Being a vocal socialist means I don’t get asked to celeb bashes or red carpet shindigs. But very occasionally, an unexpected invite arrives and I sometimes accept.

One of those was in 2013, to a party thrown by Jemima Goldsmith at some posh venue. It was to celebrate one of the first TV documentaries she’d produced. She was with Russell Brand, her partner at the time. I have always thought he was brash, his manner and behaviours repulsive. Why was this graceful woman drawn to him?   

I admire Jemima and had interviewed her about her abiding love for Pakistan, where she’d lived as Imran Khan’s wife. It was for my book, published in 2015.  

She and Brand were gliding easily around the room, packed with monied and famed folk, including Mick Jagger, to whom I was introduced. I realised this was a tribe with shared cultural understandings, loyalties and lifestyles.

Sometimes pressures build and break the codes of silence. Jemima Goldsmith has now revealed that she had called the police in July 2014 during a violent incident. She broke up with Brand and now accuses him of “violence, coercive control and abuse”. This follows revelations about a harassment injunction Goldsmith and Brand obtained in 2015 against a woman who, Goldsmith says, had sent threatening and antisemitic messages. The woman had been booked to give Brand a massage at Goldsmith’s house and alleged that he had assaulted her.

Goldsmith, who helped journalists investigating Brand’s historic abuse of young women, is being unfairly, viciously slated online.  

Lurid allegations about David Walliams’s “predatory” behaviours are now filling the pages and screens. His lawyers tried and failed to get an injunction to stop such coverage. The allegations, at present, are legally untested and unproven, and Walliams denies them.

But some stars in the comedy circuit and women working in his publishing house are speaking out. The comedian Lucy Beaumont told Sky News and the about her suspicions. She claims no one else in the comedy business is prepared to take that risk. They turn a blind eye, because “… you’re seen as you might be a trouble causer”. In 2023 she said: “Comedy attracts such interesting, passionate, raw, edgy, wounded people – but it also attracts predatory men who are really messed up and sexually have been repressed for years. And they get a bit of fame and display these behaviours.” Agents, channels, festivals know – but do nothing.

Parts of the entertainment industries, publishing and media cover up the misdemeanours of such rogue men. Worse than that, when revelations tumble out, denials sweep in. One night in 2008, Jonathan Ross, was with Brand on BBC Radio 2, when the pair left obscene voice messages on actor Andrew Sachs’s voicemail about his granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. The infantile blokes found that hilarious. Ofcom didn’t. Ross apologised both privately and publicly for his “juvenile and thoughtless” remarks.

Now Ross says he was unaware of Walliams’s conduct. In 2004, he shared this joke while hosting the British Comedy Awards:  “The comedy awards is 15 years old – 15 years old! And like most 15-year-olds, it’s drunk, it’s unpredictable and it’s probably going home with David Walliams.” Ross said in a statement on Tuesday that the joke was written for him by the British Comedy Awards team. But why was that considered an acceptable punchline?

To me, the mainly British Pakistani groomers in many of our towns like Rotherham are part of that same appalling reality. They found young girls, spoke to them nicely, gave them food and kindness, then raped them. Victims were treated as if they were nothing. The abusers were protected by their kith and kin, the disdain shared by police and social workers.

I thought of this when one of Brand’s victims told the court how, after he had anally raped her, the abuser told her to “clear up the mess you’ve made”. The wife of one jailed groomer told me years back that the girls deserved no respect because they did anal sex and were dirty. She stood by her man. As have many other such wives.

Men from all races and backgrounds chase, charm or entrap young women and girls and use them for sex. Brand has been convicted; Pakistani rapists of white girls are in prison. But females will never be safe while circles of the rich and powerful or defensive ethnic and religious communities bound by unspeakable allegiances, shield the violators.