Footage of The Game.

The BBC and ITV memory-holing programmes featuring Russell Brand still leaves plenty of evidence to consider, but not for right-wing columnists...

Previously: In the shadow of 'The Nude Statesman'
The New Statesman played a pivotal role in allowing Russell Brand to remake himself as a 'revolutionary'.

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In the aftermath of serious accusations about a famous person, it’s easy to turn every clip featuring them into a new Zapruder tape (“Look how his hand touches her knee… back and to the left, back and to the left…). That’s, in part, why the BBC and Channel 4 have scrubbed every episode featuring Russell Brand from their streaming services: It has less to do with protecting audiences and more with making potential evidence far less easy to access.

That said, a Vice News interview from 9 years ago with a duration of under 10 minutes provides a huge amount of insight into the techniques Russell Brand used to charm, steamroll, and dominate interviewers. It also explains why Brand was so quick to give a cover quote to Neil Strauss for the follow-up to his pick-up artist book, The Game, and why the two men were so chummy.

The filmmaker and presenter, Charlet Duboc, discussed dealing with Brand in an interview with a Vice Film School in 2018. She explained:

I knew friends of mine who’d had run-ins with him over the years – the warning I got was that, to put it mildly, he could be a bit flirty. The interview was part of a junket promoting his new book. He’d just done Paxman and I was like, ‘Why do you want me to do this, I’m nothing like Paxman?!’ Then I realised that his book was probably meant for people like me and thought maybe I could represent the VICE audience, who are the people I’m sure he’d like to read it… 

It was so bizarre – when you watch it back, it’s like, ‘Dude, what are you doing?’ He’d never get away with that now, he’d be absolutely lynched on Twitter. You know what I mean? The mob would come for him, with the way that he treated me.

I’m not a small girl, I’m six feet tall and he’s probably 6’ 5”, so I’m not a complete mismatch with him physically, but by the end he had me totally squashed into the corner of the sofa. 

That technique, I found out later, is something that’s written about in that book The Game, the pick-up artist bible… basically I think he wasn’t ready for a normal chat and so when I turned up trying to do that he just went into attack mode. Not that I’m saying he had any designs on me sexually, I think he just wanted to control the interview.

Strauss’ book, The Game — originally published in 2005 — returned to prominence in 2007 when VH1 broadcast a show called The Pickup Artist. Brand provided his cover quote not for that book but its ‘self-help’ follow-up, The Rules of the Game. The 2008 UK edition featured the following line from Brand:

Neil Strauss’s writing turned me from a desperate wallflower into a wallflower who can talk women into sex.

When Strauss appeared on Brand’s BBC Radio 2 show in 2006 — alongside Brand’s then co-writer Matt Morgan and the comedian Trevor Lock — the pair discussed techniques for ‘chatting up’ women:

Strauss: Every guy, they’re all boring, same chat-up lines you guys all say; as soon as you meet a girl, you’ll say: What’s your name? What do you do for work? Where do you… / 

Brand: Get in the van! 

Strauss: (laughing) ‘Get in the van’, exactly… So you ask all those boring questions and they’ve heard it from every guy who walks up to them, so you’ve got to show you’re different… 

… 

Matt Morgan: I’m bad at openers. You’re good at openers, Russell. 

Strauss: What are your openers? How do you start? 

Brand: Oooh ‘ello! I’m a post-modernist, of course. I go, ‘Oh love, I’ve arrived here to chat you up! This is the chatting up commencing now. The chatting up has already begun. Stuff like that, you know, deconstruct it while it’s happening… 

Strauss: That’s actually great because you’re actually making fun of all the guys who actually do that while doing it. 

Brand: While actually doing it… 

If the phrase “while actually doing it” doesn’t bring to mind the title of the Dispatches documentary on the allegations of sexual assault against Brand — In Plain Sight — then a comment from Strauss later in the programme almost certainly will:

“My first book was on Marilyn Manson¹. His thing is you can’t bust him on anything because he puts it all out of the open…”

During the programme, Strauss also ‘helped’ Lock to reply to a woman who had followed him on MySpace, ‘negging’ her about the fact that only one side of her face was showing in her profile picture (“Are you trying to hide a mole?)

Later the same year, when Brand, Morgan, and Lock were in Edinburgh, the latter was arrested and charged with raping a 20-year-old woman after a party at a flat the trio were sharing. The charges were dropped when the woman decided she didn’t want to proceed with the case.

In My Booky Wooky 2, Brand’s second autobiography, he writes about the incident with a total lack of empathy for the victim or any sense of seriousness:

As with all terrifying and difficult situations, remarkably, some incredibly funny things happened. Here are some of those incredibly funny things. Trevor had to describe to the police the night’s events, you have to go through it in meticulous fucking detail again and again and again, it’s a police inquiry. It’s tense. The word ‘rape’ is flashing in neon throughout the proceedings. John and Nik [Brand’s then agents] are trying to be professional, although on some level they must be thinking, “Well, it was too good to be true … we took this junky and turned him into something.” 

… “Well, what happened on the night in question?” asked the sullen, more Taggarty of the two Taggarts that had come down to resolve the case. 

I do not like authority, so in a scenario like this, self-preservation is put aside in favour of tomfoolery. “Well, thankfully I’ve got about a dozen witnesses who can tell you where I was, officer. I’ve got genetic evidence, DNA all over the bedroom. If you were to shine an ultraviolet light into my room it would look like Jackson Pollock had been in there, drunk on a trampoline, which I think at one stage he was, he’d stayed in by mistake with Alan Yentob who was making an obsequious documentary about him.” 

Me and Matt were relatively safe now that Trevor had identified himself as the one who’d slept with the girl. Still, we had to accurately recite the events. “The girls all came upstairs and we had this gin and tonic and Trevor was nominated their barman.”

Trevor added piously, innocently, on the brink of tears, “I was in the corner of the room. I was in charge of preparing the gin and tonics. I was just there in the corner of the kitchen hacking up an old lemon…” Trevor paused, and the police looked up from their pads. Matt said, “Which is what Trevor calls a prostitute.” 

Well, we all thought it was very amusing and lightened the horrific mood. The police on the other hand simply arrested Trevor and took him down to Kentish Town Police Station. 

The chapter ends with Lock facing no further action but dropped from the radio show, and Brand’s circle of friends. But it’s neither the woman nor Lock who are the true victims according to the book, Brand manages to make that him:

I learned that [fame] is a dangerous game and like all games, there will be losers — in this case, I lost a friend and the tabloids found a controversial anti-hero and quietly awaited further opportunities for annihilation. 

In a 2008 profile of Brand for GQ, he was quite blatant about his plans to re-Brand himself in the wake of the Sachsgate scandal:

After [My Booky Wook] was published in Britain, there were plans for the director, Michael Winterbottom, to make a film version. Brand, in an ultimate act of self-mythologizing, would have played himself. Such plans have now been put on hold. "My career took off," Brand explains. "It’s ’Make this film with Judd Apatow. Make this film with Adam Sandler.’ Why am I going to go, ’Hello, America—I nicked my girlfriend’s keys and spit at prostitutes’ when I could go, ’I’m Adam Sandler’s buddy’ It was no longer the most prudent choice."

Brand presented his worst behaviour as character in print and on-air; he said out loud what his strategy was, just as Strauss said he should (“… you can’t bust him on anything because he puts it all out of the open…”)

But for right-wing talking heads, grifters, and columnists, it doesn’t matter what Brand himself admitted to in countless articles, two autobiographies, and several stand-up specials. Now Brand says the kind of things they like, the Right has decided that the people at fault must be investigative journalists and the women who’ve come forward to make the allegations public.

There are many examples we could look at but Allison Pearson of The Daily Telegraph arguably provides the worst. Having decried The Sunday Times investigation without having actually read it, she’s written a column with a headline and sub-deck that read:

Beware turning Russell Brand’s story into a conspiracy theory in its own right

The attempt to unperson the comedian is almost as disturbing as the sins of which he stands accused

“Unperson” comes, inevitably, from Nineteen Eighty-Four, top of the list of about five books that British columnists are allowed to reference. In the novel, someone is made an unperson when they are secretly executed and removed from any previous books, news reports, and film clips that featured them.

Russell Brand’s radio and TV episodes have been taken off streaming services but they still exist. Similarly, while YouTube has suspended monetisation on his videos there, they have not been deleted and were not his primary source of income; he plies most of his trade on the rival site Rumble.

Pearson’s role at the Telegraph is always to side with power while pretending that she is, in fact, a voice for the “little people”. She writes of Brand and his accusers:

[He] was a hugely successful womaniser and his success was enabled by the girls who threw themselves at him in huge numbers. A friend who went to the same clubs as Brand back in the day attests to his extraordinary animal magnetism “despite that awful smelly hair”. (“I think he is guilty of very bad behaviour when he was an addict,” she says, “I do not believe he raped anyone”.) 

Are the females who fell for his weapons-grade flirting and lascivious quips, for that vampish slash of Kohl under the beady, greedy eyes, all victims of “emotional abuse”? Or did they possibly make really bad choices, as most of us have done at some point, ignoring the fact that the Shagger of the Year was unlikely to turn into Mr Darcy just because he pretended to take your phone number after you’d had sex with him in the hotel opposite his gig?    

… This is known as “victim shaming” now, but it is a true account of how young women felt about a famous, magnetic male who flattered them. And it would be more honest, perhaps, to admit that certain girls will always throw themselves at powerful, sexy, exploitative men, no matter how much their sisters in The Guardian may disapprove.

I don’t know if Russell Brand committed the hideous offences several women claim that he did. If the police go ahead, the merit of the allegations must be tested in court. There is a world of difference between a “shagger” and a rapist. No political partisanship should lure us into excusing the latter as laddish behaviour. What I do know is that our system holds that a man is innocent until proven guilty. The attempt to unperson Russell Brand is almost as disturbing as the sins of which he stands accused. 

Pearson is the same woman who used her column to protest her son’s A-level results and got the Telegraph to delete a piece she wrote about The Voice when her daughter was set to audition for the show, but when it comes to other people’s children? They deserve what they — allegedly — had coming to them.

“Certain girls will always throw themselves at powerful, sexy, exploitative men…” she writes dismissively, sure in her Lidl-brand Leni Riefenstahl way that her daughter would never.

Russell Brand is innocent until proven guilty but that’s a feature of the legal system, not a commandment that prevents individuals from coming to their own conclusions on evidence presented to them in The Sunday Times / Dispatches investigations or in the words and actions that Brand committed to print, audio, and video.

We don’t need to guess what game Brand was playing; he showed us and explained the rules time and time again.

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1. That strategy only worked so long for Manson too; in 2021, four women published an open letter accusing him of sexual abuse — one of whom has since recanted her claims — and a further 12 individuals have made accusations against him. A series of protracted legal cases is still ongoing and Manson denies the claims.