Russell Brand has been outed as a creep. What took so long?

I went to interview an irreverent superstar comedian with a formidable intellect and razor sharp wit. I’d been warned, but I still left wanting 90 minutes of my life back.

I don’t know if Russell Brand is guilty of the specific rape and sexual assault and harassment claims being levelled against him.

I do know I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for him to be called out as an allegedly predatory and controlling creep.

I do know that when I walked out of a one-on-one interview (actually, there was one of me, and then him and the tittering entourage he played to in the room) with Brand more than a decade ago, I’d just met a very unprofessional and decidedly ordinary human being.

I’d been witness to — and the subject of — a Russell Brand performance he’d spent countless press tours perfecting which featured a specialist misogynist using facile, lowbrow stunts dressed up as humour to disarm and humiliate women trying to go about their jobs and remind them he was in charge.

Russell, his supporters would say, was just being Russell: the notorious womaniser was flirty, cheeky, bold. It was banter. It was harmless. Lighten up. Who was he hurting?

Russell Brand gave a performance this writer wanted to forget during a Sydney interview. Picture: News Corp

These were the days before #MeToo.

Nobody was calling him out on the way he acted in interviews as he made comments on questions he didn’t feel like answering or hearing, and clearly felt it utterly acceptable to comment on your appearance or physical attributes.

Nobody took on a major celeb. If you called it out, you were the problem. You were humourless. You were being ridiculous.

And you certainly weren’t getting any more interviews.

I’d been told by other female journalists who’d had the dubious pleasure of interviewing Brand how it would go.

Brand has emphatically denied claims of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. Pictures: Supplied

Russell would pick a feature … your boobs, your legs, your butt, the length of your dress, early in the meeting. It would be masked as a compliment, and then it would get creepy, unprofessional and uncomfortable as he’d inevitably riff on it again and again.

For one of my colleagues — an entertainment writer of years of experience — her boobs were, apparently, totally fair game.

Brand’s running commentary at their first meeting saw her eventually, half-jokingly, appeal: “Russell, can you look at my eyes?” as his assistants tittered, and his co-stars sat mute.

She, like so many of us before and since, sucked it up and rolled with it.

For her next encounter, she was ready. “No Russell, we’re not doing this,” she said firmly, as she saw the words about to leave his mouth.

He meekly “behaved”. Like a naughty little child.

I had written sport for ten years before I switched to entertainment, and in that round had met a thousand Russell Brands: blokes who didn’t like that a female would have the audacity and temerity to write about serious subjects like racing and rugby league.

Russell Brand leaves the Troubabour Wembley Park theatre in northwest London after performing a comedy set. He faces claims about his sexual behaviour at the height of his fame, which he vehemently denies. Picture: James Manning/PA Images via Getty Images

You learned to push back, or make the fact you were female invisible. Sometimes both.

So on that day in 2009 at Sydney’s Park Hyatt as I waited for my time with Brand I was on my guard, but only vaguely.

I’d seen Brand’s work — the stuff he got paid for — before, and actually admired his eccentric schtick, humour and razor-sharp wit.

The interviews were running late, as these things often are.

ONE-ON-ONE WITH BRAND

I had plenty of time to watch other journos emerge from their time with him. The majority of them were women. Stony-faced.

I can’t recall what he was selling on that trip to Australia. But within seconds it was clear it wasn’t professionalism.

As I walked in and offered my hand to shake his, he looked me up and down, carefully assessing me, then slowly met my eyes.

“Hello, Debbie Schipp,” he said, a faint mocking tone as he used my full name and his gaze returned to my legs.

I’d been warned Brand could be quite hard to pin down, so I thanked him for his time, and said ‘since we’re a bit late can we get right into it?’.

He laughed, looked at my legs again, and then said “Ooh, you’re very serious, Debbie Schipp, aren’t you? Why are you so serious?”

I shrugged and said, “I’m really not. I love a laugh, I just know we don’t have much time.”

Too late.

Brand had stood, glanced at his giggling entourage and darted out the door, insisting on saying hello to somebody he’d apparently met earlier in the lift.

He returned a few minutes later, sat — no apology — looked at my legs again, and said “right, where were we?”.

Brand loves an audience - even if it’s just a tittering entourage to play to. Picture: AFP)

As I posed a second question, he was off again, this time chasing down a Park Hyatt employee he’d seen wandering past our interview room, for something that clearly couldn’t wait.

But the time he’d mocked two of my questions, inviting his entourage to ridicule them again, remarked several more times how serious I was (a shame, he said, because I could be quite pretty when I smiled) and had left the interview for a third time to hail yet another new hotel ‘friend’, I’d had enough.

‘I’M DONE’

I closed my notebook. Switched off the tape recorder. Stood. Shouldered my bag.

“Where are you going, Debbie Schipp, we’ve got another ten minutes,” Brand said, looking me in the eye for the first time.

“Yeah, I’m done,” I said.

It was the only time he had no smart-arse reply and no control.

As I exited, a publicist looked at me bleakly and said: “So I’m guessing this won’t be a cover?”

It should have been a cover story. But nobody would have read it.

These were the days when few called out the likes of Brand on his bullshit.

I shook my head and kept walking.

I was more sad and disappointed than angry.

I’d admired the irreverent and offbeat Brand as an entertainer with a formidable intellect who went where few dared, and skewered with smart humour.

Resorting to total disrespect and lame commentary on a woman’s physical attributes and palming it off as a joke was lazy humour. Easy pickings. Not the slightest bit clever. I thought he was edgier than that.

It wasn’t funny then. It’s not funny now.

Russell, the position you find yourself in now isn’t some mysterious plot engineered by faceless powerful people and angry women to bring you down.

You did that all by yourself.

It’s way past time you and creeps like you were called out.

It’s not a conservative revenge plot. It’s not a grand conspiracy.

It’s just people finding their voice. And the karma bus catching up.