Ben Shapiro
There’s a supposed exposé from The Sunday Times in the U.K., accusing Russell Brand — a person I consider a friend — of rape, sexual assault, and abuse between 2006 and 2013. I didn’t know Russell at that time. I think if I had known him, I wouldn’t have liked him, considering he, by his own admission, has said he was a sex addict, promiscuous, and a person who engaged in incredibly vile behavior during that entire period.
Then Russell Brand remade himself. In the period I’ve known him — the past three or four years — he has been a person who is searching for something meaningful. He has settled down; he’s married, and he has kids. He’s a person who’s been trying to put together a good life.
Can I attest to Russell’s character from 2006 to 2013? I cannot; I did not know him at that point. Do I think the Russell Brand of today is a good person? Yes, I think Russell Brand today is a good person.
Here’s my problem with this particular attack on Brand from the media: the timing. While he was flagrantly promiscuous and incredibly vile, when he spoke publicly about sex and about women, the media were championing him. He was a hero of the Left when he engaged in that behavior. He was treated as some sort of person to emulate; he was being treated as a public celebrity. He was the impish devil who was having sex with as many women as humanly possible and earning millions to do it.
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Ten years later, when Brand has fixed his life and is trying to make a better life for himself, _now_ he gets a full-scale exposé about his past behavior.
Brand responded, “During that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that then — almost too transparent. And I’m being transparent about it now as well. And to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal, that I absolutely deny, makes me question if there is another agenda at play. Particularly when we’ve seen coordinated media attacks before, like with Joe Rogan, when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn’t approve of. … It feels to me like there’s a serious and concerted agenda to control these kinds of spaces and these kinds of voices.”
“What I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations,” he continued, pointing out that there were witnesses whose evidence contradicted the narratives that these two mainstream media outlets were trying to construct, “apparently in what seems to me to be a coordinated attack. Now, I don’t want to get into this any further because of the serious nature of the allegations, but I feel like I’m being attacked and plainly they are working very closely together.”
Is he right about the timing? The question I have is, why the sudden interest by the media in all these stories _now_ when these stories have been floating around for over a decade? Brand crossed a particular political line. If he’d still been on the “correct” side of the line, the media definitely would not have targeted him.
Nothing changed about Joe Rogan from point A to point B except his political viewpoint, and then the media attacked him. Nothing changed about Elon Musk except his supposed politics. Nothing changed about Russell Brand from point A to point B except that Russell has decided he is not in favor of a lot of left-wing narratives ranging from COVID to wokeness.
I find the timing suspicious.
There’s talk about how when Brand was a Channel 4 presenter, there were people sent out into the crowd to pimp for him to pick up women and bring them backstage so that he would have sex with them. This has been common practice in Hollywood for decades. It’s disgusting. It’s been vile forever.
People like me have been pointing it out, and we’ve been considered prudes for doing so. It’s totally fine in Hollywood until some point, and then suddenly it’s not. Bill Clinton did the same thing and the media dismissed it. Why wasn’t it relevant then? Because the men were on the _same side_ as the Left with their other values.
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Ep. 1813 - How Howard Stern Avoided Cancellation
Howard Stern provides a case study in how to avoid the consequences of your own vile public behavior through Left-wing pandering; Joe Biden heads to the UN and mumbles incoherently; and Zelenskyy pushes for more aid…and cooperation on climate change.
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Typically you must have a burden of proof that shows something did happen. We’ve seen too many situations in the past few years of accusations that turn out to be either exaggerated or false, Brett Kavanaugh being the most obvious example that comes to mind. I don’t know what happened with Russell; you don’t know what happened. I _can_ say what I think of Russell Brand today. I can’t say what I think of Russell Brand in 2012. And I don’t know what Russell Brand would say of Russell Brand in 2012.
But what is noncredible about the entire situation is the media’s decision to go whole hog on this story after spending years propping him up while he was engaged in that behavior.
Those of us who have always advocated for traditional sexual mores have been scoffed and laughed at by the media for literally decades. And it turns out, the greatest protection for both women and men is precisely those sexual mores.
Only when Russell Brand has embraced that perspective does the media come after him full-scale.
**Ben Shapiro**
Editor Emeritus,
The Daily Wire
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