I know Russell Brand – or at least, I thought I used to. I’ve never met him, but for a while, he made sense to me.
On the face of it, Brand and I could hardly be more dissimilar. I’m middle-class and have a PhD. Brand’s signature Estuary accent loudly announces his Essex origins. He has a history of addiction, notably to heroin and sex (I don’t). He’s an autodidact expelled from several conventional and stage schools. Yet somehow the contours of his life feel familiar to me.
That may be because the people close to me are working-class (my partner, extended family, a close colleague) and over the course of my life I have witnessed the messages they have internalised: you are your labour; you must work to be worthwhile; tending to yourself is a superfluous activity, since any need beyond your labour is to be repressed, preferably through drink and drugs. I’ve many friends who have been heroin addicts. Class oppression and addiction go hand in hand – you need something when you’re under the boot.
Like Brand, I am an only child. I live in my imagination. My mum died when I was 20. I lost my twenties to grief, Brand his to heroin and fame. We both found ourselves through Vedic spirituality in our late twenties. I went on holiday to India and there developed a belief in karma and reincarnation. Returning home, I read the Bhagavad Gita (a central Hindu liturgical text) and spent time in a Hare Krishna temple. I chanted. I trained as a yoga teacher. I still meditate, though as part of a non-theistic spiritual practice. In his twenties, Brand found support for his addiction through Iskcon Krishna consciousness (colloquially known as the Hare Krishnas) and started to practice yoga and meditation, as he describes in his memoir, My Booky Wook.
When I first encountered Brand, I was entranced by his chaotic, magnetic energy and use of language. The way he embodied and gave voice to his class, gender and sexuality expressed a particular kind of defiance I was attracted to. Then in September 2023 I watched appalled as the Brand I thought I knew disappeared: Channel 4 Dispatches revealed that Brand was the subject of four allegations of sexual assault and emotional abuse of women and girls – one aged 16 at the time of the alleged incident – between 2006 and 2013. I realised that over the years I had myself rationalised and excused Brand’s obvious and repeated transgressions. How had I got him so wrong?
Big mouth.
I got to know Brand watching Big Brother’s Big Mouth, which he hosted from 2004 to 2006. The hour-long show, broadcast on Channel 4 directly after the latest episode of Big Brother, featured Brand talking to a live audience about the latest activity in the Big Brother house. Reality television was still a recent invention and while already denigrated as trashy, it was doing something entirely new: giving audiences a chance to observe everyday people relate to one another with seeming spontaneity and authenticity.
The format suited Brand perfectly. It allowed him to demonstrate his considerable skills in reading a room, feeling its energy and alchemising it into entertainment. He had an uncommon ability to speak to his audience, generate immediate connection and a feeling of intimacy and draw out others’ opinions. There was simply no one else on telly like Brand at that time, not only his disruptive energy but also his stark appearance, with back-combed hair, tight jeans and black eyeliner.
Without explanation, Brand would sign off the show with “Hare Krishna”. Brand has the Hindu deity Krishna – often depicted as a blue-skinned male figure, representing compassion, love and protection – tattooed on his upper arm. Part of Brand’s rebellion was to smuggle into mainstream celebrity culture allusions to philosophy and spirituality, forcing the transcendental into a devoutly materialist realm.
Brand’s speech similarly marked him out. He has an unconventional grasp of language: a wide vocabulary and an ability to uncommonly re-deploy words, for example, “metastasise” and “undergird”. He cuttingly deployed political and historical references against his opponents: “You’re a Poundshop Enoch Powell,” he told Nigel Farage on BBC Question Time in 2014. His self-taught erudition was a refreshing contrast to the old Etonians crowding out public life with their obscure classical and historical references. While people like Boris Johnson used knowledge to reinforce their born-to-rule incumbency, Brand made knowledge urgent and accessible.
Following Big Brother’s Big Mouth, Brand’s star ascended rapidly. He moved into radio, hosting a show on Radio 6 and then, in 2007, a primetime slot on Radio 2. It wasn’t long before Brand got himself into trouble. In October 2008, Brand and his guest co-host Jonathan Ross called up Andrew Sachs, the actor from Fawlty Towers, leaving voice messages discussing Brand’s brief relationship with Sachs’s granddaughter Georgina Baillie (“He fucked your granddaughter!”). The show was pre-recorded, and Brand’s calculated decision to broadcast it was to most people a clear indicator of his flawed capacity to judge social propriety, not to mention his latent misogyny. Brand resigned from the BBC; Ross was suspended without pay for 12 weeks. I left the country that year to study abroad so I missed the media furore, though my dad gave me live commentaries on “Sachsgate” on our weekly phone calls. He said it was the media event of the year, but hearing it at one remove, I was nonchalant. I probably should have been joining the dots. Brand published his memoirs My Book Wooky (2007) and Booky Wook 2 (2010) – though in truth, all of Brand’s books are memoirs – and I read them as soon as they came out. I was gripped by his storytelling. His capacity to confess the ways in which he wasn’t in control of himself felt brave, a counterpoint to other, less vulnerable or self-reflexive masculinities popular at that time – rather than a grim indicator of things to come. As a child, Brand relates how he was prohibited from trashing the neighbour’s flowerbeds – and despite not wanting to, he does. Part of Brand’s appeal to me was his fearlessness in sharing embarrassing things – the need for spiritual practice, for example (I never told anyone about my spiritual journey). The memoirs also convey the sexual mores to which Brand was inculcated, such as the holiday to Asia he took when he was 17, in which his father paid for them both to spend a substantial amount of time with several sex workers.
After his rise to national prominence Brand went to Hollywood, starring in a range of films including Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him To The Greek, Arthur and Rock of Ages, and marrying pop star Katy Perry in a Hindu ceremony in India. A couple of years later Brand was divorced and back in London.
He began to use his charm, humour and challenging demeanour to disrupt the establishment when he was invited to speak at a Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into drugs policy in 2012.
He positioned addiction as a health issue rather than a moral failing: “What I want to offer people is truth and authenticity, in the treatment of this illness and in regard to the criminal components of it, in assisting victims and in the way we legislate and organise our society.”
Brand’s transition from pop culture to politics began in earnest in 2013 when he guest-edited The Spectator, writing about his experiences as a drug addict in recovery. Promoting his Spectator edition, Brand was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight, infamously stating that he did not vote. This was a significant moment in popular culture: a mainstream celebrity appearing on a prestige political news show.
Capitalising on this new attention, Brand positioned himself as a social justice warrior. In 2014 visiting Focus E15, a group of mothers squatting empty flats on a council estate in Hackney to campaign for better housing provision. He publishes his third book, Revolution, and appears again on Newsnight, saying to Evan Davis “I’m here to give a voice to ordinary people.” Indeed, he uses the proceeds of the book to start Trew Era, a social enterprise cafe in Hackney staffed by local recovering drug addicts. Brand spoke directly to audiences outside of the Westminster bubble in his media appearances within the political space – his inclusion opened up political discussion for new audiences. “What was funny was out of that [Jeremy Paxman] interview last year, where you said you didn’t vote, you were accused and still being accused by people of turning young people off politics, not getting them engaged and ironically you’ve actually probably engaged more young people in thinking about these issues than any politician who votes, right?”
Brand is bullish, missing Davis’s repeated offers of a more credible framework for his views. He’s argumentative as Davis shares a graph showing the UK real wages since 1870, at which Brand balks: “I don’t have time for graphs.” Patiently, Davis replies, “I’m not trying to confuse you, I’m trying to take you seriously, the graph shows real wages have gone up over the last 150 years …I’m on your side here.” When Davis presses Brand on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, Brand is defensive to the point of paranoia.
In 2014 Brand started his YouTube channel The Trews (a portmanteau of “true news”), in which he dissected mainstream media narratives from an anti-establishment perspective – mainly alone, but sometimes in conversation with guests. In 2014, I was in my wilderness years. I’d completed my PhD and was lost. I watched The Trews daily – it filled a void and introduced me to fringe figures I still admire, such as Blindboy and George Monbiot. It was interesting to see a television celebrity move onto YouTube – a reversal of the more typical celebrity trajectory in which social media influencers sought legitimacy by moving into more conventional formats like TV and radio. At the time, I understood the move as communicating Brand’s desire for the freedom, immediacy and intimacy with this audience that YouTube allowed. On reflection, I wonder whether it was also that he’d burned his bridges with television and radio execs through his on- and off-screen behaviour.
In an interview with the American social work scholar Brene Brown in 2019, Brand reflects on this period: “It made me mental and I had a nervous breakdown.” He doesn’t elaborate, but it suggests that going from making entertaining telly to challenging the narrowness of political discourse was too unsteadying a transition for him. He had the kind of attention he craved but was unprepared for.
Perhaps feeling a need to substantiate some of his political instincts, in 2017 Brand began an MA in religion in global politics at Soas University of London. The same year, he launched Under the Skin, a wide-ranging long-form interview podcast. He bagged serious figures – Al Gore, Naomi Klein and Brad Evans – interrogating them with his scatty, inconsistent interview style. This style was the product of Brand’s professional background: Brand had honed his craft getting a studio audience to love him on Big Brother’s Big Mouth. On Under The Skin, Brand’s aim seemed similarly to dazzle his interviewees.
Interviewing the documentary director Adam Curtis in 2017, Brand interrupts at key moments when Curtis is gathering his argument. Brand gets in the way with facile interjections and literal pleas for hugs and affection: “I’m coming round to kiss you”, says Brand. “I don’t want to be controlled by your comedic persona,” replies Curtis. Frustratingly, he’s entirely aware of what he’s doing, telling Curtis:
I know I’m narcissistic, I know I’m no different from anyone with ego problems, showing off, going ‘Love me, love me, adore me, give me attention,’ but it ain’t just that. It’s something else, and that thing. I’ve got to do something with it.
Later, Curtis develops this point, framing Brand: “The persona you have created as a comedian is the arch narcissist of our age, you play on that, but you are self-conscious about it, and in that sense, you are an example of modern social realism, because everyone lives in their heads … you express it in a big comedic way.” It’s a testament to the rapport between them that Curtis can deliver back to Brand such a stark portrait of himself.
Talking to a verbally strident rightwing American commentator Candace Owens in 2018, we see a different Brand. Owens sideswipes swathes of political thought, championing what she considers the ultimate fairness of the free market and asserting socialism is a killer, with minimal evidence. Brand does his best to keep up, find common ground and ask hard questions. But Owens pokes fun at him and Brand admits he doesn’t have the tools to dismantle her argument, even though what she’s saying doesn’t ring true.
What you realise is that Brand reflects the energy of whomever he’s with. Brene Brown’s warm presence draws out an emotionally grounded Brand in his interview with her on Under The Skin in 2019. Brown advises Brand on how to evolve as a parent and remain calm in the face of toddler tantrums. The pair share their experiences of recovering from addiction. Presented with Brown’s vulnerability, Brand offers his own. This sensitive emotional mirroring demonstrates Brand’s particular abilities, we see here used positively. It is precisely this skill he used to demean and dominate.
Après-coup.
I was a teenager in the nineties. Between Zoo and Nuts, aimed at bringing instant sexual titillation to young men, and Cosmo, with its sexual position how-tos aimed at young women, the script was clear: being a girl meant that men were going to touch, pet and condescend to you.
I felt a tension between wanting to be sexually visible and wanting to visualise myself unconventionally. If you wanted to objectify me, I’d make it a challenge. As an art student and on the fringes of alternative scenes, we all tried, in various ways, to subvert gender. With his eyeliner, big hair, jewellery and exaggerated estuary English, Brand was flipping a script, too. His dandyish presentation challenged both class and gender expectations, though his hypersexuality – he was named the Sun’s “shagger of the year” in 2006, 2007 and 2008 – complicated the apparent queerness of his style.
What was clear, however, was that Brand represented a desire to push past staid traditions and flout taboos. I was grateful that sex was Brand’s text – everywhere else, sex was the subtext, and that was confusing. The constant inadequate attempts to conceal the way that women were objectified were disorienting. To me then, Brand’s obsession with sex sounded like he was interested in giving women a good time and somehow, that seemed like progress. It’s just that women were the butt of his jokes. I couldn’t see the abuse at that time, for the same reasons that I couldn’t see the abuse that I was being subjected to. I couldn’t see it because it was everywhere.
In Studies on Hysteria, Freud offers the concept of deferred action or après-coup, in which a subject understands her own experiences with new insight – for example, sexual abuse that a child failed to understand and therefore repressed, but as an adult now comprehends. I feel a strong sense of après-coup now as I consider my own parasocial relationship with Russell Brand.
I needed the jolt of Dispatches to reevaluate Brand’s behaviour. The documentary juxtaposes the stories of five women who give testimonies of sexual abuse, manipulation, coercion and rape by Brand with his comedy material and media appearances from the time of the alleged abuse. “I can undo your bra!” he joked to Australian reporter Liz Hayes in 2012, at the end of an interview as he kissed her on the lips, and she good-humouredly laughed along. While Hayes takes the interaction in her stride, Brand physically dominates her on camera, knowing perhaps that the camera compels Hayes to be receptive and good-natured.
Old footage of Brand’s interviews and comedy has resurfaced. His sexual transgressions were often barefaced: “I don’t think God would give you that body and then give you morality.” “When you laugh like that it lets me know what you’d sound like when you come.” However, it is within his confessional style of comedy, his fast-paced, outrageous stories permitting no deeper reflection that he hides what he’s really done. “I like them blow jobs where it goes in their neck a little bit,” he tells the audience in his Shame, 2006 comedy show, standing in front of Hindu temple decorations and a beatific Lord Krishna.
After Dispatches was broadcast, further clips began circulating of Brand that should have raised red flags at the time. In one, Brand tells the American talk show host David Letterman: “Despite appearances, I’m a heterosexual man. People think because I’m so well-dressed, people think ‘he must be gay, look at his wonderful haircut he must be gay. Look how sensitive and vulnerable he is he must be gay. That means women feel safe around me and then bang! Pregnant. Bang! Pregnant! Bang! Pregnant!” His comic timing is impeccable – even now, it’s hard not to laugh.
Near the start of the Dispatches documentary, we hear one testimony from Nadia: “He does this thing where he glazes over”. Later on, we hear his accuser Phoebe say: “I saw something come over his eyes, I swear to God, like black, his eyes had no more colour, they were black, like a different person literally entered his body.” I understood this description of glazed-over eyes. I have been in sexual encounters where the other withdraws into himself, closed to my vulnerability. The opposite of Brand’s famous skill: reading the room.
At an Oxford Union talk in 2015, Stephen Fry described Brand’s characteristic ability to see into people with reference to his eyes: “He has an extraordinary ability to look people deep into the eyes such as they melt like a chocolate put in front of the fire.” This ability to melt people with his gaze apparently worked in Brand’s favour as his star continued, irrepressibly, to rise. “It’s a pattern that seems to follow Russell Brand throughout his career,” Lorraine Heggessey, controller of BBC One between 2000 and 2005, says on Dispatches. “He misbehaves, he transgresses what would normally be acceptable within broadcasting and he gets rewarded by promotion, by another show, by something else.” After Dispatches, Brand finally began facing the consequences he had dodged for so long.
The beginning of the end.
His live comedy tour was cancelled. His publishers have paused work with him. Channel 4 removed shows featuring Brand from its streaming platform. YouTube demonetised his videos, though Rumble hasn’t, which hosts his main output of solo videos to camera with media analysis and commentary. Brand was interviewed by the police and in November it was reported that a file had been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service for consideration.
Personally, Brand lost me during the pandemic. My partner is a molecular biologist and cancer researcher, and our conversations seemed to have no place in Brand’s output. Brand’s anti-vax, anti-science positions lacked nuance, based as they were hunches and prejudices. Going back to his videos to write this article, I find it difficult to even grasp his arguments – he jabbers on without an obvious starting or endpoint. In some senses, I don’t believe his sincerity now – he’s performing positions he’s previously been against. Either he has an exceptionally loose grip on his own beliefs and commitments, or he’s a grifter – I honestly couldn’t call it.
On Rumble, he continues to review the media, but with thinner observations that feel formulaic, and with more of an emphasis on “them”: a word he repeatedly uses without explanation. Now the threat is the deep state and authoritarianism. He encourages his new audience to do their research – the conspiracy theorist’s call to action. His new videos feature sponsorship with partners including Airestech, a signal-blocking amulet – one that presumably protects Brand from the Bluetooth microphone that’s clipped to his shirt.
On their podcast Origin Story, centrist commentator Ian Dunt and author Dorian Lynskey analyse Brand’s output over his career, and argue that his move from left to right did not come out of the blue – signs of his conspiracy theory tendencies were always there. I feel it’s not as clear-cut. True, Brand’s mistrust of authority has always structured his observations, leading him once to what he describes as “anarcho-syndalicalism”, now as anti-authoritarianism. Yet what’s always been clear is that Brand’s positions are grounded less in political conviction than refracted through the prism of his emotional state in any given moment. Just as he did on Big Brother’s Big Mouth, Brand reads the energy in the room to inform what he says – though now, what he says is designed to accrue power more than puncture it.
In her recent book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein writes about the mirror world, in which cancelled figures continue to grow their audiences, but making less and less sense, their untested ideas drifting further from the need for veracity. Brand is now subsumed in that mirror world. Adrift from former allies like George Monbiot, who prior to Dispatches had already distanced himself from Brand, calling out the dangerous game he was playing. The mirror-world Brand has become unrecognisable to me now. He speaks from positions he previously persuasively critiqued. Even his manner of speaking has changed. On an appearance with Tucker Carlson, his cadence was noticeably slower (perhaps the footage was slowed down) indicating that his speech needs to be adapted to his new American audience. Brand no longer speaks to or indeed for a working-class British audience. Rather than standing for the oppressed, Brand belabours his own persecution by the rape allegations. (In advance of the Dispatches documentary, Brand released his own video, saying: “I’m aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, ‘Watch out Russell they are coming for you, you are getting to close to the truth, Russell Brand did not kill himself’”). Having once skewered Nigel Farage he now jokes that he’d love to work in Trump’s new government if asked. The brakes on his ego are off. He clutches at power.
He has converted to Christianity, which to me seems less a product of deep spiritual conviction than a way of aligning himself with his new peer group of rich, white, male, heterosexual power players (Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump). He has made videos exclaiming that he’s redeemed of his sins, which is convenient.
In the 2019 Under the Skin interview with Brene Brown, Brown says to Brand: “I can find God in you, but I’m going to hold you accountable for what you’ve done.” Like Brown, I don’t believe it is helpful to characterise Brand as a monster. That would be too easy. In Brand’s interview with Naomi Klein, Klein talks about the Trump in all of us, and the danger of treating Trump as other, beyond us. There is certainly a Brand in me: by which I mean, I maintain my spiritual practices of self-examination, reflection and making amends. I do not write this from the pearl-clutching holier-than-though position but in full recognition of the complicatedness of being a person, and the harm that I do as a result.
While the rape allegations have now moved into legal processes, the show’s not over. If Brand can stop fast-talking, stop selling, if he can pause, take a breath, examine his behaviour and apologise, I’m listening. Knowing Brand, an extreme volte-face is well within the realms of possibility.
In the preparation of this piece, my thoughts turned to my friend Jamie Dolan – here for a good time, not a long time. I dedicate this piece to him. Jamie Dolan, 5 May 1975 – 28 April 2023.