Russell Brand

- No, no, no. - Michael Hobbs is talking. - Oh my gosh.

“- Could you rather don't move like my little sounds?”

- Yeah, all of it. - 'Cause I was just texting my friend, and I was probably just like making little sounds. - Why do you think that? - I like that you know one of your main sounds,

which is, hmm. - No, 'cause I hear myself doing it at like how many times have I done that in the last five minutes? - I think I told you about being with hanging out

with my brother and him sitting down and going, (grunting) - Yeah. - I was like, that's how old we are. We're the age where we do that.

And he went, it feels better. (laughing) And it feels, it actually feels better. - I'm with your brother on this one. - 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 were in the same boat and he got real defensive." - What do you have? - Well, I have two.

Okay, I think I know what you want to do. - Give me an 8, let's A, B, test it. Let's A, B, test it. - Yeah, option A, here we go.

“- Hi everybody and welcome to maintenance faves.”

The podcast that has a cadence of jokes, but are there jokes that we've got? - That's a spoiler for episode two.

You can't spoil the second part.

- This is, okay, you're ready for an option B. - All right, B, okay, do it. - Hi everybody and welcome to maintenance faves our potty podcast. - Oh my God, dude, you're gonna make me say

the title is fucking book, aren't you? - He wrote a book called My Book You Look I hate. - I would say I have followed about as much of Russell Branson's career as your average bear, like aware of big, starring with their roles,

aware of his work. On like panel shows and doing stand up, particularly in the 2000s and early 2010s in the UK, and then aware of his criminal charges and of his baptism.

- There's been quite the pivot the last couple of years. We're gonna get into it. - They're sure he's in, I am aware that he has been showing up at fucking Maha events. - Oh, yeah.

- Like he endorsed Trump, like it's not, it's not like he's leaning toward the right.

“He's a full-on, just explicit right-winger at this point.”

- We took our little divergence away from current events and now we're like half back in. - But say your name, we haven't like done the name yet. - If you do a little, she will do a tiny repeating machine. - I'm ready.

- I'm Aubrey Horton. - I'm Michael Hops. - Mm-hmm. (laughing) - If you would like to support the show,

you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase. You can also subscribe through Apple Podcasts. - The same audio content. - Same stuff. - Aubrey Michael.

- Today. - Today, we are talking about a comedian who is unique in his annoyingness. - I was actually, I was watching one of his videos from like, I don't get it in seven 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'd laughed in like three weeks.

I will say I first came to know Russell Brandt. I'm a person who has followed as much as you can from the US has like followed British comedy. - Yeah. - And the jokes about Russell Brandt

were like, it was like a bunch of jokes being like, "Mother's lock up your daughters." - I know. - Oh yeah. - And he was like married to Katy Perry.

- Yes. - In one of the most chaotic wellness marriages, we will come home. - I know. - I'll go divorce her by text.

He sort of falls off after a while. - Yeah. - And then he pops back up with these sexual assault allegations. - Right. - Yes, this is the story we are going to be telling today.

How this guy who is 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. - Great.

- And 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.

- Yeah. - Like he's one of the canonical examples of the far-left, too wellness, too right wing pipeline. - Right, so that is what we are going to be doing over the course of the next 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 going to 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. - Here we fucking go. - 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.

"I'm going to be around a lot more these days, you know?"

“And then disappear again, kind of classic DEI-DAD shit.”

- Just a disappointment factory? - Yeah, exactly. So the book is framed around his treatment for sex addiction. So the book starts kind of in a like record scratch

about you're wondering how I got into the situation kind of thing, where he's in sex addiction in patient 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 had

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. - Yeah, give me an example of really worrying sex stuff. - So he has a thing where he has an aunt who like, I don't know like busty and like has big boobs and he's kind of like obsessed with big boobs

out of 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. - Oh.

- The way that he remembers this is kind of like, aha, like I managed to be in the bathroom while she was showering. Like what a little rascal. - He also started reading his dad's pornography fairly young. This is the 70s and 80s so there isn't like internet

pornography or anything. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, so you find a box of magazines or whatever. - Yeah, so his dad is like, I don't play boy hustle or whatever, the UK's equivalent are.

But it appears this is like very young. Like four or 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. - Oh, so he's sexually abused. There's no touching or anything but like,

it's definitely an act of abuse. - Yes. - Yeah, that is, yes. 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-flect faces”

of senselessly enraged adults looming like ogres, thinking, well, this all seems like a bit of a storm in a teacup. I was awake as a child. I knew it was nonsense.

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 has mad at him. Even in preschool, he's like, oh, this is unjust.

Is there any point where he's like, oh, I get why they said that? - No, this is what's so fascinating to me. Is like, I understand how you would feel that in the moment, right?

Like, it's fucking Nazi, like, won't let me run around during nap time or something. But later on, you'd be like, yeah, I must have been a challenge for my teachers. Or like, that was unsafe what I was doing.

Or I can see where they're coming from. That probably made their jobs harder. - Yeah. - Even just to sound like a grounded person when you're talking about it in, say, a book.

- The perfect example of this is in his second memoir.

My bookie book two. - Oh my god. - Oh my god, there's a second one. - Oh, yeah, I read both of them. The second one's much worse. - Michael, Michael, I have been semi-pro hating the title

of my bookie book, and I did not know that there was a second one, and frankly, that's on me. - So this is describing himself, aren't you? - Airplane. - 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 over-priced travel without dressing like a boffin, it irritates conformists.

Oh Lord. - So boffin is like a egghead, like expert kind of thing. - If someone's like, I got kicked off of a plane because I irritated conformists. - Yeah, yeah.

- I immediately have a minimum of 20 questions. - So then he tells the rest of the story. I offered the hotty air hostess the perfect chance to tell me off by being a bit drunk and body 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 sense she was enjoying being authoritative, and we all know just doing my job

is the excuse offered up for enacting genocide.

- She's basically a Nazi for asking me to put my feet down.

(laughs)

which I assume means like hitting on her while she's at work.

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

“and elicited the support of the pilot who honestly”

flung open the cockpit door and had to go at me over his shoulder. Like a dad chastizing naughty daughters on a motoring holiday. I ignored that too. I was in a silly mood. 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 wanna put my feet down. - The pilot made an announcement that because of quote unquote 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.

- The investment in persecution here is fascinating. - Sort of stunning.

- 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 get fired from being five minutes late "to a meeting and then like, "Oh well, what actually happened?" He's like, "I showed up late in my boss

"of like, where are you late?" And I was like, "Shut up, you fucking bitch." He's like, "I don't think you were fired "because you were late to a meeting dude." 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." - Yeah, exactly.

- Boy, it doesn't matter what job you're at, it doesn't matter what role you're in. - He even after he's like in recovery, he's now sober. He can't look at this situation and go,

and I must have really sucked for the stewardess that day. Like, she's got a drunk passenger who for no reason refuses to do just like a extremely basic thing before takeoff. He's still the hero of the story

and she's still literally a Nazi. It's also like feels reminiscent of our like metabolife guy in that there's like zero reckoning with the effects on other people. - Yeah, completely.

- I just like to imagine a serene pastoral landscape a cool breeze blow it in the air and just the sound of one giant red flag full of happening in the wind. (laughing)

- The other, I mean this book is like all fucking red flag and it's the other one that like really stood out to me, especially as far as this 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 he's like, hey, I grew some flowers. Look at how nice my front yard looks. And then the guy's like, hey, I got a running side

to like go to the bathroom for a second.

I'll leave you out here. Don't stop on the flowers. - Oh, no.

“- Kind of a weird thing to say honestly.”

- Whatever, I just am gonna flag that my bullshit meter is already fucking going up here. Like, do we think an adult was like, hey, don't stop on those flowers? Well thing is, I think probably because it's a neighbor,

he probably knew that Russell was like kind of a trouble maker. - Oh, I mean, he might have 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. 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 this is kind of like disordered behavior, like this is bad, right? But I think also what you find when you watch any of this political videos

or you read like anything kind of clinical political that he's written, he just hates being told what to do. He doesn't want to stamp on the fucking flowers, right? It's like, it's this hollow opposition, where if you tell him what you tell him to do the opposite,

even if it makes no sense and he doesn't want to do it.

“- Yeah, and I think there's something about that”

that he like comes to believe that that's like a charming thing. - Yes. - Also this whole anecdote is like check-offs anti-cancill culture turn.

- Completely fast forward, fucking 30 years. And this kid is like, you can't say anything anymore. - 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. - This guy's grows to be a real shit head, but 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. - Yeah.

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

in the entire book. - Oh no, did I empathize to early? - I like having checked this in years, but Apple podcast has the thing where they allow you to see where people stop listening to your podcasts,

like how many people make it to the end and stuff. - So glad I didn't know about this feature, Michael.

- It bums me out and I never check it,

but I want to check it for this episode, 'cause I think we're gonna lose like half of the listeners after the story. This 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. - Oh God, you're gonna make me tell the fucked up story. - You're reading all the slurs, you're reading all the terrible stories. - It's all you.

- When we first got Topsy, she would be allowed to sleep in the bed with me, but when Colin came and 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 purchase 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 declame in a rather arch manner. You know perfectly well, you're not allowed upstairs before truly kicking her back down to the bottom again 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. - It's like all there, dude. On some level, it's sympathetic 'cause you're like he's clearly hurting,

but also he's lashing out like this innocent creature. I can understand not wanting to recognize the quote unquote authority of a fucking stepdad. You don't like that, I'm not 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. - Yeah, I know, this is the fucking dark triad, fucking shit. 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 the 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.

- Right, and it's all like a stick, right? - So if you don't like me, it's that you don't like the act. - 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. - What a cool fun game for all of this. - Russell Brand walked so Donald Trump could run. - 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. - This is a boy's school or a co-ed.

- Co-ed. - It appears like Jesus, fuck right, 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 really wants to like have sex. Like 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. - Boy. - 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 girls 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 the 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. - What ain't no fuck is going on with this student comparing like a flight attendant and a school prefect to Nazis?

- Yeah. - There's like that whole part of the metabolite 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 grifted.

- Yeah.

“- And I think similarly Russell Brand thinks any boundary”

that gets set for him is someone who's like, "Drunk with power." - Totally. - 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 thing about sort of looks maxers as like a women optional space. And like actually the point is to create a space

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

- Women are props to display your value to other men

and that's about it.

“- 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 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. People are calling gay all the time. People are calling fat all the time. And his sexuality feels really threatened. And I think a lot of what he does

for the next 30 years of his life is like to try to prove to himself and to the rest of the world that like I'm a man like I can be a masculine guy.

I can still have sex with girls.

- 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? 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? - Yeah, just in different ways, right? - He also says that he starts cutting himself at this time. 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, he gets arrested later on

and as part of that he'll go to a psychiatrist or there's school psychologists, 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.

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

Like when he's doing interviews around the shit are people like, hey, bud, you okay? - When the book came out, I read a bunch of reviews. It's just like well reviewed. It's like, oh, a wild romp through like working class Essex

and like trying to become an actor in London, but like, yeah, nobody really pointed out like super fucked up the stuff in his book is. We're not even to the fucked up shit yet. - Yeah, hold the fuck.

- So his big epiphany comes when he gets a role in the school play, he is cast as fat Sam in Bugsie Malone. - Great, good. - 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.

- Yeah, I get to pretend to be somebody else, great. - 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. - I don't think it's mean to say what's in his book.

- He also starts a pattern that he does throughout the book numerous times. He says, you know, now that I'm acting, people have 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 school boy Tony Montana,

rampaging around the playground, indiscriminately spraying girls with chat at 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. No one was safe for me is a dark as fuck life. - I like stop copypacing them eventually. They're so much foreshadowing in the book

of like the kind of creep that he turns out to be. So he says, by my 20s, I would relish the challenge of chased maids and the search for the correct combination of words required to decode their moral resistance. Jumping through hoops, ducking questions,

fainting in difference to sex, the nob stickal course, I call it. - Jesus Christ. - He had lots of bits in his stand-up comedy about this like the nob stickal course thing.

Basically like, how do like kind of trick women in his saying, yes, to having sex with you? - 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. - 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 like that's 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”

with 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? - Right, which is 'cause 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 slouching. - Yes, exactly. - Off the face of the fucking earth. - He devises a scheme where he sets up a tape recorder and calls her and is like, hey, you know how we had sex

- Oh, fuck off.

“- And then he gets her on tape admitting to this.”

But then what's weird, he doesn't start the book too. He describes a scheme of like getting her on tape where she's admitting to them having sex.

But then he just, he never benches 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 is like a funny story. Like, ha ha ha, this is my losing my virginity story. (whooshing) - Keep making that sound for that thing. - Michael.

- Oh my God. - This is part one. - Michael. We're still in his teenage years, Michael. He is now age 16.

He gets into an acting school in London. So he moves to London. - Yeah. - He then describes again. He says, like, oh, I was getting all this attention from girls

'cause like I was at a good school and I was acting. But then when he actually describes the specific girls and 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 Wygan at the end of term.

- 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. - You know what I'm about to say. I mean, he talks about their looks. Like he talks about like, oh, this like she was a radiant creature

and like her blonde curls, you know, it's like physical appearance stuff. It's clear that these are like sort of trophies to him or like conquest like based on their attractiveness. So the girl Penny, he meets her at school.

She's like, oh, I'm going home for the holidays. She 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 the station.

And then he sort of like worms his way onto the train. So here's this. - Penny didn't want me to come to her house, but I used charm and relentless pig headed persistence to persuade her.

I'd pursued her with poetry and promises, neither of which were original or true for months. I tackled the nobstical course with such dog-ed a plum 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 round. 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. - Charming stuff.

- 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

or I know that makes this okay. - Or not gonna read them all, but this thing happens many times in the book where he's super infatuated with a girl, I can't stop thinking about you. He's writing six letters a day, whatever.

He talks her into sex, wears her down,

and then he never mentions her again.

- Yeah. - So this girl Penny is not mentioned for the rest of the book. - Yeah, I'm sure. - He can't stop himself from going to the next infatuation. Like once he's kind of won, like the conquest is over,

he said sex with them, like he has no more attention for them. - Infatuation maybe his language.

“I'm not sure that that's how I would describe it”

as an outside observer. - Wait, what would you say? - Love, you think it's pure love, you think it's really pure love. - I think it's too long. (laughing)

- Honestly, like the thing that comes to mind is like, almost like marks. - Oh yeah, great. - He sort of like in it to win. And the winning happens when you have sex

and then the game is over and we're done. It's not really infatuation because that implies some level of attraction to something in eight about that person. To me, it seems much more like he's just sort of constantly

setting personal best. - But so the next bit of lighter fluid that is poured on this dynamic is the fucking way he starts doing drugs. - Oh great.

- He discovered alcohol when he's like 9 or 10 him and a friend were going through a sort of 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,

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. - Jesus God. - So this then creates a pattern where he gets kicked out of acting school for showing them drunk and high all the time.

He then has 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.

- Very good move. - 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.

- Oh no. - So he's talking about them. - Here, let me just send you this 'cause it's gross. - Thank you so much. - You took the gross ones.

- 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 high. 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 and their bras.

“That's what makes it such a fucking good read.”

- Cool story. - It's not like this is almost exactly what like gets him on TV. Is this kind of material, right? It's not like, this was the dark side

that none of us knew about. It's like, don't know. He was talking about this shit. - 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. He's how old is he at this point? - 17. So he's 17 and he's already doing the fucking wine steam thing. It's really shocking.

And I was telling us about it years later without any man, this was really like how fucked up this was. It's like how funny story I think that I did when I was a kid. - Right, this is like sex criminal super villain, fucking shit.

“So the other big thing that happens when Russell is 17”

is his dad gets divorced from his third wife

and wants to go on a sex trip to East Asia. - Oh fuck, his dad is a passport bro. - He's a passport bro dude. - I've watched enough 90 day fiance to know all the fuck about this guy.

- 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.

Holy fucking shit. They go, it appears first to Thailand and then to Hong Kong. Russell only tells the story 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. - Like part of the issue with passport bro.

(laughing) - A long-degression about wife talk. - No, no, no, no. - No, why I have this like noting 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. - Yeah, yeah. - 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. - So he chooses one sex worker named Mary Lou. His dad chooses two sex workers. They go back to their hotel. They're saying it's some fancy hotel.

Once they get to the room, they're like fooling around with these women. He says this naked. I was shy about my body then. I had trouble getting hard.

The blue job seemed daft. The way it feels when a customs official pulls your trousers down or a doctor puts his finger up your arms. Not sexual, just giggly and intrusive. - It's clearly kind of uncomfortable.

- Not sexual, just giggly and intrusive is how I would describe a lot of Russell Brands. - Yeah, she's a crime. - Yeah, she's a crime. - 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 fly your juicy. - So he's listening to his dad have sex with sex workers next door as he's having sex.

- And he clearly is impressed by his dad.

“He describes this as in this aspirational way”

of just like, oh, some day, all of the school is my dad. But this is unbelievable fucking loser behavior. - Before there was Andrew Tate, there were fuck off dads like this. - And here's the next morning.

He comes out the next morning as dad is like reading the newspaper, the breakfast table. - 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've. Then the corner of the page flicked up once again and he was gone. In the course of the rest of that holiday,

I fuck loads more prostitutes.

Always got a heart on, never wore a condom

and never fell in love. - Cool. - In Bangkok, when bar girls in Pat Pong left their post to follow me down the street, cooing and touching my hair,

I felt that I had my dad's unequivocal approval. Fucking Jesus God. - 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, or whatever, but there's no moment of reflection on this. So the fact that he's like, I never wore a condom. He's like, wow, cool man, why?

- Yeah, cool story, bro. What a good thing to put in your memoir about sex addiction. I mean, like I guess. So then he gets back to London.

He gets into another acting school.

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

- He says he shows up drunk every day. - Oh! - He drinks before school. And then he's like, hammered. - That would do it.

This is like too much 'cause we already just like this guy, but like God, this either is fake or it's real and fuck off. So here's this for, he's saying that when he's in this period like post drama school, post getting kicked out

of drama school number two. One of my brilliant gimmicks was to have a mouse living in my hair. He's doing a ran-to-ing. - I know, maybe this explains the rest of his career.

Maybe it's actually just the mouse isn't charged. - 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.

So I hope this is fake. If this is real, this is like one's pathetic, like attention getting things I've ever heard in my life. - Jesus fucking hell. - Surely you could just get attention

for people by being like nice to them. - This is absolutely the kind of behavior that would make me avoid being around a person. - Yeah, not necessarily because of the mouse, not necessarily because of the mouse smell,

not necessarily because of any of that kind of sound. - Well, because of the for me it would be because of the mouse and the mouse smell, but okay. - No, but just because of the level of red flag that is like in this person thinks this is how you engage

with other people and like I don't want to be engaged in these kinds of ways by a person. So I'm just gonna give them a real wide birth. - 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. - 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.

- Yeah, I think, might suit him. - 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 performances

at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He's not like the very early stages of kind of like making it as an actor/communion. 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.

- What a cool fucking guy.

“- 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 in the 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 labor party conference in Bournemouth in 1999. That's the entirety of the charge. I guess from these day and up comedy gigs,

he then gets noticed by MTV, and in 2001, he gets like a segment on MTV called Dance Floor Chart. We're like, he goes around to nightclubs and interviews people.

The way that he tells the 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 'cause he's like, oh, I'm gonna 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. Oh! And he's high walking around, the 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, on the next day they fired me.

But he doesn't mention this, but he doesn't really get into it the actual reason that he got fired. I was gonna say, what are the chances

that there was zero sex pasting for Russell Brand?

- Well, no, it actually isn't a sex pasting, Aubrey. - What? If you go to his like Wikipedia entry and he does mention his in his book in this weird cursory way, this story is taking place

on September 12th, 2001 and he is dressed as Osama bin Laden. - What in the fuck? - So like, he does say this, here I'm gonna send it to you. - I was dressed in a white Muslim tunek with matching white bottoms, a camouflage, flat jacket,

a false beard, and a tea towel on my head held in place by a shoelace. - Cool. - 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 vlog their records. That afternoon, our guest was to be Kylie Minogue. - And then he like tells the Kylie Minogue story. I just dealing this from the on brand podcast, which is an entire podcast about Amazon 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.

- Right. - Kylie Minogue probably had like a two-minute conversation with this guy and was like, "Well, gotta go." Like I don't think Kylie Minogue fucking reported Russell Brand.

“I think you got fired 'cause you dressed as fucking Osama bin Laden”

the day after September 11th. - Well, and also like you dressed in such a way as to make manifest a fucking slur. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - You put a towel on your head, you fucking asshole.

- 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 you did some crumbs, 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 like, again, just this like, I put a mouse in my hair.

Like I wanted to get attention kind of thing. - I don't know, man. Like the day after they captured the fucking golden state killer, are you going on TV dressing up like that guy? So the only other thing we know of that takes place

in just one 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 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.

- My God, stop giving him this specific job.

“- How do we expose him to the most people possible?”

- He says, together we can drive to take on taboo's. Have a fight with your dad to examine the idea of an edifice 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. And like these are like little stunts that he does. He ends up like jerking off a man. - They're all just props. - Yeah, yeah.

- Right for him to do an outrageous thing. That is, I mean, I do think that's core to the ideology. It's just like, these are taboos. But he's not seem to have any kind of like basic moral compass because one of the episodes is about hanging out

with his guy who says part of the British National Party, which is like based on 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.

- It feels like a house with no foundation. - Yeah. - 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.

- Right. - There's not like a core driving morality underneath it. It's just, oh, you don't want me to do this. - So then at the end of 2002, he finally gets sober.

He's like drinking every day, using drugs every day. Imagine he goes into rehab. He doesn't say that much about it.

It seems to work and he's sober for the rest of his life.

“According to him, does he mention anything”

about staying in recovery spaces? Like does he go to meetings? - He's really into 12 steps. - Okay. He's called recovery that it's 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. - 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. Based on what we know comes next. It just seems like that might be part of the picture. It's actually really interesting because 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

repatious, somehow became enhanced further. I started seeing different women quickly acquiring a harem of about 10 whom I would rotate in addition to one nightstands in random casual encounters. Boy, there's nothing quite so chilling as a white man referring

to a harem. - And also how are you doing this, too? - I mean, 10 people and also one nightstands. - Do you think that's real? - Oh yeah.

- And if you read the accounts of his accusers, he has this like urgency about sex. And oftentimes he'll have a couple women in one night. It's not like you come over and you have to the 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. - This is gay men territory. What are you doing? - It's really, even as a gay man, I'm like,

this is, you're fucking unwell. - No, totally. - So that isn't too 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.

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

“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 expo's A about him that was published in 2023,

they talked to a female comedian who knew him on the comedy scene. A female comedian said that in the early 2000s when they giggged 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. - It's so dark because I think his way of relating to himself is to interpret all of his actions as sort of playful.

- Yeah. - Fighting someone's face is an unhinged thing to do. - Okay, imagine someone doing that to you with a mouse and their fucking hair. - Oh.

- He's the worst. - He's like, oh. - Drunk mouse and hair, hair smells like mouse piss and shit. - So in 2005, that's when he goes to sex addiction treatment. 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 worst thing about being in rehab”

is that I really miss Sarah. But he hasn't mentioned Sarah. - That's the first mention. - Yeah, Sarah is Sarah. - I guess that's the woman he's dating, but it's like, does anyone edit these fucking books?

Like, they're just as 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's gonna cut his wrists. - Pretend is doing some heavy lifting there. - But again, this is just in his diary entry. So you're like, is this in the book or something else?

What? And of course, he's never mentioned again.

The book ends with him like, oh, I went through a sex addiction rehab, but then all he says is, after he's down, I did continue to have sex with adult human females, but I made sure it didn't interfere with my work.

- That was the point of concern. So he ends with this like, oh, I learned all my lessons, none of which I'm gonna actually explain at the end of this book. He then starts book two, fucking bookie book two.

He starts book two by bragging about the time he fucked Kate Moss. - 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.

- We're now entering the point where he starts to become much more famous. He gets a gig as a big brother commentator in Christen 5. - Sure, very talking dead territory. - One of the things I laughed at in his book,

he's talking about this big brother. It's called Big Brother's Big Mouse. He says, "I worked on the show for three years, "which encompassed seven seasons."

- I fucking love reality. - A fucking reality. - Fucking reality. - Oh, it's so weird. - And just like, sure just churn through a man who cares.

He also a thing that really rockets him to fame.

“And I think that he's been very good at doing”

throughout his career is writing controversies into more fame and more notoriety. So in 2006, he hosts the NME Awards, which is like a music magazine, music awards, the new music express, I believe.

- 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 lead singer of the strokes is named Julian Casablanca. - Yes.

- 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 Casablanca's thinking?"

She was 90 years old, and she was a lesbian. - What? - That's the joke, the strokes. That's the whole, that's the joke. - Again, the cadence of he know, delivered

with a thick accent from a guy doing a ratatouille. He then introduces Bob Gueldoff, 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, and I was an eighth grade.

This is his introduction to Bob Gueldoff.

This is Russell Brand. He says, "The winner of Best DVD is Bob Gueldoff. "My Best DVD is Big Natural Tits 10." She and 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 Gandalf, and introduces him.

Then Bob Gueldoff comes up, and he just like, "Lines, he starts out, he just leans in the microphone, he says, Russell Brand, what a punt." - Yeah, good job, good job. It's also sort of the shortcoming

of this kind of like edged Lord era of humor, which is just like, you don't actually have to have a joke. - Yeah. - Sort of like his earlier stuff. The point is just like, "Oh, it's taboo."

So I'm gonna say, Ted, that's not his joke.

- Yeah.

“- A joke takes craftsmanship, a joke takes subversion”

of expectation. - Are you talking about how sophisticated you were for using the soundboard on this podcast? - Oh, we were quite bored. - Oh, we were quite bored. (laughing)

- What is your attraction? - What did it say? - We're gaining attraction. - What the fuck is that? What is this? - Let's really drill down on this.

- What is this? - A friend gave me a corporate jargon one. (laughing) - You have to be disruptive. - That's good, let's put it pin in that.

Let's circle back to that. - That is the case again. You're right, Aubrey, it takes dedication. - That's a no planer. (laughing)

- 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.

- Oh, yeah. - Right, like this is also the era of Adam Corolla, Don Eimus, all of these fucking dickweed edge lord 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. - Oh, you man, it gets you mad about this and then you get to do the whole fucking stick. We're like, they're all mad at me again. - Oh my God.

- 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 alleged 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 alleged that Brand would get staff to approach young female audience members so he could meet them after filming.

- Oh boy. - 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,

claimed 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. - 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.

- There's also in December of 2007, somebody may say complaint about quote an alarming display of aggression and disrespect

in Fits of Rage and quote, urinating in a bottle in full view of everyone. - Sorry, this is after he gets sober. - 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. - I'm sure. - Like the time I pissed in a cup I'm sure. - In front of staff at 100% rock bottom. - Yeah, yep, yep, yep. - 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. - God, imagine living in a media environment

“or the media goes, wait a minute, did we have a hand in this?”

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

- Is there something we should have done differently 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 fairly big celebrities. He interviews like Tom Cruise and stuff.

And so here is him talking about a celebrity encounter. - Neil brought Courtney love with him who is a mad and chantris, a rasping white witch, Barbie and opinionated and lionhearted. 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 blarny family. Lord alone knows, many of famous man has emerged

from its confines, some of whom surely must have been famous on the way in. - Jesus fucking Christ. - 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. - Yeah, I mean, Mike, what do you expect? He's saying her vagina is dead. (laughing)

- What higher praise is there than now?

“- Am I not supposed to say this when I talk about you?”

- Yeah. (laughing) - Well, tell me, tell me about your clothes. - Well, let's start with her vagina and work our way outward. - Blarny vagina, how do you describe my vagina?

(laughing) - Let's work, shop it, fellas. (laughing) Is it gay to describe your clothes for vagina? - It's actually not problematic because I am gay.

I'm allowed to describe your vagina. - It's gay not to. (laughing) - God, what a fucking twerp. - Okay, so this is like the hardest transition

of the whole show, we're like giggly and stuff. We now have to talk about the 16-year-old that he dated allegedly orally rape. If it's a 16-year-old, what's the age of concept in the UK? - Unfortunately, 16, so it was not illegal.

- Oh shit, 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, I have that 17, you're like, nope.”

- I don't want to be the guy who can answer your question. - Yeah, exactly. Like, like, like, like overhearing a conversation to restaurant, like, oh, actually it's 16 and a UK. (laughing)

- No. (laughing) - It's actually a feeble feeble yo. - 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 proves as 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. - He approached her in Lester 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, "Fucking hell." So again, you see this extremely aggressive way of hitting on women, right? - Right, but also like when you're 16.

- You don't know. - I know. - You don't know that this dude is like actively dangerous to you. - Yeah, I tell you.

- To us this early, yet in your life. - There's then this period where it's like he's a completely aware of her age and how inappropriate this is. So he asked her to read Lolita,

which is a really fucking weird detail. He asked her to put himself in her phone as Carly

or something, they don't find like a man's name.

- Holy fucking shit!

“- 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, there's like Russell Brand's professional driver

pulls up his house and like begs her not to get out of the car. He's like, "I have a daughter of your age. "You don't want to go into that house." - This is, you know,

to borrow a fucking very law in order to refray. This is like evidence of premeditation, right? - Yeah. - This is someone who knows that what he's doing will not be viewed in a kind light.

- Yeah. - This is someone who is actively engaged in like, regardless of the age of consent in a given place, this is fucking grooming behavior. Reblo Lita, 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, this is how it ended.

“- 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."

- 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 horrible scene so that she has to break up with me. - It's also like not for nothing. It is kind of nuts that he does dress like a cartoon villain. - To be fair, he has been telling us very loudly

who he fucking is for his entire career.

- For a very long time, yep, totally. We also, this is like now the fucking sexual assault montage. - It wasn't before? - No, this is where it gets really bad. So in 2007, 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 Intanglement with a Celebrity and in the book she calls him Randall Grand. She's elsewhere said that this was based on Russell Brand.

- She's my true friend. - Yeah, basically, yeah. And she, she led his, like, him sexually assaulting her and cheating on her and a bunch of, like, really awful shit. In this book, sounds like our guy.

- Yeah, and then when the allegations come out in 2003, she's like, I don't wanna be interviewed, but I stand by the book. - We then in 2008 have this incident. - 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 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 too.

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. - Yeah. - 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. - What? - That's weird. - When she said that wasn't her name,

she says he replied, well, I'm gonna fuck you. And I said, know 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. - This woman Olivia texts a friend and she's like, "A fucking Russell Brand is like,

"wiped his dick out in the bathroom." - Good for Olivia. - And he goes, I know they're talking about it live on the air. - What? - They're like joking on air.

One of his eyes co-host 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." - Boy, I'm fucking old.

- So this is like a bit within like 15 fucking minutes. It's a fucking bit on the air. - I don't even know how to fucking process this shit. - And also everyone, 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 was not a fucking persona. - There are lots of like real dipshit dumb guy parts of American media and political landscapes.

- One of them really is like, "Boy, boy, the degree to which we get charmed "by a British accent and a Lothario." - Do I know terrible fucking behavior? - So the final episode that we are going to talk about

before we close, are you familiar with it? Saxgate? - Is this when one owner Ryder did her shoplifting? - No, it's Andrew Sax. - I know this name, why do I know this name?

You watch Faulty Towers growing up, right?

- Oh sure.

“- I was obsessed with Faulty Towers when I was a kid.”

So the guy who plays man well on Faulty Towers is named Andrew Sax. - Okay. - He is into this 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. - Oh boy. - 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. - Oh, I'm so sorry.

Do you mean sound board energy? (laughing) - I was trying not to say the word 'cause I knew you'd get inspired. - I'm at capacity.

(laughing) - Let's make that a heart. - This is a word soundboard, Aubrey. - It's really not good and I love it. That's kind of what I love the most about it.

- That's a no-thrainer. (laughing)

“So this intersect 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 machines and they talk to his answering machine. - I have a vague recollection about this where they are like fucking sex pests

about his daughter or something. - Grand daughter. - Yes. - Creep fucking city. 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 like massive scandal at the time. - Yeah. - So we are going to read a transcript of the answering machine message. So I am going to send you this transcript.

You are gonna be Russell Brand. I'm gonna be Jonathan Ross because I know if I made you Jonathan Ross, you tried it in voice. - 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. - Let's do it. - Man, er, Andrew Sachs.

- Don't call him Manuel, that's really bad manners. I apologize for Russell, he's an idiot. - I said Andrew Sachs, look Andrew Sachs, I have got respect for you and your lineage and your progeny.

Never let that be questioned.

- Don't hint, I weren't hinting. Why did that come across as a hint? - Because you know what you did. That wasn't a hint. - He fucked your granddaughter.

- Jesus fucking crazy stuff, so cute. - What a couple of little rogues. - 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.

- Russell Brand at this point would have been in his, with 30s? - Yeah, early 30s. - Yeah. - And the granddaughter's in her early 20s.

- Jonathan Ross is like fucking 50? - He's just always been 50. - Yeah, it's unclear to be serious. - He used to use middle-aged forever. - It's like a gene hackman situation.

- That's fucking nuts. Like a middle-aged man being like, he fucked your grandchild. - Oh, what in the fuck are we doing? - It is the two boys on the telephone being like,

Marianne, 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 dating. - Shut up, hang up, hang up, hang up.

- Yeah, I have sex with you. - Also, I was thinking about this from Georgina's perspective that like, okay, you date this guy, whatever. It appeared like a week, a couple dates,

whatever, it's not super serious. And then a couple weeks later, you find out that he's bragging about having sex with you on the fucking BBC to your grandpa. - Is she a public figure in her own right at this point?

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

- That's my own word. - British women, famous sex scandal. Helen Mirren! They then hang up and then they talk amongst themselves. So this is them sort of doing like a little recap.

- Andrew Sachs, I did not do nothing with Georgina. Oh no, I revealed, I know her name. Oh no, it's a disaster, a board, a board. - 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. She was on a swing when I met her, let's ring back Andrew Sachs.

- Thank you. - Fucking gross. - Then they call again. - 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'm phoning you to ask if I can marry,”

that's right, Mary, Georgina, the granddaughter. And I would like to be the page boy. He wants to be a page boy. We're going to have a faulty towers themed wedding. Now you've spoiled it.

- No, I mean it better, I'm sorry. I'll do anything, I wore a condom, put the phone down.

And then there's one of the hang up, and then there's a third message.

but I'm not going to make you come up with a tune.

- 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.

- Great. - I said something, I didn't have a auto, 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. She wasn't menstrual. - What?

- A fucking creep. - Unbelievable. - 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 forever, because if you're willing to be this level of boundary crossing,

“then I think there maybe is no rock bottom for you.”

- At the time, it isn't really noticed. Apparently the BBC only got two complaints about this at the time, but then the daily male 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 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. - It's weird to be like, am I siding with

what would then become mum's net? - I know. - Right, you don't want to be in the same camp, but I do think you got a sort of standing your repulsed reaction to this,

and be like, this is like not actually fucking okay. 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 accountability for this at the time.

But then what's amazing is that then Russell Brand

kind of just moves over to Hollywood. - Yeah. - 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 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 the UK,

it's kind of memory-hold, because all of a sudden he's a movie star. - 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.

- Yeah exactly. - Don't expect better. - That would have been a better fucking title for his book than bookie book. - Don't expect better.

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

“- Can I give a preview of what my reaction is going to happen?”

- I know you guys have your little soundboard in front of you. I know you're gonna do. (screaming) (laughing) Is that the size soundboard?

- Disappointed size. Is the name of this one. - Is that all it does? - Yeah, do you want to hear male size? - Oh yeah.

(laughing) - You, as a millennial podcaster, should not have told me about that because I can now replace you with one of those.

- I've always been replaceable by a soundboard.

(laughing) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)