"But ultimately any fan who had consensual sex with him is not a victim. It was so obvious all along he was a sleaze. Regret is not rape."
Anyone? Might not claim to have been raped, but certainly a victim of Brand.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/19/brave-victims-russell-brand-misogyny-deserve-full-support
What is completely bizarre, with the benefit of 2023 hindsight, is how the Sachsgate story was framed, both by those who were reflexive defenders of the BBC and “comedy” and free speech (then a somewhat lefty preoccupation, funnily enough), AND by those who wished their destruction. Fleet Street quickly settled into tribes and covered it as a story where each assumed the other was acting out of vested interests. This was back when our only culture wars were about things that happened on the BBC. (My how we’ve grown.) Mail vox pops were incandescent; some Guardian ones found it an “overreaction”.
When the Brand expose broke last weekend, I found myself transported back to that time. And with my 2023 head on, rather sickening alarm bells began to ring, because I knew – I knew – that I wouldn’t have centred anything I wrote about it on Georgina Baillie. I had this shaming suspicion I had treated it as a sort of media story – and so it proved. My mentions of it say Ross and Brand were total scumbags, but they chiefly ridicule the fact that people complained to Ofcom because of the Mail titles’ coverage, despite never having heard the original broadcast. I mean … so what? Speaking of moronic points: LOOK NO FURTHER. Dear 2008 Marina: you think you’re being clever but you’re being horribly obtuse. Get your head out of your arse. It doesn’t matter whether or not they heard it, it’s still hideous and they have every right to think it’s absolutely unacceptable for the BBC to have aired it.
Yet despite getting it right on the vileness of the broadcast, the tabloids pursuing the BBC got it wrong by endlessly and ferociously slut-shaming Georgina Baillie (even though slut-shaming wasn’t a term people used at the time). They cast the entire affair as an insult to Andrew Sachs, instead of to Baillie as well. She was roundly blamed. I’m sorry if the Guardian’s cuttings archive is incomplete and I’ve missed something, but I couldn’t find a single column centred on defending Baillie in any contemporaneous newspaper. A year later, Baillie sold an interview and underwear photoshoot to the Sun in which she said the media maelstrom had sent her “insane”, subsequently telling the Guardian she was “a tart with a heart, a nice girl”. I am mortified to see I reacted to this by saying she should stop banging on about the whole thing.
In fact, Baillie sank into addiction and out of the public eye (barring the fact that the Brand story will probably be all anyone sees when they Google her for the rest of her life). But last weekend, she gave an interview to the Mirror in which she reiterated that her relationship with Brand had been consensual, though the radio prank and its nuclear fallout had obviously been anything but. Brand made millions with a standup tour in which he mined the incident and further humiliated her, while – among other desolations – her grandfather didn’t speak to her for eight years. She revealed that Brand had got in touch apologetically a few years ago, and paid for her stint in rehab. Georgina’s reflections were so without fury and blame as to be utterly heartbreaking. “For about 10 years after Sachsgate it was very hard,” she said, “because I didn’t know whether I was in the wrong, so when he apologised it was a huge weight lifted off me.” That quote floored me. She spent a decade thinking it was all her fault. That’s “the culture” right there.