Russell Brand Part 1

Tracing the left-to-right political trajectory of the unfunniest man in British comedy. Support us: Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks! Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuseExposing Russell BrandRussell Brand And The Conspiracy GriftRussell Brand on revolutionCelebrity Capital in the Political Field: Russell Brand’s migration from stand-up comedy to New...

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Yo.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Yo.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  Yo.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Michael Hobbs is talking.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Could you hear that little "mhm"? Like, my little sounds?

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of it.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Because I was just texting my friend and I was probably just, like, making little "mhm" sounds. While I was doing that.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  I like that you know one of your main sounds, which is "mhm."

• 0:28Speaker 00

  No, because I hear myself doing it and I'm like, "How many times have I done that in the last, like, five minutes?"

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I think I told you about being with, hanging out with my brother.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Uh.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  And, uh, him sitting down and going, "Huh, uh."

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  I was like, "That's how old we are. We're the age where we do that." And he went, "It feels better." And it feels, it actually feels better.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  I'm with your brother on this one.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think he's wrong, but I just think it was funny that I was like, "Oh, yeah, you and me, we're in the same boat." And he got real defensive.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Uh, what do you have?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Well, I have two. Okay, I think I know which one I'm doing.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  All right, give me an A. Let's A-B test it. Let's A-B test it.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Option A, here we go.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that has a cadence of jokes, but are there jokes in there?

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. That's a spoiler for episode two. You can't spoil the second part.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  This is, okay, you ready for option B?

• 1:18Speaker 00

  All right, B, okay, do it.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, our potty wad cast.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, dude, you're gonna make me say the title of this fucking book, aren't you?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  He wrote a book called My Bookie Wook.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  I hate it.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  I would say I have followed about as much of Russell Brand's career as your average bear, right? Like, aware of big starring movie roles, aware of his work on, like, panel shows and doing stand-up, uh, particularly in the 2000s and early 2010s in the UK.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  And then aware of his criminal charges and of his baptism.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  There's been quite the pivot the last couple of years. We're gonna get into it.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  There sure is, and I am aware that he has been showing up at fucking Maha events as well.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Like, he endorsed Trump, like, it's not, it's not like, "Ooh, he's leaning toward the right." He's a full-on, just explicit right-winger at this point.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  We took our little divergence away from current events, and now we're, like, half back in.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  But say your name. We haven't, like, done the names yet.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Oh, you wanna do a tiny repeating machine?

• 2:18Speaker 00

  I'm ready.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  I'm Aubrey Gordon.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  I'm Michael Hobbs.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase. You can also subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Same stuff, Aubrey.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Michael.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Today.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Today, we are talking about a comedian who is unique in his annoyingness.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  I was actually, I was watching one of his videos from like, I don't know, 2007 or something yesterday. He said something and I sort of laughed and I was like, why does this feel so weird? I was like, it's the first time I've laughed. In like, three weeks.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  I will say, I first came to know Russell Brand, I'm a person who has followed as much as you can from the US, has like, followed British comedy.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  And the jokes about Russell Brand were like, it was like a bunch of jokes being like, mothers, lock up your daughters!

• 3:13Speaker 00

  I know, I know.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, and he was like, married to Katy Perry.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  In one of the most chaotic wellness marriages we will cover.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  I know, I know. Also divorced her by text.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  He sort of falls off after a while.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  And then he pops back up with these sexual assault allegations, right?

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Yes, this is the story we are going to be telling today. How this guy who was a stand-up comedian, then an actor, then a fairly credible left-wing figure during like, the Occupy Wall Street era, becomes a wellness influencer.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Great, good, good.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  And then slowly becomes a straightforward, right-wing influencer and, you know, fundamentalist Christian, the kind of guy who has numerous videos about how DEI is a forced agenda and there's gender ideology in the schools.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Like, he's one of the canonical examples of the far-left, too-wellness, too-right-wing pipeline.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  So, that is what we are going to be doing over the course of the next, uh, two episodes, and before we do it, we have to issue the most fucking Omni-Trigger Warning we've ever had on the show. These episodes are gonna include fucking animal cruelty, like, child sexual abuse. And like, everything you can imagine is going to be in these episodes. So like, fair warning.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Here we fucking go.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  So Russell Brand is born in 1975 in Essex. When he's six months old, his parents separate. So he's basically raised by a single mom. It sounds like his mom is like really nice and like a really positive presence in his life. His father is this kind of mercurial presence where he will like disappear for months or years on end. And then like come back and like shower Russell with gifts and do the like, hey, man, it's great. I'm gonna be around a lot more these days, you know? And then disappear again. Kind of classic deadbeat dad shit.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Just a disappointment factory.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So the book is framed around his treatment for sex addiction. So the book starts kind of in a like record scratch. I'll bet you're wondering how I got into this situation kind of thing. Where he's in sex addiction inpatient treatment in Philadelphia. And then the book kind of rewinds to be like, well, how did I end up in sex addiction treatment? Right? I've never read a celebrity memoir that has this much fucking sex in it and it's much like womanizing. But also I guess his excuse is like, well, that's sort of the theme is that like I've been struggling with sex addiction. So we start getting like really worrying sex stuff as early as like the first chapter of the book.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, give me an example of really worrying sex stuff.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  So he has a thing where he has an aunt who like, I don't know, is like busty and like has big boobs. And he's kind of like obsessed with big boobs throughout the book. And he sort of schemes as like a four or five year old to be in the bathroom while she's showering. So he can like watch her shower.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  The way that he remembers this is kind of like, ah, ha, ha, like I managed to be in the bathroom while she was showering.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Like what a little rascal.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  He also started reading his dad's pornography fairly young. This is the seventies and eighties, so there isn't like, you know, internet pornography or anything.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So you find a box of magazines or whatever.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  So his dad is like, I don't know, Playboy Hustler, whatever the UK's equivalent are. But it appears this is like very young, like four, five, six kind of thing. He's like reading through his dad's pornography. He also, I think when he's seven or eight, he's a bit unclear on the timeline at various points. But at seven or eight, he's abused by his babysitter. I think his babysitter probably brought up masturbation. The babysitter was like 16 or 17 years old. And little Russell was like, oh, well, what's masturbation? And then his babysitter's like, I'll show you. So he is naked, standing in the shower as his babysitter jerks off.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Oh, so he's sexually abused?

• 7:01Speaker 00

  There's no like touching or anything, but like, it's definitely an act of abuse. Yes.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is, yes.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  He also starts to exhibit, I think, like, the personality trait that explains his entire political ideology, where he seems to be totally oppositional to any figure of authority. So he talks about getting in trouble in school, like, from a fairly young age. He says, "My mom did numerous jobs, taking me with her until I began play school, where I was frequently in trouble, having daily tantrums when she left me behind. It's a bit ridiculous to get in trouble at play school. I remember inspecting the spittle-flecked faces of senselessly enraged adults looming like ogres, thinking, well, this all seemed like a bit of a storm in a teacup. I was awake as a child. I knew it was nonsense."

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Over and over again in the book, he gets in trouble for various things, but there's no point at which he ever recognizes the authority of someone who is mad at him. Even in preschool, he's like, oh, this is unjust.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Is there any point where he's like, I get why they said that?

• 8:00Speaker 00

  No, this is what's so fascinating to me, is like,

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's troubling.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  I understand how you would feel that in the moment, right? Like, this fucking Nazi, like, won't let me run around during naptime or something. But later on, you'd be like, yeah, it must, I must have been a challenge for my teachers.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Or like, that was unsafe, what I was doing.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Or, I can see where they're coming from, that probably made their jobs harder.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Even just to sound like a grounded person when you're talking about it in, say, a book.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  The perfect example of this is in his second memoir, My Bookie Wook 2.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Ah, oh my god!

• 8:33Speaker 00

  For the love of god.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Oh my god, there's a second one?

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, I read both of them. The second one's much worse.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Michael, Michael, I have been semi-pro hating the title of My Bookie Wook for so long.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  And I did too!

• 8:45Speaker 01

  And I did not know that there was a second one. And frankly, that's on me.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  So this is describing himself on an airplane.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  I was thrown off an Iberia Airlines jet at Barcelona Airport after I refused to remove my feet from the top of the seat in front of me. Scruffy people are not welcome in any class other than economy. If you find a way of affording overpriced travel without dressing like a boffin, it irritates conformists. Oh, Lord.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  So boffin is like a egghead, like, expert kind of thing?

• 9:20Speaker 01

  If someone's like, "I got kicked off of a plane because I irritated conformists",

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I immediately have a minimum of 20 questions.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  So then he tells the rest of the story.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  I offered the haughty air hostess the perfect chance to tell me off by being a bit drunk and bawdy and lounging about. She told me off, but I ignored her. I thought, "I wonder what'll happen if no matter what happens, I refuse to cooperate with this woman." I know she was just doing her job, but I sensed she was enjoying being authoritative, and we all know "just doing my job" is the excuse offered up for enacting genocide.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  She's basically a Nazi for asking me to put my feet down on an airplane.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  And for, like, being drunk and bawdy, which I assume means, like, hitting on her while she's at work?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  It's basically like, I was being a huge asshole, and she was a Nazi for telling me to stop.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  She became increasingly agitated and elicited the support of the pilot, who honestly flung open the cockpit door and had a go at me over his shoulder, like a dad chastising naughty daughters on a motoring holiday. I ignored that, too. I was in a silly mood.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  There's, like, hundreds of people that need to get where they're going, but, like, I was in a silly mood and I didn't want to put my feet down.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  The pilot made an announcement that because of "passenger disruption", the flight would not be taking off, thereby falling back on a form of psychological warfare constantly deployed against me in childhood, where the teacher says, "Because Russell's been naughty, the whole class has to stay behind in the hope of turning everyone else against you." Wow.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  Dude.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  The investment in persecution here is really sort of stunning.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  I had a friend in high school who would always, just like, was constantly... Getting fired from jobs and every, the story was always something totally benign. He's like, I got fired for being like five minutes late to a meeting. And then like, oh, well, what actually happened? He's like, I showed up late and then my boss was like, why are you late? And I was like, shut up, you fucking bitch. I'm like, I don't think you were fired because you were late to a meeting, dude.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  It goes in the same category to me of like, oh, this is enough red flags for me to disengage. As like someone who complains about work, but just talks about like everyone they work with is an idiot.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Boy, it doesn't matter what job you're at, it doesn't matter what role you're in.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  He, even after he's like in recovery, he's now sober. He can't look at this situation and go, man, it must've really sucked for the stewardess that day. Like she's got a drunk passenger who for no reason refuses to do this like extremely basic thing before takeoff. He's still the hero of the story and she is still literally a Nazi.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  It's also like, feels reminiscent of our like Metabolife guy in that there's like zero reckoning with the effects on other people.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, completely.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  I just like to imagine a serene pastoral landscape, a cool breeze blowing in the air and just the sound of one giant red flag flapping in the wind.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  The other, I mean, this book is like all fucking red flag anecdotes. The other one that like really stood out to me, especially as far as his politics go, is apparently when he's very young, five, six, he's walking around the neighborhood and there's an old guy who sort of stops him and is like, hey, I grew some flowers. Look at, look at how nice my front yard looks. And then the guy's like, hey, I gotta run inside to like, go to the bathroom for a second. I'll leave you out here. Don't stomp on the flowers.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Kind of a weird thing to say, honestly.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Whatever. I just am gonna flag that my bullshit meter is already fucking going off here. Like, do, do we think an adult was like, hey, don't stomp on those flowers?

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Well, the thing is, I think probably because it's a neighbor, he probably knew that Russell was like kind of a troublemaker.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I see.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  I mean, he might, he might've said that to any kid or maybe he was joking or something. But what's so interesting is Russell hears the phrase, don't stamp on those flowers. And he's like, well, I have to stamp on the flowers.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  So the minute the guy goes inside, he just destroys the entire flower bed, like jumping up and down, just like pulverizes all of these flowers. The fact that he's telling This in his book means that like he on some level gets that this is kind of like disordered behavior. Like this is, this is bad, right? But I think also what you find when you watch any of his political videos or you read like anything kind of quote unquote political that he's written. He just hates being told what to do. He doesn't even want to stomp on the fucking flowers, right? It's like, it's this hollow opposition where if you tell him to, he'll do the opposite, even if it makes no sense and he doesn't even want to do it.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think there's something about that, that he like comes to believe that that's like a charming thing.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Also, this whole anecdote is like Chekhov's anti-cancel culture turn.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Completely.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Fast forward fucking 30 years and this kid is like, you can't say anything anymore.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  So at seven years old, his mom gets cancer. She recovers, the cancer comes back when he's 11. He doesn't really understand sort of the nature of conditions like this, and so he blames himself a little bit and he feels like I'm not able to protect my mom. And so the acting out in school gets significantly worse. She also starts dating a man, Colin, who he doesn't like. He says, I had a growing sense that I was a disappointment to people. Not only that I wasn't the kind of person my dad would have wanted me to be, but also that I wasn't able to look after my mom. Either to prevent her from getting ill or to stop Colin from moving in.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  This guy grows to be a real shithead, but like for this kid, even with like behavior issues, even with this oppositional shit. Like feeling like you have failed a parent for getting a terminal illness or for being in a bad relationship.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Is like horrible and is legitimately like a big thing to figure out how to shake off.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  And then he tells the most fucked up story in the entire book.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Oh no, did I empathize too early?

• 15:07Speaker 00

  We've, I like haven't checked this in years, but Apple Podcast has a thing where they allow you to see where people like stop listening to your podcast. Like how many people make it to the end and stuff.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  I'm so glad I didn't know about this feature, Michael.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  It bums me out and I never check it, but like I, I want to check it for this episode because I think we're going to lose like half of the listeners after. The story, the story is so fucked up. So his dog, the only thing you need to know for this is his dog is named Topsy. So here's this story.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Oh God, you're gonna make me tell the fucked up story?

• 15:35Speaker 00

  You're reading all the slurs, you're reading all the terrible stories. It's all you.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  When we first got Topsy, she would be allowed to sleep in the bed with me. But when Colin came, an absurd edict was introduced whereby she was no longer allowed upstairs. I evidently had a lot of anger and hate in me about this because I would perch at the top of the stairs and lure her to come up. Topsy, Topsy, Topsy. Then, when she would slink nervously upward to the forbidden terrain of the upper floor, I would suddenly become Mr. Hyde. "Oh dear, Topsy," I would declaim in a rather arch manner. "You know perfectly well, you're not allowed upstairs." Before cruelly kicking her back down to the bottom again,

• 16:19Speaker 01

  where I would rejoin her and give her a sympathetic cuddle, regretfully muttering, "Oh Christ, were you kicked down the stairs? This is terrible. Holy fuck."

• 16:29Speaker 00

  It's like all there, dude. On some level, it's sympathetic because you're like, he's clearly hurting. But also, he's lashing out at like this innocent creature.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  I can understand not wanting to recognize the quote unquote authority of a fucking stepdad you don't like. I'm like, sure, fair. But I think not even recognizing that like a different person has different wants. Being like, I'm just gonna respect that this is what this person wants, or I'm gonna figure out how to navigate that or whatever. I will also say, not for nothing, I am not alleging anything about Russell Brand, but like, this is on the fucking serial killer checklist.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  This is the fucking dark triad fucking shit.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  So his mom decides to put him in boarding school at this time. He doesn't really specify why. I think it's probably because he was acting out in school. And then he immediately starts acting out again. He says, "Whenever I'm in any kind of social group, I always tend to think I won't fit in and gravitate toward an identity that will stand out." So this sort of makes his stand-up persona make a little bit of sense, right? He's like, "Maybe you won't like me, so I'm just gonna like act crazy."

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Right, and it's all like a Right? So if you don't like me, it's that you don't like the act.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  He then, based on this, gets like a reputation as like kind of a weirdo and an outcast. And so he says, another dubious attention-seeking device that I invented at the school was the game genital grabbing.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  What a cool, fun.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  A fun game for all of us.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Russell Brand walked so Donald Trump could run.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  So he like walks up to people at school and just like grabs their junk. I mean, outside of their pants. It's like the only saving grace of this, but like he starts doing this, obviously gets in fucking trouble.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Is it a boys' school or a coed?

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Coed, it appears.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Okay, Jesus, fucking Christmas.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Good stuff. And then he eventually gets kicked out of boarding school, not for this. This is also a very telling thing where he says he like really wants to like have sex. Like he's, he's getting into his teenage years where he's like post puberty and he like, he says he really wants to like get with girls. But at one point he says, I didn't want to get with girls as much as I wanted to tell other boys that I was getting with girls.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Boy.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  But he becomes desperate to get laid at this time. And so the way that he gets kicked out of boarding school is a whole scenario that he doesn't describe very well. But he's like, he sneaks into a girl's room to try to hook up, but then like her roommate is there. And then he sneaks girls into his own room. And then his like prefect finds out that there are girls in his room and you can't have girls in your room. And so he gets kicked out. But also what tellingly, talking about this prefect, like basically the guy that like figured out that he was doing this and busted him. He says, children shouldn't be given SS-style powers.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  What in the fuck is going on with this dude and comparing like a flight attendant? And a school prefect to Nazis?

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  There's like that whole part of the Metabolife book where he's talking about how like lawyers have one of the best grifts around or whatever. And you're like, oh, you think everyone is grifting?

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  And I think similarly, Russell Brand thinks any boundary that gets set for him is someone who's like drunk with power.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Totally, yes.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  It's really telling. And I think the other thing is earlier, when you said like, he wasn't really doing this to impress women, but to impress men. You and I were talking the other day about sort of looksmaxers as like a women. Space, right? Or like, actually, the point is to create a space that rejects women.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  And you actually just get to relate to other men and like one up other men and women, if present at all, are like tools for that. Like, I think that's really an undercurrent of like a lot of misogyny.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Women are props to display your value to other men, and that's about it.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  The other interesting thing about his identity is also the sense of himself as having this kind of threatened masculinity. So after he's kicked out of boarding school, he then goes back to his comprehensive school. He talks a lot about being like really insecure about his appearance. He's fat at this point. He's getting bullied a lot for being fat. And like, there's something really interesting about the struggles that Russell is having at this time where he is kind of feminine.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  People are calling him gay all the time. People are calling him, you know, fat all the time. And hi- his sexuality feels really threatened.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  And I, I think a lot of what he does for the next like 30 years of his life is like to try to prove to himself and to the rest of the world that like, I'm, I'm, I'm a man. Like, I, I can be a masculine guy. I can, I can still have sex with girls.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  It can be easy to underestimate how much a constant drumbeat of other people's messages about your sexuality shape your own understanding of your own gender and sexuality, right?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  To be constantly made fun of for being gay is like actually gonna sort of fuck you up whether you're gay or you're straight.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Just in different ways, right?

• 21:13Speaker 00

  He also says that he starts cutting himself at this time.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  He gets a really rough eating disorder. He just starts engaging in like pretty hardcore bulimia to lose all of the weight. He also, throughout the book, he sort of mentions various psychiatric assessments that he's had. I mean, you know, he gets arrested later on and as part of that, he'll go to a psychiatrist or their school psychologist. But it seems like every single mental health professional who has ever seen him in any capacity has said like, you have serious mental illness. He's been diagnosed with depression, bipolar, ADHD. Everyone seems to give him a different diagnosis, but every page of this book, you're like, this is an unwell person.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Did any of this come up in the media around the book?

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Dude.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Like, when he's doing interviews around this shit, are people like, "Hey bud, you okay?"

• 22:01Speaker 00

  When the book came out, I read a bunch of reviews. This was like, well reviewed. It's like, "Ooh, a wild romp through, like, working-class Essex and, like, trying to become an actor in London." But like, yeah, nobody really pointed out how, like, super fucked up the stuff in this book is. We're not even to the fucked up shit yet, Aubrey.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, holy fuck.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  So his big epiphany comes when he gets a role in the school play. He is cast as Fat Sam in Bugsy Malone.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Great, good.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  The minute he starts acting, he's just like, "This is it. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life."

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get to pretend to be somebody else? Great.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. And also, he, I mean, I don't want to sound mean, but like, he does describe this as like, "I get to be the center of attention."

• 22:39Speaker 01

  I don't think it's mean to say what's in his book.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  He also starts a pattern that he does throughout the book numerous times. He says, you know, "Now that I'm acting, people had, like, seen me in the school play, I started to get a lot of attention from girls." So he's like, "Ooh, girls were, like, really into me." But then when he actually describes the nature of, like, "Girls were really into me," it seems to be mostly him pestering women. He says, "I became a schoolboy Tony Montana, rampaging around the playground, indiscriminately spraying girls with chat-up lines. Say hello to my little friend. I hollered in canteens and corridors. No one was safe for me. Charged by a white mound of my own newly-discovered potency, every female was a potential target."

• 23:22Speaker 01

  "No one was safe from me" is a dark-as-fuck line.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  I, like, stopped copy-pasting them eventually. There's so much foreshadowing in the book of, like, the kind of creep that he turns out to be.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  So, he says, "By my twenties, I would relish the challenge of chaste maids and the search for the correct combination of words required to decode their moral resistance. Jumping through hoops, ducking questions, feigning indifference to sex. The knobsticle course, I call it."

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  And he had lots of, like, bits in his stand-up comedy about this, like, "The knobsticle course" thing, of basically, like, "Ha, ha, how to, like, kind of trick women into saying yes to having sex with you."

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is the guy who thinks that, like, cutting a hole in the bottom of the popcorn bucket is, like, actually a good gag.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  He then describes losing his virginity. He is 15. It sounds like it's like a fairly awkward situation. He doesn't even like take his clothes off. It's with a fellow actor from the play who seems like she's older and more experienced than him. It's almost kind of like classic losing your virginity as a teen story where it takes like five minutes. And he's like, oh, I guess that happened. But then afterwards, I think because he's like not super popular, the girl is like, hey, let's not talk about this. Like, let's just act like this never happened. And then Russell says, I blabbed to anyone who'd listen. Instead of telling no one as requested, I told anyone I encountered. So he starts blabbing about this. This girl, Mary Ann, denies it. She's like, no, I never had sex with Russell. What are you talking about?

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Right. Which is because the stakes for him are, he's like, people will see me as more masculine. And she's like, yeah, the stakes for me is that I will be fucking slut-shamed off the face of the fucking earth.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  He devises a scheme where he sets up a tape recorder and calls her and is like, hey, you know how we had sex the other night?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck off.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  And then he like gets her on tape admitting to this. But then what's weird, he does this throughout the book too. He describes this scheme of like getting her on tape where she's admitting to them having sex. But then he just, he never mentions it again. It's not clear what he did with the tape. Did he play it for his friends? Did he show it to people at school? You would think, especially from someone who went to sex addiction treatment, to be like, you know, at the time, I had these ideas about women that like I was in control and they didn't have any autonomy and it was up to me. Like, some description of like, I later learned that this was wrong. But he just tells it as like a funny story. Like, ha, ha, ha, this is my losing my virginity story. Keep making that sound for the next like two to three hours. This is part one.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Michael, we're still in his teenage years, Michael.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  He is now age 16. He gets into an acting school in London. So he moves to London. He then describes again, he says, like, oh, I was getting all this attention from girls because like I was at a good school and I was acting. But then when he actually describes the specific girls that he has like flings with, it appears to be him showing like worrying levels of infatuation. So he says- I became obsessed with Louise. I spoke to her recently and she reminded me that I'd sent her up to six letters a day. He also says, Penny, I was so helplessly infatuated with her that I followed her to her home in Wigan at the end of term.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  So earlier on, you mentioned that he seems to be invested in this in a way that is like in order to sort of prove something or illustrate something to other men. When he talks about being like hopelessly infatuated, does he talk about anything about these women that he particularly likes about them or particularly wants about them or whatever?

• 26:50Speaker 00

  You know what I'm about to say, Aubrey. He talks about their looks. Like, he talks about like, oh, this like, she, she was a radiant creature and like her blonde curls. You know, it's like physical appearance stuff.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  It's clear that these are like sort of trophies to him or like conquests like based on their attractiveness. So this girl Penny, he meets her at school. She's like, oh, I'm going home for the holidays. He goes, oh, let me walk you to Houston Station, but like then I'll leave you alone. Don't worry about it. She's like, okay, you can walk me to the station. And then he sort of like worms his way onto the train. So here's this.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Penny didn't want me to come to her house, but I used charm and relentless pigheaded persistence to persuade her. I'd pursued her with poetry and promises, neither of which were original or true, for months. I tackled the nobsicle course with such dogged aplomb that when night fell, I was allowed to sleep in her bed, top to toe. I spun gags and yarns till she let me turn around. I painted verbal pictures and begged until she kissed me. I lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till reluctantly she removed her bra.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  Charming stuff.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Evoked the spirit of Pan. Like, that's the kind of stuff that I'm like, yeah, that sounds like his stand-up act where you're like, oh, you're just sort of throwing in weird references and thinking that that's like a joke?

• 28:12Speaker 00

  I know.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Or thinking that that like makes this okay?

• 28:15Speaker 00

  We're not going to read them all, but this thing happens many times in the book where he's super infatuated with a girl. Like, oh, I can't, I can't stop thinking about you. Writing, you know, six letters a day, whatever. He talks her into sex, wears her down, and then he never mentions her again.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  So this girl Penny is not mentioned for the rest of the book.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  He can't stop himself from going to the next infatuation. Like, once he's kind of won, like, the conquest is over, he's had sex with them, like, he has no more attention for them.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Infatuation may be his language. I'm not sure that that's how I would describe it as an outside observer.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Wait, what would you say? Love? You think it's pure love? You think it's really beautiful?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  I think it's twwo. Honestly, like, the thing that comes to mind is, like, almost like Marx.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Right? That he's sort of, like, in it to, to win. And the winning happens when you have sex, and then there, then the game is over and we're done. It's not really infatuation, because that implies some level of, like, attraction to something innate about that person.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  To me, it seems much more like, like, he's just sort of constantly setting personal bests.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  But so, uh, the next, uh, bit of lighter fluid that is poured on this dynamic is that he starts doing drugs.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  He discovered, uh, alcohol when he was, like, nine or 10. Him and a friend were going through a sort of, uh, supply closet at the school, and they found some alcohol, and then he drank it, and he was like, "I fucking love this." Like, he took to it immediately. It's not clear how much he's drinking, because I think it's hard to get a hold of, but he talks about how he started smoking weed. He says, "The first time I went around to Jimmy and Justin's flat, I got so stoned that I went to bed and I was there for three days. I didn't eat or anything, just lay there bewildered. People came to look at me. Someone took a photograph. I refused all food. I just stared and wondered and became a drug addict. From then on, I smoked weed every day without fail or exception until the narcotic baton was passed on to heroin. Whenever I went to school, or indeed, anywhere, I would have a joint first.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Many years later, when I eventually got clean, I was astonished to learn that I don't actually enjoy my own company. I always thought I loved being on my own, but actually, I don't. It was being on drugs that I liked."

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Jesus, God.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  So this then creates a pattern where he gets kicked out of acting school for showing up drunk and high all the time. He then has, like, this weird period of sort of, like, floating about. He's only 17 years old at this point. Him and a friend decide that they're going to put on a play based on the- Tibetan Book of the Dead, which neither of them have read.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Very good move.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  But they find like a performance space and they start holding auditions. And it appears the only reason they're holding auditions is to like get contact with attractive women.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  So he's talking about them. Here, let me just send you this because it's gross.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  You do the gross ones.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  There were two women that were particularly sexy, Claudine and Maria. Maria was an Asian girl with all this tumbling black hair, who turned up in this red dress and looked impressive. And we were just a couple of jerks sat there, hi. Okay, right, this play, do you want to improvise a scene? Will you do kissing? There's lots of kissing. And bras, the Tibetan Book of the Dead is full of women kissing in their bras. That's what makes it such a fucking good read.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Cool story.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  It's nuts that like, this is almost exactly what like gets him on TV.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Is this kind of material, right? It's not like, oh, this was the dark side that none of us knew about. It's like, don't know, he was talking about this shit.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  This is also the beginning of a pattern where the minute he can, he starts using his power to get laid, right? This isn't even that much power. It's like I'm putting on a play. I'm like a random guy who's like writing a play and I have a performance space. Immediately, he's using that power to get women in their bras.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  He's, how old is he at this point?

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Seventeen.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Great. So he's seventeen and he's already doing the fucking Weinstein thing.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  It's really shocking and also telling us about it years later. Without any like, man, this was really like how fucked up this was. It's like, ha, ha, ha, funny story, a thing that I did when I was a kid.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Right. This is like sex criminal supervillain fucking shit.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  So the other big thing that happens when Russell is seventeen is his dad gets divorced from his third wife. And wants to go on a sex trip to East Asia.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck, his dad is a passport, bro?

• 32:32Speaker 00

  He's a passport, bro, dude.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  I've watched enough 90 Day Fiance to know all the fuck about this guy.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Apparently, the friend that he was going to go with dropped out. So he thinks- What if my 17 year old son would like to come with me to Asia and go to a bunch of brothels?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Holy fucking shit.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  They go, it appears first to Thailand and then to Hong Kong. Russell only tells the story of like the first experience. They go to some sort of brothel where there's like a runway catwalk kind of thing where women are like walking back and forth. And you can like pick one, you know? And so his dad picks two and he picks one named Mary Lou.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Like part of the issue with passport bros.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  A long digression about why passport bros are bad.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  No, why I have this like gnawing pit in my stomach about whatever is about to happen. When people are flying halfway around the world to do that, there is often a justification that is like Western women are too mouthy. And like, there's like a cultural expectation of subservience, right? They've sort of written a series of myths in their head. About like, what amounts to, if I go to this other country, there's a kind of woman who won't say no.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  And there's something extremely dark about a kind of man who wants to engage in what they believe on some level to be like boundaryless sex.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  So he chooses one sex worker named Mary Lou. His dad chooses two sex workers. They go back to their hotel. They're staying at some fancy hotel. Once they get to the room, they're like fooling around with these women. He says this.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Naked. I was shy about my body then. I had trouble getting hard. The blowjob seemed daft. The way it feels when a customs official pulls your trousers down or a doctor puts his finger up your arse. Not sexual, just giggly and intrusive.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  So he's clearly kind of uncomfortable.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Not sexual, just giggly and intrusive is how I would describe a lot of Russell Brand's.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, Jesus Christ.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  She was a good prostitute, Mary Lou. She played her part very well. She didn't make me feel embarrassed and was incredibly romantic, really, given the context. I stroked Mary Lou's hair and kissed her cheek and traced my finger down. Her perfect nose scored by the cacophony from the adjacent bedlam. Yeah, come on and foah, you're juicy.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  So he's listening to his dad have sex with sex workers next door as he's having sex.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  God, Jesus God.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  And he clearly is like impressed by his dad. He describes this as in this like aspirational way of just like, oh, someday I'll be as cool as my dad. But like, this is unbelievable fucking loser behavior.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Before there was Andrew Tate, there were fuck off dads like this.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  And here's the next morning, he comes out the next morning, his dad is like reading the newspaper at the breakfast table.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  My dad concealed behind a newspaper folded down the top right hand corner. Did you wear a condom with that bird last night? Oh no, I didn't dad. He sniffed, you should have. Then the corner of the page flicked up once again and he was gone. In the course of the rest of that holiday, I fucked loads more prostitutes. Always got a hard on, never wore a condom and never fell in love.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  In Bangkok, when bar girls in Patpong left their posts to follow me down the street, cooing and touching my hair. I felt that I had my dad's unequivocal approval. Fucking Jesus God.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  There are many memoirs that include like kind of disturbing stories. And then a person's like, I went into recovery and I learned and I don't do this anymore, whatever. But like, there's no moment of reflection on this. Also, the fact that he's like, I never wore a condom is like, wow, cool, man. Why?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, cool story, bro. What a good thing to put in your memoir about sex addiction. I mean, like, I guess.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  So then he gets back to London. He gets into another acting school. He then gets kicked out of that too.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  I don't really know what it takes to get kicked out of acting school. Like, not to say that it's not like a serious endeavor or whatever, but just like, I genuinely don't know what conduct.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  He says he shows up drunk every day.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  He drinks before school and then he's like hammered.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  That would do it.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  This is like too much because we already dislike this guy, but like, God. This either is fake or it's real and fuck off. Here's this for he's talking about when he's in this period like post drama school, post getting kicked out of drama school number two.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  One of my brilliant gimmicks was to have a mouse living in my hair. He's doing a Ratatouille.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  I know. Maybe this explains the rest of his career. Maybe it's actually just the mouse is in charge.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  I kept this going for quite a long time, at least a month or so. I'd gone out and got a mouse from a pet shop and let it live on my shoulders and in my hair. Mice are incontinent. They poo and wee whenever they feel like it. So my hair was all full of mouse excrement and urine. I'd put it in a little Tupperware box when I went to sleep.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  So I hope this is fake. If this is real, this is like one of the most pathetic, like attention getting things I've ever heard in my life.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Jesus fucking hell.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Surely you could just get attention from people by being like nice to them.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  This is absolutely the kind of behavior that would make me avoid being around a person.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Not necessarily because of the mouse, not necessarily because of mouse smell, not necessarily because of any of that kind of stuff.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  Well, because of the, for me, it would be because of the mouse and the mouse smell, but okay.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  No, but just because of like the level of red flag that is like, oh, this person thinks this is how you engage with other people.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  It's like so weird.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  And like, I don't want to be engaged in these kinds of ways by a person. So I'm just going to give them a real wide berth.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  I, I, I think this is like the only way that he knows how to relate to people is like, people kind of gawking at him or be like, wow, you're so, you're so wild and crazy, Russell.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in that way, the sort of like very like Hollywood experience of like, sort of having an entourage, but maybe not necessarily having friends, I would think might suit him.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  We then have a period where he's dropped out of acting school. He's getting kind of odd jobs. He starts doing like stand up, open mic nights. He joins a comedy duo. He does a couple of performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He's at like the very early stages of kind of like making it as an actor slash comedian. He also starts doing heroin at this time. We also have in 1999, toward the end of this period, we have the first alleged. Rape by Russell Brand.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  What a cool fucking guy.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  There's, I believe, seven rape allegations at this point that he's on trial for. And so as we're going, I'm gonna sort of put them into chronology. I mean, I should say that he denies all of these allegations categorically. He says, yes, I was a sex addict, but everything 100% was consensual. So we need to get that on the record. In the UK, they don't seem to release indictment documents with like details of any of the charges. So literally all we have is one sentence. Brand of Oxfordshire is accused of raping a woman in a hotel room while she attended a Labour Party conference in Bournemouth in 1999. That's the entirety of the charge. I guess from these stand-up comedy gigs, he then gets noticed by MTV.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  And in 2001, he gets like a segment on MTV called Dance Floor Chart. Where like he goes around to nightclubs and interviews people. He then gets fired from MTV in late 2001. The way that he tells this story, he goes to work and he's fiending for drugs. So he invites his drug dealer to the set of MTV. And then the drug dealer brings his like eight-year-old son, because he's like, oh, I'm going to MTV. Like, my kid likes MTV. I'll bring my kid with me. And then Russell Brand and this guy apparently smoke crack in the bathroom in front of the kid.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  According to him. He, you know, he's high, walking around. This drug dealer's also high. It's the same day as Kylie Minogue is like filming an interview or a segment or something. So Kylie Minogue is around. And he walks up to Kylie Minogue with his drug dealer. And he's like, meet Grant, or whatever the guy's name is. And he like introduces Kylie Minogue to his drug dealer. And he's like, and the next day they fired me. But he does mention this, but he doesn't really get into it. The actual reason that he got fired.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, what are the chances that there was zero sex pesting from Russell Brand?

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Well, no, it actually isn't a sex pest thing, Aubrey.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  What?

• 41:18Speaker 00

  If you go to his like Wikipedia entry, and he does mention this in his book, but in this weird cursory way. This story is taking place on September 12th, 2001, and he is dressed as Osama bin Laden.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  What in the fuck?

• 41:33Speaker 00

  So like, he does say this. Here, I'm gonna send it to you.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  I was dressed in a white Muslim tunic with matching white bottoms, a camouflage flak jacket, a false beard, and a tea towel on my head, held in place by a shoelace.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  I'd been aware of Osama bin Laden for about a year. He wasn't someone who people of my age group generally knew about, but he'd been involved with some other bombings, and he was top of the FBI's Most Wanted list, and I was fascinated by that sort of stuff. That day, I was going to present this program called Select, where kids phoned in and chose videos for us to play, and pop stars would come on to flog their records. That afternoon, our guest was to be Kylie Minogue.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  And then he like tells the Kylie Minogue story. I'm stealing this from the On Brand podcast, which is an entire podcast about how much Russell Brand sucks, which is very enjoyable. But like Kylie Minogue has met drug dealers before. Kylie Minogue has met weird people backstage at things. Like, the Kylie Minogue thing has nothing to do with you getting fired.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Kylie Minogue probably had like a two-minute conversation with this guy. I was like, well, gotta go. Like, I don't think Kylie Minogue fucking like reported Russell Brand. I think you got fired because you dressed as fucking Osama bin Laden the day after September 11th.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Well, and also, like, you dressed in such a way as to, like, make manifest a fucking slur.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  You put a towel on your head, you fucking asshole.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  He doesn't give any explanation for why you did this. It's the day after 9/11, you're dressing as the killer? Why? Like, oh, I've been aware of him for a year, and like, he did some crimes, and I knew about him. And also, he was presenting a children's show? There's no description of why he did this, or what he was even trying to do. I think it was, again, just this like, I put a mouse in my hair, like, I wanted to get attention, kind of thing.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  I don't know, man. Like, the day after they capture the fucking Golden State Killer, are you going on TV dressing up like that guy?

• 43:25Speaker 00

  So the only other thing we know of that takes place in 2001 is another alleged attempted rape. This is also from the charging document. He is charged with indecently assaulting a woman by grabbing her arm and dragging her toward a male toilet in 2001. That is the entirety of the information that we have. He then gets fired. Fired from MTV and then he almost immediately gets another job. He gets another kind of like man on the street interview show on a like now defunct cable channel.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  My god, stop giving him this specific job.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  I know.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  How do we expose him to the most people possible?

• 44:01Speaker 00

  He says, "Together we contrive to take on taboos. Have a fight with your dad to examine the idea of an Oedipus complex. Have a bath with a homeless person. Get to know a member of the British National Party to see what they're like and seduce an old woman."

• 44:17Speaker 01

  What?

• 44:17Speaker 00

  And like, these are like little stunts that he does. He ends up like jerking off a man.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  They're all just props.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  For him to do an outrageous thing.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  That is, I mean, I do think that's core to the ideology. It's just like, these are taboos.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  But he doesn't seem to have any kind of like basic moral compass. Cause one of the episodes is about hanging out with this guy who's part of the British National Party, which is like basically the UK Nazis. But in his brain, it's like, well, it's taboo to be nice to a homeless person and it's taboo to be in like a super racist political party.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  It feels like a house with no foundation.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  He's not meaningfully on the left or meaningfully on the right, no matter how he shows up, because there's not like a foundational thing that he's tied to.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Right? There's not like a core driving morality underneath it. It's just, "Oh, you don't want me to do this?"

• 45:00Speaker 00

  So then at the end of 2002, he finally gets sober. He's like drinking every day, using drugs every day. Eventually he goes into rehab. He doesn't say that much about it. He just like goes into inpatient rehab. It seems to work and he's sober for the rest of his life, according to him.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Does he mention anything about staying in recovery spaces? Like, does he go to meetings?

• 45:20Speaker 00

  He's really into 12 steps.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  He wrote a book called Recovery that is kind of like part of his wellness pivot. It has 12 chapters and each chapter is like one of the steps. So he's like very much a 12 step guy.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  The reason that I ask is there's this concept in AA of like the dry drunk, which is someone who's like not drinking, but also not dealing with the shit that made them drink in the first place.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Based on what we know comes next, it just seems like that might be part of the picture.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  It's actually really interesting because he, he's fairly open in the book about the fact that getting Sober makes him worse with women. He says, "Once I started to feel a bit more confident and realized there was now a great gaping hole in my life that wasn't filled by drugs and booze anymore, my tendency to pursue women, which had always been quite rapacious, somehow became enhanced further. I started seeing different women, quickly acquiring a harem of about 10 whom I would rotate, in addition to one-night stands and random casual encounters."

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Boy, there's nothing quite so chilling as a white man referring to a harem.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  And also, how are you, how are you doing this too? I mean, 10 people and also one-night stands?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Do you think that's real?

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  And if you read the accounts of his accusers, he has this like urgency about sex. And oftentimes, he'll have a couple of women in one night. It's not like you come over and you have sex with Russell Brand and you cuddle and you watch a movie. It's like, he kicks you out, or sometimes he will invite over another woman while you're there.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  This is gay men territory. What are you doing?

• 46:49Speaker 00

  It's really, even as a gay man, I'm like, this is, you're fucking unwell.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  No, totally.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  So that is 2002, when he gets sober. One of the rapes he's accused of is in 2004. The Met Police say, "In 2004, a woman was orally raped and sexually assaulted in the Westminster area of London." That's basically all of the information that we have.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  There's something about this like lack of detail on like one sentence that is so fucking chilling to me.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  There's another one, I believe, also in 2004, that says, "He is also alleged to have grabbed a radio station worker's face, pushed her against a wall, and kissed her before groping her breasts and buttocks." In the exposé about him that was published in 2023, they talk to a female comedian who knew him on the comedy scene. "A female comedian said that in the early 2000s, when they gigged together, Brand chased her around backstage and bit her on the face. Whenever he saw me, he would grab me and bite my face, and it was coupled with this weird, horrible energy, she recalls. I said to him, 'I don't like this,' and he still did it so much before he stopped." It was him crossing boundaries.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  It's so dark because I think his way of relating to himself is to interpret all of his actions as sort of playful.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Biting someone's face. Is an unhinged thing to do.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  Also, imagine someone doing that to you with a mouse in their fucking hair.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Makes it worse somehow. You're like, oh.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Drunk mouse in hair.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Hair smells like mouse piss and shit.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  So in 2005, that's when he goes to sex addiction treatment.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  Uh, this is where his first book ends. The book is really strange in that he goes to sex addiction treatment and then he just publishes verbatim excerpts from his diary that he kept when he was there and they're kind of all over the place. There's a section where he says like, oh, the most, the worst thing about being in rehab is that I really miss Sarah, but he hasn't mentioned Sarah. That's the first mention of Sarah.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, who is Sarah?

• 48:42Speaker 00

  I guess that's the woman he's dating, but it's like, does anyone edit these fucking books like they're just this person that he misses? And then he mentions that she's 19. They were fighting. He says that he like smashed a glass and then was like sort of using the shards to pretend that he was going to cut his wrists.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Pretend is doing some heavy lifting there.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  But again, this is just in his diary entry. So you're like, is this in the book or something else? What, what? And of course she's never mentioned again. The book ends with him like, oh, I went through sex addiction rehab. But then all he says is after Keystone, I did continue to have sex with adult human females, but I made sure it didn't interfere with my work.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  That was the point of concern.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  So he ends with this like, oh, I learned all my lessons, none of which I'm going to actually explain at the end of this book. He then starts book two, fucking booky wook two. He starts book two by bragging about the time he fucked Kate Moss.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Well, again, like if the point is to prove your worth to other men, the thing that matters is that you had sex with a woman who is famous for being beautiful.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  We're now entering the point where he starts to become much more famous. He gets a gig as a Big Brother commentator in 2005.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Sure. Very Talking Dead territory.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  One of the only things I laughed at in his book, he's talking about this Big Brother. It's called Big Brother's Big Mouth. He says, I worked on the show for three years, which encompassed seven seasons.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Great. I fucking love reality TV.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  Fucking reality show. It's so weird.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Unhinged.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Just like churn, just churn through a man. Who cares? He also, a thing that really rockets him to fame, and a thing that he's been very good at doing throughout his career, is riding controversies into more fame and more notoriety. So in 2006, he hosts the NME Awards. There's like a music, music magazine, music awards.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  The new Music Express, I believe.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  First of all, he goes through some of his jokes for the awards show. He says that the band The Strokes is attending. For context, the, the lead singer of The Strokes is named Julian Casablancas.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  I, I guess he's in the midst of saying like, "The Strokes are here." He says, "Oh, my nan had a stroke. I think that's what killed her." What was Julian Casablancas thinking? She was 90 years old and she was a lesbian.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  What?

• 51:06Speaker 00

  That's the joke. The Strokes. That's the whole, that's the joke.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Again, the cadence of humor.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  I know.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Delivered with a thick accent from a guy doing a Ratatouille.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  He then introduces Bob Geldof, who's like a legendary music actor guy. I know him from being the lead of Pink Floyd's "The Wall", which I saw like 400 times when I was in 8th grade. This is his introduction to Bob Geldof. This is Russell Brand. He says, "The winner of Best DVD is Bob Geldof. My best DVD is Big Natural Tits 10, in a welcome return to form after the lazy and derivative Big Natural Tits 8 and 9. Of course, we ain't really captured the glory days of Big National Tits 1 and 2. Don't be ridiculous. But all this is academic because the Big Natural Tits series has been overlooked. Again, here's Sir Bobby Gandolph." And then he introduces him.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  And then Bob Geldof comes up and he just like leans, he starts out, he just leans at the microphone. He says, "Russell Brand, what a cunt."

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, good job, good job. It's also sort of the shortcoming of this kind of like edgelord era of humor, which is just like, you don't actually have to have a joke.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Sort of like his earlier stuff. The point is just like, oh, it's taboo, so I'm gonna say it.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  That's not a joke.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  A joke takes craftsmanship. A joke takes subversion of expectation.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Are you talking about how sophisticated you were for using the soundboard on this podcast?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Wait, where's my soundboard?

• 52:42Speaker 02

  We're gaining traction.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  What did it say?

• 52:45Speaker 02

  We're gaining traction.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  What fucking soundboard is this?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Let's really drill down on this.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  What is this?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  A friend gave me a corporate jargon one.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  We have to be disruptive.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  That's good. Let's put a pin in that.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Let's circle back to that.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  That is sophisticated. You're right, Aubrey. It takes dedication.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  That's a no brainer.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  What's standing out to me about this that I find really fascinating is it's sort of a referendum on Russell Brand, of course, and it should be, but it's also sort of like a pretty good reflection of like an era that enabled a generation of assholes like this.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Right? Like, this is also the era of Adam Carolla, Don Imus.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  All of these like fucking dickweed edgelord assholes who were just like, I'm gonna say the most shocking thing possible, and it would often be about shit that was like taboo for a fucking reason.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Oh, you mad? Guess you're mad about this. And then you get to do the whole fucking shtick. Where you're like, they're all mad at me again.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Oh, Michael.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  And he also gets a chat show on MTV around this time and becomes the kind of person who just like shows up at things. He's presenting this thing. He's presenting that thing. This also dovetails with the abuse allegations. In 2023, we get the article reporting on all these kind of like specific women who allege abuse, but then we also get allegations that he was using his contacts at the BBC and at Channel 4 to recruit audience members from these shows and like send them backstage. It says, "TV researchers and runners who worked on Channel 4 shows during this period allege that Brand would get staff to approach young female audience members so he could meet them after filming."

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Another, kind of later in the article, it says, "Brand would regularly have sex with women he met at events. Two who went back to his home on separate occasions claim he became threatening and shouted at them when they refused to have intercourse with him. One left his home in tears." So we yet again see this pattern where he's like using his power to like systematically recruit women to have sex with, allegedly.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is also like the mid 2000s, which means that the response to this kind of media would have been like, wow, it looks like those women made some bad choices.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  There's also in December of 2007, somebody makes a complaint about, quote, "an alarming display of aggression and disrespect," which included Brand hurling objects across the studio in fits of rage, and, quote, "urinating in a bottle in full view of everyone."

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Sorry, this is after he gets sober?

• 55:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's actually super fascinating to me. A lot of these anecdotes are basically like what other people would describe as their rock bottom.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  I'm sure.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Like the time I pissed in a cup.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  I'm sure.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  In front of staff at work.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  100% rock bottom.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, yep, yep.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  So there is, after these abuse allegations, the article detailing the abuse allegations come out, BBC and Channel 4 both launched like retrospective investigations to be like, did we get complaints? Like, was there a systematic failure here? The BBC says they only received three complaints during his time at the BBC, and they weren't followed up on. However, the person who led the investigation also said, "The BBC did not maintain a centralized record of staff complaints regarding bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment at the time." So basically, they haven't found anything, but also they weren't keeping records of anything.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  God, imagine living in a media environment where the media goes, wait a minute, did we have a hand in this?

• 56:21Speaker 00

  Or like, or like, did we write this down?

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Is there, is there something we should have done differently here?

• 56:26Speaker 00

  Here, I'm gonna send this to you and I might cut it. This is from the period when he's doing his MTV show, where he's interviewing like fairly big celebrities. Like, he interviews like Tom Cruise and stuff. And so here is him talking about a celebrity encounter.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  "Neil brought Courtney Love with him, who is a mad enchantress, a rasping white witch, barmy and opinionated and lion-hearted."

• 56:48Speaker 01

  More interesting than her lion heart, though, is her vagina, which has been referred to as magic in that it has a mythical power to bestow stardom and heavenly gifts upon those who enter. A kind of Blarney Fanny. Lord alone knows many a famous man has emerged from its confines, some of whom surely must have been famous on the way in. Jesus fucking Christ.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  He later says, like, oh, we had a nice time. She's a nice person. We became friends. So this is him talking about like a woman he holds in high esteem.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Mike, what do you expect? He's saying her vagina is good. What higher praise is there than that?

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Am I not supposed to say this when I talk about you? I'll be like, tell me, tell me about your co-host. I'm like, well, let's start with her vagina and work our way outward.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Blarney vagina. How do you describe my vagina?

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Let's workshop it.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Fellas. Is it gay to describe your co-host's vagina?

• 57:52Speaker 00

  It's actually not problematic because I am gay. I'm allowed to describe your vagina.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  It's gay not to. God, what a fucking twerp.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  OK, so this is like the hardest transition of the whole show where like giggly and stuff. We now have to talk about the 16-year-old that he dated and allegedly orally raped.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  If it's a 16-year-old, what's the age of consent in the UK?

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, 16, so it was not illegal.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Fuck, shit.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  I'm saying, well, I'm saying unfortunate also because I don't like knowing what the ages of consent are in places because anyone who can like rattle off, like, oh, Iowa, that's 17. You're like, no.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  I don't want to be the guy who can answer your question.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Like overhearing a conversation at a restaurant, like, oh, actually, it's 16 in the UK, I think. But no.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  It's actually a phoebe-philia?

• 58:40Speaker 00

  That's the energy. So this is from, I keep mentioning this, but there's a very good investigation by the Sunday Times, the Times of London and Channel 4, which produces a long investigative article and also a documentary. This is a four-year investigation where they interview, it appears to be like dozens to hundreds of people about various allegations throughout. Russell Brand's career. This is a woman who they are calling Alice in the article, who is 16 when she meets Russell Brand in 2006. She has just recovered from an eating disorder and she has never had a boyfriend. And here is her description of how it started.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  He approached her in Leicester Square after she had been shopping at Top Shop at Oxford Circus, and he had been working at a nearby studio. Alice recognized him from TV and had previously seen him do stand up. He took my shopping bags from me, which was quite disarming, and proceeded to go through my purchases and critique them. And then he took one dress out and said to me, "You're going to wear this on our date this week," she recalls.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Fucking hell.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  So again, you see this extremely aggressive way of hitting on women, right?

• 59:48Speaker 01

  But also, like, when you're 16.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Dude, I know, I know.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  You don't know that this dude is, like, actively dangerous to you, necessarily, yet, in your life.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  There's then this period where it's like he's acutely aware of her age and how inappropriate this is. So he asks her to read Lolita, which is a really fucking weird detail. He asks her to put himself in her phone as Carly, so that in case her parents check her phone or something, they don't find, like, a man's name.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Holy fucking shit.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  He coaches her on what to say to her parents. He also sends a car to her high school to, like, pick her up and take her to his house. And there's this heartbreaking scene where, like, the driver of the car, this is like Russell Brand's professional driver, pulls up to his house and, like, begs her not to get out of the car. He's like, "I have a daughter your age. You don't want to go into that house."

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  This is, you know, to borrow a fucking very law and order-y phrase, this is like evidence of premeditation, right?

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  This is someone who knows that what he's doing will not be viewed in a kind light.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  This is someone who is actively engaged in, like, regardless of the age of consent in a given place, this is fucking grooming behavior. Read Lolita.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  She alleges that he orally raped her as part of the relationship. And she basically was like, "Stop, stop, stop." She had to hit him to get him off of her. There's then this paragraph, which is absolutely fucking insane, so.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Oh, Michael.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  This is how it ended.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  "The relationship ended when Brand invited her over one day, and she arrived to find another woman in his bed." I was so angry and I said to him, "Why would you do this to me? This is so humiliating."

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  It's either totally just reckless and like you're in some sort of mania and you don't really realize what you're doing, or it's deliberately like, "I'm too chicken shit to break up with this person and so I'm gonna create this like horrible scene so that she has to break up with me."

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  It's also, like, not for nothing, it is kind of nuts that he does dress like a cartoon villain.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  To be fair, he has been telling us very loudly who he fucking is for his entire career.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  For a real long time, yup, totally.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  We also, this is like now the fucking sexual assault montage.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  It wasn't before?

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  No, this is where it gets really bad. So in 2007, uh, he was allegedly in a relationship with somebody named Jordan Martin, who wrote a book in 2014 about being in an abusive relationship. It's called "Not Entanglement With A Celebrity." And in the book, she calls him Randall Grand. She's elsewhere said that this was based on Russell Brand.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Schmushelshman.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically, yeah. And she alleges like him sexually assaulting her and cheating on her and a bunch of like really awful shit in this book.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Sounds like our guy.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then when the allegations come out in 2023, she's like, "I don't want to be interviewed, but I stand by the book." We then, in 2008, have this incident.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  The woman, who we are calling Olivia, worked for a media company in the same building as the BBC's Los Angeles office. On 16th of June 2008, she says she answered the door to Brand and his team, who were there to pre-record an episode of The Russell Brand Show for Radio 2. She then went to the bathroom to get some sinus medication. While squatting to look through the medicine cabinet, she says she felt someone behind her. Fucking hell.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  She turned around to face a man's crotch. "I was startled and got up and I realized it was Russell." She says he told her he was going to call her Betty. When she, uh, what?

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  That's weird.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  When she said that wasn't her name, she says he replied, "Well, I'm gonna fuck you." And I said, "No, you're not." She says he then pulled out his penis on his hand and quote, "Pretty much served it to me as you would be serving someone some food." She says the door to the bathroom was closed and she felt trapped. Olivia says he then put his penis back in his trousers and she heard someone banging on the door. She says someone from his team called for him, at which point Brand left. Jesus fucking Christ, it's like having a dog that needs to be on a fucking leash.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  This woman Olivia texts a friend and she's like, "Uh, fucking Russell Brand just like whipped his dick out in the bathroom."

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Good for Olivia.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  And he goes, "I know, they're talking about it live on the air."

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Oh, what?

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  They're like joking on air. One of his co-hosts says, "It's been 25 minutes since he showed his willy to anyone." And Brand is like laughing and he's like, "Easy for you to judge."

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Boy oh fucking boy.

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  So this is like a bit, within like 15 fucking minutes, it's a fucking bit on the air.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  I, I don't even know how to fucking process this shit.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  And also everyone, every, it's so extreme. I think everyone assumes it has to be a joke, I guess. What a lothario. That's like, that's the persona that he was able to cultivate, but it like was not a fucking persona.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  There are lots of like real dipshit dumb guy parts of, uh, of American media and political landscapes. One of them really is like, boy oh boy, the degree to which we get charmed by a British accent and allow-

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  Dude, I know, huge.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Terrible fucking behavior.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  So, the final episode that we are going to talk about before we close, are you familiar with Saxgate?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Is this when Winona Ryder did her shoplifting?

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  No, it's, uh, Andrew Sax.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  I know this name, why do I know this name?

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  You're, you're like a UK comedy nerd. You watched Faulty Towers growing up, right?

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  I was like obsessed with Faulty Towers when I was a kid. So, the guy who plays Manuel on Faulty Towers-

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Ah!

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  Is named Andrew Sax.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  He is in 2008, kind of like an elder statesman kind of guy. He's like an old guy, kind of shows up on TV in various times. And so, there is an incident where he is supposed to show up on the radio show of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  So at the time, Russell Brand is hosting a morning zoo kind of situation. I don't think it's on in the mornings, but it's like that kind of vibe. You know, like a bunch of dudes and it's kind of like zany and there's like sound effects and shit.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm so sorry, do you mean soundboard energy?

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  (laughing) I know, I was trying not to say the word because I knew you'd get, you'd get inspired.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  I'm at capacity. Let's take that offline.

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  This is the worst soundboard, Aubrey.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  It's really not good and I love it. That's kind of what I love the most about it.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  That's a no brainer.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  So this Andrew Sachs guy is supposed to be on Russell Brand's radio show. For whatever reason, he cancels. And so they do a bit where they call his answering machine.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  And they talk to his answering machine.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  I have a vague recollection about this, where they are like fucking sex pests about his daughter or something?

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  Granddaughter, yes.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Creep fucking city.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  The thing is, I was gonna skip this because it's so, it's just a very weird controversy for reasons we will get into. But people in the UK say like, you cannot underestimate how fucking big of a deal this was. This was like literally front page news for like months. This was a massive scandal at the time. Yeah. So we are going to read a transcript of the answering machine message.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  So I am going to send you this transcript. You are going to be Russell Brand.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:07:11Speaker 00

  And I'm going to be Jonathan Ross, because I know if I made you Jonathan Ross, you'd try to do the voice.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  No, I would not try to do the voice. Hello, Andrew Sachs. This is Russell Brand. You are meant to be on my show now, mate. I'm here with Jonathan Ross. I could still do the interview to your answer phone.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Man, or Andrew Sachs.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  Don't call him Manuel. That's really bad manners. I apologize for Russell. He's an idiot.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  I said Andrew Sachs. Look, Andrew Sachs, I have got respect for you and your lineage and your progeny. Never let that be questioned.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Don't hint.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  I weren't hinting. Why did that come across as a hint?

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  Because you know what you did.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  That wasn't a hint.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  He fucked your granddaughter.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Jesus fucking Christ.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  Cute stuff. So cute.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  What, what a couple of little rogues.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  So we find out, it was not clear at the time, but we do find out later that Russell Brand did briefly date his granddaughter.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Russell Brand at this point would have been in his thirties?

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, early thirties. Yeah. And the granddaughter's in her early twenties.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  Jonathan Ross is like fucking 50?

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  He's just always been 50. It's unclear to me what his age is.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  He's middle aged for forever.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  It's like a Gene Hackman situation.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  That's fucking nuts. Like, a middle-aged man being like, "He fucked your granddaughter." Like, what in the fuck are we doing?

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  It is the two boys on the telephone being like, "Mary Ann, so when I had sex with you, I had sex with you, right? You're confirming that I had sex with you while I'm taping it?"

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Shut up, hang up, hang up, hang up. Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  Also, I was thinking about this from Georgina's perspective, that like, okay, you date this guy, whatever. It appears like a week, a couple of dates, whatever, it's not super serious. And then, a couple of weeks later, you find out that he's bragging about having sex with you on the fucking BBC to your grandpa?

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Is she a public figure in her own right at this point?

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, not like a major public figure, but she was a dancer and like, was on the scene in some sense. But like, yeah, this, she was not a public figure in like, you know, a Helen Mirren sense, right? Or like-

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  I love that Helen Mirren was the name that you reached for.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  That's my only one, British women.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Famous sex scandal, Helen Mirren.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  They then hang up, and then they talk amongst themselves. So this is them sort of doing like a little recap.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Andrew Sachs, I did not do nothing with Georgina. Oh no, I revealed I know her name. Oh no, it's a disaster. Abort, abort.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  If he's like most people of a certain age, he's probably got a picture of his grandchildren when they were young and innocent right by the phone. So while he's listening to the message, he's looking at a picture of her when she was nine on a swing.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  She was on a swing when I met her. Let's ring back Andrew Sachs.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  Cute.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Fucking gross, dude.

• 1:09:44Speaker 00

  Then they call again.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Andrew, this is Russell Brand. I am so sorry about the last message. It was part of the radio show. It was a mistake. The truth is, I am phoning you to ask if I can marry, that's right, marry, Georgina the granddaughter.

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  And I would like to be the page boy.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  He wants to be a page boy. We're going to have a Fawlty Towers-themed wedding.

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  Now you've spoiled it.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  No, I made it better. I'm sorry. I'll do anything. I wore a condom. Put the phone down.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  And then, there's one, they hang up, and then, there's a third message. This is Russell Brand singing, but I'm not gonna make you come up with a tune.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'd like to apologize for the terrible attacks, Andrew Sachs. I would like to show contrition to the max, Andrew Sachs. I would like to create world peace between the yellow, white, and blacks, Andrew Sachs.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Great.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  I said something I didn't have auda, like I had sex with your granddaughter. But it was consensual and she wasn't menstrual. It was consensual lovely sex. It was full of respect. I sent her a text. I've asked her to marry me, Andrew Sachs.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  She wasn't menstrual.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  What a fucking creep.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  Unbelievable.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  If I, as a human being, and encountering someone who's willing to go to these kinds of lengths, I'm like, get away from me for forever. Because if you're willing to be this level of boundary crossing, then I think there maybe is no rock bottom for you.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  At the time, it isn't really noticed. Apparently, the BBC only got two complaints about this at the time. But then the Daily Mail seizes on this as a way to attack the BBC. Right? Because the right wing hates public media. And so they're like, the BBC allowed this smut to go on the air. And then the BBC starts getting flooded with complaints. And then it becomes a big scandal. I feel kind of complicated about it because like, this is fucking scandalous and absolutely disgusting. But the only reason it was noticed is because it was like a right wing smear campaign, basically against the BBC.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  It's weird to be like, am I siding with what would then become Mumsnet?

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Right? Like, you don't want to sort of be in the same camp. But I do think you gotta sort of stand in your repulsed reaction to this and be like, this is like, not actually fucking okay.

• 1:12:03Speaker 00

  So, he is fired from the BBC over this. Jonathan Ross is given, I believe it's six weeks or maybe six months of unpaid leave. The controller of the BBC is forced to resign and the BBC is fined 140,000 pounds. This is like, actually a really big deal and there was like accountability for this at the time. But then what's amazing is that then Russell Brand kind of just moves over to Hollywood.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  He's fired from MTV for dressing up as Osama bin Laden. He's like disgraced on the radio and on TV. His award show, the enemy award show thing was like considered a debacle at the time. He just keeps like fucking up and then people keep giving him second, third and fourth chances. And this sort of happens again after this. And by the time he comes back to UK, it's kind of memory hold because all of a sudden he's a movie star.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, part of it is that that is like a little bit part of his persona, right? Is that he's like, I'm a lovable fuck up.

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Don't expect better.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  That would have been a better fucking title for his book than booky wook.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Don't expect better.

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  So that is where we're going to leave Russell Brand. And next episode, we are going to pick it up with his journey to America and his travails in Hollywood.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Can I give a preview of what my reaction is going to be to that?

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  You have your little soundboard in front of you. I know what you're going to do.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  Is it the sigh soundboard?

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Disappointed sigh is the name of this one.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Is that all it does?

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you want to hear male sigh?

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  Dude, you as a millennial podcaster should not have told me about that because I can now replace you with one of those.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  I've always been replaceable by a soundboard, thank you.