How Russell Brand conned the crank right

Former comedian Russell Brand has been sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison for three counts of sexual assault and one count of rape.

Many uncomfortable questions are rightly being asked of a liberal entertainment industry that tolerated Brand’s behaviour for so long, with some even describing it as an ‘open secret’ within the comedy sphere. Attention has also turned to the left-wing political commentators and politicians who chummed up to Brand when he was going through his painfully cringeworthy ‘revolution’ phase. In fact, left-wing political commentator Owen Jones has now admitted he was ‘willing to overlook’ Brand’s ‘history of problematic behaviour’ in order to reach a bigger audience.

As damning as that admission may be for what little character Jones possesses, at least he was being honest. Which is more than can be said for Brand’s defenders and associates on the crank right.

Charges against Brand were made public in April 2025 and an endless stream of conspiracy theories followed. In short, it was claimed that the charges against him were little more than an orchestrated attack and concoction by ‘the establishment’ to silence him.

Why? Because Brand’s verbose and vacuous ramblings on YouTube supposedly presented such a threat to ‘them’ (no one can ever properly explain exactly who ‘they’ are) that he needed to be taken off the board by all means necessary.

From 2020 onwards, Brand spent most of his time pumping out endless ‘just asking questions’ conspiracy theories on his YouTube channel. The chosen topics were a greatest-hits collection of predictable, click-chasing fare: Covid, vaccine scaremongering, the unique evil of Bill Gates, the war in Ukraine, the World Economic Forum, and so on. This would all culminate in Brand attracting (and accepting) the embrace of the American Christian right and, in 2024, a very public conversion to Christianity.

One particular narrative ran through Brand’s output, pushed at every opportunity: the establishment and mainstream media cannot be trusted. They are lying to you, and they’ll destroy you for daring to expose the truth about them.

Many on the crank right were quick to draw the conclusions Brand was hoping for when the rape allegations finally went public. When the trial began last month, hard-right commentator Gavin McInnes posted on X: ‘Isn’t it funny how as soon as someone goes against the deep state, they become a rapist?’ Apparently, there are people walking among us who are so impressed by the conspiratorial bile spewed by Brand that they imagine it to be a threat to the powers-that-be.

However, there are some rather inconvenient facts for those pushing the narrative that Brand was stitched up because he embraced the Christian right and began dropping ‘truth bombs’ about the deep state and vaccines.

First of all, The Times investigation into Brand’s crimes began in 2019, before his reinvention as a born-again Christian and conspiratorial ‘truth-teller’ on the right. There can be little doubt that Brand knew these public accusations were making their way over the hill, which means one should look at the timing of his pivot to the American Christian right with even more suspicion. What Brand accomplished before his downfall was to cultivate an audience and army of defenders who were primed to reject mainstream media reporting and dismiss legal institutions as corrupt, no matter what. And that is what has happened.

The hypocrisy is staggering. The crank right talks a good game about the sexual deviants lurking within the ‘liberal elite’ and the need to ‘protect girls’ from them. Yet the moment a rape victim goes to the police and endures the gruelling legal process required to secure a conviction before a jury in a court of law, those same people are all too happy to dismiss her as a whore in the pocket of the deep state, simply because the deviant in question happens to be one of their own.

While Brand was able to dupe the right’s reality-challenged community with his sophistry, the justice system prefers to deal in evidence and facts – and Russell Brand is in prison as a consequence. Further rape allegations against him are now also being investigated.

Beneath all that paranoid, conspiratorial tosh in defence of Russell Brand were real women, real victims, who had endured horrific sexual assaults at the hands of a rapist. I have little faith that this reality will ever get through the skulls of those so eager to turn someone else’s suffering into yet another tawdry instalment of their tinfoil fantasies.