How 2000s lad culture helped Russell Brand to hide in plain sight

Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual acts

No British celebrity navigated the cultural changes of the early 21st Century better than Russell Brand.

His life has been one long personal rebrand.

He morphed from provocative stand-up comic to TV star and Hollywood actor. He became a YouTuber and political activist, taking up left-wing causes around issues of inequality in the 2010s, then Covid conspiracies and in 2024 supporting Donald Trump for President. That same year he was baptised as a Christian in London's River Thames.

Now he has a new persona to try on: convicted rapist.

On Thursday, the disgraced comedian was found guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault at Southwark Crown Court, following a three-week trial.

As he faces jail, it's clear that the behaviour that formed the backdrop to Brand's prosecution is the same behaviour that helped elevate him in the first place.

Brand shot to fame as a sexually outrageous libertine whose risque humour thrilled audiences.

He cultivated the image of an insatiable, shameless womaniser. Sex, drugs and excess were central to his comic material.

Over the decade of his offending, Brand sold out stand-up comedy venues and theatres, broadcasters - including MTV, Channel 4 and the BBC - started to throw money at him.

With his backcombed hair and drainpipe black jeans, Brand regaled audiences at his stand-up comedy gigs with the graphic details of his sexual exploits: anal sex, prostitutes and orgies.

He simulated masturbation and sex on stage. He said he liked oral sex with women "where it goes in their neck a little bit" and their "mascara runs a little bit," acting it out on stage.

Even Brand's own barrister called the humour "a product of its time," reminding the jury in the trial that this graphic sexualised comedy was viewed as "radical and different" back then.

Barely a generation later, many will view it as deeply rooted misogyny dressed up as humour. But these were different times.

The late nineties and early noughties in Britain were an era that celebrated casual sexism and often elevated celebrities who espoused it.

In 1999, FHM projected a naked photo of the Scottish TV presenter Gail Porter on to the Houses of Parliament. She only found out when she saw it on the news, and spoke later about how it deeply affected her mental health.

What might now be termed toxic masculinity was often deemed funny, seen by some as good old-fashioned male humour. By others it was viewed as palatable because they believed it was being done with an apparently ironic eyebrow raise.

"There is no question he was a very talented stand-up," says Sarah Ditum, author of Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties. "There was an appetite for taboo breaking.

"I think it looks very old hat if you look back on that stuff. It's dated horribly and I don't think many people are going to be keen to defend Brand's act now knowing that it reflected his real world behaviour rather than an ironic performance."

But there were clues at the time that his outrageous stage act did not stop when the show ended - most publicly in his 2007 bestselling memoir, My Booky Wook.

"I'm a bloke from Grays with a good job and a terrific haircut who's been given a Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory 'cos of ol' fame."

Of course, many of his sexual partners consented. As his defence barrister told the jury "he devoted himself for many years to a highly promiscuous life", reminding them that "having lots of sex is completely lawful".

My Booky Wook, which topped the Sunday Times bestseller chart for seven weeks in 2007 and sold 600,000 copies in hardback in the UK, opens with him checking into a clinic for sex addiction. He writes about going to lap dancing clubs and having "a lot" of oral sex in toilets and many threesomes.

"The rules change when you're famous. In that case two is often better than either none or one."

He writes about how an MTV PR "reminded me that I put lap dances and prostitutes on her gold card and got the hotel to give me cash on her account without her prior knowledge".

The Observer called it "a scandalous, libidinous memoir that is better written and more entertaining than any number of celebrity autobiographies that clog the shelves".

Heat said: "You come away from the book feeling like you really know - and like - the real Russell."

You can't imagine a celebrity these days writing a memoir in which he claims that at stage school a primetime actress, whom he names, "kissed me once in a corridor" and for years afterwards he'd tell people "'I had sex with her… And by sex, I mean bumming'".

But it's all told in a jokey, revelatory way, by "a bloke from Essex who likes birds with big bottoms and big boobs…. Lovely dolly-birds".

In light of his offending, writing that was celebrated for being frank, honest - and very funny - now looks anything but.

People "are willing to mistake irony and self-awareness for truth telling and trustworthiness," says Ditum. "The idea that he made these jokes about being this kind of sexual monster was supposed to convince you that he wasn't actually a sexual monster in real life."

Did normalising his behaviour allow him to hide in plain sight? Were the media companies who embraced him, the comedy venues who promoted him, the audiences who laughed at his humour, in some way complicit?

A former TV boss who didn't want to be named explained the thinking of his peers like this: "You've got this charismatic presenter who appears to be very, very good and you don't want to lose that.

"The women who were being persecuted didn't feel empowered to speak up and the few who did feel empowered might have been classed as troublemakers but certainly weren't really listened to because you didn't want to lose the star. That was the process."

Indeed, in Brand's trial, one of the complainants told the court she didn't report what had happened to her because she didn't think she would be believed in "those laddish culture times".

"It was my word against his," she said in her evidence.

Jo Caulfield, a contemporary of Brand's on the early noughties stand-up circuit, says she initially found him "utterly charming" but she sees that he was "enabled and nobody will say anything against it".

"People have people around them, promoters, assistants in TV. It's in the hierarchy of TV. If a runner [an entry-level production assistant] goes to his dressing room and he gets his knob out, it's like, 'oh, come on, don't make a fuss.'"

And while safeguarding standards have been heavily tightened in some parts of the entertainment world, she says it "still goes on".

"Nobody wants to upset the star. This person is making them money so everybody down the food chain better not say anything if they behave badly," says Caulfield.

At the end of My Booky Wook, Brand writes "I have done some terrible things over the course of this booky wook… I mean, over my life."

We now understand quite how terrible.