Russell Brand’s behaviour used to be a bit of a giggle – except for the victims

The Russell Brand allegations of sex abuse date from an era when laddish misogyny was applauded.

Among the many stories that emerged about Russell Brand this weekend, all of which he denies, I’m sure you’ll have seen the one about the 16-year-old, dubbed Alice. He assaulted her, she said, forcing his penis down her throat because he wanted “to see your mascara run”. She remembered, also, her taxi driver pulling up outside Brand’s house and begging her not to go in. “Please,” he said. “You could be my little girl.”

He’s a rare hero in this story, that taxi driver. At the time, Brand was 30. Given that he turned 48 a couple of months ago, I make it 2005, maybe 2006. How much, I found myself wondering, would this taxi driver have known about him? So I looked back. Plenty.

Already, “Russell Brand Does Sex” was a tabloid staple. “He got me naked and pounded on top of me like a rabid dog,” a woman from an Abba tribute act told the Sunday People, for example, apparently quite cheerfully. One day he’d be planning to bed Paris Hilton ("Would I bonk her brains out? Yes"), another he’d be bragging about a one-night stand with a Big Brother contestant.

Generally, it was all a giggle. “HAVE you bonked Russell Brand this week?” asked the Sun, “Call us on …” This, after the News of the World had reported that “RANDY Russell Brand is coming to the Edinburgh Festival with women on his mind”, noting that “The BB host has asked for a flat across the road from the theatre where he’ll star, to save time getting groupies into bed. Let’s hope the bedroom action lasts longer than the walk!”

Russell Brand leaves the Troubabour Wembley Park theatre in north-west London after performing a comedy set. Picture: PA via Getty Images.

Soon afterwards, Edinburgh police got involved after a woman claimed to have been drugged and raped in the flat in question. Charges would eventually be filed against Brand’s flatmate then dropped, and Brand himself would go on to win damages from the Daily Star for implying it had been all about him. In the interim, though, he had a good laugh about it while accepting a GQ Award. “I never did a sex attack,” he declared. “At the time I was having consensual sex with witnesses – consensual mind – and a lovely evening it turned out to be.” The room chortled. While somewhere else, perhaps, some forever nameless woman tried to pull her shattered life back together.

If it seems strange today that the same man could have gone on to be feted by Ed Miliband and Jeremy Paxman before guest-editing the New Statesman, then I suppose that’s a testament to how different the early 2000s were. Some stuff – and I say this having been a celebrity gossip diarist at the time – was just very easy not to care about. Although I don’t mean “stuff”, do I? I mean people.

There’s a temptation to understand the Brand story only through the prism of #MeToo; the male impunity of another age. This, I think, misses the scale of the social change since then, which is a change that is hard to understand because it is still unfolding. Put aside his celebrity flings, and the odd kiss and tell. Brand claims to have slept with thousands of women; sometimes several a day. Yet the reporting was almost always only about him. As if the experiences of his partners, whoever they were, were never the point.

Russell Brand’s shows in his latest tour have been cancelled. Picture: PA Images via Getty Images.

Russell Brand has been accused of sex abuse by a number of women. Picture: AFP.

Back then, lots of things weren’t the point. With any sort of public voice, in fact, you had ultimate power over what the point was. Whether on stage or in print, you didn’t really have to worry about the people you had joked about, or even just opined about, rearing up and making a fuss about it afterwards. There was no social media at their disposal; no news but the news that made the news. Perhaps you remember that gruesome line in Succession, when Logan tells Kendall to forget about the boy he let drown in a crashed car. “No real person involved,” he shrugs. That’s how it was. No consequences.

The Roy family in Succession was the epitome of amorality. Picture: Supplied

One depressing feature of the past few days has been the number of public voices springing to Brand’s defence. Many are active in a particular newish fringe of media – the ecosystem of GB News and so on – which is beloved by similar conspiracy theorists to those who now flock to Brand’s own YouTube channel. So I suppose there’s a degree of pure grift there.

I wonder, though, whether it’s also something to do with this new world of consequences. For them, perhaps, Brand is an avatar of what happens when you fall foul of this thing that we now call “cancel culture”. Why, they wonder, can’t the world be as simple as it once was? When a joke was just a joke, and a grope was a sporting chance, and a shagger was a tabloid hero?

Kevin Spacey was acquitted of sex abuse but is still seen as a predator. Picture: Getty Images.

Over the past year, several times, the comedian Katherine Ryan has remarked that the world of comedy was harbouring a “predator”. Most assumed she meant Brand. The line between “predator” and “abuser” is fuzzy. One thinks of Kevin Spacey, acquitted in Southwark crown court on charges of being the latter, yet doomed to be remembered as the former, regardless. As a headline in the Los Angeles Times put it, “Kevin Spacey may have been acquitted. That doesn’t mean he should be uncancelled.”

I can see why some find this new world to be cruel and unforgiving. Often it is. Reports about Brand seem meticulous, but lives can and have been ruined over swirling innuendo with far less basis, or none at all.

Think back, though, to when Brand was banging away. Was that time, do you think, less cruel? When it was all a laugh. When, long before there were Twitter mobs, and petitions, and a whole new economy of outrage, the only person who seemed to care at all was a taxi driver. Peering over his shoulder at a girl who could have been his daughter. Fresh out of school, and doing her make-up in the back of his cab.

The Times