Even for Russell Brand, it was a brazen move. Posing for photographers as he arrived at a comedy awards run by now defunct ‘lads’ mag’ Loaded, the comedian very publicly peeked down the white low-cut top of nurse-turned-glamour model Abi Titmuss.

The cameras snapped away as he entered the event at London’s then-hip celebrity haunt Sketch, where he’d be named funniest man of 2006. Later, he would tell Abi, the former girlfriend of disgraced This Morning presenter John Leslie: ‘You like sex too. You are filthy, aren’t you?’

But that was nothing new. Brand was regularly seen prowling after women on London’s party circuit in the Noughties, dressed in trademark black, his shirt undone to the navel, with spray-on black jeans and his signature cowboy boots. He ‘leched at girls for fun’, one of his former associates tells me – but I already knew that.

I was there myself in the Noughties when Brand was the most sought-after guest if you were throwing a party in media-land.

He was everywhere. As was I. I was a showbusiness gossip columnist for a tabloid newspaper, which often meant staying out until the early hours, like Brand and his friends, though my mission was not to find a sexual conquest but a scoop.

At that time, Brand was often referred to in headlines, with a kind of benign joshing – now totally misplaced – as ‘Randy Russ’ or a ‘Lanky Lothario’. In fact he was a predator.

Take the night I saw him at the NME music awards, which he hosted at London’s Hammersmith Palais also back in 2006. That was when Sir Bob Geldof called Brand a ‘c***’ on stage amid rumours he’d been romancing his daughter Peaches, who had not yet turned 17.

After the show, and despite Sir Bob’s outburst, I watched aghast as Brand still flirted outrageously with Peaches. Her age didn’t seem to bother him one jot.

At another equally alcohol- fuelled bash, the annual National Comedy Awards, I and fellow journalists were gripped as Brand trailed Charlotte Church around the old ITV HQ on London’s South Bank.

Indeed, wherever Brand was, a woman would not be far away – whether she liked it or not.

In the early hours of one morning, I found myself traipsing to the Maddox Club in Mayfair after a Teenage Cancer Trust concert.

Brand was there too, draped over a Vivienne Westwood model named Jordan.

The romance didn’t last long. Shortly after Brand ditched her, I was told that he was ‘foul’ to her, with his associate adding: ‘Girls’ feelings don’t matter to Russell.’

For those who employed him – Channel 4, where he hosted Big Brother’s Big Mouth, or Radio 2 where he presented a Saturday evening programme in the mid-2000s – this behaviour should have attracted censure. Seemingly it didn’t. Indeed it appeared only to make him even more employable. The Noughties were indeed a riotous and grubby time. Money was washing around, meaning free drinks – beer, wine, spirits – flowed at parties and big budgets to pay celebrities to make an appearance. Women were enticed by the famous men on guest lists. Cocaine was rife.

The people in Brand’s orbit, of course, included TV host Jonathan Ross and comedian Noel Fielding. One journalist friend of mine was once summoned to a party in a dingy basement flat in Camden by Great British Bake Off host Fielding, who was then star of comedy act The Mighty Boosh. I went with her. Brand was there too, all over a woman in the corner of a room, while the rest of the party sat in a circle taking it in turns to snort coke.

Fielding, who admitted some months after this event to taking pills, magic mushrooms, cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine, was not very kind to my lovely friend that night. He, too, was forever strutting around Camden’s then-trendy haunts, such as The Hawley Arms. He also formed a bizarre friendship with Pixie Geldof, who was at school at the time.

One day I spotted them on a shopping trip at Urban Outfitters on Kensington High Street. Fielding had a cult following of music and celebrity publicists who would trail behind him as he attended gigs at the Kentish Town Forum and drank in the nearby Pineapple pub. Every time I saw him, I noted his air of arrogance.

Ross was not a partygoer in the same way but Brand and Fielding looked up to him as if he were the doyen of the comedy circuit. And the recently re-surfaced ‘joke’ he made at the 2004 British Comedy Awards about disgraced David Walliams ‘taking home’ 15-year-olds, sums up the prevailing attitude to women.

On Tuesday, Ross issued a statement in an attempt to distance himself. ‘This joke was submitted to me by the Comedy Awards scriptwriting team and I believed that the punchline was a reference to the fact he had publicly dated younger women, exaggerated for comic effect,’ he said.

UK comedy then was meaner than it had been in the 1990s. Women comics have never felt comfortable on the circuit – but the hyper-sexuality of Brand and the crude mockery of Little Britain humiliated female audiences too.

As Jo Brand once observed, the 2000s saw the rise of the rape joke, as though comics wanted actively to return to the broad misogyny of the 1970s – but with an even nastier twist. Jimmy Carr’s 2010 stage show was titled Rapier Wit, for example, and included the ‘joke’: ‘What do nine out of 10 people enjoy? Gang rape.’

Then there was the incident on Channel 4’s Big Fat Quiz of the Year in 2007 where Ross, Brand and Fielding starred alongside host Carr, comics Rob Brydon and David Mitchell – and one sole woman, singer Lily Allen, then 21.

At one point Ross referred to Brand and Fielding as ‘two of the best-known c***smen in the business’ and suggested he swap chairs with Allen so she could sit closer to Brydon and Mitchell and ‘might go home with her dress still on’.

‘How dare you, we’re not rapists,’ exclaimed Fielding, prompting a huge laugh from the studio audience. Carr then questioned why Fielding was wearing a cape for the show ‘if [he] wasn’t a rapist’ and The Mighty Boosh star said he was wearing a Jack The Ripper cape. ‘He wasn’t a rapist, he was a…,’ Fielding said, prompting Russell Brand to finish the sentence with: ‘Serial murderer.’

Brand then added: ‘There is no direct corollary between rapes and capes; it’s just a rhyme.

‘Leave him alone. What if, horror of horrors, he ain’t even done a rape? You could ruin his reputation.’ When women were expected to laugh at these ‘taboo-busting’ gags or be branded a prude, in a culture so heavily invested in shaming and judging them, it’s no wonder they felt unable to call out the rogues, the creeps and the criminals. Indeed, it’s becoming ever clearer that, in UK comedy and TV, the creeps and the rogues were the ones calling the shots.

A friend of mine sent me that clip last week and, after watching it, my reply was simply: ‘Sadly that was 2007 – stuff like that going on everywhere.’

But why? What made the 2000s so uniquely toxic for women?

The 1990s had seen an intense focus on British culture and a cohort of young women were inspired by high-profile peers such as Tracey Emin, Zoe Ball and Kate Moss, who seemed to be living life on their own terms. The party was chaotic but it looked like fun. The 2000s were harder-edged. The Spice Girls’ cartoonish girl power devolved into the powerlessness of Britney Spears in pigtails and Amy Winehouse’s tragic addictions.

Big Brother spat out a number of wannabe celebrities who threw themselves onto the nightclub scene and desperately wanted to date a famous man. The London club and bar scene was thriving – some nights I’d have six or seven invitations to star-studded events – as were the gossip mags. Meeting a star inside a party and being snapped by paparazzi on the way out was deemed a huge win.

And for some men, there was also the feeling that women were ‘up for it’ in those hedonistic Noughties. They were gaining in confidence and now it was payback time for muscling into this man’s world of music and comedy. As Brand said to Abi Titmuss, the cohort of young women who grew up in the 1990s were ‘filthy too’.

And make no mistake, male celebrities were hero-worshipped. Today they are far more tentative about how they behave. No camera phones back then meant no evidence. Indeed, such tawdry womanising wasn’t just part of the comedy world but happened all the time in the TV industry as a whole and among high-profile footballers.

My sister reminded me this week of one night at Funky Buddha, a Mayfair club I went to every Tuesday night in search of stories. We were standing chatting when a boyband star put his hand up her skirt. This was in 2005 and if I was able to tell you who it was, you’d be shocked. My sister was, deeply – and, of course, still talks about it today.

Then there were the footballers. In 2005, one former England player approached me in London’s Embassy club, touched my leg and said: ‘Cor, I like a pair of nice, strong legs.’ He went on to try to give me a lift home. When I declined, saying I could pay for my own taxi, he replied: ‘Your loss,’ with a wink.

Such behaviour was rife. The stars themselves would ask their friends if a potential conquest was ‘safe’ – meaning that she wouldn’t sell her story to the Press. Many still did, of course.

In the mid-Noughties there was no footballer who featured more often in the red top Press for his philandering than England player John Terry, who one night even had sex with a woman with a broken leg in the Embassy, a favourite hangout of his Chelsea teammates. After I met him at the venue he bombarded me with grotesque sexual messages, as he did several other women.

I also saw footballers ask their friends to pick out women from nightclubs and lure them over to Chinawhite, another club frequented by the likes of George Best’s son Calum and the former EastEnders actor Dean Gaffney. I saw both regularly chatting up glamour models and Page 3 girls. They sat at the club’s ‘top table’ with their manager Dave Read who had a lengthy roster of models to hook them up with.

Meanwhile, there were reported incidents of the vile sexual practice called ‘roasting’. I had my own near miss during a trip to Marbella in 2005, when a then well-known Premier League star invited me to a hotel room for a drink after a day at a pool party – only for two of his friends to appear afterwards.

I dashed out, feeling very lucky indeed to escape.

After the fall of Russell Brand, we can only hope women are safer within the entertainment industries and that other, better, men are ready to call out what they see.