12.11.2026

Celebrity culture in the dock

With the conviction of Russell Brand on one count of rape and three of sexual assault, and now the David Walliams allegations, Paul Demarty calls for self-critical reflection on the left and a healthier, more egalitarian sexual culture

Three years after allegations of rape first broke in the media, Russell Brand has been convicted of a series of sexual crimes.

Of the seven charges for which he was eventually tried, Brand was found guilty on four - three of sexual assault and one of anal rape - for which his sentence is ten and a half years. The police are investigating two further allegations, and many more are circulating. The charges (so far) all refer to incidents that took place in the 2000s, when Brand was at the height of his fame as a risqué popular comedian and his reputation as a sexually voracious philanderer was already in place.

Few indeed are his defenders now, but some attention must be paid to the strange life he has led since then. In the mid-2010s, he decided - oddly - to get political all of a sudden. His orientation at that time fit his general presentation as a ‘Wildean rake’ - anarchistic, but definitely of the left. He was part of the furniture, for a time, of the anti-austerity movement. This culminated with his guest-editing of a New Statesman issue on the theme of “revolution” (by all accounts, this did not involve him doing much actual work) and then publishing a book of the same name - a strange follow-up to his memoir, My booky-wook.

Thenceforth, he became a political influencer, an early example of the species. His presence among the left was always controversial. Millennial feminist suspicion of his right-on bona fides - given his general habit of carrying on with groupies, like the lead guitarist of an ’80s band - was rife.

That in turn yielded Mark Fisher’s notorious essay, ‘Exiting the vampire castle’, which defended Brand in a remorseless philippic against the censorious mores of modern identity politics. Fisher’s own fame made this essay the first counterblast against the identitarian turn in left politics outside of small journals like this one; it is, let us say, unfortunate that, on the specific point of departure, his adversaries turned out to be correct, and there is therefore a certain amount of score-settling going on. Fisher, having died by suicide in 2017, is not around to defend himself; but others who bigged up Brand in his ‘revolutionary’ period are. Owen Jones is under pressure, and not only him.

Brand faded somewhat from prominence - celebrity leftism is a fickle beast - but there was another twist to come with the Covid pandemic. Brand’s soft-focus anarchism led him to a hard turn against the public health measures of that time. He was absorbed into the ‘anti-Covidian’ conspiracy world, ranting about the World Economic Forum and the ‘great reset’ and so on. This, inevitably, pulled him into the orbit of the ‘new right’, which was - more or less - where he could be found at the time that rape allegations were reported by the Sunday Times and Channel 4. Having flirted with Christianity, he now formally converted and was baptised in the Thames by celebrity survivalist Bear Grylls. It seems now that god was wise enough to let his call go to voicemail.

Celebrity

As we wrote back in 2023, his bizarre political trajectory is surely not unconnected to the rape allegations surfacing when and how they did; yet only a truly blinkered superfan could deny, at this point, that they were nevertheless at least partly true. They were also not surprising. That is the trouble with shagging everything that moves, after all: one inevitably drifts into ‘grey areas’ of consent, and from there over lines that definitely should not be crossed.

It is an article of faith of contemporary ‘sex positivity’ that rape is not a product of sexual desire, but the desire to inflict violence; this is in fact false (studies of straight male sexual desire, for example, find that the age distribution of desirable women maps closely onto the age distribution of victims of rape). As that most libertine of ’80s bands, Jane’s Addiction, put it, “sex is violent!” There is no bright line between the two, which coexist murkily, especially in male psychology. The question is one of restraint and the cultivation of healthy desire, whether obtained by social sanction or by quaintly old-fashioned individual virtue.

Thus, also in the dock - in principle, if not in messy legal reality - is the whole system of capitalist celebrity culture that indulged Brand’s sexual misconduct. In the years concerned, popular media was “intensely relaxed”, as Peter Mandelson would put it, about Brand’s behaviour. He won the Sun’s coveted “shagger of the year” award for three years running. Brand himself described his early fame as being “thrown into a washing machine of tits and money”.

Capitalist ideology, after all, must always be an ideology of desert - the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, everyone in their right place. The particular ideology of modern celebrity culture dramatises this in the form of the star: a heroic individual, exceptional in their beauty and talent, whose fame is readily, if mysteriously, connected to their charisma (a word derived, after all, from the ‘gifts of the Spirit’ enumerated in the Pauline corpus of the New Testament). The movie star, the pop singer, the priapic comedian: all are intensified - and typically more pleasant - images of the capitalist entrepreneur.

Three classes

To both these classes of persons, nothing is denied: such is precisely the grain of truth in the problematic phrase, ‘Epstein class’. Yet, as with the Epstein clique, occasional disclosures of depravity are unavoidable on a long-enough timeline. Brand’s personal history as an award-winning shagger, and personal present as a fringe political ideologue, rendered him exceptionally vulnerable to such disclosures, since their impact could be readily contained, unlike the chaotic drip-drip of the Epstein affair. It is a short hop from fame to infamy: the appearance of exceptional character is easily transformed into an appearance of exceptional malignancy. The tabloid press, and its modern digital equivalents, is designed to manage such transitions.

There remains, then, the matter of drawing lessons from this sorry business. Two matters present themselves: one of leftwing political hygiene, and another - more fundamental - of the long-term equality of the sexes.

On the first, we must return to the readiness with which Brand was welcomed into the fold as a celebrity, rather than an ordinary comrade who happened to have an unusually large following in wider society. Mark Fisher defended him thus:

I’ve long been an admirer of Brand - one of the few big-name comedians on the current scene to come from a working class background … I had seen Brand’s stand-up show, Messiah complex, in Ipswich. The show was defiantly pro-immigrant, pro-communist, anti-homophobic, saturated with working class intelligence and not afraid to show it, and queer in the way that popular culture used to be (ie, nothing to do with the sour-faced identitarian piety foisted upon us by moralisers on the post-structuralist ‘left’).

But this was not good enough for the ‘vampires’:

For the moralisers, the dominant story was to be about Brand’s personal conduct - specifically his sexism. In the febrile McCarthyite atmosphere fermented by the moralising left, remarks that could be construed as sexist mean that Brand is a sexist, which also meant that he is a misogynist. Cut and dried, finished, condemned.¹

Given the events of recent years, this has aged badly, but it should be said in Fisher’s defence that the accusations against Brand at that time were, precisely, of common-or-garden male chauvinism, not serial sexual violence. The problems are rather that a working-class background is elided with membership of the working class per se, first of all (Fisher complains that some had asked how a millionaire could be working class, as if that was a ridiculous question); and, above all, in the sheer excitement of someone famous finally talking our language. By the end of his life, Fisher was obsessed with somehow cutting through like this, which was a regression from his best work.

Even more so Owen Jones, whose career as a significant public figure has been characterised by the search for an appropriate great helmsman, judged invariably by their temporary popularity. He was, not long ago, a big fan of the rogue financier, Gary Stevenson; more recently, he is a camp follower of Zack Polanski; others will no doubt follow. Politics in the Jones mould is entirely a matter of charisma. It is no surprise that he should have been so enamoured of Brand at the time.

The point here is not to be wise after the fact, but to indicate a more fundamental weakness of this obsession with short-term ‘cutting through’. Capitalist celebrity culture is its own structure, with its own laws. It cannot be ignored, any more than we can avoid speaking in this language rather than that. Yet we must not lose sight of the basic idea that socialist politics is about the working class and broader popular classes taking power for themselves. Capitalist celebrity culture is an instrument for preventing this from happening. There is always a tension there.

For a more recent example, the US midterm elections have thrown up the character of Abdul el-Sayed - a ferociously eloquent and talented individual, now elected to the Senate from Michigan. He is not a socialist, but perhaps he is recruitable. Really recruiting him, however, would mean him placing his talents under the accountability and discipline of an organisation. Relating to him merely as fans accomplishes nothing in this regard. It therefore cannot contribute to the building up of the power of the masses as such: their office, in this scheme, is to wait for rain and sunshine from above.

Egalitarian

This itself poses the second problem - of a more egalitarian sexual culture in broader society. The second-wave feminists were right, at least, that abuses of the Brand sort are fundamentally a male problem. This may be wholly a problem of culture and socialisation, or it may be partly a matter of basic human biology (it cannot be wholly a matter of basic human biology, since human species being is irreducibly social and cultural); and so, in either case, social norms and structures are the lever we have available to mitigate or fix this problem.

Capitalist celebrity culture, as we have argued, is entirely opposed to this goal, as were premodern social forms that gave ruling classes the right to the bodies of their slaves and serfs. Yet other kinds of normative structures are out there. Extant hunter-gatherer tribes have elaborate mechanisms for disciplining men who get too big for their boots; it is reasonable to assume that similar structures held in the vast extent of human history, when we more or less universally lived in such societies.

This is not something we want to copy. These are typically societies with strictly fixed gender roles, that happen to be fixed in such a way that more or less guarantees broad equality between the sexes. We should not want to give up the self-determination partly won in the social struggles of the modern period. Yet really generalising this self-determination means collectively determining its limits. Christopher Lasch, in his magnum opus, The true and only heaven, errs in finding the best expression of this idea in the ‘morality of the petty bourgeoisie’ (his words, not mine), but is surely correct that a realism about human limitations is essential to republican thought.

So we impose limits: in place of the centralised machinery of mass culture, we must fight for a genuinely popular culture, where the line between producers and consumers is radically permeable; and, alongside that, democratic forms of popular power that can legitimately enforce egalitarian taboos on sexual misconduct. Neither naive, liberal sex-positivity nor bureaucratic-conservative sexual regulation will answer to this need, as amply demonstrated by the history of sexuality in the modern period, and - in a small way - by the criminal career of Russell Brand.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20131129003704/https://thenorthstar.info/?p=11299↩︎