Russell Brand - Leaving the Past Behind
That sentence holds my whole question. What does it mean to
be a different person, and who gets to say so?
I have no intention of reading Brand's soul. The Church has
never asked me to, and Bishop Arun Arora is right to warn
against the attempt: people often find faith in a crisis, and nobody is
beyond redemption. Brand’s search was long, too. He passed through Buddhism,
the Hare Krishna movement, and the Twelve Steps well before anyone accused him
of anything. A real hunger for God is entirely possible. It is also possible to
hunger for God and lie about your past. Many of us have managed it.
So I will leave the heart alone and look at the fruit. John
the Baptist told the crowds who came to him to ‘bear fruits that befit
repentance’ (Luke 3:8).
The record begins in September 2017, two days after Brand
married Laura Gallacher. He sat down with Katie Glass of the Sunday Times
to promote Recovery, a book about the Twelve Steps. Her copy of
the interview is online. Steps eight and nine ask you to list everyone you
have harmed and make amends. Glass asked what he regretted from his years as a
sexual addict. He had no regrets. Nothing at all? ‘Nothing.’ There were quite a
lot of names on his list, he said, though not hundreds, and nobody left to whom
he owed amends. Then he wandered off into some remarks about self-preservation
and the obligations of celebrity. On the women he had slept with, he grew
defensive. His sexuality, he said, had been about connection and yearning, and
nobody had been tricked or bribed into anything.
No allegation existed yet. He was sober, newly married, and
the father of a ten-month-old girl. He was selling a programme whose eighth
step is an inventory of the harm one has done. He had the vocabulary of
repentance. The interview suggests he had very little else.
It also shows where his moral universe ended. Nobody had
been tricked or bribed, so nothing needed repenting. Consent was the whole of
it. Karol Wojtyła’s Love
and Responsibility rests on the principle that a person is the being toward
whom the only adequate attitude is love, and that using a person as an
instrument of pleasure is wrong even when the person agrees. Consent is the
floor beneath which a use becomes violence. It was never the ceiling of the
moral law. A man who treats it as the ceiling has no category for the wrong of
using a woman as the instrument of his appetite, whatever she agreed to, and a
man without a category for a wrong has nothing to repent of.
Two years later, the Sunday Times Magazine asked
whether #MeToo had made him look at his past differently. He
said it had not, while calling the movement a sign of real awakening. He
admired the awakening and declined to join it.
Then the allegations came. On the eve of the Channel 4 Dispatches
programme in September 2023, he posted a video admitting that he had been very
promiscuous and insisting that the
relationships were ‘absolutely, always consensual’. He added that he had
always been too open about his past. He told the world about the appetite. He
never told it about the harm. Seven months later he announced his baptism,
which had been explained to him, he said, as ‘an
opportunity to leave the past behind and be reborn in Christ’s name’.
That language is not unorthodox. The trouble lies in who it
leaves out. The past he proposed to leave behind included several women who
said he had harmed them, and they appear nowhere in that declaration.
When he was charged in April 2025, he told his followers
that before he lived in the light of the Lord he had been a fool, a drug addict
and a sex addict, and that ‘what
I never was, was a rapist’. Look at the shape of it. He freely confessed
the sins that cost only him. The ones with a victim are denied. He was entitled
to deny the charges, and nobody should be pressed to confess what he says he
did not do. But the confession kept halting at the edge of other people.
At the trial, under cross-examination, he agreed it had been
wrong to let his fame facilitate
sexual access and described his earlier life as ‘beyond
reckless philandering and idiocy’. That is more than he gave Glass in 2017,
and credit is due. But he said it to a prosecutor, in answer to her questions,
and not to any of the women. The jury rejected his account on four counts, and
the judge, as Reuters
reports, described him as a predator who believed that fame allowed him to
behave as he pleased.
What should repentance look like? According to the
Catechism, contrition comes first, meaning sorrow for sin with a resolve not to
repeat it (1451).
Confession means looking squarely at what one has done and taking
responsibility for it (1455).
Where the sin has wronged a neighbour, the penitent must do what he can to
repair the harm (1459),
and reparation is owed ‘even if its author has been forgiven’ (2487).
Scripture says the same. The prodigal rehearses his
confession in the pigsty, and when he delivers it, he says he has sinned
‘against heaven and before you’ (Luke 15:21). He names the father he wronged.
Similarly, Zacchaeus is never asked for restitution. He volunteers it,
promising fourfold repayment to anyone he has cheated, and Jesus tells him that
salvation has come to his house (Luke 19:8–9).
None of this requires a repentant man to call a press
conference. Confession is private and should remain so. The sacrament does not
depend on a statement to the papers. Brand, though, made his rebirth public. He
was baptised in the Thames on camera, with Bear
Grylls at his side, and he held
online prayer meetings while the women gave their evidence. A man who
broadcasts his renewal cannot complain when people go looking for the fruit.
The Rev
Ravi Holy told the Guardian that a genuine conversion ought to make
Brand face up to what he put the women through. Nick
Spencer of Theos observed that we want to affirm grace and forgiveness
without ignoring justice. Both seem right to me. The difficulty is to affirm
forgiveness without setting aside justice.
The academic Ellie Tomsett, borrowing a term from Andrea
McDonell, has a name for the manoeuvre. Writing
in Celebrity Studies, she calls it ‘self-cleaving’, the attempt by accused
men to build a wall between the person they were and the person they are now.
Brand’s barrister was building the same wall in court. Paul tells the
Colossians to put off the old self (Colossians 3:9), and the verb is not ‘wall
off’. An old self fenced away is still standing there.
Ten and a half years is a long time to be sorry in. Whether Brand uses it that way is between him and God. What he owes the four women the jury believed is a separate matter, and no baptism video settles it. Grace is not a defence against justice. It is what gives a man the courage to stand before it.
That court sketch artist should be sacked.
ReplyDeleteI have a great deal of skepticism about everything surrounding Brand. I hope that his conversion was genuine, but I wonder about the spectacle that accompanied it. I'm also not entirely sure how I feel about these kind of cases - where a lot of time has elapsed since the offences, there is no physical evidence, a lot of substances were involved, and everyone was a competent adult. It's true that male celebrities can use their fame to get access to women, but it's also true that female fans throw themselves at male celebrities. Who is using whom? From what I've read of the evidence, everyone's behaviour was pretty deviant.
I notice that we've returned to the 'believe women' stage of things, though - rather than the stage where we throw them out of police stations, arrest their parents for making complaints, return them to their abusers and cover it all up.
I’ll pass your note on to the sketch artist.
DeleteI share some of your scepticism. I hope the conversion is genuine, and the spectacle around it is why I wrote about the fruit and not the water. I don’t claim to know what is in his heart, and the essay is careful not to try.
On the verdict, your unease is reasonable. The trial answers more of it than it first appears. Old offences, no physical evidence, and a haze of drink and drugs are real problems for any court, which is why the jury has to be sure, not just suspicious. They heard weeks of evidence, including from Brand, and they didn’t convict on every charge. They acquitted on two rape charges and an attempted indecent assault, and convicted on four counts. That looks like a jury sorting the evidence. The judge also found that his claim never to have touched a woman without consent was one of a series of lies.
“Who is using whom” is a fair question about the lifestyle, and I agree it was disordered on every side. But that is a different question from the one the jury answered. A woman who throws herself at a celebrity has not consented to everything that follows, and the jury found that these four did not consent and that he had no reasonable belief that they did.
You are right that the opposite failure is real and was monstrous. Complainants were dismissed, disbelieved, and sometimes punished, and the institutions that did it should answer for it. The remedy for being too quick to disbelieve is not to believe automatically. It is to test the evidence properly before twelve people who have to be sure, and that seems to be what happened here.
My own piece takes the verdict as given for that reason and asks what repentance would look like for a man who has been convicted.