Russell Brand and the crisis of skepticism

So, this Russell Brand thing. Is it an open-and-shut case of rape? Or is it a stitch-up by ‘the regime’? Here’s my radical proposition: it’s neither. The accusations against Brand, which are serious and grim, have not been tested in a rigorous enough fashion for any of us to be able to say: ‘He is guilty of sexual assault.’ At the same time, the cries from Brand fanboys about ‘Them’ taking him down, about Big Pharma and its lackeys in Big Media targeting Brand because he hosts a popular, vax-sceptical YouTube show, sound cranky in the extreme. On one side we have a rush to judgement, on the other a rush to conspiracism. Where has good, honest scepticism gone?

No one should downplay what is being said about Brand in the investigation carried out by The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches. Four women are alleging that he sexually assaulted them between 2006 and 2013, during the height of his fame as a comic and ‘serial shagger’. Some of the accusations are very serious. One woman says he raped her. Text messages between the woman and Brand do seem to suggest something terrible happened. ‘When a girl say[s] NO it means no’, the woman wrote. Brand replied saying he was ‘very sorry’. One can easily imagine such messages appearing as evidence in a court case on sexual assault. Brand has questions to answer.

Yet should we now accept that he is a rapist? That he is guilty of it all? To my mind, no. I do not want to live in a society where a man can be branded a rapist by accusation alone. That way tyranny lies. Without the guardrail of the presumption of innocence, without the democratic requirement of proving someone’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before we mark him a ‘criminal’ and banish him from the public eye, society would descend into chaos. Lives and reputations might be destroyed by the mere point of a finger. Indeed, in the #MeToo era, numerous men had their lives utterly upended by allegations made from the pulpit of the mass media, far outside the bounds of normal justice.

[In 99.9% of cases, I’m always a “let it shake out” kind of person… ~ Beege]