Julie Page

My last post on the Russell Brand trial reached nearly a million people, and my replies were immediately flooded with defenders insisting this was all just a coordinated establishment hit job. Well, week three just concluded at Southwark Crown Court, and the reality has gotten so much worse for anyone trying to defend him. For the last three years, Brand hid behind a podcast microphone, carefully rebranding himself as a humble, persecuted spiritual outsider. He even got baptized right after the criminal allegations broke to complete the transformation. Then he actually had to take the witness stand under oath, and the entire manufactured persona collapsed in real time. When questioned by his own barrister, Brand put on a loud theatrical performance, throwing around words like "badinage" and "loquacious" to charm the jury. But the moment the prosecution stood up to cross-examine him, the swagger completely evaporated into long, excruciating spells of dead silence. The prosecution didn't even need outside witnesses to tear him apart. They simply opened his own 2007 memoir and read his own confessions back to his face. Jurors had to sit there while the court read passages where Brand explicitly wrote that when he wanted a woman, he would "resolutely remove anything that’s in the way, until I possess the object of my desire." They read his own captions bragging about pretending to be effeminate specifically so women would lower their guard and let him into their hotel rooms. Think about that for ten seconds. He put the playbook in writing himself. As the prosecution pointed out in their closing speech, the jury isn't dealing with a media conspiracy. They are looking at six separate women spanning a ten-year timeline between 1999 and 2009. They didn't know each other. They have no personal or financial benefit to gain, and endless online abuse to endure, by having to sit in a criminal court to describe being assaulted. You can build an army of online defenders and hide behind sudden spiritual conversions all you want. But when your own published books describe treating women as objects to be possessed at any cost, the enlightened guru act is completely finished.