Ben Shapiro defends Russell Brand, says he is being targeted for his political views
Shapiro: “Do I think that Russell Brand today is a good person? Yes. I think that Russell Brand today is a good person.”
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From the September 18, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): So the news that has engulfed much of the legacy media, it's engulfed the British media for sure, a lot of the media here in the United States is this massive expose, supposed expose from the Sunday Times in the UK accusing Russell Brand -- a person I consider a friend -- of rape, sexual assault, and abuse from the period 2006 to 2013. Now, I didn't know Russell Brand at that time. My guess if I had known Russell Brand, I wouldn't have liked Russell Brand very much at that time, considering that Russell Brand by his own admission in all of his writings and in all of his statements has basically admitted to being a sex addict and incredibly promiscuous and a person who I would be considered to have engaged in incredibly vile behavior during that entire period.
And then, Russell Brand has remade himself. And in the period where I've known Russell, which is really the past 3 or 4 years, Russell has been a person who is searching for something meaningful. He has settled down. Obviously, he's married. He has kids. He's a person who's been trying to put together a good life. Now, can I attest to Russell Brand's character from 2006 to 2013? I -- again, I cannot. I did not know him at that point. Do I think that Russell Brand today is a good person? Yes. I think that Russell Brand today is a good person.
Now, is it possible that you're mistaken about people you think you know? Sure, that's possible too. But here is my problem with this particular attack on Russell Brand from the media. My problem is the timing. During the time that Russell Brand was pretty flagrantly and obviously not only promiscuous, but incredibly vile in the sorts of things that he said publicly about sex and about women and all the rest of this sort of stuff, the media were championing him. He was a hero of the left at this time, when he was engaged in this sort of behavior. He was --- he was treated as some sort of person to emulate at this time.
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Now 10 years later, when Russell Brand has fixed his life and is trying to make a better life for himself, now he gets hit with a full scale Sunday Times expose about all of these women. Now we're gonna go through some of the allegations with which Russell has been hit here.
Russell has denied all of the allegations. And again, in every situation when you're talking about, like, a 10 year, 15, 20-year ago situation, it is what he said, she said. There's just no way to verify one way or the other whether somebody is telling the truth or whether they are not, absent some sort of DNA evidence. And even DNA evidence isn't gonna fully explain what exactly happened if a man and a woman are in a room together because consent or non-consent is a matter of behavior in the moment. It is not something that can be evidenced by physical evidence, typically, unless you're talking about, god forbid, some sort of, like, full on murderous rape or something.
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The real question I have here is why the sudden interest by the media in all these stories now? Meaning, all these stories have been floating around for 15, 10 years, over a decade. And only now do they see fit to actually track down all the women who slept with Russell Brand and try to find some who will make allegations, or who believe that that they were victims of rape or sexual assault from Russell Brand. And all I can imagine here is that Russell Brand crossed a particular political line that, if he had still been on the right side of the line, the media definitely would not have been going after him. Because you have to -- you do have to learn about the motivations. What exactly changed?
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The media were not only uninterested, they were paying him. 10 years later, when Russell has -- he's, by the way, not a right winger -- when Russell has just decided that he is not in favor of a lot of sort of left wing narratives ranging from COVID to to wokeness, when that happens, suddenly you have a coordinated attack, a coordinated investigation between the Sunday Times and the Channel 4 News in Britain. I find the timing at least somewhat suspicious. When I say "somewhat", I mean a lot suspicious.