The Celebrity Sexual Harassment and Rapists Thread

[Factotum]

Agree. Brand was clearly always going for the shock jock Howard Stern thing in the UK. Does he come off as a prick? Yes. But the focus should be on the accusations against him. That's what's important.

[SuperBacon]

When people are saying things like "Remember What Not To Wear and You Are What You Eat" and conflating things like that to this discussion, then yeah the focus has been lost.

Framing this as 'Nuts and Zoo magazine bred a sexual predator' is lazy, stupid and quite frankly offensive to his victims. Its about as helpful as blaming Marilyn Manson for Columbine.

As is trawling his past, his addictions, his trauma for an excuse as well IMO. They aren't an excuse for his actions. They could be reasons for his actions, but are never an excuse and again, I think its offensive to victims.

Russell Brand is a sexual predator because Russell Brand is a sexual predator.

A psychologist can pick the bones apart as to why and how, not some fucking culture writer with a blue tick screaming about High Street Honeys and Snog, Marry, Avoid. 

[deathrey]

Very well said @SuperBacon

I know everyone is making a big deal of questionable things he said on tv/during stand up routines etc. That was on stage and makes him a prick, it was during a time where the culture wholly accepted people being pricks and glorified it. That is not the same as rape and sexual assault. They are crimes. 

[d-d-d-dAz]

4 minutes ago, deathrey said:

Very well said @SuperBacon

I know everyone is making a big deal of questionable things he said on tv/during stand up routines etc. That was on stage and makes him a prick, it was during a time where the culture wholly accepted people being pricks and glorified it. That is not the same as rape and sexual assault. They are crimes. 

Far fewer words to make a more concise point than I did, but exactly this.

Cultural reprisals are all well and good, but that lets people off the hook for specific instances of criminality and allows people to just talk about ‘cancel culture’ and ‘different times’ and all that unhelpful waffle that allows people to pick sides at a time when there really doesn’t need to be sides.

 

[DavidB6937]

I can see why they did the Dispatches show how they did. It's natural to do an edit that uses clips that they believe support the story. That's pretty standard for documentary type things so no surprise there. I'm sure they felt like it would make it more impactful and arguably support the "hiding in plain sight" narrative more.

But yeah there's definitely a danger that the focus moves towards the comedy and the public persona and criticising those sorts of things rather than the behind closed doors behaviour.

I guess because there's only a limited amount of those other stories and the media wants content, they're just pulling whatever they can at the moment.

[Carbomb]

I get the impression that the reason why they're picking apart his past behaviour is because of Savile. There's now an established narrative that, because Savile was hiding in plain sight, with all the documentaries that analyse all the stuff he was saying and doing at the time as being clear indicators that he used as a smokescreen, someone like Brand might be the same, though to a lesser degree. (Though it does bring to mind an article I read from Astro, when he referred to Brand as a later version of Savile, i.e. "a screeching scarecrow who shags a lot".)

[LCJ]

Excuse the whataboutery but why did the media never seem to give Bill Wyman a hard time after he was blatantly grooming an underage Mandy Smith while he was in his forties? Is it because the Rolling Stones are successful around the world and considered a national treasure? I suppose if social media had been around back then, then Wyman most likely would have had more of a backlash against him.

Pete Townshend from the Who seemed to escape a media backlash too after “accidentally” logging onto a child porn site for “research purposes”.

[DavidB6937]

1 minute ago, LCJ said:

Excuse the whataboutery but why did the media never seem to give Bill Wyman a hard time after he was blatantly grooming an underage Mandy Smith while he was in his forties? Is it because the Rolling Stones are successful around the world and considered a national treasure? I suppose if social media had been around back then, then Wyman most likely would have had more of a backlash against him.

Pete Townshend from the Who seemed to escape a media backlash too after “accidentally” logging onto a child porn site for “research purposes”.

That was.. early 80s or something right? We're in a very very different world now. Even if social media was around back then I'm not sure it would've made much of a splash. It's definitely something that has been glossed over in more recent years when it comes to the group. I vaguely remember it coming up when there was a recent documentary but yeah it seems to have just been avoided.

[deathrey]

It's odd isn't it who gets finger pointed and who doesn't? Elvis has faced plenty of criticism for his relationship with Priscilla, I can't really see how Wyman is all that different

[gmoney]

Prince met Mayte Garcia when she was 16 and he was 32, he became her legal guardian at 17 and eventually married her. You hardly ever see him brought up in these discussions. 

[BomberPat]

I'm honestly amazed the music industry has never seriously been impacted by this kind of thing, you'd have to assume the surviving members of Led Zeppelin were shitting bricks when the MeToo movement started.

[LCJ]

Wyman married Mandy Smith around 1989 I think when she was 18. They’d been in a relationship for years before that though (definitely before she was 16). 
 

Steven Tyler had an underage girlfriend who he got pregnant and forced her into having an abortion in the 1970s when he was in his mid twenties.

And while I’m not condoning what Ric Flair did on the plane ride from Hell, proven wife beater Steve Austin seemingly escaping criticism from the IWC and being a talking head on that particular series of Dark Side of the Ring didn’t sit well with me. I’m guessing the Dark Side creators won’t do an episode on Austin refusing to job to Brock Lesnar and going home where he beat Debra because he was one of their favourite wrestlers. Double standards I suppose.

Edited September 20, 2023 by LCJ

[Tamura]

The number of actors, many of them big names, willing to appear in Roman Polanski films suggests some people within the entertainment industry are prepared to bury their head in the sand. It's not like the vast majority of them actually need to work with him is it, they aren't poor, out-of-work actors struggling to pay their rent.

Edited September 20, 2023 by Tamura

[WyattSheepMask]

Ted Nugent wrote a song about wanting to fuck a 13 year old, and then in 1978 did the “Legal Guardian” thing that @gmoney mentioned about Prince with a 17 year old when he was 30. Might be where Prince got the idea 

[Tommy!]

2 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

High Street Honeys

Off topic but Carrie Johnson apparently submitted photos for that and used the right to be forgotten to try and get it purged from the Internet.

 

38 minutes ago, LCJ said:

Pete Townshend from the Who seemed to escape a media backlash too after “accidentally” logging onto a child porn site for “research purposes”.

"Researching a book", although the question of what he's writing about that needs him to research that never really got clarification.