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Notes -
Russell Brand Accusations
Russell Brand has been accused of sexual misconduct and/or rape by four women in a large exposé by the Sunday Times [2]. The mainstream consensus online is that the testimony of these women is absolutely correct. I wonder, though, how many false accusers we should expect given the context of Russell Brand.
Russell Brand is not just some guy, he was at one point a party icon in the UK. As such, he has slept with 1000 women. And these are not just some women, just like Brand is not just some guy. This is not a sample size of the median woman in the UK. The women he slept with would differ psychologically from the average woman: more likely to make poor choices, more likely to be partying, more likely to be doing things for clout (like Russell Brand), more likely to be involved with drugs and mental illness. A study on the lives of “groupies” in the heavy metal scene found that groupies were more likely to use sex for leverage, to come from broken homes, and to have issues with drugs and alcohol. (This is not a one-to-one comparison; heavy metal is different than the rock n roll persona of Brand).
Scott has written that up to 20% of all rape allegations are false. But with Brand, we have a more complicated metric to consider: how many false accusers will you have sex with if you’ve had sex with one thousand women who make poor choices? Scott goes on in the above article to note that 3% of men will likely be falsely accused (including outside of court) in their life. If this is true, we might try multiplying that by 125 to arrive at how many accusers Brand should have. That would bring us to four, rounding up — but again, this would totally ignore the unique psychological profile of the women he screwed.
There’s yet more to consider. Brand is wealthy, famous, and controversial. His wealth and stature would lead a mentally unwell woman to feel spite, and his controversy would lead a clout-chasing woman to seek attention through accusation. What’s more, (most of) these allegations only came about because of an expensive and time-consuming journalistic investigation, which would have lead to pointed questioning.
All in all, it seems unfair to target a famous person and set out your journalists to hound down every woman he had sex with. It’s a man’s right to have consensual sex with mentally unwell and “damaged” women, which would be a large chunk of the women Brand bedded. Of course, this cohort appears more apt to make false accusations. Quoting Scott,
This is the point at which I stop going along. Haven't you heard the good old "don't stick your dick in crazy"? And nobody, man woman or other, has the "right" to have sex with anyone.
I think Brand's in a grey area; he did like to get involved in some tacky shit in order to keep the edgy image going. He probably did sleep with women who were flaky, crazy, or unstable. And those women probably were in some sense vulnerable, thought that pulling a big name famous guy would result in more than it did, might even have hoped for a relationship. Years later, they've imbibed the notion that they weren't able to consent or that he coerced them into sex.
And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent. So are the accusations false? They're in that fuzzy area of "not quite false, not quite true".
Consider it karma for the shit he pulled back when he was being an edgelord: the Andrew Sachs prank phone call. Andrew Sachs was an actor, a genuinely nice guy, and best known for his role as Manuel in "Fawlty Towers". He was also of Jewish ancestry and his family had settled in Britain after fleeing the Nazis:
In 2008, when Sachs was 78 years of age and Russell Brand was 33 and his co-presenter Jonathan Ross was 48 years of age, they were going to do a pre-recorded section for Brand's radio show. That didn't go as planned, because the two shitheads Brand and Ross (and I've always thought Jonathan Ross was a dickhead) thought they could be so funny by being loons:
So broadcasting to the public stupid messages where you yell at an elderly man about fucking his grand-daughter, then 'apologise' by invoking Hitler to that same man whose family had to flee the Nazis is so thigh-slappingly funny. I hope Russell is laughing as heartily now with these accusations, it's all only a bit of lewd fun isn't it!
What a questionable assertion to make.
Do you want to take that line of thought to the conclusion that if a married woman develops, say, a bout of mild depression, it's the job of the police and her psychiatrist to stick on a chastity belt against the wishes of her and her husband?
A mild case of OCD? BPD like the women Brand was probably fucking?
In medicine and law, it's not just a matter of having "a" mental illness, unless the person is a ward of the state or their family, then it's incredibly dumb to refer to them as incapable of extending sufficient consent for sex, an incredibly common and fundamental activity, when they're not disbarred from doing a great deal more they can't weasel out of on grounds of mental incompetence.
Not that I think that even the grossly retarded, like a person with Downs, should be stopped from having sex, but even broader society doesn't hold the insane assertion you make as true, de facto or de jure.
Hello, hello, guess why the offence of marital rape was created in law?
A depressed woman may not feel like having sex with her husband. If her husband goes ahead and insists on his "marital rights", maybe even forcefully, then whaddya know - it's rape!
You're being obtuse here, intentionally or not.
You claimed that any kind of mental illness (without bothering to specify degree or type) makes a woman unable to consent, presumably above and beyond plain old saying "nah dawg, not feeling it tonight" and turning over.
So the relevant comparison is where a woman with depression voluntarily has sex with her husband, not where she denies it. It might be begrudgingly, but couples regularly do things for the sake of the other they find less than maximally enjoyable. Marital rape where the husband forces himself upon her, this is clearly not.
Perhaps you might well beg to differ, but society broadly doesn't consider "get thee to a nunnery" to be the appropriate response when encountering women with any kind of mental illness. If I couldn't fuck because I was depressed, I'd be more depressed.
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You're ignoring the quoted part that this comment is, obviously a response to.
That's the same language we, as a society, use for minors. That seems arguing for making consensual sex with a mentally unwell person count as statutory rape, or at least I feel this is a valid interpretation.
It is, more or less. Certainly with mental retardation and possible with schizophrenia. If you're consulting a lawyer regarding your sex life, you had better have a damn good reason to be swimming in those murky waters.
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