Brand supporters- do you feel the same now

[Whereforartthoudave]

More details are emerging about his behaviour and history towards women?

YABU - makes no difference, the ‘establishment’ are out to get him.
this is trial by media of an innocent man

YANBU - supported him too early. It’s becoming clear that he is an abuser.

So even with all those followers @Lazyusername do you think he was so close to bringing down western capitalist society that the “authorities” have made this stuff up to silence him? Because they’ve done a bad job of that. I imagine more people have watched his output this week than the last five years put together.

Always found him repulsive, made my skin crawl even seeing his face and before he opened his filthy mouth. I had the same feeling about JS as a child but couldn’t have articulated why. The fact that the two had been in cahoots years ago discussing naked young women confirms my instincts.

I agree with the above comment re RB being the millennial JS, and although the accounts of his persistent misogyny and abuse and assaults are difficult to hear, I’m so glad that he’s being exposed and will hopefully have to answer countless difficult questions.

Suspect both. He was an abuser, which is common in his industry. He has spoken against the left wing establishment, lost their protection and they are put to get him.

What left wing establishment would that be then, @Pinkbubblybits? You are aware that we are 'governed' (if you can call this shower of shit a government) by an increasingly right wing political party?

In an ideal world, no, the media would not be the place for victims of rape and sexual assault to seek justice. However, we need to remember that conviction rates for these types of offensives are extremely low. Often women will seek assistance from the police only told be there is not enough evidence or you waited too long. Maybe these women felt this was the only way they could be heard? We need a complete overhaul of the system when it comes to how the police and criminal justice system deals with these allegations. I wish we lived in a world where women felt they could seek police assistance, as soon as the assault has taken place, and that their allegations are always taken seriously. It is not just women this happens to, people who report that they were abused as children are often met with the same attitude of 'oh, how are we ever going to prove this?' Even if there was some underlying reason behind why these journalists made the decision to investigate these particular claims, it does not mean they are not true! Brand's whole attitude towards women in the past, as demonstrated through his idea of being funny, was deplorable. I do not want my son to grow up in a world where those sorts of attitudes towards women and sex are seen as acceptable.

I had never heard of him until the last few days. I vaguely remembered the Andrew (?) Sachs interview being on a Radio 4 news bulletin years ago, but could not recall the interviewers / pranksters names. But then I don't need SM or bother with celebrity stuff (like the majority of people).

When I saw his picture last week I thought it was Johnny Depp in the news again at first. Russell Brand may well have 6 million of followers, but given the world has 8 billion people now that is 0.0007%. Given most of those will not avidly follow him the influence he has gets very, very small.

I suspect he is a bright yet manipulative individual exploiting all his skills to feed his addictions. Bright enough perhaps to foresee what was coming and to attempt to cover his tracks by creating a persona in the conspiracy arena.

@BIWI there’s a very strong left wing agenda in the western world.

I'd hate to think what you imagine a right wing agenda would be then

I'm not a Brand supporter, I thought he was vile just looking at his antics and behaviour on tv not to mention the stuff I don't know about. However, I dislike even more a public lynching by media. There has been no trial yet, no jury and he has not yet been convicted of anything.
I abhor the cancel culture that allows this.
Nobody should have their income taken from them unless they have been tried and found guilty. It is a process, without this process we may as well run for the hills because it could happen to anyone.

Umm, are you aware that democracy is threatened all over the shop? Rise of the right wing parties to power quite clearly in evidence? Stuff like that?

I am genuinely stunned anyone would think that what Russel had to say was of any import, never mind so very important the “establishment”out to get him

do people even know what the establishment is? It’s the royal family, aristocracy, senior civil servants, the Church of England, senior academics, the privy council etc,

it’s utterly ludicrous to think Charles, senior civil servants and the Archbishop of Canterbury and academics are out to get brand due to his ridiculous you tube Chanel ( that he’s just made clear he does for the cash).

and even if you were so utterly deluded to think that could be possible, you’d have to realise it doesn’t mean he isn’t guilty. Both things can be true, but on the balance of probabilities the former is as far fetched as bill gates microchipping the global population.

Sure. But some of us know that false accusations of rape are incredibly rare. Yes they happen. But they are there and our going in position is to believe a woman when she says she was raped or sexually assaulted as the balance of probabilities is overwhelmingly that she is telling the truth.

and that balance of probabilities increases enormously when multiple women who don’t know each other all say the same thing independently

so for me, my going in position is I believe the women. And I will always chose to believe a woman when she says she was raped. Because as said the overwhelming odds are she is telling the truth.

This is something I've heard too. @Pinkflamingopants what do you mean?
A friend of mine is very intent on there being a hard left wing agenda infiltrating society that originates in universities by hard left academics and is finally coming into the mainstream. 'woke' being an example, designed to destabilise society. I'll be honest, it's slightly lost on me as all I see is the rise of the far right.

I think the idea that it is very rare to lie about rape is slightly exaggerated. I personally know a person who I suspected lied about rape and one who admitted it. The one that admitted it wasn't a bad person, just someone who consented to sex at uni whilst drunk, and desperately desperately regretted it when she was being laughed at my his awful friends and he moved onto someone else immediately. In circles and parties full of sex and drugs and alcohol and threesomes and orgies and god knows what else he was up to, I'm not surprised that claims have come forward.

And of course if someone lies, we may never know that they lied, so it's very hard to establish in statistics. I don't see how a study can possibly identify those that claimed rape and then lied?
The multiple Brand allegations aren't consistent, they are actually very different. My personal view is that he is probably guilty of rape and I'd like to see him fairly convicted, but I would never assume someone was definitely telling the truth just because they are a woman.
The evidence about the rape treatment centre is very compelling and if she goes to the police surely she would have a very strong chance of a conviction, but she hasn't, so the evidence can't be interrogated by anyone.

He's a misogynistic, sadistic, non-entity in the grand scheme of things. And an alleged rapist.
Kick him into the fking sea.

@Ilinaya oh. It's you. You do make a beeline for threads where you can air your incessant rape apologism, don't you? It must take a lot of time and energ

You do recognise that 'I know somebody who....' doesn't amount to any form of statistical evidence?

@AnxiousPangolin whateves doll,
You have the option of just not reading ….

I have no idea who you are... weird.

You do you realise you're on here too right, also using time and energy 😂
I won't waste mine on you though.

On balance I think that RB probably did commit rape of some description and the testimony from the woman who was only 16 when the relationship started makes for very grim reading, that's a relationship that was highly inappropriate and he should have known better than to enter into.

However I'm deeply uncomfortable with him being deemed guilty by companies/individuals he worked with and the wider public based on not a police investigation and a jury of his peers, but instead a journalism team who could (I'm not saying have, just saying could have) an agenda that we don't know about. I also am a bit uncomfortable with the way that much of the findings are behind a paywall and the rest of them were shown on a Saturday night in an "entertainment" time slot (with a big, hyped PR campaign that relied on morbid curiosity) on a commercial channel.

As I say, not a rape-apologist or some kind of mad Brand evangelist- I was certainly a fan back in the day but he's gone very weird these past few years- but I would like to see an investigation into all of this done properly.

And FWIW I've been abused by someone in a position of power who was much older than me and never complained about him to the police because it seemed futile with so little hard evidence, so I get why these women haven't complained to the police. However, even having been in that position, I don't love the idea of someone's life being trashed by a non-legal investigation. It just doesn't feel transparent enough to me to be deemed in any way fair.

The amount of women who don’t believe other women on here is terrible.
I believe all 4 women.
I have been raped and never bothered to report. Even women don’t support rape victims so what’s the bloody point.

@BitOutOfPractice Yes, I think it has backfired on them a bit in that respect. 🙂 Especially since it now seems he intends to carry on broadcasting. The post he put online less than a day ago has had over 1.5 million views. I think they thought the public would just blindly accept the statements the actors repeated on the documentary without asking for proof, legal process or a fair hearing for Brand. Some people were willing to go along with this but some weren't.

There is no debate over whether the Government is involved in what is going on; we know they are. They have sent a letter about him to Rumble asking whether he is going to be demonetised. I hadn't watched his videos before but I have watched a few now - one he made about Obama for example is to my mind definitely the sort of thing certain people would not like being broadcast.

Those saying he does not have the reach to be of interest to anyone; his videos have had over a billion views. I ran a quick question by ai as to who has the biggest reach, Brand or Channel 4. The response was that Channel 4 has a larger reach for TV and streaming but Brand has a larger reach in terms of social media and online content. TV viewership is declining, especially amongst young people so Brand's influence could only be expected to increase over time, while the legacy media and TV see their influence decline.

For me, there is just too much similarity with what happened to Julian Assange. Someone decides they don't like what you are doing and so accusations have to be dredged up to silence and discredit you. That doesn't mean those accusations are necessarily false; they are used to achieve an end.

In this case I am interested to know how these accusations were collected. The accusers, it would seem, did not come forward of their own volition. Channel 4 went looking for people. Since Brand has said he has slept with thousands of women they had a lot of people to approach. They were willing to put three years of diligence in to find evidence. I would like to know what was said to these people by Channel 4 and whether money was ever mentioned or involved. I think it's very important to know this.

What are you talking about? He’s not been found guilty by companies or indivuals he worked with, we as women have decided to believe the 8 women who have said he raped or assaulted them. Do you take issue with this.?

Sorry @Janieforever I probably wasn't clear, I meant that some of the companies/people he was working with (or who were hosting his work/advertising via his channel etc) have withdrawn their support based on the investigation. And that that investigation wasn't a legal one, but a journalistic one. Doesn't seem entirely right- I don't know that I'd lose my job if I'd been accused of crimes by a newspaper but not investigated or convicted by the police/law... why should this be any different?

I also believe the women, for what it's worth.

I work in a highly regulated sector but presumably most people have bringing the business into disrepute or appropriate standards of behaviour type clauses in our employment contract. We're expected to uphold certain standards and values as part of doing our job.

I don't see this as that different. His livelihood comes from being in the public eye. If his clients, whether members of the public or corporate advertisers, decide they no longer wish to associate with him on the basis of the reports they've read, that's their prerogative. I don't feel sorry for him.

Nike cancelled Mason Greenwood's sponsorship when his allegations came to light. Manchester United suspended him (albeit on full pay) and ended up sending him out on loan. That was on the basis of one victim, not multiple ones.

If your behaviour is highly questionable at best, you can hardly complain if businesses decide to steer clear of you.