But at the weekend, even before the report had been published, social media was swirling with verdicts from the court of public opinion. And soon after it landed, the 48-year-old comedian and actor was already being spoken about by many in the past tense, as someone whose life, to all intents and purposes, was over. All that was left, once the litany of allegations had subsequently been repeated and dissected by those on Twitter, was to ask how complicit Brand’s colleagues and employers had been in his behaviour.
Meanwhile, a smaller faction led by the likes of Andrew Tate and Elon Musk was equally quick to defend the Essex-born star, as though their political leanings gave them more of an insight into the alleged criminal offences. For them, the obvious truth was that the star was himself the victim of a “co-ordinated attack” waged by a mainstream media intent on silencing Brand’s “anti-establishment” views.
The arrogance of anyone who was not either there to witness Brand’s behaviour or knows him personally making a judgement is breathtaking. Chilling. Yet this kind of barbaric pile-on is becoming the norm: we saw it with Phillip Schofield in May and Huw Edwards in July.
The Metropolitan Police has only just begun its inquiries into the allegations made by four women, who claim Brand committed rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse between 2006 and 2013 – which Brand vehemently denies – with a view to launching a criminal investigation.
Comedian Russell Brand performs at "Eddie Murphy: One Night Only," a celebration of Murphy's career, at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills in 2012. Photo / AP
And the investigative journalists who have been working on this story for four years, interviewing hundreds of sources who knew or worked with Brand and gathering everything from private emails and text messages to medical and therapeutic notes as part of their evidence, would be the first to remind the public that theirs was not an official criminal investigation. That due process is the central tenet of justice.
Trying to bypass that process will wreck the lives of the innocent and, where there is guilt, harm above all the victims’ cases.
There are already calls for the Metropolitan Police and forces in the US to investigate the allegations against Brand, and they must be allowed to do this in the proper way.
I have interviewed Brand a few times, and this weekend was soon receiving messages from an acquaintance who knew I’d met him. “What d’you reckon? Rapist or not?” And I found myself falling into the opinion trap, reading back through the transcripts – for what?
If it was retrospective red flags I was looking for, there were plenty of them. Brand was at the height of his fame both times I interviewed him – once in October 2010 and then again in June 2017 – and although I’ve never been a fan of his schtick and always found his wordplay wearying, he was certainly a lively interviewee.
Russell Brand addressed the serious allegations in a video posted on YouTube and Twitter (now known as X). Photo / YouTube
He was happy to talk about the sex addiction that consumed him throughout the early and mid-Noughties, when he supposedly slept with thousands of women.
“I was arduous and committed,” he told me in the first interview, before admitting that after two periods of abstinence “releasing myself from that self-imposed exile from the flesh did feel like a relief”. Asked whether he had ever felt female attention was predatory, he replied: “I don’t think that women are as predatory as we are.”
In our more recent interview, he was less provocative: a “new man” and a fully paid-up member of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme, rejoicing in his marriage to Laura Gallacher, new fatherhood and “being clean” – as he put it: “an evacuee from madness”.
Did any of this give me the confidence to decide whether or not Brand is a criminal? No. The evidence presented in the investigative report is compelling but I’m not a detective. This is not a “whodunnit” to be revelled in with a curry on our lap trays, and these are not actors but real people, so I’ll leave the criminal investigation to the police and the judgements to a court of law.
