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Lisa Nandy has called Russell Brand’s conviction for rape and sexual assault a “wake-up call” for the world of entertainment over its culture of acceptance and the failures to confront his behaviour.
Calling the verdict a “defining moment for our country”, the culture secretary said it highlighted the dangers of “power imbalances” in media and entertainment, “just as in politics and other forms of public life”.
Brand was today sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison, with the judge calling him a “sexual predator” who displayed “staggering arrogance”.
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With more women expected to come forward with allegations against him, attention is now turning to what Guardian comedy writer Rachael Healy described as “the ultimate open secret” in an industry that for too long turned a blind eye to celebrity sexual predators.
What did the commentators say?
The trial has been “surreal” to follow, “verging at times from the harrowing to the bizarre”, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. Over four weeks, the court “travelled back in time to the toxic nexus of pre-MeToo celebrity culture in the late Nineties and Noughties, where famous men felt emboldened to demand a massage off a stranger or paw the breasts of a woman they had just met”.
The “context around Brand’s offending is everything”, said Libby Brooks in The Guardian. From “the media circus, the tired tropes, the threats of litigation, the enablers and the institutional cultures of silence that protect powerful perpetrators”, the extent of Brand’s offending was matched only by “the staggering degree of enabling that accompanied it: the staff who escorted victims to his home, the colleagues who laughed along to his humiliation of other female coworkers, the executives who didn’t want to lose their cash cow”.
Reflecting on her appearance with Brand on Channel 4’s “The Big Fat Quiz of the Year” in 2007, the singer Lily Allen put it more bluntly in an interview in 2023. “It makes me uncomfortable but I don’t think I felt that at the time because it was the culture.”
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What next?
“We are long overdue a reckoning with the ongoing ramifications of this culture,” said Lucy Morgan in Esquire.
One prominent TV producer, who the court heard “laughed” as Brand sexually assaulted a woman in 2009, has already “stepped back” from his current production job, said The Guardian.
Nandy has called on employers to ensure vulnerable whistleblowers are protected and urged media companies to sign up to the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority, which allows workers to report harassment and abuse.
But given Brand was so open and blatant about his attitude to women and sex, the big question is “why did no one stop him?” said Morgan. In this we need answers not just from “the producers who kept booking him” and “the TV execs who ignored complaints about his behaviour,” but also “perhaps even” from “ourselves, sitting in the audience, laughing along the entire time”.
