I am delighted that Russell Brand is going to prison. The actor and comedian has just been sentenced to 10-and-a-half years after being found guilty on four counts of rape and sexual assault that occurred between 2004 and 2009. He was acquitted on three other counts, but his name will be on the UK’s sex offenders registry for life.
The verdict is likely to bring relief and a sense of justice to many people, not only the women who pressed charges and saw the trial through, but also to others who were harmed by Russell, and on a macro level, even those who have been harmed in any way by his sexual entitlement mentality.
Judge Joel Bennathan was unequivocal in calling him a “sexual predator” in the sentencing remarks. The prosecution’s notes stated that one of Russell’s personal goals had been to sleep with 5,000 women, at least as per a friend who testified against him. Promiscuity was a significant part of his public persona for a long time, a trait that was evidently achieved through an ultimate disregard for consent, preceded by misleading overtures (from pretending to be gay so that women might more easily trust him, as disclosed in his 2007 memoir My Booky Wook, to bragging that he would “tell women whatever they wanted to hear”).
As I was saying: it’s good he’s going to jail. Not just because of what he did, but also because of anything he enabled by being someone in the public eye who influenced ideas of masculinity and intimacy in unfavourable ways. He was certainly not the only one who did this, either historically or in more recent pop culture. But it is rare to see it being punished — especially, being punished without further punishing women, which can happen through any morality derived from an oppressive, usually patriarchal and religious lens, and not from an ethical framework that respects individuality.
I draw a straight line between Russell’s criminal nature and musician Billy Corgan’s recent comments on the Popcast show that his spouse Chloe Mendel’s youth was an “advantage”, as compared to many age-appropriate women he had met over the years who were “broken”. Billy and Chloe had met when he was 44 and she was 19, and have been together since 2012. In the same interview, Billy also defended his friend and fellow musician Marilyn Manson against numerous allegations of sexual harassment and assault.
Billy’s remarks, whether he knows it or not (and that’s perhaps an unnecessary grace to give him, because he does know, because he started responding to the question about their generational gap by saying, “I don’t wanna make all the feminists mad”), play right into deeply misogynistic tropes about gender dynamics in heterosexual partnerships. Specifically, these tropes are about how younger women are easier to control, and more experienced women will demand better treatment.
Both Russell and Billy are linked by core beliefs about women, but they themselves are merely representative of a mindset that is shared by too many others. The Russell Brands of the world do the breaking and the Billy Corgans of the world blame the broken.
