Posted in: BBC, Comedy Central, Movies, TV, YouTube | Tagged: bbc, channel 4, russell brand, youtube

Russell Brand Responds to "Distressing" Week; Goes Conspiracy Route

Russell Brand posted a video update online, his first since accusations of "rape, sexual assaults, and emotional abuse" came to light.

Less than a week after a joint investigative report from The Sunday Times of London and Channel 4 – as well as the Channel 4 "Dispatches" doc Russell Brand: In Plain Sight – accused the actor/comedian of "rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse," Russell Brand (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek) has taken to Instagram to post his first social media response to the accusations. Claiming he's had an "extraordinary and distressing" week after the reports went live, Brand would thank those still supporting him for (as he states) "questioning the information that you've been presented with." Though Brand has denied the claims in the past, that same information that Brand asked his social media followers to question is the same information that Brand did not address in the video. Instead, Brand chose to go the route of his previous YouTube videos and podcast appearances, with claims of "media corruption and censorship" and "deep state and corporate collusion" – promising a more detailed video on Monday on another video streaming site that's not YouTube.

Russell Brand: The Sunday Times of London & Channel 4 Report

The report alleges that Brand sexually assaulted four women between 2006 and 2013 (with The Sunday Times of London keeping the names of the women anonymous). One alleged victim claims the actor/comedian assaulted her when she was 16 years old, and Brand was in his 30s, adding that Brand had nicknamed her "the child" and asked that she read from Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. Another alleged victim shared that she was raped at Brand's home in Los Angeles, while another claimed that Brand sexually assaulted her and then threatened her with legal action if she ever went public with what took place.

"These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies," Brand says at one point in the video "So, This Is Happening" that he posted late Friday in the U.K., seeking to pre-emptively refute the allegations before they went public. "And as I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous. Now 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." The television, film & radio personality has been less visible on that side of the entertainment industry over the past several years, focusing more on social media & YouTube posts that offer his quite often controversial positions on any number of topics – with the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the mainstream media being some of Brand's favorite topics to attack (though Brand has been accused by many in the media of promoting unfounded conspiracy theories and pandemic misinformation in the past).

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