An Open Letter to Russell Brand

I read about your statement before I was aware of the Dispatches programme due to air. I played Dispatches on catch-up today. I was compelled to write to you even before I’d finished watching.

It’s not for me to decide whether you are guilty. It’s not for me to judge you or your behaviours – past or present. But let me share with you some observations and experiences that I hope will take you out of yourself for just a minute and help you weigh up the big picture. I don't presume to speak for anyone else, this is my take based on my life to date.

As a victim of sexual assault, I am acutely aware that even today, there is not enough education across genders around the issue of consent. From my own experiences, I can say that both victim and perpetrator can, at the time, be oblivious to the breach being committed. And that even if something within us tells us it is wrong, we don’t find the words or the strength to make it stop. It is in the aftermath that the difference between the victim and the assailant becomes all too apparent.

While the perpetrator can go about their lives never facing up to what they’ve done, it is not the same for the victim. The bad feeling doesn’t go away. The bad feeling grows or festers. The bad feeling surfaces often after the event. Everyday occurrences can trigger the bad feeling or flashbacks of the event we were unable to stop at the time it happened.

Add to that the terrible indictment on our society that celebrities are lauded, worshipped, idolised, coveted. They become embroiled in a world where they believe they can have anything they want. So if they hear no, stop, don’t, it does not compute. They are a precious commodity and to access that commodity, God-like status is thrust upon them by those who want to monetise them, and those who are struck by the talent that makes them so precious. Reality is skewed. And this is even more complicated if you possess demons you did not ask for, that make reality feel intangible at the best of times never mind the worst.

As a victim of abuse, I can say that the continued denial from our abusers brings the most pain. Even in the face of indisputable evidence, to proclaim innocence and thereby call your accuser a liar or fantasist, is possibly even more heinous than the original crime. No amount of inner guilt or recriminations, no amount of outward do-gooding can ever redress the balance of violating someone and then denying it repeatedly, consistently, infinitely.

I see you as a man who has struggled in life; a man who has battled with his demons and tried to use his struggles to educate others and save them the same troubles. I have not been a follower of yours by any means, but I am of an age where I consumed the media that featured you so prominently all these years and am therefore aware of some things that led me to this image of you, an image that I have held for a long while and I think (although I have not given myself time to reflect) I probably still hold. Bad people – and make no mistake, a person who refuses to take ownership of the pain they have caused others is a bad person – can still do good in the world. Some of them even believe it absolves them from the crimes they know they have committed but will never admit to.

And it is here I will draw a comparison with Jimmy Saville. That man went to his grave denying the horrendous and vile things he had done to the most vulnerable of people, bragging about it on his headstone. But in death his crimes were uncovered, and he was rightly disgraced, his body dug up from his hometown where no-one wanted it, his headstone removed and ground down in the middle of the night. I hope some kind of afterlife exists where he is utterly humiliated by how he is now viewed in society. I hope he feels the pain of having all his good work stripped away and meaningless because in death he no longer had the power to cover up what he had done. I hope that vile, narcissistic man regrets with every fibre of whatever he is now made of all the awful things he did and how he denied, denied, denied till death. Only evil can explain such conduct, only someone sub-human could have gone to his deathbed keeping his secrets.

Jimmy Saville never wanted to be better. He wanted to indulge in his behaviour till he physically no longer could.

Whether or not you are guilty of these crimes, I believe you are a man who has wanted to be better. I believe there have been times in your life where you have really tried to be a good man who makes the world better.

Imagine if a man like you were to do the right thing. Imagine if that man was to not only take ownership of their wrongdoing, but to use his profile and his compelling oratory skills to explain how wrong it was, to speak up for victims, to educate and empower others to be better. To move society one giant leap forward in understanding consent, abuse of power, healthy expression of sexuality.

I believe that man would not have to go to his grave a villain. I believe that man may have gone some way to redress the balance of the crimes he committed. I believe that man’s victims may find it in their hearts to forgive him, because if that man could be brave enough to do such a thing, his victims would experience some semblance of peace around their experience. They would know that some good had come of the terrible thing that happened to them and they may find solace in that.

A man that brave could change the world for the better. That must be worth any shame or punishment that comes from owning up to their crimes, surely?