Destroying Russell Brand
I have come to detest the MeToo movement, which I actually disliked from the start. The idea that women don’t ever lie is an abomination, one that is used to ruin men’s lives and destroy the protections built into the legal system against false allegations and allegations that come so late in time that it is difficult or impossible to mount a defense.
Russell Brand recently has been accused by several women of sexual assault taking place many years ago. No doubt Brand was a promiscuous SOB when he was younger. He admitted that well before these allegations surfaced. He says all the sex was consensual and the women say it was certainly not.
Nowadays if someone accuses a person of sexual assault – especially a person whose politics aren’t sufficiently leftist and woke, and Brand fits that definition – then that person must be destroyed, including economically. Just send him to Siberia and be done with it. And yes, it’s interesting that the accusations against Brand have come out when he’s become a successful YouTuber who questions the standard messaging on COVID as well as challenging other kneejerk leftist positions. I don’t necessarily agree with Brand on a ton of things, but I strongly defend his right to say them.
He is innocent till proven guilty. Period.
What are the accusations? Here’s one, which happened in 2008. What is the statute of limitations on indecent exposure? Three years in California. Isn’t that convenient? So apparently, this can’t be heard in a court of law, so there would be no need to prove it and the allegations cannot be easily challenged.
The women are all anonymous. One says he raped her in 2012, also in LA. Another says she was 16 at the time of the alleged assault (not sure where that is alleged to have occurred, but in Britain 16 is the age of consent).
It’s interesting to me that all the allegations are of offenses that are alleged to have occurred between 2003 and 2013. That’s between ten and twenty years ago. They seem to have mostly been in California. The statute of limitations there for rape and certain other sexual offenses is open-ended; see this. However, that only applies to such crimes if committed after 2017. For crimes before that, the older limitation applies, which is ten years.
So it appears that all of these alleged crimes are past the time of the statute of limitations, if I am correct in my understanding of the law. That means that they fall into the realm of character assassination and never will be heard in a court of law – unless, of course, Brand defends himself a la Trump, calls his accusers liars, and is successfully sued for defamation.
Is Brand guilty? I don’t know. He’s certainly guilty of being a boor and sexually promiscuous. He apparently mended his wicked ways quite some time ago, and as far as I can tell these people have never come out of the woodwork with these accusations before in terms of pressing charges when they might have done so. To me, whether the charges are true or not (and I doubt we’ll ever know), this smacks of an orchestrated campaign to get Brand. And so far it has been very successful; you can read about a cascade of cancellations of gigs and demonetizations of videos by Brand.
Rumble has stood firm in its defense of Brand’s free speech rights and has refused to deplatform him. However, the anti-Brand forces are now out to punish Rumble and are having some success:
Major brands have started pulling adverts from Rumble, where Russell Brand broadcasts his weekly show, as the comedian vows to keep publishing videos on the platform in spite of claims of rape and sexual assault against him.
Burger King, Asos and HelloFresh are among the brands to have removed adverts from the platform, where Brand has amassed a following of 1.4m, according to the News Movement. He hosts a weekly live show on the platform at 5pm BST.
According to the News Movement, Burger King said it had paused advertising with the platform while investigations continue, while Asos said it had manually removed its ads from Rumble.
Apple and Amazon haven’t pulled their ads – not yet, anyway.
Destroy a heretic, Brand, and destroy a platform, Rumble, that provides competition to the Left in YouTube. Win Win. Of course using anonymous allegations that can’t be proven or effectively countered, perfect.
Rules for thee, not for me.
The advertisers are willing to avoid selling product to 1.4 million followers, plus, probably, casual occasional viewers, over unproven anonymous allegations having nothing to do with what Brand is currently saying on Rumble. This doesn’t strike me as too bright. Have these people not seen what happened to Budweiser? It’s not the same, but this may very well increase Brand’s reach.
I was amused to read that Gavin Newsom is worried about his young son, who is watching Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.
It’s unlikely the women came forward. They have other things to do with their lives than follow Brand’s politics.
They were recruited. Given the time frame, there isn’t even any reason for them to have had anything to do with Brand. Can’t be proven, can’t be disproven.
Now, how about Tara Reade, huh? Guys?
He might be guilty, who knows? He was definitely a smarmy fellow back in the day.
But, innocent or guilty, I am confident none of these allegations would ever have surfaced had he not publicly and successfully expressed his deviation from woke orthodoxy.
Brand has also been accused of “emotional abuse” as if that is some sort of crime. Brand was obviously a self-centered obnoxious jerk, and one can only assume that this is why women were attracted to him. Some women are drawn to men who are guaranteed to emotionally abuse them, and when they complain about “emotional abuse”, their other complaints cannot be taken very seriously.
There was a very enjoyable mystery program from Australia titled “Dr. Blake Mysteries”. The primary actor was Craig Mclachlan. In 2014 the primary actor did a short live theatre presentation of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. One of the female actors claimed he touched her on the rear end. Five years out of work and in court destroyed his career, but he did finally win the case. Last December he was getting ready for a return to the stage—but, not to worry the dirty girls came up with a new lawsuit which they were threatening. Suffice it to say the new one-man show was canceled ahead of time. Now, the dirty girls have filed a lawsuit against the production company. They simply will not let a straight white man win once they have decided he should be the one they use to prove a lesson.
*P.S. I hope I have all the dates and details correct. I am pretty close I think!
Charlie Kirk agrees with Neo, if that means anything.
h/t Hoyt’s Meme post today.
https://accordingtohoyt.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/1551932487750389771.webp
“The idea that women don’t ever lie is an abomination”
I am not a misogynist. If you boil it down, men exert influence through both language and physical strength. Women exert influence through language and sex. It is thus reasonable to assume that women, as a group, are more likely to engage in deceit through language than men as a group when it is a question of ‘he-said she-said’. Please don’t throw tomatoes at me.
“The women are all anonymous.”
Indeed.
“Christine Blasey Ford, who alleges that Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh sexually
assaulted her decades ago…”
Decades ago? Did you file a complaint with the criminal justice authorities? No. Did you file a civil claim? No.
Aren’t these relaxations of the statute of limitations some sort of constitutional violation in regards to ex-post facto law?
Here’s Jean Carroll:
Trump the billionaire with a penthouse and the ability to acquire anything he desires sexually assaulted me in a changing room of a department store.
When did this happen? I cannot recall. The year? I cannot recall. Here’s $5M. Oh, he bitched about it? Sue him again.
If you cannot recall the year in which you have been harmed, your claim should be ‘prima facie’ thrown out.
What about that Johnny Depp case? Turns out she is a lying coprophiliac.
The MeToo movement has been a joke from the start, with apologies to legitimate rape victims.
Erronius
What Ackler said @8:11 pm.
Whenever he surfaced pre-2020 he seemed kind of creepy. Nutty.
Kept asking myself: Who was this guy, anyway? And why do we have to know about him? And who cares?
Then, after Biden was elected, he started criticizing the Narrative and—astonishingly, for me, anyway—began to make some sense.
Yep, Time to BRING HIM DOWN.
Just got back from England. The TV news is all over Brand, 24/7. He is toast. I do not know if it all happened, but doesn’t matter. And by the way he is obnoxious.
Why doesn’t he sue his accusers for defamation? If he wants to play rougher, he can also sue those who republish the defamation. If Miss A says I did a bad thing to her, I sue her for defamation. And if B spreads A’s story, I warn B to stop spreading lies. If B doesn’t stop, I sue B as well.
These suits may be costly and ultimately unsuccessful, but what have I got to lose? Make them pay. Build a reputation as somebody jealous of his honor and expensive to cross.
Owen:
I believe that’s what Dershowitz did to his accuser. Thing is, Dershowitz could prove he never even was anywhere near where his accuser said he was. With Brand, he apparently had sex with these women (and plenty of others), and so I doubt he could prove he was never around them. It just becomes she said he said about something that happened 15 years ago. That’s more difficult.
At the moment, Brand’s accusers are also anonymous, at least to the public. I’m going to assume he knows who they are, but perhaps he doesn’t – at least, yet.
Neo: I hadn’t followed the Brand story so, apologies, I did not know that the accusers are (as yet) unnamed. So this really is the sleaziest version of an ambush. Hard to sue those who hide in the shadows. Maybe one could go after the media peddling such garbage, but then we have the NYT v. Sullivan defense (“I can’t tell you who told me, but I honestly think she’s telling the truth, and Brand is a public figure (because I dragged him into the public eye by putting out the story); so no defamation, right?”).
Disgusting business. As you and other commenters say, this practice comes at a cost. Not just to the target, not just to the publishers, but to all future victims whose stories are now subject to a stronger presumption that they, too, are just making it up. And the social capital account dwindles: all of us must live in an uglier, less-trustworthy world.
Whatever happened may have happened in a druggy haze for both parties. That and time and politics can make memories uncertain and the truth even harder to discover.
#MeToo has another meaning. Once someone comes up with plausible or half-way plausible accusations, other accusers appear saying “Me too, me too,” whether anything happened or not.
I decry this Meee Tooo BS & see it as partially a byproduct of the suck-up-to-women-and-minorities zeitgeist.
I’m not into “celebrities” & never heard of this guy. I don’t care for men with greasy long hair who wear what look like women’s shirts.
I believe the situation with Russel Brand and others fits the old aphorism coined by Sir Acton perfectly, that is “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
That is the power to assassinate a character is an absolute power, with no consequence for lying. (In court, such would be perjury.)
How many corpses with reputations destroyed by falsehoods need to lie about, stinking, before such BS is ever called out for what it is, a false allegation?
Yes, I do have personal experience with similar allegations, on a much smaller scale of course. In a university setting. With anonymity promised. Nothing ever in writing, verbal complaints that can be denied or reworded if challenged. And test the accusers are all female, and me, a male. I guess I need to wear a bodycam whenever interacting with women on campus.
This is a control mechanism that, as a bonus, puts the right in a ridiculous situation. The left debased the culture. Once Russell Brand participated in the debased culture, they owned him. He sealed his fate when he strayed from the leftist orthodoxy.
With Brand in particular, though, there is a second benefit for the left. The way that the left has done Russell Brand stinks to high heaven. But the world doesn’t do nuance anymore. Defending Brand is going to be perceived as defending a sexual predator. Technically, it is at least defending a serial cad. So the right has to fight the left’s degradation of society and then also fight their abusively selective #metoo moves like this, but somehow do so without appearing to defend the left’s degradations.
Good luck to us. We need it.
A crazy idea, but…
I wonder if countersuits could be launched by men, claiming that these women had seduced and enticed them into sexual relations against their will, 10-40 years ago; in other words sexually (mentally?) “assaulted” them. If these suits were not allowed, it would be sex discrimination!
Maybe some preemptive anti-lawfare test cases?
Sauce for the gander…
The repressed memories from years ago really surface when does badthink out loud.