Russell Brand and the Death of the Sh*gger Era

Russell Brand is a convicted rapist. Yesterday, a jury in Southwark Crown Court found him guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. He will be sentenced on Monday and is currently in police custody. The presiding judge said that he will go to jail for a long time.

The details of Brand’s many alleged sex crimes first emerged as part of an investigation by Channel 4 and The Sunday Times in 2023, but for years before that, his behaviour was one of the biggest open secrets in the British comedy scene. The initial report opened the floodgates, and soon it felt like everyone had a Russell Brand story to share. I even saw a few people joke that they were surprised he hadn’t been outed sooner, not because they’d heard any stories about him but just because of his overall vibe. To put it bluntly, he just seemed like a creep. Indeed, that's what made him so popular for so many years. But we didn't call him a creep then. He was just Russell Brand, and that's why people loved him.

Hindsight is 20/20, and we’re all too used to hearing the defence of “It was a different time.” We just did things differently way back in the prehistoric era of the early-to-mid 2000s. Photographers lay on the pavement to take photos of women’s genitals and newspapers bought them. A popstar had a mental breakdown, and we mocked her for it. Magazines promoted crash diets while calling teenage girls fat. And the biggest newspaper in Britain, a political kingmaker owned by one of the most powerful people on the planet, crowned Russell Brand as The Shagger of the Year.

I don’t think anyone needs me to explain what this, uh, honour was given for. The Sun’s showbiz section, Bizarre (once run by Victoria Newton, the current editor-in-chief), offered this “cheeky” celebration of promiscuity to the famous man who had earned the biggest cad reputation of any given year. The paper also gave out awards for Caner of the Year, a slang term for a raucous party animal who indulges in excess. The celebrities in question were usually photographed accepting the award with pride. For all the claims that these awards were “tongue-in-cheek”, they were also an implicit endorsement of misogyny and toxic masculinity. When the rapper Professor Green won it, he was commended for moving on from his divorce “in the best way they know how—with booze and women.”

Brand won Shagger of the Year several times in a row, to the point where the award was renamed in his honour. He also took immense joy in the title. Large portions of his stand-up were dedicated to his sex life. In 2008, he and Jonathan Ross (a British TV presenter who is still a big deal in the UK) were sacked from their jobs at BBC Radio when they left a taunting voicemail on the phone of actor Andrew Sachs, with Brand bragging about having had sex with his granddaughter. After that, Brand moved to America and became more popular than ever. The scandal made him seem entertainingly dangerous, a rare novelty from that other side of the Atlantic at a time when leading men were clean-cut, and comedians were schlubby bros. Stateside, his image was somewhat softened to that of a roguish chap, but he never lost his predatory linger.

The British tabloids thrive on sex, both in policing it and voyeuristically revelling in it. These papers and magazines—many of which are no longer in print—offered big money to people to blab about the celebrities they fucked, and the men would almost always be heralded for their player abilities. Women, less so. But editors still wanted the stories, if only to play both sides of the coin. And those who didn’t comply could prepare for years-long campaigns of stalking and phone hacking. Sienna Miller saw one tabloid illegally gain access to her medical records to prove she was pregnant (she later had an abortion) in the midst of the Jude Law drama. Shobna Gulati, a British actor best known for their soap and comedy work, had their phone hacked and voicemails accessed by journalists that were spun into stories speculating about the parentage of their child.

I was a teenager in the mid-2000s, that period where the internet was taking over in a real way but traditional media’s power was still mighty. Tabloids ruled the roost, and the no-holds-barred snark of the online world was reflective of what was printed on paper. Calling women “skanks” and drawing circles around their body fat was something serious publications did as well as Perez Hilton. The Sun, the most read paper in the UK, had topless 18-year-olds on Page 3 while they called Amy Winehouse a druggie trainwreck in the entertainment section. It’s often startling to remember just how overwhelmingly misogynistic the British press was, so openly and cravenly anti-women in ways that everyone rolled with. Tony Blair snuggled up to Rupert Murdoch, as did every other party leader, even as his newspapers’ photographers stalked teenage girls like Emma Watson and Charlotte Church for slut-shaming content.

Brand was beloved by the tabloids, an easy source of salacious drama who was shameless enough to welcome it but also savvy in his crafting of a marketable image. It’s amazing how being able to speak in multiple syllables made Brand seem like an otherworldly genius rather than a fraudster, but it worked. He was voracious, a shock jock who read Oscar Wilde and dressed as a parody of an indie sleaze rocker. The media thrives on easy stereotypes, easily marketable or slogan-ready tropes they can force onto a person regardless of whether or not it fits. Brand was simultaneously easy to describe and able to subvert those narrow expectations. Being able to talk about sex while spinning word salad yarns and quoting literature? What sorcery is this?

It wasn’t just the right-wing press, of course. When Brand reinvented himself as a liberal commentator, he was quickly elevated to the status of political icon. The Guardian gave him a column. He worked with The New Statesman. Politicians lined up to be interviewed and receive his endorsement. It was, if nothing else, a move of craven genius for Brand to swing to the other side of the political spectrum. That he was so quickly welcomed by the “good guys?” Well, misogyny has never been apolitical. He claimed to have been cured of his sex addiction. He married Katy Perry and got into yoga (then dumped her hours before a massive concert via text message.)

And through it all, he kept telling us who he was. That Shagger of the Year reputation, egged on by the gleeful press, was built upon his own public confessions of cruelty towards women. Dannii Minogue called him out in 2007, saying he was a “vile predator” who “wouldn’t take no for an answer.” All of his “jokes” about sex, about degrading his partners, about being a “cad” to women like Britney f*cking Spears… He disguised himself with the truth. I’m not the first person to be reminded of Jimmy Savile, the notorious serial rapist who spent decades preying on women and children under the guise of a gross old man who made everyone uncomfortable but was dismissed as “harmless.”

Brand's U-turn to born-again sanctimony and hard-right pandering was a tedious but predictable step in his defence. He tried to rally a wave of attack dogs to his side by claiming that the many well-reported allegations were part of a smear campaign designed to attack his “anti-establishment” agenda. Never mind that a man formerly employed by the BBC, Channel 4, and several major Hollywood studios was the epitome of the establishment, of course. But the swing from dollar store libertine to conservative rabblerouser is an old trick, two sides of the same misogynist coin. The Sun, after all, was never the bastion of progressiveness. Shaggers of the year don’t like women. The right wing has never had standards about the scammers and creeps it picks up, so of course they adopted Brand as their latest “Why I left the left” fraudster. In the post-#MeToo era, the elevation of accused sex criminals is a deliberate attack on women from all walks of life.

Brand's arrest will bring with it the usual conversations of accountability and who aided and abetted him in his decades-long campaign of abuse against women. Really, we haven’t moved on much from the early days of #metoo when Harvey Weinstein was revealed to be a serial predator. Big promises were made about cleaning house, about getting rid of a crooked system that had allowed this cancer to fester for decades. But all we really got out of it was a few incremental changes followed hastily by a backlash that further empowered those who’d done all the dirty deeds. Many of the people who hired Brand, who were aware of his behaviour and still gave him work, are still employed in high-level positions across the entertainment industry. Many of his contemporaries laughed and goaded him on. Those who tried to speak out risked losing work. Katherine Ryan, who called him out to his face in an unaired episode of Roast Battle, said she was unable to name him publicly for years because he had a reputation for litigious attacks.

Watching this case, one couldn’t help but think of the current discourse surrounding the comedy scene and the prevalence of misogynistic language and rape threats in stand-up. I was reminded of some of Brand’s more repugnant jokes, ones about women choking while giving head and him enjoying the struggle. It wasn’t really a joke, more a statement, as most of these sexist comments are. The punchline is hating women. Always has been.

Brand is an opportunist, and if nothing else, his swift changes to avoid culpability were also the shifts being made in the wider culture. He became the MAHA-beloved prince of the manosphere when that cancer began to grow, moving to YouTube and asking inflammatory questions, Joe Rogan-style, while his dutiful wife prays by his side. But by the end, the scales had finally fallen from everyone’s eyes. When even Piers Morgan gets a good dunk in at your expense, you know you’ve lost the lead. Plenty of others followed in his suit, of course. The Tate brothers and Clavicular feel like disciples of Brand, albeit with more steroid use and a limited vocabulary. There really are only so many ways you can dress up toxic masculinity.

The British tabloids, shockingly, no longer celebrate Shaggers of the Year, but they have only grown more rotten towards marginalized people. Meghan Markle is currently being blamed for her estranged father being an accused sex criminal. Trans people are shamed daily for just existing. Jason Arday is still dead. A few dead-eyed think-piece writers mount contrarian defences for men like Brand and the Tates, all in the name of being “anti-woke.” Punching down is a business strategy as well as a social one. Elevating macho bro player behaviour is part of the system.

What stops these men is good, well-funded journalism, a justice system that takes victims seriously, and a hefty dose of cultural shame towards misogynists who are too cowardly to do anything beyond spew the same old slurs and claim it’s a joke. Alas, I think we’re more than a few years away from that kind of seismic change, but embarrassing these losers is still free.

Of course, we’re probably going to be going through all of this once more in the near future on this side of the pond. Have you heard about that injunction and the well-known public figure threatening suicide if an investigation into allegations of abuse is allowed to be published? Well, we all know who that guy is. The Sun loved talking about his womanizing ways too…