The unspeakable truth about Russell Brand

Before the accusations of being a Bad Feminist start, can I say that I am inclined to believe the women who claim to have been sexually assaulted and raped by Russell Brand. Nevertheless, I found another of the complaints about him featured in the Dispatches documentary – that sexual partners would telephone Brand’s employees ‘in tears’ after being ‘treated poorly’ – somewhat trivialising of a serious situation. Insult is never the same as injury, especially in the arena of sex.

Look at Brand. He’s vile. You can tell he smells. If he’d been Joe Schmo, would he have been having sex with ‘different women three, four, five times a day – in Ireland, nine in one evening’? No; his father even took him to a hooker to lose his virginity at an age when most of us are attractive enough to be effortlessly relieved of it for free. But the moment he was famous, sex with strangers became as easy as masturbation – which I can’t help thinking it was all an elaborate form of, hence the hurt feelings of the bed-mate bystanders involved.

Now comes the Bad Feminist bit, where I’m going to have to diss a sister or two. There will always be shallow, parasitic women who go for famous men. Men know this and often become famous – consciously or not – in order to get access to a wide selection of them. If you have sex with such an unappetising man as Brand – who must know deep down that he would not be attractive to women if he was unknown and poor – it’s understandable that he might have contempt for you and not bring you breakfast in bed with red rosebuds on a tray the next morning.

Brand has said openly: ‘The fame I had meant that, instead of taking someone for a date and then going to the pictures and then calling them, I was able to go, “Let’s do sex right now!’’’ Talk about hiding in plain sight; it’s almost like he was setting up a filtering system to keep gently-raised maidens away from him. You can’t say he didn’t talk about spitting, slapping and choking; all he failed to do was have POISON tattooed on his forehead.

One of the accusers, 16-year-old ‘Alice’, says that sex never made Brand happy, just more angry, as is usual for sexual compulsives (I don’t believe in ‘sex addiction’) so why did she stick around if neither of them was enjoying it? The G-word seems to have come into it: ‘Although Alice was over the age of consent in the UK,’ the voiceover tells us, ‘she and a family member who has also spoken to the Sunday Times to corroborate her story both describe Brand’s behaviour as “grooming”.’

‘Russell engaged in the behaviours of a groomer, looking back, but I didn’t even know what that was then, or what that looked like,’ she says. I’ll help. No one not below the age of consent can be said to be ‘groomed’ unless they are disabled in some way. It’s extremely offensive to the powerless children raped, tortured and trafficked by the grooming gangs to compare the two situations.

Alice says: ‘It shouldn’t be legal for a 16-year-old to have a relationship with a man in their thirties. There should be something in place to protect children.’ There is. It’s called the age of consent and she’d reached it. The barrister Gudrun Young told Women’s Hour that we do already police some relationships between those over 16 and full adults: when the latter has a duty of care over the former. She explained: ‘The law has gone as far as it should in criminalising relationships with adults and people over the age of 16. The real question is: if we were to expand it further, where does it stop?’

The allegations of sexual assault that Alice makes against Brand are awful. But when it comes to the wider relationship and what she describes as ‘grooming’, we can’t legislate that all females are fragile flowers in need of ceaseless protection – that way lies the real danger of grown women being treated as a cross between children and chattels, in need a guardian to approve everything they do. I’d rather take my chances playing fast-and-loose with Bad Men rather than give away my freedom to those often dodgy types who identify as Good Men.

I’ve always loved the concept of the beautiful Amish word ‘rumspringa’, whereby teenagers are allowed to have a wild year. Being good Amish kids, they generally settle for learning to drive and watching television. But I remember my wild year when I was 17, at the start of which I was a virgin and at the end of which I stupidly got engaged to the first man I had sex with. But boy, did I ever have fun doing nasty stuff with much older and wildly inappropriate men! Even now, looking back as a much-married matron of 64, I still get a glow thinking of how downright dirty my wild year was.

But I was probably the exception. The problem with shagging culture is that young women in particular find that casual sex is rarely casual and that catching feelings is common. Despite what they’ve read about hooking up being their birthright as strong, independent women, sex with a man who doesn’t see them as someone special has a way of reducing a lot of females to weak, clingy girls. The type who might ring up Russell Brand’s runner in tears because he never called back. If it can happen to an OnlyFans model like Lottie Moss (who has just been breaking her heart over Love Island love-rat Adam Collard on the most recent Celebs Go Dating), it can certainly happen to some starry-eyed fan plucked from the crowd to grace her idol’s bed. 

So while I believe the women who accuse Brand of attacking them – accusations that he denies – I find some of what they said objectionable. Equating unpleasantness with criminality does no one any good. And to reinstate my feminist credentials, I’ll add that the only women I have contempt for in the whole Brand kerfuffle are the profoundly thick females currently sticking up for Brand like a bunch of starry-eyed ‘sheeples’, to use a term they like to dismiss other people. ‘He was always nice to me – how could he be a rapist?’ has been the reaction of scores of silly women in Brand’s defence. So what? Ravenous attack dogs don’t attack everyone. Professional burglars don’t steal from every person they meet. It’s meaningless. Ironically, the women now defending Brand suffer from the same fame-struck soppiness as the women they condemn. Being a groupie is never a good look – but then, neither is being a cheerleader for a man who has nothing but contempt for your entire sex.