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Are The Sexual Assault Allegations Against Russell Brand His Punishment For Questioning The Left?

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Danny Masterson is an actor most people haven’t thought about for a long time, if at all. By all accounts, his career peaked all the way back in 2006, with the conclusion of the sitcom “That 70’s Show.” But a few years ago, all of a sudden, Masterson’s name was everywhere. That’s because in March of 2017 — the year the #MeToo movement began in earnest — Masterson was accused of sexual assault by three women. In response, without waiting for a trial, Netflix summarily fired Masterson from his role as a series regular on one of their shows. Three years later, in the summer of 2020, Masterson was formally charged with three rapes in Los Angeles, a jurisdiction that “believes all women.” Prosecutors said one rape occurred in 2001, another in early 2003, and a third in late 2003.

Right off the bat, the timeline raises some obvious questions. For one thing, how is it possible to prove rape beyond a reasonable doubt, 20 years after the fact, in the absence of any physical evidence of violence or drugging? You might think that the accusers must have had airtight stories. But that’s not true in this case. In fact, one of the accusers previously told authorities that Masterson had not raped her. She says that she only realized years later that she was raped. She originally thought it was consensual, and then — years after the fact — changed her mind. All of this explains why, late last year, the jury deadlocked. There was a mistrial. According to the foreman on that jury, they were leaning towards acquittal on every count. He said that they found the stories from the accusers to be inconsistent, contradictory, and implausible. 

But then, just a couple of weeks ago, as you might have heard, Masterson was put on trial again. And this time around, the judge changed the rules. The judge allowed testimony that Masterson had drugged his victims, even though there was no physical evidence of that. In the first trial, the prosecution was only allowed to describe the condition of the accusers after they consumed alcoholic beverages that Masterson gave them, describing them as woozy and disoriented. They weren’t allowed to directly claim that the women were drugged because there was no evidence of that — no evidence that their wooziness was the result of anything more than the alcohol they were drinking. In the second trial, that kind of caution was thrown to the wind, and — again without any actual evidence — Masterson was accused of drugging his alleged victims. That apparently did the trick, and Masterson was convicted after the retrial. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

You don’t have to like Danny Masterson, or know who he is, or believe he’s innocent, to understand the implications of what happened to him. Danny Masterson’s case is proof that, even in 2023, years after the #MeToo hysteria has faded, physical evidence of wrongdoing is not required to convict someone of rape and destroy their life — neither is timely reporting, or a consistent story from the alleged victims. All you need is a story. Danny Masterson’s case demonstrates that. 

For one thing, that means our judicial system isn’t exactly functioning the way it should. But you knew that already. What Masterson’s case also means, if you think about it from the perspective of the government, is that accusations of rape are trivially easy to use as political weapons. Masterson’s own case doesn’t appear to be political, but it shows how easy it could be, and has been, to use a rape accusation to achieve a political end. You’d hate to think that false stories about rape could ever be deployed for these kinds of purposes — to ruin the lives of influential voices who challenge the people in power — but increasingly, that’s exactly what’s happening. 

A few days ago, the influential comedian and commentator Russell Brand uploaded this video, explaining that he’s now being accused of sexual assault by multiple media outlets. Watch:

We don’t know exactly who these women are, who are accusing Brand of sexual misconduct. But The Daily Wire reports that these incidents allegedly occurred between 2006 and 2013. So, like the accusations against Masterson, these sexual assaults allegedly occurred at the height of Russell Brand’s mainstream fame. And yet, strangely enough, without any explanation, these accusations are only coming up now, many years later. The whole lengthy story with all of the allegations is laid out in a Channel 4 documentary and in The Times. You can read the details for yourself if you pay for a subscription to The Times. That’s because they launched a series of allegations against Brand, and then immediately put the accusations behind a paywall. 

It’s too early to say right now exactly what’s really happening, or what really happened all those years ago. We can’t prejudge this case, of course. But one thing we can say with certainty is that Russell Brand is a far bigger threat to this nation’s power brokers now than he was at the height of his fame — back when he was married to Katy Perry and starring in Hollywood films and living, as he said, a very promiscuous lifestyle. Anyone who watches Russell Brand’s videos knows that. But really, Brand’s turn to unorthodox thinking began roughly a decade ago. It was in 2013 that Brand was ejected from the GQ Awards show for noting, in his acceptance speech, that a sponsor of the show had previously made uniforms for the Nazis.

From that point on, Brand became something of a pariah in the entertainment industry. And in recent years, his views have only become more intolerable to those in power. In particular, Brand has heterodox views on the integrity of U.S. elections. He doesn’t toe the line on January 6th. And perhaps most consequentially, he’s extraordinarily critical of Big Pharma. He doesn’t believe, as the rest of the corporate media does, that you should reflexively trust the pharmaceutical companies, and ingest every drug they give you. And he made his views known. Here he was with Bill Maher for example:

That’s not something you’re supposed to say out loud. And it’s hard not to notice that people who say things like this out loud tend to get in a lot of trouble. You might remember what happened to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. O’Keefe exposed a high-ranking Pfizer official admitting, among other things, that his company is conducting secret gain-of-function research on coronaviruses right here in the United States. The Pfizer official then freaked out when he realized he was on camera. What happened next? The Pfizer official wasn’t publicly fired. Instead, O’Keefe was publicly fired. Funny how that works out.

Is Russell Brand being targeted for the same reasons? Already, his agent and several organizations have cut ties with him. So he appears to be on the same trajectory. To be clear we don’t know whether Russell Brand is innocent or guilty, just like we don’t know if Danny Masterson is innocent or guilty. But there are obvious reasons to doubt stories that surface several years after the fact, especially when witnesses contradict the narrative. As you just heard, that’s what Russell Brand says is happening.

One woman just posted a video claiming that British media reached out to her for a documentary on Brand, but didn’t use her story because she said her interactions with Brand were all consensual and positive. Watch:

Well, that’s interesting. If you were making a film about sexual assault accusations against a famous person from several years ago, you’d think you’d want to gather all the relevant evidence and present it. But if you wanted to create a hit piece, you’d ignore the witnesses you don’t like, and present the ones with the most salacious stories possible. And it appears, based on that video, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Now, Brand’s critics will argue that just because the woman in that video says she wasn’t raped, that doesn’t mean that other women weren’t raped. A rapist isn’t going to abuse every woman he comes across, presumably. But the point is that if you are dredging up accusations from years and years ago, and you have no evidence that anything happened, then all you can do is theorize and make assumptions. The best you’ll end up with is an educated guess. But it’s not possible to make an educated guess without being presented the full picture — the full story — of what sort of person the accused was at the time when he allegedly did the things he was accused of doing. If you are a journalist only presenting part of the picture, and leaving out the parts that don’t lead to your preferred conclusion, then you are not a journalist at all. You are an assassin, looking to kill someone’s reputation. 

We’ve seen this again and again. The moment someone becomes a threat to the establishment, the accusations of sexual assault materialize from thin air. We see it at the Supreme Court, with Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. We saw it with Trump, too. He was a billionaire celebrity playboy but was never accused of sexual assault until he became a threat to the Left. Even Tucker Carlson was accused of sexual misconduct at the height of his show’s success. Those accusations were absurd on their face and never went anywhere. But that’s not how these things usually play out. 

Whatever you think of Dave Portnoy, the accusations against him follow a similar pattern. Portnoy isn’t even particularly political, and I certainly wouldn’t call him conservative. But during COVID, he did something you’re not supposed to do. He noticed that the government’s lockdowns were destroying small businesses — and that the feds’ so-called pandemic relief fund wasn’t covering these businesses’ losses, not even close. So Portnoy, through his company, raised millions of dollars for businesses, as long as they kept employing their workers throughout the lockdowns. That got the attention of the government. A year later, he was accused of — can you guess? — sexual misconduct:

NBC News didn’t verify the accusations, but of course, they were happy to repeat them. It’s a familiar story. This is the inevitable result of “believe all women.” This is the legacy of #MeToo. You can either do what you’re told, or the most powerful forces in the country will try to destroy you.

With respect to Russell Brand, we’re left with two possibilities: one is that Brand is an innocent man being smeared by the mainstream media. I don’t know for sure if this is what’s happening here or not — nobody can know — and that’s how the game is played. Just by printing the accusation, you have forever tarnished a man’s reputation whether it’s true or not. After all, the most that even his most ardent defenders can say is that he’s probably not a rapist. This is what makes the media’s willingness to print accusations — no matter how credible or incredible they are — so sinister. They know that the accusations will devastate a man’s life and reputation even if there’s no evidence to support them. Even if they’re debunked and refuted.

But there’s another possibility here. The other possibility is that the media’s claims are true. In that scenario, Brand is a known serial rapist who victimized multiple women for years during the height of his fame. That’s what the media is saying. It’s what they want us to believe. But here’s the thing: if THAT’S true it makes the media arguably even worse than if they were inventing these claims out of whole cloth. It means that they left Brand alone — they allowed him to continue abusing women, for years and years — until he said things they disagreed with. Both of those options are horrific in their own way. And in either case, it’s clear who the real enemy is.

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The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  Are The Sexual Assault Allegations Against Russell Brand His Punishment For Questioning The Left?