Russell Brand Part 1

Introduction

0:00Michael Hobbs is talking like my little sounds yeah all of it because I was just texting my friend I was probably just like making little sounds I like that you know one of your main sounds which is no because I hear myself doing it I'm like how many times have I done that in the

0:31last like five minutes I think I told you about being with hanging out with my brother and uh him sitting down and going yeah I was like that's how old we are we're the age where we do that and he went it feels better it feels it actually feels better I'm with your brother on this one I mean I don't think he's wrong but I just think it was funny that I was like oh yeah you and me were in the same boat and he got real defensive uh what do you have well I have two okay I think I know which one I'm doing give me an a let's a b test it let's a b test option a here we go

Podcast Introduction

1:04hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that has a cadence of jokes but are there jokes oh my god that's a spoiler for episode two you can't spoil the second part this is okay you're ready for option b all right b okay do it hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase our potty wadcast oh my god dude you're gonna make me say the title of this fucking book aren't you he wrote a book called my bookie wook I hate it I would say I have followed about as much of russell brand's career as your average bear right like aware of big starring movie roles aware of his

1:39work on like panel shows and doing stand-up uh particularly in the 2000s and early 2010s in the uk and then aware of his criminal charges and of his baptism there's been quite the pivot the last couple years we're gonna get into it there sure is and I am aware that he has been showing up at fucking maha events oh yeah as well like he he endorsed trump like it's not it's not like oh he's leaning toward the right he's a full-on just explicit right winger at this point we took our little divergence away from current events and now we're like half back in but say

Host Introductions

2:14your name we haven't like done the names yet oh you want to do a tiny repeating machine I'm ready I'm Aubrey Gordon I'm Michael Hobbs uh if you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase you can also subscribe through apple podcast it's the same audio content same stuff Aubrey Michael today today we are talking about a comedian who is unique in his annoyingness I was actually I was

2:45watching one of his videos from like I don't know 2007 or something yesterday he said something and I sort of laughed and I was like why does this feel so weird I was like it's the first time I've laughed in like three weeks I will say I first came to know Russell Brand I'm a person who has followed as much as you can from the U.S. has like followed British comedy yeah and the jokes about Russell Brand were like it was like a bunch of jokes being like mothers lock up your daughters I know I know oh yeah and he was like married to Katy Perry yes in one of the most chaotic wellness marriages we

3:21will come I know I know also divorced her by text he sort of falls off after a while yeah and then he pops back up with these sexual assault allegations right yes this is the story we are going to be telling today how this guy who was a stand-up comedian then an actor then a fairly credible

Russell Brand's Career

3:42left-wing figure during like the Occupy Wall Street era becomes a wellness influencer great and then slowly becomes a straightforward right-wing influencer and you know fundamentalist Christian the kind of guy who has numerous videos about how DEI is a forced agenda and there's gender ideology in the schools like he's one of the canonical examples of the far left to wellness to right-wing pipeline right so

Trigger Warning

4:14that is what we are going to be doing over the course of the next uh two episodes and before we do it we have to issue the most fucking omni trigger warning we've ever had on the show these episodes are going to include fucking animal cruelty like child sexual abuse and like everything you can imagine is going to be in these episodes so like fair warning here we fucking go so Russell Brand is born in 1975 in Essex when he's six months old his parents separate so he's basically raised by a single mom it sounds like his mom is like really nice and like a really positive presence in his life his father is this kind of

4:51mercurial presence where he will like disappear for months or years on end and then like come back and like shower Russell with gifts and do the like hey man it's great I'm gonna be around a lot more these days you know and then disappear again yeah kind of classic deadbeat dad shit just a disappointment

Russell Brand's Book

5:09factory yeah exactly so you know the book is framed around his treatment for sex addiction so the book starts kind of in a like record scratch I'll bet you're wondering how I got into the situation kind of thing where he's in sex addiction inpatient treatment in Philadelphia and then the book kind of rewinds to be like well how did I end up in sex addiction treatment right I've never read a celebrity memoir that has this much fucking sex in it and it's much like womanizing but also I guess his excuse is like well that's sort of the theme is that like I've been struggling with sex addiction

Russell Brand's Behavior

5:41so we start getting like really worrying sex stuff as early as like the first chapter of the book yeah give me an example of really worrying sex stuff so he has a thing where he has an aunt who like I was like busty and like has big boobs and he's kind of like obsessed with big boobs throughout the book and he sort of schemes as like a four or five year old to be in the bathroom while she's showering so he can like watch her shower oh the way that he remembers this is kind of like ah ha ha like I managed to be in the bathroom while she was showering like what a little rascal he also

6:16started reading his dad's pornography fairly young this is the 70s and 80s so there isn't like you

Russell Brand's Sex Addiction

6:22know internet pornography or anything yeah yeah so you find a box of magazines or whatever so his dad is like I don't playboy hustler whatever the UK's equivalent are yeah but it appears this is like very young like four five six kind of thing he's like reading through his dad's pornography he also I think when he's seven or eight he's he's a bit unclear on the timeline at various points but at seven or eight he's abused by his babysitter I think his babysitter probably brought up masturbation the babysitter was like 16 or 17 years old and little Russell was like oh well what's masturbation and

6:53then his babysitter's like I'll show you so he is naked standing in the shower as his babysitter jerks off oh so he's sexually abused there's no like touching or anything but like it's definitely an act of abuse yes yeah that is yes he also starts to exhibit I think like the personality trait that explains his entire political ideology where he seems to be totally oppositional to any figure of authority so he talks about getting in trouble in school like from a fairly young age he says my mom did

7:24numerous jobs taking me with her until I began play school where I was frequently in trouble having daily tantrums when she left me behind it's a bit ridiculous to get in trouble at play school I remember inspecting the spittle flecked faces of senselessly enraged adults looming like ogres thinking well this all seemed like a bit of a storm in a teacup I was awake as a child I knew it was nonsense over and over again in the book he gets in trouble for various things but there's no point

Russell Brand's Mental Health

7:51at which he ever recognizes the authority of someone who is mad at him even in preschool he's like oh this is unjust is there any point where he's like I get why they said that no this is what's so fascinating to me is like I understand how you would feel that in the moment right you're like this fucking nazi like won't let me run around during nap time or something but later on you'd be like yeah it must I must have been a challenge for my teachers or like that was unsafe what I was doing or I can see where they're coming from that probably made their jobs harder yeah even just to sound like

8:23a grounded person when you're talking about it in say a book the perfect example of this is in his second memoir my bookie wook 2 for the love of god oh yeah I read both of them the second one's much worse Michael Michael I have been semi-pro hating the title of my bookie wook for so long and I did not know that there was a second one and frankly that's on me so this is describing himself on an

8:53airplane I was thrown off an Iberia Airlines jet at Barcelona airport after I refused to remove my

Russell Brand's Career in Hollywood

9:00feet from the top of the seat in front of me scruffy people are not welcome in any class other than economy if you find a way of affording overpriced travel without dressing like a boffin it irritates conformists oh lord so boffin is like a egghead like expert kind of thing if someone's like I got kicked off of a plane because I irritated conformists yeah I immediately have a minimum of 20 questions so then he tells the rest of the story I offered the haughty air hostess

9:32the perfect chance to tell me off by being a bit drunk and bawdy and lounging about she told me off but I ignored her I thought I wonder what'll happen if no matter what happens I refuse to cooperate with this woman I know she was just doing her job but I sensed she was enjoying being authoritative and we all know just doing my job is the excuse offered up for enacting genocide she's basically a nazi for asking me to put my feet down on an airplane for like being drunk and bawdy which I assume means like

10:05hitting on her while she's at work it's basically like I was being a huge asshole and she was a nazi for telling me to stop she became increasingly agitated and elicited the support of the pilot who honestly flung open the cockpit door and had a go at me over his shoulder like a dad chastising naughty daughters on a motoring holiday I ignored that too I was in a silly mood there's like hundreds of people that need to get where they're going but like I was in a silly mood I didn't want to put my feet down the pilot made an announcement that because of quote-unquote passenger disruption

10:37the flight would not be taking off thereby falling back on a form of psychological warfare constantly deployed against me in childhood where the teacher says because Russell's been naughty the whole class has to stay behind in the hope of turning everyone else against you wow dude the investment in persecution here is really fascinating sort of stunning I had a friend in high school who would always just like was constantly getting fired from jobs and every the story was always something totally benign he's like I got fired for being like five minutes late to a meeting and then like

11:11oh well what actually happened he's like I showed up late and my boss was like why are you late and I was like shut up you fucking bitch like I don't think you were fired because you were late to a meeting dude it goes in the same category to me of like oh this is enough red flags for me to disengage as like someone who complains about work but just talks about like everyone they work with is an idiot yeah exactly boy it doesn't matter what job you're at it doesn't matter what role you're in he even after he's like in recovery he's now sober he can't look at this situation and go man it must have really sucked for the stewardess that day like she's got a drunk passenger who for

11:45no reason refuses to do this like extremely basic thing before takeoff he's still the hero of the story and she is still literally a nazi it's also like feels reminiscent of our like metabolife guy in that there's like zero reckoning with the effects on other people yeah completely I just like to imagine a serene pastoral landscape a cool breeze blowing in the air and just the sound of one giant red flag the other I mean this book is like all fucking red flag anecdotes the other one that

12:18like really stood out to me especially as far as his politics go is apparently when he's very young five six he's walking around the neighborhood and there's an old guy who sort of stops him and it's like hey I grew some flowers look at look at how nice my front yard looks and then the guy's like hey I gotta run inside to like go to the bathroom for a second I'll leave you out here don't stomp on the flowers oh no kind of a weird thing to say honestly whatever I just am gonna flag that my bullshit meter is already fucking going off here like do we think an adult was like hey don't stomp on

12:49those flowers well thing is I think probably because it's a neighbor he probably knew that Russell was like kind of a troublemaker oh I see I mean he might have said that to any kid or maybe he was joking or something but what's so interesting is Russell hears the phrase don't stamp on those flowers and he's like well I have to stamp on the flowers yeah so the minute the guy goes inside he just destroys the entire flower bed like jumping up and down just like pulverizes all of these flowers the fact that he's telling this in his book means that like he on some level gets that this is kind of like disordered behavior like this is this is bad right but I think also what you find when you

13:25watch any of his political videos or you read like anything kind of quote-unquote political that he's written he just hates being told what to do he doesn't even want to stomp on the fucking flowers right it's like it's this hollow opposition where if you tell him what you he'll do the opposite even if it makes no sense and he doesn't want to do it yeah and I think there's something about that that he like comes to believe that that's like a charming thing yes also this whole anecdote is like Chekhov's anti-cancel culture turn completely fast forward fucking 30 years and this kid is like

13:57you can't say anything anymore so at seven years old his mom gets cancer she recovers the cancer comes back when he's 11 he doesn't really understand sort of the nature of conditions like this and so he blames himself a little bit and he feels like I'm not able to protect my mom and so the acting out in school gets significantly worse she also starts dating a man Colin who he doesn't like he says I had a growing sense that I was a disappointment to people not only that I wasn't the kind of person

14:30my dad would have wanted me to be but also that I wasn't able to look after my mom either to prevent her from getting ill or to stop Colin from moving in this guy's grows to be a real shithead but like for this kid even with like behavior issues even with this oppositional shit like feeling like you have failed a parent for getting a terminal illness or for being in a bad relationship yeah is like horrible and is legitimately like a big thing to figure out how to shake off and then

15:01he tells the most fucked up story in the entire book oh no did I empathize too early we've I like haven't checked this in years but Apple podcast has a thing where they allow you to see where people like stop listening to your podcast like how many people make it to the end and stuff I'm so glad I didn't know about this feature Michael it bums me out I never check it but like I I want to check it for this episode because I think we're gonna lose like half of the listeners after the story this story is so fucked up so his dog the only thing you need to know for this is his dog is named Topsy so here's this story oh god you're gonna make me tell the fucked up story you're reading all the

15:36slurs you're reading all the terrible stories it's all you when we first got Topsy she would be allowed to sleep in the bed with me but when Colin came an absurd edict was introduced whereby she was no longer allowed upstairs I evidently had a lot of anger and hate in me about this because I would perch at the top of the stairs and lure her to come up Topsy Topsy Topsy then when she would slink nervously upward to the forbidden terrain of the upper floor I would suddenly become Mr. Hyde oh dear Topsy I would

16:10declaim in a rather arch manner you know perfectly well you're not allowed upstairs before cruelly kicking her back down to the bottom again I know where I would rejoin her and give her a sympathetic cuddle regretfully muttering oh Christ were you kicked down the stairs this is terrible holy fuck it's like all there dude yeah on some level it's sympathetic because you're like he's clearly hurting but also he's lashing out at like this innocent creature I can understand not wanting to recognize the quote

16:40unquote authority of a fucking stepdad you don't like I'm like sure fair but I think not even recognizing that like a different person has different wants yeah being like I'm just gonna respect that this is what this person wants or I'm gonna figure out how to navigate that or whatever I will also say not for nothing I am not alleging anything about Russell Brand but like this is on the fucking serial killer checklist yeah I know this is the fucking dark triad fucking shit so his mom decides to put him in boarding school at this time he doesn't really specify why I think it's probably

17:13because he was acting out in school and then he immediately starts acting out again he says whenever I'm in any kind of social group I always tend to think I won't fit in and gravitate toward an identity that will stand out so this sort of makes his stand-up persona make a little bit of sense right he's like yeah maybe you won't like me so I'm just gonna like act crazy right and it's all like a shtick right so if you don't like me it's that you don't like the act he then based on this gets like a reputation as like kind of a weirdo and an outcast and so he says another dubious

17:44attention-seeking device that I invented at the school was the game genital grabbing what a cool fun game for all of us Russell Brand walked so Donald Trump could run so he like walks up to people at school and just like grabs their junk I mean outside of their pants it's like the only saving grace of this but like he starts doing this obviously gets in fucking trouble this is a boys school or a co-ed co-ed it appears okay jesus fucking great good stuff and then he eventually gets kicked out of boarding school not for this this is also a very telling thing where he says

18:15he like really wants to like have sex like he's he's getting into his teenage years where he's like post-puberty and he like he says he really wants to like get with girls but at one point he says I didn't want to get with girls as much as I wanted to tell other boys that I was getting with girls boy but he becomes desperate to get laid at this time and so the way that he gets kicked out of boarding school is a whole scenario that he doesn't describe very well but he's like he sneaks into a girl's room to try to hook up but then like her roommate is there and then he sneaks girls into his

18:45own room and then his like prefect finds out that the girls in his room and you can't have girls in your room and so he gets kicked out but also what tellingly talking about this prefect like basically the guy that like figured out that he was doing this and busted him he says children shouldn't be given ss style powers what in the fuck is going on with this dude and comparing like a flight attendant and a school prefect to nazis yeah there's like that whole part of the metabolite book where he's

19:17talking about how like lawyers have one of the best grifts around or whatever and you're like oh you think everyone is grifting yeah and i think similarly russell brand thinks any boundary that gets set for him is someone who's like drunk with power totally yes it's really telling and i think the other thing is earlier when you said like he wasn't really doing this to impress women but to impress men you and i were talking the other day about sort of looks maxers as like a women optional space right like actually the point is to create a space that rejects women yeah and you actually just

19:50get to relate to other men and like one up other men and women if present at all are like tools for that like i think that's really an undercurrent of like a lot of misogyny yeah yeah women are props to display your value to other men and that's about it the other interesting thing about his identity is also the sense of himself as having this kind of threatened masculinity so after he's kicked out of boarding school he then goes back to his comprehensive school he talks a lot about being like really insecure about his appearance he's fat at this point he's getting bullied a lot for being fat and

20:25like there's something really interesting about the struggles that russell is having at this time where he is kind of feminine yeah people are calling him gay all the time people are calling him you know fat all the time and his sexuality feels really threatened yeah and i think a lot of what he does for the next like 30 years of his life is like to try to prove to himself and to the rest of the world they're like i'm i'm i'm a man like i i can be a masculine guy i can i can still have sex with girls it can be easy to underestimate how much a constant drumbeat of other people's messages about your sexuality shape your own understanding of your own gender and sexuality

21:01right to be constantly made fun of for being gay is like actually gonna sort of fuck you up whether you're gay or you're straight yeah yeah just in different ways right he also says that he starts cutting himself at this time he gets a really rough eating disorder he just starts engaging in like pretty hardcore bulimia to lose all of the weight he also throughout the book he sort of mentions various psychiatric assessments that he's had i mean you know he gets arrested later on and as part of that

21:31he'll go to a psychiatrist or their school psychologist but it seems like every single mental health professional who has ever seen him in any capacity has said like you have serious mental illness he's been diagnosed with depression bipolar adhd everyone seems to give him a different diagnosis but every page of this book you're like this is an unwell person did any of this come up in the media around the book dude like when he's doing interviews around this shit are people like hey bud you okay when the

22:02book came out i read a bunch of reviews this was like well reviewed it's like oh a wild romp through like working class essex and like trying to become an actor in london but like yeah nobody really pointed out how like super fucked up the stuff in this book is we're not even to the fucked up shit yet yeah holy fuck so his big epiphany comes when he gets a role in the school play he is cast as fat sam in bugsy malone great good the minute he starts acting he's just like this is it this is what i want to do for the rest of my life yeah i get to pretend to be somebody else great yeah and

22:35also he i mean i don't want to sound mean but like he does describe this as like i get to be the center of attention i don't think it's mean to say what's in his book he also starts a pattern that he does throughout the book numerous times he says you know now that i'm acting people have like seen me in the school play i started to get a lot of attention from girls so he's like oh girls were like really into me but then when he actually describes the nature of like girls were really into me it seems to be mostly him pestering women he says i became a school boy tony montana rampaging around the

23:08playground indiscriminately spraying girls with chat up lines say hello to my little friend i hollered in canteens and corridors no one was safe for me charged by a white mound of my own newly discovered potency every female was a potential target no one was safe from me is a dark as fuck line i like stop copy pasting them eventually there's so much foreshadowing in the book of like the kind of creep that he turns out to be so he says by my 20s i would relish the challenge of chaste maids and the search for the correct combination of words required to decode their moral resistance jumping

23:42through hoops ducking questions feigning indifference to sex the knobsticle course i call it jesus christ and he had lots of like bits in his stand-up comedy about this like the knobsticle course thing of basically like how to like kind of trick women into saying yes to having sex with you yeah this is the guy who thinks that like cutting a hole in the bottom of the popcorn bucket is like actually a good gag he then describes losing his virginity he is 15 it sounds like it's like a fairly awkward situation he doesn't even like take his clothes off it's with a fellow actor from the play who seems

24:15like she's older and more experienced than him it's almost kind of like classic losing your virginity as a teen story where it takes like five minutes and he's like oh i guess that happened but then afterwards i think because he's like not super popular the girl is like hey let's not talk about this like let's let's just act like this never happened and then russell says i blabbed to anyone who'd listen instead of telling no one as requested i told anyone i encountered so he starts blabbing about this this girl marianne denies it she's like no i never had sex with russell what are you talking about right which is because the stakes for him are he's like people will see me as more

24:50masculine yeah and she's like yeah the stakes for me is that i will be fucking slut shamed yeah exactly off the face of the fucking earth he devises a scheme where he sets up a tape recorder and calls her and is like hey uh you know how we had sex the other night oh fuck off and then he like gets her on tape admitting to this but then what's weird that he does this about the book too he describes this scheme of like getting her on tape where she's admitting to them having sex but then he just he never mentions it again it's not clear what he did with the tape did he play it

25:22for his friends did he show it to people at school you would think especially from someone who went to sex addiction treatment to be like you know at the time i had these ideas about women that like i was in control and they didn't have any autonomy and it was up to me like some description of like i later learned that this was wrong yeah but he just tells it as like a funny story like ha ha ha this is my losing my virginity story keep making that sound for the next two to three hours this is part one we're still in his teenage years michael he is now age 16 he gets into an acting school in london so he

25:57moves to london yeah he then describes again he says like oh i was getting all this attention from girls because like i was at a good school and i was acting but then when he actually describes the specific girls that he has like flings with it appears to be him showing like worrying levels of infatuation so he says i became obsessed with louise i spoke to her recently and she reminded me that i'd sent her up to six letters a day he also says penny i was so helplessly infatuated with her that i followed her to her home in wagon at the end of term so earlier on you mentioned that he seems

26:31to be invested in this in a way that is like in order to sort of prove something or illustrate something to other men when he talks about being like hopelessly infatuated does he talk about anything about these women that he particularly likes about them or particularly wants about them or whatever you know what i'm about to say he talks about their looks like he talks about like oh this like she she was a radiant creature and like her blonde curls you know it's like physical appearance stuff yeah it's clear that these are like sort of trophies to him or like conquests like based on

27:05their attractiveness so the girl penny he meets her at school she's like oh i'm going home for the holidays he goes oh let me walk you to houston station but like then i'll leave you alone don't worry about it she's like okay you can walk me to the station and then he sort of like worms his way onto the train so here's this penny didn't want me to come to her house but i used charm and relentless pig-headed persistence to persuade her i'd pursued her with poetry and promises neither of which were original or true for months i tackled the nobstacle course with such dogged a

27:37plum that when night fell i was allowed to sleep in her bed top to toe i spun gags and yarns till she let me turn round i painted verbal pictures and begged until she kissed me i lied and danced and evoked the spirit of pan till reluctantly she removed her bra charming stuff evoked the spirit of pan like that's the kind of stuff that i'm like yeah that sounds like his stand-up act where you're like oh you're just sort of throwing in weird references and thinking that that's like a joke or i know that

28:13like makes this okay we're not gonna read them all but this thing happens many times in the book where he's super infatuated with a girl like oh i can't i can't stop thinking about you he's writing you know six letters a day whatever he talks her into sex wears her down and then he never mentions her again yeah so this girl penny is not mentioned for the rest of the book yeah i'm sure he can't stop himself from going to the next infatuation like once he's kind of won like the conquest is over he's had sex with them like he has no more attention for them infatuation maybe his language i'm not sure that

28:43that's how i would describe it as an outside observer wait what would you say love you think it's pure love you think it's really i think it's true love honestly like the thing that comes to mind is like almost like marks oh yeah yeah right that he's sort of like in it to to win and the winning happens when you have sex and then yeah then the game is over and we're done it's not really infatuation because that implies some level of like attraction to something innate about that person yeah to me it seems much more like like he's just sort of constantly setting personal bests but so

29:17uh the next uh bit of lighter fluid that is poured on this dynamic is that he starts doing drugs oh great he discovered uh alcohol when he's like nine or ten him and a friend were going through a sort of supply closet at the school and they found some alcohol and then he drank it and he was like i fucking love this like he took to it immediately it's not clear how much he's drinking because i think it's hard to get a hold of but he talks about how he started smoking weed he says the first time i went around to jimmy and justin's flat i got so stoned that i went to bed and i was there for three

29:48days i didn't eat or anything just lay there bewildered people came to look at me someone took a photograph i refused all food i just stared and wondered and became a drug addict from then on i smoked weed every day without fail or exception until the narcotic baton was passed on to heroin whenever i went to school or indeed anywhere i would have a joint first many years later when i eventually got clean i was astonished to learn that i don't actually enjoy my own company i always thought i loved being on my own but actually i don't it was being on drugs that i liked jesus god

30:19so this then creates a pattern where he gets kicked out of acting school for showing up drunk and high all the time he then has like this weird period of sort of like floating about he's only 17 years old at this point him and a friend decide that they're going to put on a play based on the tibetan book of the dead which neither of them have read very good move but they find like a performance space and they start holding auditions and it appears the only reason they're holding auditions is to like get contact with attractive women oh no so he's talking about them here let me just send you this

30:54because it's gross thank you so much you do the gross ones there were two women that were particularly sexy claudine and maria maria was an asian girl with all this tumbling black hair who turned up in this red dress and looked impressive and we were just a couple of jerks sat there high okay right this play do you want to improvise a scene will you do kissing there's lots of kissing and bras the tibetan book of the dead is full of women kissing in their bras that's what makes it such a fucking good read

31:26cool story it's nuts that like this is almost exactly what like gets him on tv yeah is this kind of material right it's not like oh this was the dark side that none of us knew about it's like don't know he was talking about this shit this is also the beginning of a pattern where the minute he can he starts using his power to get laid right this isn't even that much power it's like i'm putting on a play i'm like a random guy who's like writing a play and i have a performance space immediately he's using that power to get women in their bras he's how old is he at this point 17 great so he's

31:5917 and he's already doing the fucking weinstein thing it's really shocking and also telling us about it years later yeah without any like man this was really like how fucked up this was it's like ha ha ha funny story a thing that i did when i was a kid right this is like sex criminal super villain fucking shit so the other big thing that happens when russell is 17 is his dad gets divorced from his third wife and wants to go on a sex trip to east asia oh fuck his dad is a passport bro he's

32:32a passport bro dude i've watched enough 90 day fiance to know all the fuck about this guy apparently the friend that he was going to go with dropped out so he thinks what if my 17 year old son would like to come with me to asia and go to a bunch of brothels holy fucking shit they go it appears first to thailand and then to hong kong russell only tells the story of like the first experience they go to some sort of brothel where there's like a runway catwalk kind of thing where women are like walking

33:04back and forth and you can like pick one you know and so his dad picks two and he picks one named mary lou like part of the issue with passport bros a long digression about why no why i have this like gnawing pit in my stomach about whatever is about to happen when people are flying halfway around the world to do that there is often a justification that is like western women are too mouthy oh and

33:38like there's like a cultural expectation of subservience right they've sort of written a series of myths in their head about like what amounts to if i go to this other country there's a kind of woman who won't say no yeah yeah yeah and there's something extremely dark about a kind of man who wants to engage in what they believe on some level to be like boundaryless sex so he chooses one sex worker named mary lou his dad chooses two sex workers they go back to their hotel they're staying at some fancy hotel once they

34:09get to the room they're like fooling around with these women he says this naked i was shy about my body then i had trouble getting hard the blowjob seemed daft the way it feels when a customs official pulls your trousers down or a doctor puts his finger up your arse not sexual just giggly and intrusive so he's clearly kind of uncomfortable not sexual just giggly and intrusive is how i would describe a lot of russell brand's yeah yeah jesus christ she was a good prostitute mary lou she played

34:42her part very well she didn't make me feel embarrassed and was incredibly romantic really given the context i stroked mary lou's hair and kissed her cheek and traced my finger down her perfect nose scored by the cacophony from the adjacent bedlam yeah come on and you're juicy so he's listening to his dad have sex with sex workers next door as he's having sex god jesus god and he he clearly is like impressed by his dad he describes this as in this like aspirational way of just like oh

35:17someday i'll be as cool as my dad yeah but like this is unbelievable fucking loser behavior before there was andrew tate there were fuck off dads like this and here's the next morning he comes up the next morning his dad is like reading the newspaper at the breakfast table my dad concealed behind a newspaper folded down the top right hand corner did you wear a condom with that bird last night oh no i didn't dad he sniffed you should have then the corner of the page flicked up once again and he was gone in the course of the rest of that holiday i fucked loads more prostitutes always got

35:53a hard-on never wore a condom and never fell in love cool in bangkok when bar girls in pat pong left their posts to follow me down the street cooing and touching my hair i felt that i had my dad's unequivocal approval fucking jesus god there are many memoirs that include like kind of disturbing stories and then a person's like i went into recovery and i learned and i don't do this anymore whatever but like there's no moment of reflection on this yeah so the fact that he's like i never wore a condom it's like wow cool man why yeah cool story bro what a good thing to put in your memoir

36:29about sex addiction i mean like i guess so then he gets back to london he gets into another acting school he then gets kicked out of that too i don't really know what it takes to get kicked out of acting school like not to say that it's not like a serious endeavor or whatever but just like i genuinely don't know what conduct he says he shows up drunk every day oh he drinks before school and then he's like hammered that would do it this is like too much because we already disliked this guy but like god this either is fake or it's real and fuck off so here's this for he's talking about when

37:04he's uh in this period like post uh drama school post getting kicked out of drama school number two one of my brilliant gimmicks was to have a mouse living in my hair he's doing a ratatouille i know maybe this explains the rest of his career maybe it's actually just the mouse is in charge i kept this going for quite a long time at least a month or so i'd gone out and got a mouse from a pet shop and let it live on my shoulders and in my hair mice are incontinent they poo and wee whenever they

37:35feel like it so my hair was all full of mouse excrement and urine i'd put it in a little tupperware box when i went to sleep so i hope this is fake if this is real this is like one of the pathetic like attention getting things i've ever heard in my life jesus fucking hell surely you could just get attention for people by being like nice to them this is absolutely the kind of behavior that would uh make me avoid being around a person yeah not necessarily because of the mouse not necessarily because of mouse smell not necessarily because of any of that kind of well because for me

38:09it would be because of the mouse and the mouse smell but okay no but just because of like the level of red flag that is like i know this person thinks this is how you engage with other people and like i don't want to be engaged in these kinds of ways by a person so i'm just going to give them a real wide berth i i think this is like the only way that he knows how to relate to people is like people kind of gawking at him or be like wow you're so you're so wild and crazy russell yeah and in that way the sort of like very like uh hollywood experience of like sort of having an entourage but

38:41maybe not necessarily having friends i would think might suit him we then have a period where he's dropped out of acting school he's getting kind of odd jobs he starts doing like stand-up open mic nights he joins a comedy duo he does a couple performances at the edinburgh fringe festival he's at like the very early stages of kind of like making it as an actor slash comedian he also starts doing heroin at this time we also have in 1999 toward the end of this period we have the first

39:12alleged uh rape by russell brand what a cool fucking guy there's i believe seven rape allegations at this point that he's on trial for and so as we're going i'm going to sort of put them in the chronology i mean i should say that he denies all these allegations categorically he says yes i was a sex addict but everything 100 was consensual so we need to get that on the record in the uk they don't seem to release indictment documents with like details of any of the charges so literally all we have is one sentence brand of oxfordshire is accused of raping a woman in a hotel room while she attended

39:47a labor party conference in bournemouth in 1999 that's the entirety of the charge jesus i guess from these stand-up comedy gigs he then gets noticed by mtv and in 2001 he gets like a segment on mtv called dance floor chart where like he goes around to nightclubs and interviews people he then gets fired from mtv in late 2001 the way that he tells this story he goes to work and he's fiending for drugs

40:19so he invites his drug dealer to the set of mtv and then the drug dealer brings his like eight-year-old son because he's like oh i'm going to mtv like my kid likes mtv i'll bring my kid with me and then russell brand and this guy apparently smoke crack in the bathroom in front of the kid according to him you know he's high walking around this drug dealer is also high it's the same day as kylie minogue is like filming an interview or a segment or something so kylie minogue is around and he walks

40:52up to kylie minogue with his drug dealer and he's like meet grant or whatever the guy's name is and he like introduces kylie minogue to his drug dealer and he's like and the next day they fired me but he does mention this but he doesn't really get into it the actual reason that he got fired i was gonna say what are the chances that there was zero sex pesting from russell brand well no it actually isn't a sex pest thing aubrey what if you go to his like wikipedia entry and he does mention this in his book but in this weird cursory way this story is taking place on september 12th 2001 and he is

41:28dressed as osama bin laden what in the fuck so like he does say this here i'm gonna send it to you i was dressed in a white muslim tunic with matching white bottoms a camouflage flak jacket a false beard and a tea towel on my head held in place by a shoelace cool i'd been aware of osama bin laden for about a year he wasn't someone who people of my age group generally knew about but he'd been involved with some other bombings and he was top of the fbi's most wanted list and i was fascinated by

42:03that sort of stuff that day i was going to present this program called select where kids phoned in and chose videos for us to play and pop stars would come on to flog their records that afternoon our guest was to be kylie minogue and then he like tells the kylie minogue story i'm stealing this from the on brand podcast which is an entire podcast about how much russell brand sucks which is very enjoyable but like kylie minogue has met drug dealers before kylie minogue has met weird people backstage at things like the kylie minogue thing has nothing to do with you getting fired right

42:35kylie minogue probably had like a two-minute conversation with this guy i was like well gotta go like i don't think kylie minogue fucking like reported russell brand i think you got fired because you dressed as fucking osama bin laden the day after september 11th well and also like you dressed in such a way as to like make manifest a fucking slur yeah yeah yeah you put a towel on your head you fucking asshole he doesn't give any explanation for why you did this it's the day after 9 11 you're dressing as the killer why like oh i've been aware of him for a year and like he did

43:06some crimes and i knew about him and also he was presenting a children's show there's no description of why he did this or what he was even trying to do i think it was again just this like i put a mouse in my hair like i wanted to get attention kind of thing i don't know man like the day after they capture the fucking golden state killer are you going on tv dressing up like that guy so the only other thing we know of that takes place in 2001 is another alleged attempted rape this is also from the charging document he is charged with indecently assaulting a woman by grabbing her arm and dragging

43:37her toward a male toilet in 2001 that is the entirety of the information that we have he then gets fired from mtv and then he almost immediately gets another job he gets uh another kind of like man on the street interview show on a like now defunct cable channel oh my god stop giving him this specific job where they're like how do we expose him to the most people possible he says together we contrive to take on taboos have a fight with your dad to examine the idea of an oedipus complex have a bath with a

44:10homeless person get to know a member of the british national party to see what they're like and seduce an old woman what and like these are like little stunts that he does he ends up like jerking off a man they're all just props yeah yeah right for him to do an outrageous thing that is i mean i do think that's core to the ideology it's just like these are taboos yeah but he doesn't seem to have any kind of like basic moral compass because one of the episodes is about hanging out with this guy who's part of the british national party which is like basically the uk nazis but in his brain it's like well it's taboo to be nice to a homeless person and it's taboo to be in like a super racist political party

44:44it feels like a house with no foundation yeah he's not meaningfully on the left or meaningfully on the right no matter how he shows up because there's not like a foundational thing that he's tied to right right there's not like a core driving morality underneath it it's just oh you don't want me to do this so then at the end of 2002 he finally gets sober he's like drinking every day using drugs every day eventually he goes into rehab he doesn't say that much about it he just like goes into inpatient rehab it seems to work and he's sober for the rest of his life according to him does he mention anything about staying in recovery spaces like does he go to meetings he's really into 12

45:21steps okay he wrote a book called recovery that is kind of like part of his wellness pivot it has 12 chapters and each chapter is like one of the steps so he's like very much a 12 step guy the reason that i ask is there's this concept in aa of like the dry drunk which is someone who's like not drinking but also not dealing with the shit that made them drink in the first place yeah based on what we know comes next it just seems like that might be part of the picture it's actually really interesting because he he's fairly open in the book about the fact that getting sober makes him worse with women

45:54he says once i started to feel a bit more confident and realized there was now a great gaping hole in my life that wasn't filled by drugs and booze anymore my tendency to pursue women which had always been quite rapacious somehow became enhanced further i started seeing different women quickly acquiring a harem of about 10 whom i would rotate in addition to one night stands in random casual encounters boy there's nothing quite so chilling as a white man referring to a harem and also how are you how are you doing this too i mean 10 people and also one night stands do you think that's real oh yeah okay and if you

46:30read the accounts of his accusers he has this like urgency about sex and oftentimes he'll have a couple women in one night it's not like you come over and you have sex with russell brandon you cuddle and you watch a movie it's like he kicks you out or sometimes he will invite over another woman while you're there this is gay men territory what are you doing it's really even as a gay man i'm like this is you're fucking unwell no totally so that is 2002 when he gets sober one of the uh rapes he's accused of is in 2004 the met police say in 2004 a woman was orally raped and sexually assaulted in the

47:04westminster area of london that's basically all of the information that we have there's something about this like lack of detail on like one sentence that is so fucking chilling to me there's another one i believe also in 2004 that says he is also alleged to have grabbed a radio station worker's face pushed her against a wall and kissed her before groping her breasts and buttocks in the expose about him that was published in 2023 they talked to a female comedian who knew him on the comedy scene a female comedian said that in the early 2000s when they gigged together brand chased her around

47:39backstage and bit her on the face whenever he saw me he would grab me and bite my face and it was coupled with this weird horrible energy she recalls i said to him i don't like this and he still did it so much before he stopped it was him crossing boundaries it's so dark because i think his way of relating to himself is to interpret all of his actions as sort of playful yeah yeah biting someone's face is an unhinged thing to do also imagine someone doing that to you with a mouse in their fucking hair oh it makes it worse somehow you're like oh drunk mouse in hair hair smells like mouse

48:15piss and shit so in 2005 that's when he goes to sex addiction treatment yeah uh this is where his first book ends the book is really strange in that he goes to sex addiction treatment and then he just publishes verbatim excerpts from his diary that he kept when he was there and they're kind of all over the place there's a section where he says like oh the most the worst thing about being in rehab is that i really miss sarah but he hasn't mentioned sarah that's the first mention of sarah i guess that's the woman he's dating but it's like does anyone edit these fucking books like they're just this

48:46person that he misses and then he mentions that she's 19 they were fighting he says that he like smashed a glass and then was like sort of using the shards to pretend that he was going to cut his wrists pretend is doing some heavy lifting there but again this is just in his diary entry so you're like is this in the book or something else what what and of course she's never mentioned again the book ends with him like oh i went through sex addiction rehab but then all he says is after

49:16keystone i did continue to have sex with adult human females but i made sure it didn't interfere with my work that was the point of concern so he ends with this like oh i learned all my lessons none of which i'm going to actually explain at the end of this book he then starts book two fucking bookie wook two he starts book two by bragging about the time he fucked kate moss well again like if the point is to prove your worth to other men the thing that matters is that you had sex with a woman who is famous for being beautiful we're now entering the point where he starts to

49:48become much more famous he gets a gig as a big brother commentator in 2005 sure very talking dead territory one of the only things i laughed at in his book he's talking about this big brother it's called big brother's big mouth he says i worked on the show for three years which encompassed seven seasons great i fucking love reality tv fucking reality show it's so weird just like sure just churn through a man who cares he also a thing that really rockets him to fame and a thing that he's

50:22been very good at doing throughout his career is writing controversies into more fame and more notoriety so in 2006 he hosts the nme awards which is like a music music magazine music awards the new music express i believe first of all he goes through some of his jokes for the awards show he says that the band the strokes is attending for context the the lead singer of the strokes is named julian casablanca yes i guess he's in the midst of saying like the strokes are here he says oh my nan had a

50:58stroke i think that's what killed her what was julian casablanca's thinking she was 90 years old and she was a lesbian what that's the joke the strokes that's the whole that's the joke again the cadence of humor delivered with a thick accent from a guy doing a ratatouille he then introduces bob geldoff who's like a legendary music actor guy i know him from being the lead of pink floyd's the wall which i saw

51:30like 400 times when i was in eighth grade this is his introduction to bob geldoff this is russell brand he says the winner of best dvd is bob geldoff my best dvd is big natural tits 10 in a welcome return to form after the lazy and derivative big natural tits eight and nine of course we ain't really captured the glory days of big national tits one and two don't be ridiculous but all this is academic because the big natural tit series has been overlooked again here's sir bobby gandolph

52:02introduces him but and then bob geldoff comes up and he just like leans he starts out he just leans at the microphone he says russell brand what a cunt yeah good job good job it's also sort of the shortcoming of this kind of like edgelord era of humor which is just like you don't actually have to have a joke yeah sort of like his earlier stuff the point is just like oh it's taboo so i'm gonna say yeah that's not a joke yeah a joke takes craftsmanship a joke takes subversion of expectation

52:35are you talking about how sophisticated you were for using the soundboard on this podcast what did it say we're gaining traction what fucking soundboard is this let's really drill down on this what is this a friend gave me a corporate jargon one we have to be disruptive that's good let's put a pin in that let's circle back to that that is sophisticated you're right aubrey it takes dedication that's a no-brainer what's standing out to me about this that i find

53:07really fascinating is it's sort of a referendum on russell brand of course and it should be but it's also sort of like a pretty good reflection of like an era that enabled a generation of assholes like this yeah yeah right like this is also the era of uh adam carolla don imus yeah all of these like fucking dickweed edgelord assholes who were just like uh i'm gonna say the most shocking thing possible and it would often be about shit that was like taboo for a fucking reason oh are you mad i

53:42guess you're mad about this and then you get to do the whole fucking shtick where you're like they're all mad at me again oh my god and he also gets a chat show on mtv around this time and becomes the kind of person who just like shows up at things he's presenting this thing he's presenting that thing this also dovetails with the abuse allegations in 2023 we get the article reporting on all these kind of like specific women who allege abuse but then we also get allegations that he was using his contacts at the bbc and at channel 4 to recruit audience members from these shows and like send them

54:19backstage it says tv researchers and runners who worked on channel 4 shows during this period allege that brand would get staff to approach young female audience members so he could meet them after filming oh boy another kind of later in the article it says brand would regularly have sex with women he met at events two who went back to his home on separate occasions claim he became threatening and shouted at them when they refused to have intercourse with him one left his home in tears so we yet again see this pattern where he's like using his power to like systematically

54:51recruit women to have sex with allegedly yeah so this is also like the mid 2000s which means that the response to this kind of media would have been like wow it looks like those women made some bad choices there's also in december of 2007 somebody makes a complaint about quote an alarming display of aggression and disrespect which included brand hurling objects across the studio in fits of rage and quote urinating in a bottle in full view of everyone sorry this is after he gets sober yeah that's

55:23actually super fascinating to me a lot of these anecdotes are basically like what other people would describe as their rock bottom i'm like the time i pissed in a cup i'm sure in front of staff at 100 rock bottom yeah yeah yep yep yep so there is after these uh abuse allegations the article detailing the abuse allegations come out bbc and channel 4 both launched like retrospective investigations to be like did we get complaints like was there a systematic failure here the bbc says they only received three complaints during his time at the bbc and they weren't followed up on

56:00however the person who led the investigation also said the bbc did not maintain a centralized record of staff complaints regarding bullying and harassment including sexual harassment at the time so basically they haven't found anything but also they weren't keeping records of anything god imagine living in a media environment where the media goes wait a minute did we have a hand in this or like or like did we write this down is there is there something we should have done differently here i'm gonna send this to you and i might cut it this is from the period when he's doing his mtv show where he's

56:31interviewing like fairly big celebrities like he interviews like tom cruise and stuff and so here is him talking about a celebrity encounter neil brought courtney love with him who is a mad enchantress a rasping white witch barmy and opinionated and lion hearted more interesting than her lion heart though is her vagina which has been referred to as magic in that it has a mythical power to bestow stardom and heavenly gifts upon those who enter a kind of blarney fanny lord alone knows many a famous man has

57:07emerged from its confines some of whom surely must have been famous on the way in jesus fucking christ he he later says like oh we had a nice time she's a nice person we became friends so this is him talking about like a woman he holds in high esteem yeah i mean mike what do you expect he's saying her vagina is good what higher praise is there than that am i not supposed to say this when i talk about you yeah like tell me tell me about your co-host i'm like well let's start with her vagina

57:38and work our way outward blarney vagina how do you describe my vagina let's workshop it is it gay to describe your co-host's vagina it's actually not problematic because i am gay i'm allowed to describe your vagina it's gay not to god what a fucking twerp okay so this is like the hardest transition of the whole show we're like giggly and stuff we now have to talk about the 16 year old that he dated uh and allegedly orally raped if it's a 16 year old what's the age of consent in

58:14the uk unfortunately 16 so it was not illegal shit i'm saying well i'm saying unfortunate also because i don't like knowing what the ages of consent are in places because anyone who can like rattle off like oh iowa that's 17 you're like no i don't want to be the guy who can answer your question yeah exactly like but like overhearing a conversation at a restaurant like oh actually it's 16 in the uk i think but no it's actually a fibophilia that's the energy so this is from i keep mentioning this but there's a very good investigation by the sunday times the times of london and channel 4 which

58:48produces a long investigative article and also a documentary this is a four-year investigation where they interview it appears to be like dozens to hundreds of people about various allegations throughout russell brand's career this is a woman who they are calling alice in the article who is 16 when she meets russell brand in 2006 she has just recovered from an eating disorder and she has never had a boyfriend and here is her description of how it started he approached her in leicester square after she had been shopping at top shop at oxford circus and he had been working at a nearby studio

59:23alice recognized him from tv and had previously seen him do stand-up he took my shopping bags from me which was quite disarming and proceeded to go through my purchases and critique them and then he took one dress out and said to me you're going to wear this on our date this week she recalls fucking hell so again you see this extremely aggressive way of hitting on women right but also like when you're 16 dude i know i know you don't know that this dude is like actively

59:55dangerous to you yeah necessarily yet in your life there's then this period where it's like he's acutely aware of her age and how inappropriate this is so he asked her to read lolita which is a really fucking weird detail he asked her to put himself in her phone as carly so that in case her parents check her phone or something they don't find like a man's name holy fucking shit he coaches her on what to say to her parents he also sends a car to her high school to like pick her up and take her to his

1:00:27house and there's this heartbreaking scene where like the driver of the car this is like russell brand's professional driver pulls up to his house and like begs her not to get out of the car he's like i have a daughter your age you don't want to go into that house this is you know to borrow a fucking very law and ordery phrase this is like evidence of premeditation right yeah this is someone who knows that what he's doing will not be viewed in a kind light yeah this is someone who is actively engaged in like regardless of the age of consent in a given place this is fucking grooming behavior read lolita

1:01:03she alleges that he orally raped her as part of the relationship and she basically was like stop stop stop she had to hit him to get him off of her there's then this paragraph which is absolutely fucking insane so oh michael this is how it ended the relationship ended when brand invited her over one day and she arrived to find another woman in his bed i was so angry and i said to him why would you do this to me this is so humiliating it's either totally just reckless and like you're in some sort

1:01:36of mania and you don't really realize what you're doing or it's deliberately like i'm too chicken shit to break up with this person and so i'm going to create this like horrible scene so that she has to break up with me it's also like not for nothing it is kind of nuts that he does dress like a cartoon villain to be fair he has been telling us very loudly who he fucking is for his entire career for a real long time yep totally we also this is like now the fucking sexual assault montage it wasn't before no this is where it gets really bad so in 2007 uh he was allegedly in a relationship with

1:02:11somebody named jordan martin who wrote a book in 2014 about being in an abusive relationship it's called not entanglement with a celebrity and in the book she calls him randall grand she she's elsewhere said that this was based on russell brand yeah basically yeah and she she alleges like him sexually assaulting her and cheating on her and a bunch of like really awful shit in this book sounds like our guy yeah and then when the allegations come out in 2023 she's like i don't want to be interviewed but i stand by the we then in 2008 have this incident the woman who we are calling olivia worked for a media company in

1:02:50the same building as the bbc's los angeles office on 16th of june 2008 she says she answered the door to brand and his team who were there to pre-record an episode of the russell brand show for radio 2 she then went to the bathroom to get some sinus medication while squatting to look through the medicine cabinet she says she felt someone behind her fucking hell i know she turned around to face a man's crotch i was startled and got up and i realized it was russell she says he told her he

1:03:22was going to call her betty when she what that's weird when she said that wasn't her name she says he replied well i'm gonna fuck you and i said no you're not she says he then pulled out his penis on his hand and quote pretty much served it to me as you would be serving someone some food she says the door to the bathroom was closed and she felt trapped olivia says he then put his penis back in his trousers and she heard someone banging on the door she says someone from his team called for him at which point

1:03:58brand left jesus fucking christ it's like having a dog that needs to be on a fucking leash this woman olivia texts a friend and she's like uh fucking russell brand just like whipped his dick out in the bathroom good for olivia and he goes i know they're talking about it live on the air what they're like joking on air one of his co-hosts says it's been 25 minutes since he showed his willy to anyone and brand is like laughing he's like easy for you to judge boy oh fucking so this is like a bit

1:04:28within like 15 fucking minutes it's a fucking bit on the air i i don't even know how to fucking process this shit and also everyone every it's so extreme i think everyone assumes it has to be a joke i guess what a lothario that's like that's the persona that he was able to cultivate but it like was not a fucking persona there are lots of like real dipshit dumb guy parts of uh of american media and political landscapes one of them really is like boy oh boy the degree to which we get charmed by a british accent and allow i know huge terrible fucking behavior so the final episode that we are

1:05:04going to talk about before we close are you familiar with saxgate is this when winona rider did her shoplifting no it's uh andrew sax i know this name why do i know this name you're you're like a uk comedy nerd you watch faulty towers growing up right oh sure i was like obsessed with faulty towers when i was a kid so the guy who plays manuel on faulty towers is named andrew sax oh okay he is in 2008 kind of like an elder statesman kind of guy he's like an old guy kind of shows up on tv in various times and so there is an incident where he is supposed to show up on the radio show of russell brand and

1:05:42jonathan ross oh boy so at the time russell brand is hosting a morning zoo kind of situation i don't think it's on in the mornings but it's like that kind of vibe you know like a bunch of dudes and it's kind of like zany and there's like sound effects and shit oh i'm so sorry do you mean soundboard energy i know i was trying not to say the word because i knew you'd get you'd get inspired this is the worst soundboard aubrey it's really not good and i love it that's kind of what i love

1:06:15the most about it that's a no-brainer so this andrew sax guy is supposed to be on russell brand's radio show for whatever reason he cancels and so they do a bit where they call his answering machine and they talk to his answering machine i have a vague recollection about this where they are like fucking sex pests about his daughter or something granddaughter yes creep fucking city the thing is

1:06:45i was gonna skip this because that's so it's just a very weird controversy for reasons we will get into but people in the uk say like you cannot underestimate how fucking big of a deal this was this was like literally front page news for like months this was a massive scandal at the time yeah so we are going to read a transcript of the answering machine message uh so i am going to send you this transcript you are going to be russell brand oh i'm going to be jonathan ross because i know if i made you jonathan ross you try to do the voice no i would not try to do the voice hello andrew

1:07:19sax this is russell brand you are meant to be on my show now mate i'm here with jonathan ross i could still do the interview to your answer phone let's do it man or andrew sax don't call him man well that's really bad manners i apologize for russell he's an idiot i said andrew sax look andrew sax i have got respect for you and your lineage and your progeny never let that be questioned don't hint i weren't hinting why did that come across as a hint because you know what you did that wasn't a hint

1:07:50he fucked your granddaughter jesus fucking christ cute stuff so cute what what a couple of little rogues so we find out it was not clear at the time but we do find out later that russell brand did briefly date his granddaughter russell brand at this point would have been in his 30s yeah early 30s yeah and the granddaughter's in her early 20s jonathan ross is like fucking 50 he's just always been 50 it's unclear to me sure he's middle-aged for forever it's like a gene hackman situation that's fucking nuts like a middle-aged man being like he fucked your granddaughter like what in the

1:08:26fuck are we doing it is the two boys on the telephone being like marianne so when i had sex with you i had sex with you right you're confirming that i had sex with you while i'm taping it hang up hang up hang up yeah yeah also i was thinking about this from georgina's perspective that like okay you date this guy whatever it appeared like a week a couple dates whatever it's not super serious and then a couple weeks later you find out that he's bragging about having sex with you on the fucking bbc to your grandpa is she a public figure in her own right at this point yeah i mean

1:08:56not like a major public figure but she was a dancer and like was on the scene in some sense but like yeah this she was not a public figure in like you know a helen mirren sense right or like i love that helen mirren was the name that's my only one british women famous sex scandal helen mirren they then hang up and then they talk amongst themselves so this is them sort of doing like a little recap andrew sax i did not do nothing with georgina oh no i revealed i know her name oh no it's a disaster abort abort if he's like most people of a certain age he's probably got a picture of his

1:09:30grandchildren when they were young and innocent right by the phone so while he's listening to the message he's looking at a picture of her when she was nine on a swing she was on a swing when i met let's ring back andrew sax cute fucking gross then they call again andrew this is russell brand i am so sorry about the last message it was part of the radio show it was a mistake the truth is i'm phoning you to ask if i can marry that's right mary georgina the granddaughter and i would like to be the page boy he wants to be a page boy we're going to have a faulty towers themed wedding now you've spoiled it

1:10:05no i made it better i'm sorry i'll do anything i wore a condom put the phone down and then there's one they hang up and then there's a third message this is russell brand singing but i'm not going to make you come up with a tune thank you i'd like to apologize for the terrible attacks andrew sax i would like to show contrition to the max andrew sax i would like to create world peace between the yellow white and blacks andrew sax great i said something i didn't have otta like i had sex with

1:10:39your granddaughter but it was consensual and she wasn't menstrual it was consensual lovely sex it was full of respect i sent her a text i've asked her to marry me andrew sax she wasn't menstrual what a fucking creep unbelievable if i as a human being and encountering someone who's willing to go to these kinds of lengths i'm like get away from me for forever because if you're willing to be this

1:11:09level of boundary crossing then i think there maybe is no rock bottom for you at the time it isn't really noticed apparently the bbc only got two complaints about this at the time yeah but then the daily mail seizes on this as a way to attack the bbc right because the right wing hates public media yeah and so they're like the bbc allowed this smut to go on the air and then the bbc starts getting flooded with complaints and then it becomes a big scandal i feel kind of complicated about it because like this is fucking scandalous and absolutely disgusting but the only reason it was noticed is because it

1:11:44was like a right wing smear campaign basically against the bbc it's it's weird to be like am i siding with what would then become mumsnet i know right like you don't want to sort of be in the same camp but i do think you got to sort of stand in your repulsed reaction to this and be like this is like not actually fucking okay so he is fired from the bbc over this jonathan ross is given i believe it's six weeks or maybe six months of unpaid leave the controller of the bbc is forced to resign and the bbc

1:12:15is fined 140 000 pounds this is like actually a really big deal and there was like accountability for this at the time but then what's amazing is that then russell brand kind of just moves over to hollywood yeah he's fired from mtv for dressing up as osama bin laden he's like disgraced on the radio and on tv his award show the enemy award show thing was like considered a debacle at the time he just keeps like fucking up and then people keep giving him second third and fourth chances and this sort of happens again after this and by the time he comes back to the uk it's kind of memory hold

1:12:49because all of a sudden he's a movie star yeah i mean part of it is that that is like a little bit part of his persona right is that he's like i'm a lovable fuck up yeah exactly don't expect better that would have been a better fucking title for his book than bookie wook don't expect better so that is where we're going to leave russell brand and next episode we are going to pick it up with uh his journey to america and uh his travails in hollywood can i give a preview of what my reaction is i know you're gonna have your little soundboard in front of you i know what you're gonna do is that the sigh soundboard disappointed sigh is the name of this one is that all it does yeah do

1:13:27you want to hear male sigh yeah dude you as a millennial podcaster should not have told me about that because i can now replace you with one of those i've always been replaceable by a soundboard thank you Thank you.