Russell Brand jailed for 10 years: Is this a victory for morality?

0:02The Telegraph.

0:30with five samples for just$10 and get$50 toward your rug when you order. Visit Ernesta.com today. That's E-R-N-E-S-T-A dot com. Pessimism. It's never going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we're working every day to connect primary, specialty, and pharmacy care and help lower prescription costs. Will we fix it all overnight? No, But we'll wake up trying again and again until health care works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at Optum.com. Optum. Ten years and six months. Russell Brand is jailed for over a decade for rape and sexual assault.

1:19It's a huge victory for justice and for the heroic women who came forward to tell the truth about his abusive behavior. But questions remain unanswered. why did the political left utilise his reputation to target the electorate despite his boasts of immorality and why media institutions who employed him not only tolerated his behaviour but enabled and facilitated it by turning a blind eye. He said, people don't mind if you behave in a very bad way so long as they're making money out of you. And there's an element with media of desperately chasing the current thing. and what matters is does it get viewers, does it get clicks, does it generate cash.

2:01I don't know if that's a celebration of immorality so much as it's a just thoroughly amoral approach towards culture. Just put on whatever it is people seem to want to see. Every single thing about him is an act, isn't it? I have no idea who the real person is. The BBC has a pattern of this. Yes. And the clarity of behaviour of Brand and Saville is deeply shocking, but neither of them pretended that they were behaving well. Yes. And the bosses just turned and looked the other way. Today we are reacting to the sentencing of Russell Brand, who has been charged with one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault.

2:46I'm joined by Jacob Rees-Mogg. Hello, Jacob. and we will be hearing from The Telegraph columnist Celia Woolden, who has met Russell Brand over the years. But first, let's look at the sentencing. In total, he was sentenced to 10 years and 6 months. That's 9 years for one charge of rape, 18 months total for 3 charges of sexual assault. These will run concurrently but consecutive to the sentence for rape. In his summation, Jacob, the judge, described Russell Brand as, quote, a sexual predator, who told a series of lies. Your casual, arrogant disregard of any woman's right to say no to you was obvious.

3:30One rape victim was, quote, a huge fan of yours, which you were happy to exploit. The whole episode reeks of casual disrespect, said the judge, and Brand's fame means you can act how you like, when you like. As for Russell Brand's entourage, they indulged his dreadful behavior. Jacob, I think it's very important that we hear the voices of the women who brought these accusations and have finally seen justice. first impact statement by a woman who was sexually assaulted by rosselbrand in a soho bar says she didn't have any respect for her afterwards and felt like damaged goods she said a leopard may change its spots but at the end of the day it's still a leopard and not a gazelle and she read that herself in court which must take the most remarkable courage after all that she's been through second impact statement from a lady who was sexually assaulted in capital radio's offices in 2005.

4:30She said, this has had a lasting impact on my life, even if I thought that I had successfully buried what happened. I recognize this now, but I tried for so long to be strong and carry on business as usual. She said that it affected her relationships with some of her male colleagues. A third statement from a woman who was mainly raped by Brand in his Hampstead townhouse in 2009 said, I struggled to eat and sleep. I found it difficult to cope with my emotions. The impact was so significant that I had to take time off from work, and for a period I returned to live with my parents because I did not feel safe and felt unable to cope on my own.

5:06She added that one of the most distressing aspects following the incident was the fear that I might have contracted HIV. And finally, a fourth impact statement from someone who was sexually assaulted in the studio in 2009 when she was working for Channel 4. She said, I was so worried about whether I would be supported and heard because I wasn't when I first spoke up initially after the assault first happened. I do not want others to be worried about speaking up because it's the right thing to do. I have a huge respect for every woman who took part and I think they are incredible. Interestingly, in her evidence during the trial, this woman said that she had reported her assault to the managers at Channel 4.

5:46And Jacob, that's one place to start. The sentence speaks for itself. Brandt will finally get the justice that he deserves. But there have to be questions about the culture in which he was able to operate in a way that has been described as a predator in plain sight. How did he get away with this for so long? And that's the point. It's in plain sight. He doesn't pretend that he is a moral person at all. He boasts of his immorality. He writes a book about it. He is proud of being a predator. And everyone thinks it's funny. And the bit that most mystifies me is that people didn't realize how awful an individual he is after the really nasty attack on Mr.

6:40Sachs, the man most famous for being Manuel in Fawlty Towers, which was a really cruel unpleasant vulgar thing to do this is when he was doing a radio program with jonathan ross and they rang saxes they said ran sax up to claim that russell brand had had sex with sax's granddaughter and asked him to kill himself i mean it's a really nasty yeah series of calls and the bbc suspended ross and i think fired brand at that point but nonetheless the bbc thought this was funny and clever until it had a strong public backlash. And that's the very odd bit that everyone who has looked at Brand with any reasonable eye has seen that he is a deeply immoral person whose standards of behavior are loathsome.

7:33And yet employers were quite happy for him to get away with this and had no interest in supporting staff who were at risk from him. they didn't really mind the risk as long as they were getting the ratings. So you've got this lady from Channel 4, but you've got also the lady who was assaulted in Capital Radio's offices. That shows, to my mind, a failure to run your office properly if somebody can be assaulted in your office and not feel able to do anything about it. Yeah, the BBC is accused of tolerating Brussels brand's behavior with women, and not necessarily assault, but the way in which he pursued them.

8:14And it's not just Russell Brand. No. The BBC has a pattern of this. Yes. And the clarity of behavior of Brand and Saville is deeply shocking, that neither of them pretended that they were behaving well. Yes. And the bosses just turned and looked the other way. And this is perversion in plain sight. Yes. And that seems to me to be deeply worrying. Well, Russell Brand once said, and I'm paraphrasing, but he said, people don't mind if you behave in a very bad way, so long as they're making money out of you. And there's an element with media of desperately chasing the current thing. And what matters is, does it get viewers?

9:01Does it get clicks? Does it generate cash? I don't know if that's a celebration of immorality so much as it's a just thoroughly amoral approach towards culture. Just put on whatever it is people seem to want to see. It tells us that we've lost our way as a society, that we used to have some semblance of Christian values. And there may have been a point at which people were hypocritical. No doubt, actually throughout history, there have been people who have been hypocritical. But post the 1960s, being immoral has been seen to be a good thing. to be modern, to be progressive. And in fact, it isn't a good thing.

9:39It's a wicked thing. And it has terrible effects on people's lives. These impact statements are tremendously important because they tell us about four women who have been abused to a criminal standard. But Brad based it of thousands of women. Yes. All of whom will have some psychological scars from this, that the idea that there is consequence-free immorality is simply not true. Yes. That if people have relationships, there is a psychological consequence of that, and therefore there is a moral responsibility for it. But this is where modern society will push back against you and say that the bar is always consent, that it doesn't really matter what you do or how many people or in what way it's done, all that matters is so long as the individual consent to it.

10:33That is the moral test for the modern world. But consent always has to assume knowledge. And it has to assume perfect knowledge to have perfect consent. And there is not perfect knowledge. And there is the power imbalance that makes consent almost impossible. Yes. It seems to me that a superstar in his 30s cannot get consent from somebody aged 20 in normal circumstances. It's invariably impossible, but it is unlikely to be the case. The girl standing outside in the queue who gets picked out by the star is not really giving full rational consent. It is a power imbalance that is an abuse, but the fundamental morality of it is very important that one shouldn't shy away from the moral precepts that have guided society for thousands of years they guided society for very good reason when they created a better society than the one we've now got that indulges this type of behavior and made it not only seem permissible but actively good actively admirable and there are still people who admire brand.

11:49I think some people think that Judeo-Christian teachings on sex have an unrealistically high standard of human behavior, do everything within marriage in short. But it's rooted in quite a pessimistic understanding of human nature, which says some men, if given an opportunity, will do bad things to women. Therefore, we need to come up with social codes that protect women. That's right. But the modern world, of course, sees that as patronizing and misogynistic, and it throws it back and says, no, what you're doing is telling women that they must avoid all men and this sort of thing, and they must be like nuns.

12:26No, you're not saying that at all. You're saying that men should behave themselves. Yes, but we can't quite trust them to. I don't think we can. I'm not saying all men are like this. I just mean I think we all need a moral code. Before the 1960s, we erected these codes because we were trying to prevent things like Russell Brand from happening. That's right. And that's not to say they never happened, that Don Giovanni explains in operatic form that it has happened in the past. But it was disapproved of. And what's interesting about Don Giovanni as an opera is that it shows the unhappiness that is created by immoral behavior.

13:02and post the 1960s we've believed that immoral behavior makes people happy and i just don't think that's true i think brand has made hundreds if not thousands of women deeply deeply unhappy and number of them we now know about has had a profound effect on their lives over 20 years because of his criminal behavior so there is criminal behavior and he will have a long time in prison to think about his criminal behavior but the criminal behavior comes out of acceptance of immorality. And that is where society, the culture of society and the culture of the organizations he's been involved with is fundamentally at fault.

13:41Now, when Brand in the early 2010s was seeking a new degree of relevance, he recalibrated in order to embrace a form of morality, which is the political morality of the left. I'm very struck by images of Brown that have floated around during this trial. Even to this day, when the TV puts up a mugshot, it doesn't tend to show him as he is now, which is a man advancing in years with grey hair. It still puts up the old images of him that look like a strange cross between Jesus, Che Guevara, and David Koresh, right? It's still the handsome young revolutionary. And I guess when, because I didn't really watch telly in the 2000s, I didn't own one, he only really came into my orbit in the 2010s when he became political and he was he was politics at the level of spirituality you have to understand this it might seem crazy to think about now but he really was that much of a zeitgeist figure this was a time in which the left had lost david cameron was in power austerity was happening we were on the brink of brexit and the left was looking for a new kind of spiritualized socialism, something to give it a sense of direction.

14:58And he provided that. And the left really embraced him. He guest edited The New Statesman. He wrote for The Guardian. And perhaps most importantly, in 2015, Ed Miliband showed up at his flat to seek his vote. Because Jeremy Paxman had interviewed Brand, and Brand had admitted, I don't vote. And Paxman instantly saw through him and thought he was absurd. But it turned Brand into the vote that the left needs to get. That if Miliband is going to stand a chance of winning, much as in the same way that Andy Burnham has chased the Greens, he needs to go after these feckless young men who actually have no intention of voting.

15:38So he had this extraordinary political salience. And it all came about because he identified this new kind of spiritualized socialism, and because the left took him to his bosom, despite everything we've just discussed, and despite the fact that the left at the same time would become the vanguard of the Me Too movement and would spearhead the new policing of sexual morality. But the left was behind the 1960s abandonment of morality. Yeah. So it has to take the blame for the abandonment of morality. And the Me Too movement isn't actually advocating traditional sexual morality. It is doing something slightly different, actually something very different.

16:23It's trying to interpose the state in relationships rather than saying that there is a cultural morality. Right, right. So, and - Explain that for people, the distinction between the two, between a state-endorsed sexual code and a religious cultural sexual code. Well, a cultural code is something that people do and is built up from themselves, and is imposed upon them by themselves. The left-wing approach, the Me Too movement, was that you should set up committees and make people have training so that they would behave well, rather than saying, actually, the answer to this is people to follow the Ten Commandments and then it will solve the problem by people's own volition.

17:05It's all about ticking boxes and your point of consent. And I mean, if Russell Brand had got a note from everybody he had slept with saying they consent, that would not have changed the abuse of power involved. And he probably could have got that. And he almost certainly could have got that because of the position that he was in. Not signed willingly, my point, but he could have used coercion to get that note. To get that. Yeah. And so I'm very suspicious of the left's approach to dealing with morality because. But conservatives were suspicious of this whole phenomenon at the time in Peter Hitchens was famously too.

17:37And of course, the first thing I did was Google Tim Stanley and Russell Brand to find out what I had written about him 10 years ago. And this was when he went on Question Time and debated Nigel Farage. And the point I made then was, why is he a media phenomenon? He knows nothing about politics. If you listen to him, the words sound very clever, but they're exactly what someone does when they don't understand the deeper wisdom. They pepper it with words to sound clever. and it frustrated me and many people on the right at the time that he was being elevated into this guru-like status and i think conservatives come out of this period quite well because they make mistakes no doubt about it but they've got a very good nose partly because they're snobs for spotting intellectual dishonesty and i think that's what i think it was obvious in the 2010s that he was making it up well you come out of it very well and charles moore comes out of it extremely well, refused to pay his license fee after the disgraceful treatment of Mr.

18:38Sachs. And the BBC has never really properly apologized for that either. It was really nasty. It was very unpleasant. And I think that showed you something about Brown, that he is not a pleasant man for all his charismatic appeal. There are often charlatans in public life. And they, you know, think of Robert Maxwell, who dominated the media scene for 20 years and was a complete fraudster. He could have been Melmott out of Trollope's novel. Former Labour MP. Former Labour MP for Buckingham. There are these charlatans around and they get lauded until they get exposed. The right is slightly more cynical about human nature as a general rule.

19:28and therefore we tend to be less taken in by them they did fall for jimmy savile marco thatcher fell for jimmy savile which is um sad and the catholic church fell for jimmy savile as well he got a very jimmy savile got a very an absurd funeral and a funeral which is embarrassing to watch as a roman catholic i mean the priest actually says in his eulogy um i hope god will fix it for jimmy to go to heaven i mean past the sick bucket yes regard even if he had been a good person that's not the kind of thing a catholic priest should be saying at a at a funeral well um if we stuck to the old right we probably wouldn't have had that sort of thing going on in funerals anyway no eulogies at funerals indeed a few words on the gospel um uh but but no the right doesn't always uh come to the correct answer with these people and sometimes gets taken in is it's just generally more cautious about human nature recognizes the fallen nature of mankind but you take my point about the i suppose not surprising but blatant hypocrisy of the left in that period you remember we were going to tory conferences and being spat at because of austerity right it would it was seen very much as i don't being spat at oh i was it was a moral binary and brand was as i say the near saintly uh face of those who opposed austerity was he i i just wonder whether that's being slightly overstated that yes he had the interview with milliband and yes he had a certain following but i don't think he was that important in the grand scheme of things i don't think he was important my my point is is that he was his image was used this is this is why i'm saying about why do we still paint him as shea gevara or jesus christ his image was used and embraced by a generation of left-wingers yes they like they like that image they thought he was cool yeah yeah by the time they were morally lording it over the right when the right was mostly just doing things in government that it had to do uh didn't necessarily want to do them though some people did um and all this time they They were getting cozy with someone who we now know is grossly immoral.

21:46And wasn't denying it at the time. No, exactly. Obviously, people didn't know he was a criminal at the time, but he boasted of his immorality. Yes, yes. Then he goes away and comes back as a born-again Christian, baptized in the presence of Bear Grylls, who I will just read out a statement because I think it's a very good one by Bear Grylls, who says, quote,

22:26I think that's actually a very good response because it would be tempting just to say, look, he pulled the wall over my eyes. But no, when someone comes to you and says, I want to be saved, You have to take that at face value. And we have no right to judge whether he genuinely is a Christian or not. Yes, I've known Bear for a long time. And he's certainly a very friendly acquaintance, if not a friend. And I think he has praised himself very well and wisely that, of course, forgiveness is a matter for God. and understanding people's inner heart is a matter for God. That Elizabeth I's line about not liking to make windows into men's hearts is something one should always bear in mind.

23:16On the other hand, you can make rational judgments and you can look at Brand and see that adopting apparently the clothing of Christianity was very convenient to him in the circumstances that he was in. not saying any more than that not saying that his conversion was fake but that it suited his purpose at the time yes uh in the dock he had been noted to pray and to also pray his rosary again i'm not going to judge anyone for that i mean you can be guilty and in fact it could be a good thing it could be a sign of personal repentance i think what complicates brand is that the religion that he followed was very personalized and you can easily see how it would fit the worldview of someone who doesn't want to come completely to terms with what they did i'm afraid this point um i'm going to be slightly judgmental first of all the piers morgan interview where he couldn't quote a single line from the bible yes secondly rosary is an extremely catholic prayer and it's just not clear what his denomination is i can't he's not a catholic i can't figure it out yeah Well, his baptism wasn't a Catholic baptism.

24:23No, it's not, no. I'm not sure that his baptism was a real... I mean, anyone can baptize as long as they do it with flowing water and say that they baptize and then Father and Son, Holy Ghost. The conditions are very slight. You don't even need to be a Christian, actually, to carry out a baptism. But it has to be a Trinitarian baptism. And then it's accepted by all the churches. But even so, I'm not sure if those conditions were met. and I wonder if he knows actually how to say the rosary. What prayers is he saying or is it purely symbolic that his lack of knowledge when talking to Piers Morgan is so startling that is he saying the Pada Nostra on the large beads and the Ave Maria on the small beads or is he just fingering them to show how religious he is?

25:14I watched the whole of his Sunday service, the one that he broadcasts in the middle of the trial, and I actually ended up watching it twice because I'm interested in theology and I found its modern take on Christianity really interesting and instructive. The fact that he did it in the middle of the trial was controversial enough. We can't comment on a trial, rightly so, because we don't want to influence its outcome. Should someone in the dock be allowed to make something like that? If I was the judge, I might have told him to knock it on the head. But if you listen to his whole approach towards Christianity, And again, I don't want to be unfair to the man, but given that he's just been found guilty in sentence, it's hard not to see everything through the prism of someone who's trying to evade justice.

25:59One narrative that's very strong with Brand is the idea that everyone's guilty, which we are. We're all born in sin. We're all born in sin. We all do bad things. But he keeps harking on this point. We're all guilty. We're all guilty. We've all done it. We've all done it. His point being, I infer, that his guilt is one that all men share, and the women who had sex with him share too. In other words, there's a kind of an equalizing quality to guilt that means that you shouldn't necessarily judge his more than other people's, and nor should he perhaps take responsibility for it. Another thing I've noticed about Brand's theology is it's very Eastern.

26:43He was once a Buddhist, and his take is almost Taoist. It's this idea that the universe is composed of energy, and you move with the energy, or you channel it and you direct it. And he has spoken in the past about sex being an energy. Sex is something that de Brand is just going to happen because it's part of the universe. And what he did when he was at his youngest and randiest was he was just a conduit for that sexual energy. now again that helps to contextualize rape the sex is going to happen right i'm just facilitating it but it was going to happen and you and i were both guilty people we both want this sex so it's just going to happen so it contextualizes that rape it makes him a little bit less responsible for it um and in and in a strange way it somehow spiritually transforms what is something really gross and down and dirty into something which can be philosophized away in a very clever manner except it doesn't because it isn't true yes and this is again it's a problem with people thinking they can invent their own religions that there is truth yeah and you and i believe that comes and the teaching of Holy Mother Church.

28:03And that tells you that, yes, we are sinners, but as sinners, we are responsible for our actions. We can't blame them on energy or on God. God doesn't make us commit evil acts. We do it ourselves because we have free will and we have responsibility and liability for what we do and how they affect other people. And most of sin is a question of the effect you have on other people, not all of it, but most of it. and that therefore leads you to a very different position from the one Brand is adopting. What he is philosophizing, if you wish to give it that word, which I think overaggrandizes it, is self-justification.

28:45He is trying to say that he hasn't really done anything wrong because he's only done what anybody else is doing. What happens? The way of the doubt, it just happens. But that just isn't true because we have free will. Yes, exactly. And therefore we have responsibility. And this is where you get into the question of repentance. And again, how do I know? But there is a reduction in sentence for people who plead guilty at an early stage. Brand has got his sentence because he did not plead guilty at an early stage. The failure to plead guilty at an early stage indicates that you are not repentant because you don't recognize that you did something wrong.

29:23And that's really important. This failure to understand that what he did was bad. And the witness impact statements we talked about at the beginning show the terrible effect that had on innocent young lives, which have had this weighing over them for 20 years and more. I don't want to give any impression that Eastern religions do not have Judeo-Christian type understandings of sexual morality. They do. It's more that he has cherry picked different elements of spiritualities in a way that psychologically makes sense to him. At one point in his Sunday service, he suggested that Jesus was like Wi-Fi.

29:59It's like tuning in and opening up. But this is just awful, awful nonsense. It's dreadful psychobabble. And it's why religion needs the structures that are provided by the Catholic Church. They need authority. They need the ancient tradition that establishes them. Yes. Otherwise, we can all pick and choose as we feel the mood takes us and then decide whatever we've done is fine because our philosophy has told us, say, this is just awful nonsense. Well, yeah. And one's true in the name of tolerance. Yes. Accept this bilge. One's got to say that it is just rubbish. Yes. Well, I agree, but I've concluded, having sat through so many hours of brandism, that it's the theology of the addict.

30:48It's the theology of someone trying to make sense of being overwhelmed by a constant desire to do bad things. He's not trying to make sense of it. He's trying to keep his audience. Or trying to justify it. But I really truly think that's what this is about. But as regards to the audience, of course, the other interesting thing is, having flirted with the left, this won him a new audience on the right. Now, it's the outside right. It's the alternative right. It's people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, some people have suggested that he's innocent. But it's just intriguing, isn't it, that in the modern era, you can't be cancelled.

31:27In the old days, if you fell out with the BBC, Jimmy Savile excluded, if you fell out with the BBC and you got kicked off air, you were never heard of again. Now what you can do through social media is you can build your own audience that can financially sustain you. And in that world, it's impossible to get cancelled. The commons can no longer exert a kind of moral discipline by saying to people, you've gone too far. We don't wish to hear from you. But you can end up in prison. Yes, you can't escape prison. Yes. No. And his victims will be able to bring civil claims against him. And therefore, his earnings will be spread rather more widely than he would have anticipated.

32:10Yes. So be sure your sins will find you out that he hasn't got away with this type of behavior. I'm in favor of not being able to cancel people because cancellation can be very unreasonable. It can cancel people who are saying perfectly sensible things. And the price of not canceling is that people who are saying bad things are also not canceled. But I think that's a price worth paying. Yes. But he has not got away with this. And justice has been done. And that's really important and should give us confidence in our society. The justice has been done in his lifetime. Fayed, Savile, it all happened after they died.

32:49Good point, yeah. Whereas with Brand and with, who's the man who used to do cartoons, the Australian man? Roe Harris. That's right. And Gary Glitter. Justice has been done in their lifetimes. And that I think is very important. And it comes back to the amazing job done by the brave journalists who reported on brand to be clear i am not pro cancellation i think at stalinist i'm just observing that it can be easily evaded nowadays and my internet computer is full of people telling me they've been cancelled but i can't seem to escape them they never seem to shut up i i will make one grim prediction which is russell brand will be back he will he will find some way of monetizing this experience and however however long it takes uh or if any of it even slips out of prison i've no doubt we will hear from him because this is the kind of person who cannot exist unless it is in public and i suspect being by himself is a very painful and difficult thing for him well though his crimes were a lesser magnitude uh jeffrey archer is the case in point isn't he who um went to prison for perjury perverting the course of justice had profound effect on some people's lives very detrimentally by the lies that he told and came back bounced back and was much lauded when he died he wrote a play about being on trial he made my rate prison diaries he made lots of money out of being a criminal convicted criminal yes are we looking here, if in a world which is uncomfortable with the concept of guilt, does it mean we also lose the self-regulation of shame?

34:35Oh, that's a very good question. I wonder, I think some people are easily shamed and others aren't, and that has always been the case, and that shameless people are not new to this society. You and I would be deeply ashamed and would hide under a stone if we were accused of any of these sorts of things, let alone sent to prison for them. But that's probably why we don't get accused of them and sent to prison for them, because the sense of shame helps us, at least to some degree, to maintain such a moral code as we may have. And you and I, I'm sure, will both know people who've done very bad things, who have found God and have turned their lives around.

35:17Well, I'm a great admirer of Jonathan Akin, who I think has done this in a really sincere in an admirable way. And what does Jonathan do today? He hasn't turned it into a TV show. He doesn't make any money out of it. Or an opera. He works as a prison chap. That's right. Which is one of the hardest areas of Christian practice to work in. And if you find God and turn your life around, that is best reflected in what you choose to do next. And some period of silence and working on behalf of other people, I think would be a very good way of demonstrating it. Humo is, of course, the great example of that.

35:55Yes. And I think that's unlikely for Brand, but not impossible. But he's got to come to terms with these very serious offenses, which so far seems unlikely that, I'm afraid, a performative rosary in the dock is not very convincing at this stage.

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38:14of his star power, his history, his charisma, being caught out as a predator and sent to jail? Well, it's a huge moment. And as everybody knows, these sorts of cases very rarely end up even going to court. So the fact that he's being convicted is a big deal. And people are talking rightly or wrongly, discussing it as a sort of follow-up to the Me Too movement, that this is a seminal moment that will encourage other women to come forward. And that crucially doesn't mean that if you are a famous or powerful person, you are immune to the consequences. You met him, you interviewed him back in 2010.

39:08Yes. What was he like in person? What was it like to meet the real Russell Brand, if such a thing existed? Well, I should probably put it in context, because bear in mind, in 2010, we were sort of at the tail end of the sort of lads mag era. But he was still very much, I mean, you know, the kind of things that he would say in an interview would be unthinkable today. and yet at the time when I was listening back to the transcript sort of just baffling to think that anyone would talk to a journalist in that way and as I say in the piece I've written, journalists contribute to that sort of, you know, there's a lot of banter going on and I was asking questions that I wouldn't ask many other people and I probably wouldn't ask anyone today.

40:01um but he is he was very happily responding to them all talking about his sex addiction about um how predatory men are about uh about the aspects of women that he he loved the most um about the sheer variety and how you know the the most delightful thing about women is that every every one of them is different and there's something to love in each one and it never you You know, the funny thing is that sort of thing just seemed it was all so much a part of his brand that it wasn't as if it seemed peculiar to me. It was just him being Russell Brand. And did that seem like an act or something genuine?

40:43Well, I think every single thing about him is an act, isn't it? I have no idea who the real person is. And, you know, the speech is ridiculous. The words were ridiculous that he uses. so you you as a journalist you certainly had no idea who who this person was and I interviewed him twice and met him several times um at social occasions because he was always out and about at kind of magazine parties and you know the GQ men of the year awards and all that those kinds of things so I sort of saw him um you know in action in terms of socially um and uh and and there wasn't a single moment when his guard would drop and you would get a genuine impression of him as a human being.

41:31And did you see, did you observe women being drawn to that or him being drawn to women? Yeah, I think a lot of women were, you know. I mean, even now, but amongst themselves, sort of I'm hearing a lot of women saying, oh, you know, I did, I've got to admit, I did always find him very attractive and sort of charismatic.

41:57and yeah, so he was certainly very popular with women and none of his whole spiel about sleeping with more than 2 ,000 of them was off-putting or seemed to be off-putting at that time. I guess it's Don Juan, isn't it? It's a sort of notion of a mythical male ability and way with women, But always with the assumption that it's consensual every time, because it just sounds like such a mess that my instinct would be to stay away from it. Well, well, I know you would think so. But as you say, he'd sort of perfected quite an old fashioned swashbuckling kind of allure, hadn't he? I suppose. And I think a lot of people were taken in by the ridiculous way in which he speaks and thought that that was someone incredibly intelligent and philosophical.

42:54And and when I met him the second time, of course, he'd been through this huge spiritual conversion, which I also felt was was a complete sham, where he was talking about having, you know, being born again and was a new man and he didn't touch anything sinful and was just very much in love with his wife and with his new baby, which is not at all hard to believe. But something about the sort of euphoria of it seemed to me to be just another pose. did you also sense reading your very good column on it that with the conversion he had mentally put all of that stuff in the past that he had created a sense of old and new russell uh that was all encompassing everything that did happen is part of his funny dark narrative of the past and of sin and everything new is the new hymn and you should accept the new hymn and let's not dwell too much on the old hymn?

44:00Well, I think that that is certainly very convenient, that, isn't it? And it's not the first time that we would see it. You see it quite often with criminals or where they go through a supposed sort of conversion and they draw a very firm line between what they did before and what they are now. And obviously that works out very well for you if you've done bad things. um now I think at the time I just assumed that it was probably slightly cynical and more to do with the fact that that that the culture had moved on and it was no longer acceptable to go around talking about being predatory and and sleeping with lots of women and so he had to find a new um you know he was a sort of chameleon like figure so he he knew that that he had to find a new shtick that would fit in with the cut with sort of current morals.

44:53I just don't get any of this really. It seems to me he's always been utterly loathsome that he looks as if he hasn't washed in a month. He can do with a jolly good haircut, short back and sides. And he was so open about his behaviour, like Jimmy Savile, he went round telling people that he was pretty close to being a sex offender, which we now know that he is. Charles Moore wrote about this and the whole affair with Mr. Sachs and that once that happened, everybody knew that he was just ghastly in every possible way. And I completely mystified that so many people have remained supportive of him for such a long time.

45:37I mean, I agree with you. I certainly wasn't in awe of him or drawn to him at all, but I could see what it was about his appeal that did work. And I think it was just people, a certain type of person would be taken in by him. And I also think, as I wrote in my piece, that I think it's, I don't know what criminal psychologists would say about this, but there was that idea that you can't actually be a pervert if all you ever talk about is sleeping with lots of women, that you must be, that it was sort of all above board and therefore not actually sinister. And I definitely at the time just thought he was one of those, you know, one of those men who was having great fun being famous.

46:38And so I didn't object to him talking about how much he relished that because it felt sort of just the way certain men did talk at that time. And yet his later image was all about self-denial and religion. I mean, Celia, as an interviewer, you write about famous people and the nature of celebrity. And one interesting thing about Brand was his ability to sustain a career over 20 years. As you know, with celebrity, culture is about good timing. People can become famous for five minutes, usually. And then whatever their shtick was, it becomes old and you never see them again. But there were several different brands, weren't there?

47:23There was Brand as the young addict comedian, Brand as the movie star marrying Katy Perry, brand as the left-wing agitator and then finally brand as the born-again Christian. Can you speak to that? Because that requires some cleverness, some cunning there to be able to spot what is coming and adjust your image so that you can remain relevant in each of those cultural cycles. Yeah, well, I think that in a very straightforward way, he deserved his fame because, as you've just described he was able to keep um becoming the person that that people wanted at that particular time and it's actually very hard to do that most most celebrities or um artists sort of find find that very hard to to do and they have one shtick that is perhaps more genuine than any of his were and they don't jump around.

48:23But I think it says a lot about how mysterious he still is, the fact that he was able to slip on all those different masks. And unfortunately, the sort of sin-free new man thing did go down really well. I think people thought, oh, isn't that great? this massive sort of Lothario who's now settled down and he's seen the light, and people really like that. Do we assume he's a bit too clever, really, that he's just a moral vacuum who went along with vacuous society at various different times and in various different guises, and that prior to 2010 being laddish was sought to be the way to behave and now being an anti-vaxxer and all that sort of nonsense has been popular and wearing God on your sleeve.

49:26And it's just somebody who has a certain charisma ploughing on through life and happening to be in the right place at the right time for some of it, but with this utter lack of moral compass that has meant that he would come a cropper eventually well i think it's probably very helpful to have a lack of moral compass in particularly in the entertainment industry isn't it because it means that you can just move from one thing or maybe also in politics actually to be able to move seamlessly from one thing to another without being encumbered by your previous you know actions or beliefs um and uh um uh but i don't know i I never got, I always thought that, I never felt that he was clever.

50:10I think he just had looked up lots of words and thought, you know, and to certain people they were very impressive. But no, I don't think, if you scratch beneath the surface, I'm sure that wasn't the case. And in fact, you probably saw that clip of my husband's show where he had asked him to, where Brand had started talking about the Bible and my husband said, which passages exactly were the ones that were so formative and crucial to you? And Brand was unable to cite a single, single passage in the Bible. And so the whole thing sort of just falls apart. And that's very important because the conversion and that great baptism ceremony in the Thames with poor old Bear Grylls is just performative.

51:08It's very hard to believe that there's any reality in that. He just rather liked pretending to be John the Baptist. Yes, yes. But I think we're living at a time when it's incredibly easy. People don't tend to scratch beneath the surface. You can get away with just saying this stuff and everyone believes you, you know. But with him, and I think in probably every area, if you gave it even a little sort of push, it wouldn't hold up. Celia Walden, thank you very much. Thank you.

52:06We'll see you next time.

52:24No, but we'll wake up trying again and again until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at Optum.com. Optum. Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show we recommend. Hi, I'm Rachel Fisher. And I'm Desi Jenakin. And we host Hollywood Crime Scene. Our show is about the salacious crimes and scandals of the rich and famous. from the early days of Hollywood to the 21st century. We also cover Los Angeles history, true events that inspired movies, interesting biographies, and more. At the end of the week, we drop our mini episode, which recaps the news everyone is talking about, plus the weirdest stories of the week from around the globe.

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