Rapey-Wapey

I used to be a fan. Russell Brand was chaotic, loud, and had a very good talent for skewering the fatuous. Takes one to know one, I guess.

My oldest daughter’s BFF introduced me to him when she was 15. Waving “My Booky-Wook” at me as she let herself into my apartment (she had a key) and raided my refrigerator, she waxed on about how funny he was, how smart he was, how simultaneously naughty and charming he was. I saw a British guy with a back-comb and eyeliner, and decided to give this weirdo a shot. I read both booky-wooks. I read his other books. I watched all his stuff on YouTube, including the execrable BrandX show and The Trews. He was a self-admitted narcissist, and presented himself as trying to get over that.

I used to travel to London four times a year for a job that ended in 2015. London is probably my favorite city in the world (and I’ve been around). Comforting and familiar from the BBC shows that PBS used to license back in the 1970s and 80s, massively multicultural and modern, endless layers of history, a global food scene and, most importantly, friends. In 2015 I was at a three-day standards conference at the British Library (that in itself is marvelous, with George III’s personal library at its literal core). On my business trips, I always made time for something fun – a new restaurant I wanted to try, a shop where I could get things I couldn’t easily get in the US, a meetup with friends I ordinarily only connected with on social media. On this particular trip, I bought myself a £25 ticket to see Russell Brand in a small venue in East London as he tried out new material for his upcoming “Exposed” tour.

He was exactly as he was on TV/YouTube. Only slightly more tired. He was at work – refining material, honing an image – and the seams showed a little bit. The usual sense of joy in what I imagine was the massive ego boost of an applauding audience – this was set off to the side as the comedic workman, with an eye towards some kind of celebrity immortality, was perfecting his craft.

I don’t remember any of the bits. Or any of the jokes. I do remember vegan cupcakes from the Hare Krishnas – one on each seat in the venue. As the show wound down, and people began heading to the café downstairs, a cluster of young women AND young men gathered around him, vying for his personal attention.

I saw him again in Brooklyn in 2017. He was hosting an evening at St. Francis Xavier College in Brooklyn Heights, for his book Recovery. Somewhere I have pictures – but again, what I most vividly remember is that he served as a hug dispenser for vulnerable people.

By that time, I’d been 2 years in deep therapy. I was beginning to recognize the signs of an unreconstructed narcissist – despite his protestations to the contrary (pretty much everything he put out between 2015 and 2017 was about “getting better” from his narcissism). His image was, to me at least, growing more brittle, less glowing with unquestioned celebrity.

When the pandemic hit, The Trews got weird. I couldn’t do it anymore. It was too transparent – he would espouse a “controversial” position, grift as much as he could from it, and move on. Like a locust devouring farm crops. His marriage, his children, his rightward swing and God-bothering and move to Florida – it was as if he was accessorizing himself with the appropriate accoutrements of a respectable man who could in no way ever be criticized.

And then the accusations surfaced. What had long been rumored (and therefore easily looked past) became real. Brand’s response was to double-down on the evangelicalism and MAGA – getting Bear Grylls to publicly baptize him in the (highly polluted) Thames. Posing with Dr. Oz and RFK Jr. Waving a Bible at the accusations the same way my daughter’s friend waved “My Booky-Wook” at me.

It would be an act of ommission for me not to include this particular gem:

I loathe Piers Morgan with all my heart. But he is correct about exactly two things: gun control in America, and the charlatan that is Russell Brand.

In 2014, a model named Jordan Martin self-published a fictionalized memoir about her relationship with a man named Randall Grand. It is thinly-veiled, clearly framed as fiction to protect her from lawsuits (Brand is famously litigious, and there is speculation that super-injunctions have kept accusers from speaking out until recently). It is pure documentation of what it is like to be involved with a massively self-involved man. Self-involved at a huge cost to the women around him.

Don’t get me started on super-injunctions. They exist to protect the powerful.

Suffice it to say, I am following his trial with interest. There’s no one feed or link to point to – I’m gathering my information on the fly along with everyone else. I’m sure there will be a book from someone knowledgeable at some point.

What really gets me, as someone who was raised in a preacher’s household, is the abuse of religion to give cover to heinous acts. It’s all very well to pretend your sins have been washed down the (highly polluted) Thames. But court is a different matter entirely; facing your victims is a different matter entirely. These women (and they are all women) are not lying, misremembering, exaggerating, or making shit up. The implication by the defense that they were seduced by his charisma is proving to be absolute garbage. This is a man who overpowered women, wanted to rape them, got to rape them, and left after raping them. They knew what happened to them at the time.

Next up: “Why Rape Isn’t So Bad” by…literally any man in the right-wing movement. Because that’s the thing about rape. It happens because a man wants it to. It happens because raping is the way he gets what he wants – not just sex, but also power and domination and control.

And if there’s one thing a narcissist seeks out time and time again, it’s power and domination and control.