On the menu today: The sordid allegations against actor and media personality Russell Brand, and what we face when we encounter he-said, she-said accusations. Also, a look at Brand’s dramatic political evolution, and how quickly some conservatives will rush to defend any celebrity who appears to be on their side. Meanwhile, the Polish government decides it’s not going to send any new weapons to Ukraine.
Sorting through the Russell Brand Mess
Yesterday on Megyn Kelly’s program, we discussed the allegations against actor and media personality Russell Brand.
You can find the Channel Four documentary laying out the allegations of sexual assault and inappropriate sexual relationships with 16-year-old girls here. You can read the Times of London article here (subscription required). You can find Brand’s denial, posted on Instagram here.
I don’t know if the allegations are true. Unless you’re one of a select handful of people, you don’t know if the allegations are true, either. We may believe we know the truth, or think we know what is true. We are free to draw our own conclusions, based on what we can see and hear and what we can verify. But in the end, until there’s a presentation of other evidence that verifies or contradicts the claims, we are evaluating contradictory accounts.
A few years ago, during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, I pointed out the large number of people who insist they can tell which figure is telling the truth by watching them speak. Plenty of people insist, “I know how to spot a liar”:
Right, right. This is why some of you bought tickets to the Fyre Festival, bought a lemon of a used car, invested in Enron, let Bernie Madoff manage your money, raved about James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, believed your ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend’s denials, forwarded that hoax social-media meme, and believed The Martian was based on a true story. Some of you are convinced he really is going to call you back, that the attractive woman connecting with you on social media is real, that your brother-in-law will pay back the money you loaned him, and that the guy who’s hanging around your girlfriend a lot is “just a friend.”
But you know how to spot a liar, right?
We live in country where roughly 5 million people bought weight-loss supplements that don’t work, 2 million attended the sales seminar because they were told they could win a prize, and 2 million fell for fraudulent “work at home” offers. Roughly 22.1 million Americans lost an estimated $9.5 billion to phone scams last year. . . .
Somewhere in your attic, we’ll find a Milli Vanilli album.
The world has people who are convincing liars, and the world has people who look and sound like they’re lying, even when they’re telling the truth. A lot of people are so afraid of being fooled, that they choose to believe that they have some preternatural sixth sense that turns them into a human lie detector. Perhaps you believe that about yourself. I wish that were true, and I hope your power of perception is indeed exceptionally keen and able to tell the difference between the truth and a convincing lie. But history suggests that it is probably not true.
Now, there are ways to evaluate claims like the one against Russell Brand. Were the accuser and the accused in the same place at the same time? Does the accuser list a lot of specifics and details from the time and place of the wrongdoing, or is the story vague and fuzzy on those details? Did anyone see them together before or after the alleged wrongdoing? Did the alleged victim tell anyone at the time about the wrongdoing, or are there contemporaneous accounts that help verify her version of events?
And Brand has a more than fair gripe that he’s being tried in the court of public opinion when no charges were ever filed in the court of law. In a court of law, we have clear and specific rules about the admission of evidence, the right for the accused to cross-examine the accuser, and the high threshold for a conviction and sustaining a conviction on appeal. In the court of public opinion, we have none of that — it’s a battle of the image consultants and which interview program gets the higher ratings. In a court of law, you are innocent until proven guilty. In the court of public opinion, the public can choose to believe you’re guilty. O. J. Simpson was only convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping for an incident in 2007, but lots of people ardently believe Simpson killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.
And yes, you can be forgiven for noticing these allegations — dating back to the George W. Bush and Obama administration years — are only getting the big-time mainstream-media coverage now, after Brand has experienced an ideological transformation.
For a long early stretch of his career, Brand was not a particularly political or ideological figure; he was more of a madcap anarchist libertine. Then, for a period, you would not have distinguished him from the standard-issue leftist celebrity, warning, “We are living in a time of huge economic disparity and confronting ecological disaster. This disparity has always been, in cultures since expired, a warning sign of end of days.” He argued ISIS had a legitimate point hidden in its hateful ideology, contending, “The kernel of truth in the sprawling, bewildering, bramble of ISIS madness is society isn’t working, the system isn’t working, it’s totally corrupt.” He argued that Fox News host Jeanine Pirro is “more dangerous than ISIS,” and got into a fight with Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld, contending ISIS is not “anywhere near as frightening as the existing power structures.”
I will remind you that between 2013 and 2018, ISIS killed roughly 27,000 people, conquered 100,000 acres of territory, committed genocide against the Yazidi and war crimes against unarmed people, ran a global terror campaign that featured bombings, videotaped beheadings, “mass executions, sexual slavery, rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, torture, mutilation,” and recruited children to be soldiers and suicide bombers “at an unprecedented rate.”
Both Jeanine Pirro and the existing power structure have their flaws, but “worse than ISIS” is a really high bar to clear, and Brand beclowned himself by arguing that some pundit who said things he didn’t like was a bigger menace than the world’s most bloodthirsty international terrorist group.
Despite, or perhaps because of, comments like this, Brand had quite a fanbase among the left-of-center. Back in 2018, The Atlantic published a gushing profile, declaring:
Brand has become genuinely, slow-growingly, deep-brain interesting. The Brand who presents Under the Skin With Russell Brand, the second season of which began in June, is part seeker and part clown, capering at the margins of thought in the company of scientists, anarchists, theologians, philosophers, psychologists, Marxist scholars, documentarians, and mad professors. And Al Gore. “Thank you so much for doing this interview and for putting so much thought into it, Russell,” the former vice president says, with hilarious imperturbability, to the gasping, insatiable person on the other side of the studio table. He will later reward Brand with some bass-boosted vice-presidential chuckles and, at the end of a frantic exchange about climate change and spiritual renewal, exclaim, “That is entertainment!”
(This was a little bit before The Atlantic cut ties to our old friend Kevin Williamson. Good call, everybody! Williamson makes you feel threatened with his big scary pro-life views, but Russell Brand makes you feel safe!)
But when the Covid pandemic hit, Brand started arguing that the sweeping restrictions represented an assault on freedoms, and he became an increasingly outspoken critic of Covid vaccines. (Did you notice how not trusting pharmaceutical companies changed from a left-wing thing to a right-wing thing practically overnight? A whole bunch of self-identified conservatives think I’m an establishment sellout for having the same beliefs I did four years ago. “You changed!” they cry.) This summer, the British magazine Prospect lamented Brand’s “rise as a major voice of the alt-right.” Now, some people use the term “alt-right” as a synonym for “person to the right of me that I disagree with,” but it is clear that Brand, once the fierce critic of capitalism and Fox News, was now an anti-vaccine, anti-establishment voice dabbling in conspiracy theories whose worldview was growing more aligned with the likes of Joe Rogan, Matt Taibbi, and Ben Shapiro.
Anyway, the vaccine skepticism — or perhaps more outright opposition — meant that in the eyes of a bunch of figures on the right, Brand was a good guy now. As I noted on Kelly’s program yesterday, if you are a celebrity who starts to drift to the right — or who even seems to meet some minimal threshold of being anti-left — there are conservatives who will line up to rescue you and defend you like doughboys in World War I.
A person’s guilt or innocence is not determined by their political beliefs or whether you agree with them or not.
Every time some celebrity is accused of serious wrongdoing, particularly involving sexual harassment or assault, we hear from other figures in the industry who say things like “everybody knew” or “this was an open secret.” And now we’re getting those claims about Brand. Those of us who do not travel in Hollywood, celebrity, or other influential or elite circles are getting a little tired of “everybody” knowing about either crimes or predatory behavior and “everybody” just standing around trading rumors instead of doing something about it.
Whatever his politics, I’ve often enjoyed the performances of actor Ron Perlman. He apparently had heard the unsavory stories about producer Harvey Weinstein and his treatment of women, and he decided to enact some retribution in a . . . unique manner:
Did I ever tell ya about when Harvey Weinstein told me to make sure I shook his hand at a charity event, so I stopped in the mens room and pissed all over my hand, then went straight up to him on the receiving line?
I cannot help but wonder, did Perlman ever have any idea or plan for dealing with Weinstein that didn’t involve urinating on his own hand? I mean, yes, you’ve gotten your urine on Harvey Weinstein’s hand, but to do it, you had to pee on your own hand. I can’t chalk that one up as a clear win. That really sounds more like a tie at best.
I mean, if you hear an allegation of rape that you believe to be true, doesn’t that warrant a call to the cops on the non-emergency line? Maybe this isn’t the only victim. Maybe the cops are trying to build a case against this guy.
And we’re left with circumstances in which allegedly “everyone knew” about Brand’s sexual predation upon young women, but no one felt the need to take any action, or reveal it to the public, back when Brand was a leftist celebrity. But now that his views and reputation have changed, several of the United Kingdom’s biggest media institutions have conducted in-depth investigations into allegations going back roughly a decade and laid out a disturbing portrait of him.
If you wanted to fan the flames of conspiracy theories among Russell Brand’s fanbase, you wouldn’t change much.
ADDENDUM: This newsletter’s recent discussion of aid to Ukraine warrants a brief look at the Polish government’s announcement that it would no longer supply new weapons to Ukraine, a decision that comes as Poland and Ukraine are having an increasingly heated fight about whether Ukrainian wheat should be sold in the European Union market.
But there are a few caveats to the headline “Poland no longer supplying weapons to Ukraine.” First, the previous commitments will be honored, including 60 Krab artillery weapons set to be delivered in the coming months.
Second, Poland has already supplied Ukraine with about $3.2 billion in military aid. Poland’s military budget will reach $20 billion this year. That $3.2 billion figure ranks Poland sixth in the world in total amount of military aid given to Ukraine, and fifth in military aid given as a percentage of GDP. If the United States gave the same percentage of our defense budget, we would have given $300 billion in equipment and ammunition; we’ve committed to give $46.6 billion in a year and a half.
The Poles can reasonably argue they’re tapped out, as they’re also in the middle of their own defense buildup and upgrades. Plus, the Poles will continue to operate Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport as the main logistics hub for moving NATO equipment and supplies into Ukraine. If this recent Polish government decision really is a consequence of the grain-trade fight, I’m disappointed; you shouldn’t use people’s lives as leverage in a protectionist trade fight. But Poland does begin this argument in a position where it can say it has already given more than anyone could reasonably ask.