Movies: Hollywood sexual harassment ( Russell Brand facing multiple allegations)
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KallioWeHardlyKnewYe
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The Crypto Guy
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KallioWeHardlyKnewYe
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FWIW I also read some of your posts as defending Masterson. But if you say you weren't I'll take your word for it and just chalk it up to a misunderstanding.
Defending the guilty shouldn't be stigmatized, IMO. It doesn't mean excusing their actions. It often just means defending their rights. Masterson, Brand and others have the right to a fair trial and a fair punishment. They deserve to be punished for what they did, but they also deserve a punishment that fits the crime and to not be punished for what they didn't do. We shouldn't be afraid to defend someone just because of our feelings towards him and what he did. If we don't stand up for someone's rights because of that, we're just asking for others to not stand up for ours for the same reason.
todeskultes
harumph
For those asking why the victims in sexual abuse cases are often hesitant to go to the police, I've collected some quotes to highlight how victims of sexual abuse have been silenced. Or, as in a number of these cases, police officers themselves have been the perpetrators. I've seen people in this thread repeating the false accusation myth, despite there being no evidence of this being an at all common occurrence. That in itself is a great explanation as to why many victims choose not to come forward immediately and recount an traumatic experience.
The Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Dame Vera Baird QC said (in 2019):
"I therefore particularly welcome the cross sector end to end review of how rape and sexual offences are conducted, from reporting to police right through to the end of the court process. It’s a cause of worry that the number of sex offenders referred by police for prosecutions has dropped and the numbers prosecuted has fallen even more. This is all in the face of thousands more serious sexual complaints. This mismatch is capable of robbing any victim of the confidence to report a sexual assault. Rapists are usually serial offenders and will continue until they are made to stop and so there is also a serious wider risk to public safety from this concern."
Why would victims of abuse want to speak up if they're likely to just be dismissed as lying or as trying to "ruin" someone? That's what many of them have gotten used to, why put themselves in further danger?
Considering how many people still think it's the victim's responsibility to "not put themselves in situations where they can be abused", I'm not at all surprised they would be resistant to reach out. It's honestly shocking how many people still demonstrate a total lack of understanding of consent.
"But one of those implicated in the abuse, Supt Gordon Anglesea, successfully sued for libel and it marked the start of a wider backlash, led by Wilby, against whistleblowers, victims and journalists who paid too much heed to their claims.
As New Statesman editor, he published articles denigrating the north Wales victims as “damaged” and manipulated by journalists such as me, all part of a modern witch-hunt in which the real victims were those accused of abuse. The Anglesea libel verdict was regularly cited as evidence of the witch-hunt.
Some of my witnesses in this investigation did not survive. Three killed themselves, two of whom had alleged sexual abuse by Anglesea. The former senior policeman was eventually convicted in 2016 of sexually assaulting two boys, aged 14 and 15, at an “attendance centre” he ran for runaways. He was sentenced to 12 years and died in jail a few weeks later, but it was more than 25 years too late. Mark Humphreys never lived to see the justice he craved; he took his life a few weeks after Anglesea’s 1995 libel case victory."
My editor trashed my inquiry into child sexual abuse. Now I know why | Dean Nelson
As New Statesman editor, he published articles denigrating the north Wales victims as “damaged” and manipulated by journalists such as me, all part of a modern witch-hunt in which the real victims were those accused of abuse. The Anglesea libel verdict was regularly cited as evidence of the witch-hunt.
Some of my witnesses in this investigation did not survive. Three killed themselves, two of whom had alleged sexual abuse by Anglesea. The former senior policeman was eventually convicted in 2016 of sexually assaulting two boys, aged 14 and 15, at an “attendance centre” he ran for runaways. He was sentenced to 12 years and died in jail a few weeks later, but it was more than 25 years too late. Mark Humphreys never lived to see the justice he craved; he took his life a few weeks after Anglesea’s 1995 libel case victory."
My editor trashed my inquiry into child sexual abuse. Now I know why | Dean Nelson
The Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Dame Vera Baird QC said (in 2019):
"I therefore particularly welcome the cross sector end to end review of how rape and sexual offences are conducted, from reporting to police right through to the end of the court process. It’s a cause of worry that the number of sex offenders referred by police for prosecutions has dropped and the numbers prosecuted has fallen even more. This is all in the face of thousands more serious sexual complaints. This mismatch is capable of robbing any victim of the confidence to report a sexual assault. Rapists are usually serial offenders and will continue until they are made to stop and so there is also a serious wider risk to public safety from this concern."
"In September 2021, the criminologist Betsy Stanko went into the Metropolitan police force to work out why they weren’t catching rapists. The previous year, less than 3% of rapes reported to the Met had resulted in charges being brought; in 2021, that percentage almost halved. Six months earlier, Stanko had been working with the Avon and Somerset police force on a project to improve its rape investigations, when the news broke that a 33-year-old woman named Sarah Everard had been kidnapped from a London common. The man who was later arrested for Everard’s rape and murder, Wayne Couzens, was a Metropolitan police officer. In the weeks that followed, there were demonstrations, vigils and calls for inquiries – an outpouring of rage that reminded Stanko of her time in the women’s movement of the 1970s. If many people, especially people of colour, had long been distrustful of the police, others were for the first time questioning who they were really for."
"Together, Stanko and Paddick wrote a highly critical internal report, which revealed, among other things, that cases were routinely dropped if the complainant had been drinking alcohol or had poor mental health. “And then the Met’s public affairs department recommended it be watered down,” said Paddick. “They rewrote it.” Stanko was bitterly disappointed, but continued to believe she could do more good inside the Met than without."
"It wasn’t just inexperienced officers who struggled to understand the crime. When Stanko presented her findings, the Met’s deputy commissioner, Sir Stephen House, allegedly declared to the room that “the problem with rape is it’s mostly regretful sex”. “And if he thinks that,” Stanko told me, outrage in her voice, “then there is no leadership or commitment to change.” House, who Stanko did not identify before a Channel 4 interview this month, and who categorically denies using the phrase “regretful sex”, has since left the Met, as has its then chief commissioner, Cressida Dick, who resigned last February after a fresh series of scandals involving Met officers accused of racism, bullying and misogyny."
"Amid court delays, low police conviction rates and fears over the trauma of reliving the crime in court, 69.2% of those subjected to a serious sexual assault withdrew from investigations. The figure, which was unearthed by the Labour party, compares with a 55.5% dropout rate in 2016 and 66.9% in 2021. According to the latest Ministry of Justice figures, the number of outstanding rape cases in crown courts has more than tripled in just four years to a record level. For the first time, the number of adult rape cases left outstanding has passed 2,000."
"If the murder of Sarah Everard had catalysed Operation Soteria, the arrest of PC David Carrick, the month after Stanko began work in the Met, made clear the immensity of the task ahead. Carrick was eventually jailed for life for more than 85 serious offences, including 48 rapes. For years, he had used his position as a police officer to gain the trust of women, to threaten them and hold them against their will. The cases of Couzens and Carrick showed that there were two problems at the heart of the police: a failure to investigate rape, and a failure to police itself. While Stanko’s brief was to address the former, the two were inseparable, produced by the same environment and the same failures. Couzens and Carrick are not anomalies: the Met is currently reviewing reports of domestic and sexual abuse involving close to 1,100 officers and staff.
None of this was a surprise to Stanko. Between 2005 and 2014, she had conducted seven reviews of the force’s rape investigations. Most had not been made public and leaders in the force had shown little interest in her findings. She recalled one meeting of senior Met officers in 2014. “And they put up on the board that nearly 200 officers were under investigation for sexual assault. I thought, What the f*** are you guys doing? But nobody seemed bothered. I looked at that and went, Jesus Christ. So I do know where a lot of the bodies are buried. They’ve known about this stuff a long time."
"The English police force with the best record on rape is Durham, with an average charging rate of 8%. But the force has had recent experience of serious corruption. In June 2021, former Durham PC Kevin Bentley was sentenced to 28 years for 24 physical and sexual assaults carried out over three decades. Like Carrick, he had told his victims that his colleagues would never believe them. A few weeks before Bentley’s sentencing, Durham’s chief constable, Jo Farrell, had volunteered her officers for Operation Soteria. “I thought, right, we need to be part of that,” she told me when I visited the force last autumn.
Between February and April 2022, Stanko’s team combed through three years’ worth of Durham’s case files and interviewed investigators. They had found, unusually, no evidence of a complainant not feeling believed. But there had also been the same problems as elsewhere: investigations that considered the suspect last, officers who lacked expertise or were simply burned out."
www.theguardian.com
"Together, Stanko and Paddick wrote a highly critical internal report, which revealed, among other things, that cases were routinely dropped if the complainant had been drinking alcohol or had poor mental health. “And then the Met’s public affairs department recommended it be watered down,” said Paddick. “They rewrote it.” Stanko was bitterly disappointed, but continued to believe she could do more good inside the Met than without."
"It wasn’t just inexperienced officers who struggled to understand the crime. When Stanko presented her findings, the Met’s deputy commissioner, Sir Stephen House, allegedly declared to the room that “the problem with rape is it’s mostly regretful sex”. “And if he thinks that,” Stanko told me, outrage in her voice, “then there is no leadership or commitment to change.” House, who Stanko did not identify before a Channel 4 interview this month, and who categorically denies using the phrase “regretful sex”, has since left the Met, as has its then chief commissioner, Cressida Dick, who resigned last February after a fresh series of scandals involving Met officers accused of racism, bullying and misogyny."
"Amid court delays, low police conviction rates and fears over the trauma of reliving the crime in court, 69.2% of those subjected to a serious sexual assault withdrew from investigations. The figure, which was unearthed by the Labour party, compares with a 55.5% dropout rate in 2016 and 66.9% in 2021. According to the latest Ministry of Justice figures, the number of outstanding rape cases in crown courts has more than tripled in just four years to a record level. For the first time, the number of adult rape cases left outstanding has passed 2,000."
"If the murder of Sarah Everard had catalysed Operation Soteria, the arrest of PC David Carrick, the month after Stanko began work in the Met, made clear the immensity of the task ahead. Carrick was eventually jailed for life for more than 85 serious offences, including 48 rapes. For years, he had used his position as a police officer to gain the trust of women, to threaten them and hold them against their will. The cases of Couzens and Carrick showed that there were two problems at the heart of the police: a failure to investigate rape, and a failure to police itself. While Stanko’s brief was to address the former, the two were inseparable, produced by the same environment and the same failures. Couzens and Carrick are not anomalies: the Met is currently reviewing reports of domestic and sexual abuse involving close to 1,100 officers and staff.
None of this was a surprise to Stanko. Between 2005 and 2014, she had conducted seven reviews of the force’s rape investigations. Most had not been made public and leaders in the force had shown little interest in her findings. She recalled one meeting of senior Met officers in 2014. “And they put up on the board that nearly 200 officers were under investigation for sexual assault. I thought, What the f*** are you guys doing? But nobody seemed bothered. I looked at that and went, Jesus Christ. So I do know where a lot of the bodies are buried. They’ve known about this stuff a long time."
"The English police force with the best record on rape is Durham, with an average charging rate of 8%. But the force has had recent experience of serious corruption. In June 2021, former Durham PC Kevin Bentley was sentenced to 28 years for 24 physical and sexual assaults carried out over three decades. Like Carrick, he had told his victims that his colleagues would never believe them. A few weeks before Bentley’s sentencing, Durham’s chief constable, Jo Farrell, had volunteered her officers for Operation Soteria. “I thought, right, we need to be part of that,” she told me when I visited the force last autumn.
Between February and April 2022, Stanko’s team combed through three years’ worth of Durham’s case files and interviewed investigators. They had found, unusually, no evidence of a complainant not feeling believed. But there had also been the same problems as elsewhere: investigations that considered the suspect last, officers who lacked expertise or were simply burned out."
‘I know where the bodies are buried’: one woman’s mission to change how the police investigate rape
The long read: For the past two years, Betsy Stanko has been leading an unprecedented investigation into why the police have been failing so badly to tackle sexual violence. But is there any chance of fixing a system that seems so broken?
www.theguardian.com
Why would victims of abuse want to speak up if they're likely to just be dismissed as lying or as trying to "ruin" someone? That's what many of them have gotten used to, why put themselves in further danger?
Considering how many people still think it's the victim's responsibility to "not put themselves in situations where they can be abused", I'm not at all surprised they would be resistant to reach out. It's honestly shocking how many people still demonstrate a total lack of understanding of consent.
DaaaaB's
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Are you suggesting that you can't kind of defend someone? It's all or nothing apparently lol. Maybe I misunderstood you but I wasn't the only one so maybe you should express yourself more clearly.
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A malign star kept him
DaaaaB's
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I really don't disagree with what you're saying but the thing is that most of the people defending those guys would be celebrating if it was Stephen Colbert being accused. More often than not it's not genuine, just political.
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That's why we have defense attorneys, and why they are a critical component of the system to protect individual rights.
They are also entirely irrelevant to how I can feel about a subject. I don't have to operate under the same legal standard for conviction as a court of law - in part because the consequences are so small (I don't think Russell Brand is going to care if I think he's an *******, which I already did).
I also don't have to jump through hoops to defend Russell Brand on an Internet discussion forum under the guise of "defending individual rights." Even if I liked the guy, I could just not say anything.
Yeah... that's not my point. Suppose you lost everything (career, family, friends, etc.) due to 'allegations'. The hope would be that you would get your say in court, but suppose it falls short of that. Suppose it never goes to trial. Your life is ruined and you are now left without any recourse. What's next? Litigation?... you lost your lively-hood (at the least), how will you be able to afford legal representation in a civil court case? It's over and you are done.
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Mario_is_BACK!!
ACK! ACK ACK! ACK!!!
Sound of Freedom exec. producer was filmed feeling the naked breasts of an apparently underage trafficking victim while on an undercover mission with Operation Underground Railroad
t.co
‘Sound of Freedom’ Producer Felt the Naked Breasts of Apparently Underage Trafficking Victim
Files from a joint local and federal criminal investigation released to VICE News describe video evidence of the incident, which took place in Mexico on an Operation Underground Railroad mission.
t.co
Neutrinos
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Allegations aside, I'm not quite sure where the hate for Brand comes from
Sure, he's not at all funny, but he's an incredibly bright and articulate fella who has spent the last few years shining a spotlight on the corruption within our current system
Sure, he's not at all funny, but he's an incredibly bright and articulate fella who has spent the last few years shining a spotlight on the corruption within our current system
Troy McClure
Suter will never be scratched
There is nothing wrong with taking a wait and see approach with these things. Lord knows I’ve done it when a favorite musician of my youth went through it because I didn’t want it to be true (But it was, and I was sad).
But the thing is there are certain dudes (always dudes) who make it something of a personality trait to loudly proclaim “innocent until proven guilty” whenever a woman accuses a man of sexual assault and then to play defense lawyer picking apart each each woman’s story. They do this claiming it’s about justice, yet you wander over to another thread… like the one where Alec Baldwin shot a woman on a movie set… and a lot of these very same guys forget the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
Mel Gibson Reveals Ashton Kutcher Is a 'Hidden Handler' for Hollywood Elites?
"It's evident that he has never been afraid to speak his mind, and that includes not fearing Kutcher either," the Just In YouTube channel claimed.
www.snopes.com
Spoiler: False.
The interesting/worrying part is:
A lot of fears about AI are centered around job security. Fair enough. My fear of AI is that it will become weaponized against individuals.
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https://torontosun.com/entertainment/celebrity/irreconcilable-differences-cited-as-mastersons-wife-files-for-divorce
Jumptheshark
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A lot of posters here have trouble with this unfortunately. Impossible to even try to have an adult conversation with them.
Maybe, but it cuts both ways. Pre-emptively accusing people of celebrating if Colbert were the accused suggests that you'd defend him against them if it were to happen, which would put you in the shoes that they're in now.
Yes, and there are some who are quick to believe allegations, but also quick to defend men like Baldwin. It's not about sexism, but politics, as DaaaaB's said.
DaaaaB's
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I'm really not worried about this far fetched scenerio but if it never went to trial that means the allegations would have been withdrawn.
PK Cronin
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For those asking why the victims in sexual abuse cases are often hesitant to go to the police, I've collected some quotes to highlight how victims of sexual abuse have been silenced. Or, as in a number of these cases, police officers themselves have been the perpetrators. I've seen people in this thread repeating the false accusation myth, despite there being no evidence of this being an at all common occurrence. That in itself is a great explanation as to why many victims choose not to come forward immediately and recount an traumatic experience.
"But one of those implicated in the abuse, Supt Gordon Anglesea, successfully sued for libel and it marked the start of a wider backlash, led by Wilby, against whistleblowers, victims and journalists who paid too much heed to their claims.
As New Statesman editor, he published articles denigrating the north Wales victims as “damaged” and manipulated by journalists such as me, all part of a modern witch-hunt in which the real victims were those accused of abuse. The Anglesea libel verdict was regularly cited as evidence of the witch-hunt.
Some of my witnesses in this investigation did not survive. Three killed themselves, two of whom had alleged sexual abuse by Anglesea. The former senior policeman was eventually convicted in 2016 of sexually assaulting two boys, aged 14 and 15, at an “attendance centre” he ran for runaways. He was sentenced to 12 years and died in jail a few weeks later, but it was more than 25 years too late. Mark Humphreys never lived to see the justice he craved; he took his life a few weeks after Anglesea’s 1995 libel case victory."
My editor trashed my inquiry into child sexual abuse. Now I know why | Dean Nelson
The Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Dame Vera Baird QC said (in 2019):
"I therefore particularly welcome the cross sector end to end review of how rape and sexual offences are conducted, from reporting to police right through to the end of the court process. It’s a cause of worry that the number of sex offenders referred by police for prosecutions has dropped and the numbers prosecuted has fallen even more. This is all in the face of thousands more serious sexual complaints. This mismatch is capable of robbing any victim of the confidence to report a sexual assault. Rapists are usually serial offenders and will continue until they are made to stop and so there is also a serious wider risk to public safety from this concern."
"In September 2021, the criminologist Betsy Stanko went into the Metropolitan police force to work out why they weren’t catching rapists. The previous year, less than 3% of rapes reported to the Met had resulted in charges being brought; in 2021, that percentage almost halved. Six months earlier, Stanko had been working with the Avon and Somerset police force on a project to improve its rape investigations, when the news broke that a 33-year-old woman named Sarah Everard had been kidnapped from a London common. The man who was later arrested for Everard’s rape and murder, Wayne Couzens, was a Metropolitan police officer. In the weeks that followed, there were demonstrations, vigils and calls forinquiries – an outpouring of rage that reminded Stanko of her time in the women’s movement of the 1970s. If many people, especially people of colour, had long been distrustful of the police, others were for the first time questioning who they were really for."
"Together, Stanko and Paddick wrote a highly critical internal report, which revealed, among other things, that cases were routinely dropped if the complainant had been drinking alcohol or had poor mental health. “And then the Met’s public affairs department recommended it be watered down,” said Paddick. “They rewrote it.” Stanko was bitterly disappointed, but continued to believe she could do more good inside the Met than without."
"It wasn’t just inexperienced officers who struggled to understand the crime. When Stanko presented her findings, the Met’s deputy commissioner, Sir Stephen House, allegedly declared to the room that “the problem with rape is it’s mostly regretful sex”. “And if he thinks that,” Stanko told me, outrage in her voice, “then there is no leadership or commitment to change.” House, who Stanko did not identify before a Channel 4 interview this month, and who categorically denies using the phrase “regretful sex”, has since left the Met, as has its then chief commissioner, Cressida Dick, who resigned last February after a fresh series of scandals involving Met officers accused of racism, bullying and misogyny."
"Amid court delays, low police conviction rates and fears over the trauma of reliving the crime in court, 69.2% of those subjected to a serious sexual assault withdrew from investigations. The figure, which was unearthed by the Labour party, compares with a 55.5% dropout rate in 2016 and 66.9% in 2021. According to the latest Ministry of Justice figures, the number of outstanding rape cases in crown courts has more than tripled in just four years to a record level. For the first time, the number of adult rape cases left outstanding has passed 2,000."
"If the murder of Sarah Everard had catalysed Operation Soteria, the arrest of PC David Carrick, the month after Stanko began work in the Met, made clear the immensity of the task ahead. Carrick was eventually jailed for life for more than 85 serious offences, including 48 rapes. For years, he had used his position as a police officer to gain the trust of women, to threaten them and hold them against their will. The cases of Couzens and Carrick showed that there were two problems at the heart of the police: a failure to investigate rape, and a failure to police itself. While Stanko’s brief was to address the former, the two were inseparable, produced by the same environment and the same failures. Couzens and Carrick are not anomalies: the Met is currently reviewing reports of domestic and sexual abuse involving close to 1,100 officers and staff.
None of this was a surprise to Stanko. Between 2005 and 2014, she had conducted seven reviews of the force’s rape investigations. Most had not been made public and leaders in the force had shown little interest in her findings. She recalled one meeting of senior Met officers in 2014. “And they put up on the board that nearly 200 officers were under investigation for sexual assault. I thought, What the f*** are you guys doing? But nobody seemed bothered. I looked at that and went, Jesus Christ. So I do know where a lot of the bodies are buried. They’ve known about this stuff a long time."
"The English police force with the best record on rape is Durham, with an average charging rate of 8%. But the force has had recent experience of serious corruption. In June 2021, former Durham PC Kevin Bentley was sentenced to 28 years for 24 physical and sexual assaults carried out over three decades. Like Carrick, he had told his victims that his colleagues would never believe them. A few weeks before Bentley’s sentencing, Durham’s chief constable, Jo Farrell, had volunteered her officers for Operation Soteria. “I thought, right, we need to be part of that,” she told me when I visited the force last autumn.
Between February and April 2022, Stanko’s team combed through three years’ worth of Durham’s case files and interviewed investigators. They had found, unusually, no evidence of a complainant not feeling believed. But there had also been the same problems as elsewhere: investigations that considered the suspect last, officers who lacked expertise or were simply burned out."
‘I know where the bodies are buried’: one woman’s mission to change how the police investigate rape
The long read: For the past two years, Betsy Stanko has been leading an unprecedented investigation into why the police have been failing so badly to tackle sexual violence. But is there any chance of fixing a system that seems so broken?
Why would victims of abuse want to speak up if they're likely to just be dismissed as lying or as trying to "ruin" someone? That's what many of them have gotten used to, why put themselves in further danger?
Considering how many people still think it's the victim's responsibility to "not put themselves in situations where they can be abused", I'm not at all surprised they would be resistant to reach out. It's honestly shocking how many people still demonstrate a total lack of understanding of consent.
I completely understand why people don't report these sorts of incidents right away. The issue is that the longer you wait the harder it is to prove it happened. It only gives people who try to discredit the claims more ammunition to do so and muddies the entire thing, inevitably hurting the victim and future victims more in the long run.
Whether or not false allegations are common or not is irrelevant when it comes to the courts if it happens at all. We can't be convicting people in "he said, she said" cases simply because it's not a common occurrence (and I'm not suggesting you believe this). It definitely highlights why people (the authorities) should take these claims more seriously whenever they're made. Nobody should have a predetermined outcome because there was an accusation.
There needs to be a shift that happens with these types of crimes, and maybe it's already started happening, but with our current system I'm not sure how to fix it beyond encouraging victims to come forward as quickly as possible and document as much as they can. The police policing themselves is a huge issue and I don't think that can be solved with them continuing to do so. It's an unfortunate reality that our judicial systems are not well equipped to handled these types of cases because in a lot of cases it's just the words of each party and that's just not enough.
Scandale du Jour
JordanStaal#1Fan
Bright and articulate? Have you taken a look at the bullshit he has been spewing lately?
Ceremony
blahem
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I wasn't sure how to start this post but you provided me a nice intro, thank you.
As someone who was (just) old enough to be aware of Brand when he first really started getting famous in the mid-00s, I always thought he was an arsehole. This resurfaced clip sums it up well:
The clip is from ten years ago and covers his early shifts into "commentary" as much as the 00s, but the bit at the end is the problem from the time. I'm going to guess most people reading this are North American and haven't seen the documentary, but it covers his rise to fame and the sort of media culture that existed in the UK at the time. He had a chat show and he told female guests to take their underwear off while miming masturbation. His "stand-up" included bits talking about how he enjoyed oral sex because of the noise. These weren't as part of jokes, they weren't even jokes, they were just things he said. He was named "Shagger of the Year" by the Sun three years running. An actual national newspaper that made a point of publishing topless photos of women every day had an award for "Shagger of the Year" it gave out. Could this exist today? It's honestly hard to try and sum up what the media was like at that time - partly because I was in my teens and not interested, partly because the internet wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now, but it was a completely different world. This is a decent summation of it I saw earlier.
You can read the article from the Times which accompanied the documentary here: https://archive.ph/NwmVQ It has some of the context, but it at least has the accounts from the accusers.
I'll say two other things about him. One is that while there may be merit to what the accusers are saying, there are two things to keep in mind. Brand has an addictive personality. This isn't news, or something he's ever hidden. He replaces drink/drug addictions with sex, and this seems to be at the centre of what people are accusing him of. The encounters described here aren't of someone having sex because they enjoy it, it's because he's compelled to do it because of his addictive personality. Of course people can have sex addictions and not groom children, rape people or have the celebrity standing to be able to handpick women to be interested in you, but it's worth bearing in mind. It's also worth bearing in mind that for anyone coming forward to say they were forced or coerced, there would be a lot of people who were absolutely throwing themselves at him. The documentary features his assistant or manager or something in 06/07 saying there were lots of women, and they all seemed willing. I don't know how an investigation into him will be able to separate the two, but I think it'll be hard.
The other thing worth pointing it is what's been covered so expertly in the past few pages. Within hours of the Times article going up on Saturday and his video going up, a real who's who of utter gimps were on Twitter backing him - George Galloway, Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk. And an assortment of the usual right wing accounts that circulate in these areas. The cynic in me might suggest he shifted into this side of content creation a few years ago because he knew accusations like this might happen in the future, and he wanted to cultivate an audience that would be fundamentally supportive of him. It seems to be going well, if that was the case.
In short, I always knew he was a wrong'un. Oh - and he is absolutely not intelligent or articulate. He's like Jordan Peterson, he uses big words and deliberately mispronounces them to make himself seem more mysterious and cultured than he is. This was literally part of his standup act from twenty years ago. He's an idiot's idea of what a smart person sounds like.
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DaaaaB's
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- Apr 24, 2004
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I don't think it suggests that at all as I certainly wouldn't be defending him if multiple women were accusing him of rape. Pretty ridiculous assumption to make.
