps a bit like Roberts himself?—and thanked “the women … for coming forward and seeing this sexual abuser brought to justice, in a self-congratulatory sneer that is truly breathtaking. Spare me the “courageous women coming forward” talk. There is nothing courageous in suddenly finding that something that happened seventeen years ago could now be pumped for media attention, because the tide regarding the accused has turned. It is not courageous but a little too convenient.
Spare me the “courageous women coming forward” talk.
Brand, for once, had no say in the hunt for his scalp. In a video posted on April 4, 2025, shortly after criminal charges were announced, he declared: “I’ve always told you guys that when I was young and single, before I had my wife and family—my beautiful children —I was a fool, man. I was a fool before I lived in the light of the Lord. I was a drug addict, a sex addict, but what I never was was a rapist. I never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity, and I pray that you can see that by looking in my eyes”.
I have no time for Russell Brand the Jesus freak or for the truly wacko stuff he got into in the past three years. But I did have a lot of time for someone who so obviously chose the search for truth and moral clarity when so many others—nah, let’s be honest: pretty much everyone— in the media lost their mind of over a respiratory virus and became a frothing self-avowed persecutor of transgressions against “social distancing”, lockdowns and masking up. Brand could just as easily have stayed safe—and remained friends with the progressive authoritarians on the correct side of the opinion aisle, namely the left one, in an environment stiff with denunciation, derision and division. But he didn’t. He launched the immensely popular Stay Free podcast that gained over 6 million followers in 2021-22 only. He exposed pretty much everyone from new leftist darling Bill Gates to the WEF. Very much to the dismay of his former besties.
Brand could have remained friends with the progressive authoritarians on the correct side of the opinion aisle, namely the left one, in an environment stiff with denunciation, derision and division.
In the twenty years of his career prior to this viral dissidence, Brand was loved by establishment leftoids. This even though already in the 2010s, Brand’s promiscuous lifestyle and sexual transgressions had led to public accusations. Labour-leftie Andy Burnham played them down at the time. In 2014, he wrote on Twitter: “Depressing to see media mission to discredit someone who stops playing their game & uses celebrity to help others. Keep going @rustyrockets”. That was when “anti-capitalism” was all the rage, and the likes of Brand, Owen Jones, Aaron Bastani, Ash Sarkar and all that lot rose to influence on the climate change/Greta Thunberg/anti-G7/Occupy Wall Street ticket. At the time, the streets of London were swept with anti-austerity protests. Brand actively became a spokesperson for the tenant movement and sought to denounce corrupt landlords, a critique that gained momentum with the Grenfell Tower disaster. A long hard stare at “greedy capitalists” is what secured Brand’s aesthetically left-wing Messianism a firm place among the social justice class. It took a good PR firm two seconds to replace the iconic Che Guevara T-shirt with Brand’s face—and a new icon of the Left was born.
It took a good PR firm two seconds to replace the iconic Che Guevara T-shirt with Brand’s face—and a new icon of the Left was born.
But all of that changed with Covid and the raving lunacy of the same people who had wanted a piece of Brand just a few years earlier. Brand was genuine and honest in a way no one else was in British media at the time. His style was now curious and non-accusatory. He presented the viewer of his YouTube podcast—which was later cancelled by Google and moved to Rumble—with newspaper clips and original quotes from the likes of Boris Johnson, Mark Zuckerberg, Anthony Fauci, the CDC and the NHS, just to ask how it would all add up in the face of more and more restrictions, vaccine mandates, increasing cancellations, and the huge social media backlash against free speech. The Guardian‘s George Monbiot, true to his mission to discredit anyone not in line with the New Normal, responded in March 2023 under the title “I once admired Russell Brand. But his grim trajectory shows us where politics is heading”; a published Letter to the Editor at the Guardian the same month talked of “Russell Brand’s descent into conspiracy politics”; and in September 2023, you could read in the same paper about “Russell Brand’s wonderland: the online soapbox where the star pushes his ‘free speech’”.
Indeed, the logic of the accusations against Brand that have led to a sentence of ten years and five months in prison for one charge of rape and three charges of sexual assault between 2004 and 2009, does not quite add up. When #metoo paved the way for cancel culture (which was its only function), Russell Brand’s name—though surely conducive to such accusations—never showed up. It was only two years later, when Brand’s popularity with the Left had begun to wane that Rosamund Urwin, a self-avowed “feminist” journo for the Sunday Times, seemed to have smelled her opportunity. Urwin was one of the journalists behind the investigation that culminated in the Channel 4 documentary Russell Brand: In Plain Sight, broadcast on 16 September 2023. With fellow journalist Charlotte Wace, she contacted potential witnesses and gathered corroborating evidence since 2019. The two approached many of Brand’s contacts and invited them, after so many years, to seek public attention. How convenient that the documentary was aired so soon after Brand had become a “far-right conspiracy theorist”. The rest is history: the resulting publicity from the documentary prompted the police investigation that has now led to Brand’s prison sentence.
When #metoo paved the way for cancel culture (which was its only function), Russell Brand’s name never showed up.
To let that sink in, we must briefly remember the world right after Covid and just before the Israel-Hamas war. We were still shell-shocked by the Covid response and worried about censorship and state authoritarianism. Brand was by far the most popular British broadcaster pushing back against that climate. I enjoyed watching his show because for once I felt in the company of a friend. And there is his beautiful, down-to-earth, and definitely non-toxic (a rare trait in an Englishwoman) wife Laura—an angel if there ever was one. I do not believe for a second she would be held emotionally hostage. Not to a man they try to make us believe is the worst human being in Britain right now. But progressives, and especially feminists, do not forgive and do not forget. They will send a man away from his wife and little children for more than ten years if it means they get their revenge, which is about the only motivation for anything they do.
Half a decade ago, while watching the Brand show on YouTube, I told my husband, “one day, they’re gonna get back at him”. It looks like November 6, 2026 was that day.
