It was an inspired choice to use “The Hall of the Mountain King” from Grieg’s to soundtrack the first few minutes of Netflix’s new Russell Brand documentary, . Playful and ominous, impish and terrifying, its accelerating tempo adds ghoulish anticipation to clips of Brand larking about in his tight T-shirted youth, his smile already greedy, his eyes seemingly full of foreboding. These clips would have seemed innocent enough at the time – but we all know, now, that they foreshadow the crimes this “rock star” of British comedy would go on to commit, and for which he has just begun a decade-long prison sentence.
Netflix is quick off the mark – Brand was sentenced only on Monday. Now that he has been convicted of rape and sexual assault in a court of law, a documentary that has clearly been months or years in the making can be released in all its darkness, telling the story not only of his downfall but of the hard work of journalists Rosamund Urwin and Charlotte Wace, who originally broke the story.
It also includes interviews with comedians Nish Kumar and Harriet Kemsley, actor and writer Sarah Solemani, Brand’s former flatmate, and three of his ex-girlfriends. One of them, Jordan Martin, speaks on camera about the abuse she allegedly suffered, both sexual assault and coercive control; and one of them is Georgina Baillie, granddaughter of actor Andrew Sachs and the person at the centre of Sachsgate, the Radio 2 scandal with Jonathan Ross that led to Brand resigning from the BBC.
Anyone who has been following the case, or even those who have seen resurfaced clips online, will be aware of how Brand’s abuse was – as the title puts it – an open secret in the TV and comedy industries. But seeing it all put together here, this new testimony from victims and verbatim re-enactments of key interviews – interspersed with footage from the grubby 2000s and Brand’s own tasteless, self-aggrandising jokes – feels different from reading news reports and solemn, moving statements from high court judges. This is nothing short of a horror movie.
At first, with developing into vague, terrifying rumbling in the background and the air thick with dramatic irony, Brand is positioned almost as a cartoon villain, the footage of his youth showing him as a familiar kind of Netflix-documentary figure. We are used to watching these films about cult leaders, ritual abusers and mass murderers and we know the drill: they grew up damaged, became kooky savants in adolescence and eventually grew into narcissists, psychopaths and misogynists.
We watch a clip of a young Brand with his father in which they recall a trip to Thailand when they each had sex with a prostitute in the same room. It’s prime for armchair psychoanalysis, slotting him into a stereotype that it’s all too easy to see with hindsight.
But what the documentary goes on to show is just how ordinary and acceptable his behaviour seemed to the public and the industry at the time – and how so many people enabled it, from Hollywood to the BBC to key figures on the both the left and right. What is so grossly affecting is the contrast between the inane glamour of it all – Brand the host of , Brand the eyebrow-raising guest on chat shows – and the deep, visceral harm he caused to the women who cannot speak about their experiences without breaking down.
What is most shocking is how he told us, multiple times, exactly who he was – that he was a “scumbag”, that he was “nasty”, that he’d done “terrible things”, even (in a comment assumed at the time to be in grim jest) that he “raped someone”. Meanwhile, his victims and industry witnesses who wanted to speak out were still gagged because they knew they wouldn’t be taken seriously.
For the women he assaulted, five minutes with Brand may have gone on to define the rest of their lives. Yet to Brand these incidents were non-events among thousands of sexual encounters that meant nothing to him. We see footage of him grabbing women on red carpets and in the audience of his comedy shows; kissing people at parties; leering at fans queuing for his autograph.
Baillie recalls how she would leave his house after sex and another woman would be coming straight up the path; in his pathetic book on released earlier this year, Brand wrote of the allegations that “if you own an orchard you don’t steal apples”. It’s a ludicrous thing to write for multiple reasons, but it’s also a phrase that depressingly summarises the way in which his promiscuity was used as a cover for his crimes – and evidence, perhaps, that to him there was little difference between a rape and consensual sex, so laser-focused was he on getting what he wanted.
In the programme, Harriet Kemsley talks about the climate of the 2000s and how “ladette” culture encouraged women to behave like men, then punished them for doing so; it was a decade in which we were not only encouraged to enjoy sexual freedom but not to take sex so seriously. Women were either sluts or they were frigid, and if you were a woman yourself you didn’t really want to be either. If you made sex a big deal, you were frigid – and if you had got to the point where you could accuse someone of rape, you were probably a slut.
That this was the prevailing attitude at the time Brand’s celebrity grew gargantuan was not a coincidence. These were the roles in which men and women were organised in pop culture and the media, as Brand abused and traumatised people in his flat, on film sets and in toilet cubicles with producers standing outside. He went onstage in his own comedy show and enacted a sexual encounter pretty much from start to finish, violently humping the air in a grotesque animal display. He climbed over rows of women in the audience to proposition one. He was known as a “shagger”, a “playboy”, a “cocksman”.
All of this meant that when was interviewed by Richard Herring in 2013, and deflected from a moment of vulnerability (after being asked if there was anything he was hiding) by saying: “I’m a bloke from Essex from a single-parent family that’s a pretty comprehensive show off – oh and also I raped someone once!” nobody batted an eyelid.
All of this meant that when he took to the stage in an interview with Richard Herring in 2013, and was asked if there was anything he was hiding, he could deflect from a moment of vulnerability by saying: “I’m a bloke from Essex from a single-parent family that’s a pretty comprehensive show off – oh and also I raped someone once!” – and nobody batted an eyelid.
We also hear from a woman known as “Nadia” who went to a rape crisis centre the day after the alleged incident, and whose testimony – of Brand pushing her against a wall and forcing himself inside her, a glazed look in his eyes, after she begged him to stop -was crucial to the investigation (we also hear it in full here, voiced by an actor, and see the haunting messages she exchanged with Brand afterwards in which he asks: “Will you ever forgive me? X”).
Baillie, Sachs’s granddaughter, says early on in the film that she was very promiscuous and called herself a slut so nobody else could. Brand was following the same formula. He called himself a rapist so nobody else could.
His turn to the alt-right around the time of the pandemic – which was also when investigation began – is evidence of just how much of a charlatan he really was. But it took him filming conspiracy videos about vaccines for the star to be ostracised by the left – who had previously held him up as a cool, youthful mouthpiece for the progressive agenda – and by the mainstream, where he was valued as an eccentric bad boy.
The pivot was a clever move from him – he knew the tide was turning (Urwin began her investigation in 2019) and, once again, got ahead of it by attempting to discredit any person or institution who might come out against him. But it shouldn’t have taken Bible readings online or dressing like a cult leader for the public to realise that he already was one.
Abusive men try to justify themselves in all sorts of ways. They construct entire ideologies to brainwash people into submitting to their sadistic desires. They twist and weaponise science and religion. They blame their troubled childhoods, or smear the reputations of those they have harmed to stop them speaking out. What this documentary shows is that Brand didn’t need to do any of that. He was controlling and entitled and violent and damaged, and yet he did not need to implement any villainous schemes to indulge his worst impulses because he slotted easily into a culture that already existed.
The trail of destruction he left in his wake is unthinkable and irreparable. And what is most difficult to stomach is that it seems we made it easy for him.
‘Russell Brand: Open Secret’ is streaming on Netflix