Róisín Gorman: ‘Russell Brand will still get support from the online loony brigade’

The notion that the former comedian is being punished with allegations of sex crimes because he’s a truth warrior is as laughable as his YouTube content.

When the comedy work dried up, and it usually consisted of slagging off The Sun, verbosity and big hair, Russell realised that appealing to the tinfoil hat brigade was easy money because those guys will swallow anything.

Rant about the Great Reset, wibble something about Covid, slag off Bill Gates and watch the dollars roll in.

And mention globalisation regularly because none of the swivel-headed fans will get the irony of tirades about world dominating companies on a channel owned by Google.

Brand’s most recent content, apart from his denial of sexual misconduct allegations, includes world firsts like footage of Donald Trump claiming electoral fraud, again.

That’s not truth seeking. It’s taking advantage of the bewildered.

But it also provides an army of six million people who will question every fact, apart from the one where the guru is a perv.

The kinds of truths they and Russell really didn’t like were those which were meticulously researched, cross-referenced with multiple witnesses and sources, and run by lawyers to conclude that he’s a sexual predator, whose cunning disguise was to brag about it.

His schtick, that he was an addict who battled with drugs and sex but always had the utmost respect for women wore a bit thin when those women were chewed up, spat out, cast aside, and then boasted about.

For the love of God, he laughed on his Radio 2 show about presenting his penis to a woman he’d never met before.

He thought it was hilarious to ring elderly actor Andrew Sachs on air to boast about having sex with his granddaughter.

When a sexual encounter needs a side order of humiliation that’s the biggest of big red flags.

Women publicly called him out on it, including Dannii Minogue and Katherine Ryan.

Men called him out on it, including Billy Connolly and Rod Stewart. I know hindsight is marvellous but the moment he offered his assistant, naked, to Jimmy Savile is skin-crawling stuff.

So this isn’t trial by media, it’s a reckoning that’s been a long time coming on behaviour we all witnessed.

Whether it ends with any criminal convictions remains to be seen.

What’s fairly sure is that Brand will continue to find an audience with the loony brigade on a far-right corner of the internet which will see a conspiracy where the rest of us see a dirty old man.