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PaperclipPerfector
11hr ago
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Notes -
Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault
From the Guardian:
There was some contemporaneous discussion around these parts when these allegations first came out. At the time, I remarked on the widespread perception that rape is the product of sexual frustration (hence, that "incels" are more likely to rape women than sexually satisfied men), and how the best evidence from the social sciences and criminology points in the opposite direction:
Brand wasn't merely promiscuous (he once claimed that to have had nine orgasms on a single night in Dublin; an Irish journalist wondered how many of those were prompted by him catching sight of his own reflection), or merely a cad. Perhaps his most infamous moment in the public eye came in 2008: after a brief dalliance with the actress Georgina Baillie, he recorded himself prank-calling her grandfather (actor Andrew Sachs, best-known for playing Manuel in Fawlty Towers) to gloat about fucking her, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 2. By her own account, Baillie was humiliated by the experience and didn't speak to her grandfather for eight years; I vaguely recall reading an interview with Sachs where he described the experience as the most upsetting and traumatic of his life (and this is a Jewish man who was forced to flee Germany as a child). Brand himself described the ensuing controversy, during which the BBC was slapped with a £150k fine, as "fun" (he begrudgingly apologised to Sachs six years later, and paid for Baillie's drug and alcohol rehab). Even at the time, some thought that the amount of press coverage the scandal received was disproportionate, which is not an unreasonable position to hold. Nonetheless: a man displaying such callous disregard for the privacy and sexual boundaries of a woman with whom he's been intimate (not to mention displaying such naked contempt for her family members) would be appalling even if he'd been a bit more discreet about it. But he behaved this way when he knew he was being recorded for an audience of millions. Can you imagine the kind of shit he got up to in private?
After his career in Hollywood plateaued, Brand reinvented himself as a political activist, then subsequently as a podcast conservative and born-again Christian (someone quipped that he'd given up "preying" for "praying"). His podcast tended to the conspiratorial, suggesting that nebulous elites were trying to silence him for daring to speak truth to power. It's not hard to join the dots and deduce that he knew these allegations were going to come out sooner or later, and that he was attempting to head off the problem by pre-emptively rubbishing them.
I have never had an easier time believing that a man convicted of rape is, in fact, guilty thereof. Pretty boy like him is going to have a rough time in prison: it wouldn't surprise me if he's placed on protection for a significant chunk of his sentence.
I'm not convinced that is necessarily the correct implication. It might as well be that he just has zero filter and what you see is what you get.
True, and plenty of women allege that he groped them, exposed himself and similar in full view of TV cameras. So however he conducted himself in private was at least as bad as he did in public.
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