On Friday, just shy of a year since Russell Brand was showily baptized in the River Thames, the UK’s Metropolitian Police charged the British comedian-turned-MAGA-influencer with one count of rape, one count of oral rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent exposure.
At the time of his 2024 conversion, Brand declared that he had repented of his past and that he would “acknowledge that I am in a battle against myself.” A few days before this week’s charges, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News that he had “surrendered to a higher purpose.” So, for people outside the MAGA bubble, it’s a little strange to hear Brand react to the charges by rejecting accountability, instead denying the charges with conspiracy theories so outlandish it’s hard to buy that he believes any of it.
“We are very fortunate, in a way, to live in a time when there’s so little trust in the British government,” Brand asserted in a response video on X. “We know the law has become a kind of weapon to be used against people, institutions and sometimes entire nations that will not accept and tolerate levels of corruption that are unprecedented.” Even while he insisted that he now lives in “the light of the Lord,” Brand insinuated that he’s the victim of a corrupt conspiracy to frame him.
Christianity emphasizes redemption, making it an attractive framework for a celebrity needing to rehab a bad image.
The likelier explanation for the charges is that there’s just a lot of evidence against Brand. A collaboration between The Times, The Sunday Times, and Channel 4, conducted over years, produced exhaustively documented allegations of rape and other sexual abuses. They spoke with hundreds of sources, including four accusers. They collected medical records, texts, emails, and internal documents from employers, all showing a pattern of alleged sexual abuse that is often frightening in its violence. The report came out in September 2023. Shortly thereafter, Brand was kicked off YouTube. He then swiftly joined the MAGA-affiliated Rumble network. In the next few months, he moved to the U.S. and got baptized, fully rebranding himself as a right-wing Christian influencer.
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This timeline doesn’t seem to have given Brand’s new MAGA audience a single moment’s doubt that he might have ulterior motives. On the contrary, his fans encouraged the conspiracy theory that paints him as a political prisoner and the charges as “a political prosecution,” as Charlie Kirk complained.
“We know you’re innocent, Russell and this is clearly all politically motivated,” insisted one fan. “They’re willing to sacrifice Russell though because it will make others stay silent,” said another. My favorite, though, might be the guy who replied, ” It wasn’t until you decided to clean up your life and find faith and peace that they decided you must be removed.”
This, of course, gets the timeline backwards. The accusations have been surfacing since 2006, when Australian singer Dannii Minogue first spoke out about Brand being a “vile predator.” The big Times exposé came out in late 2023, but Brand didn’t “find faith” until the spring of 2024. Not like any of the other excuses for Brand make sense. The MAGA followers talk a lot about how “they” are doing this to Brand, but it’s forever unclear who “they” are. The journalists? Police? Four alleged victims? Hundreds of witnesses? Crown prosecutors? But MAGA would rather believe that hundreds of “they” are conspiring to take down a has-been comedian than accept the likelier explanation: Brand found Jesus just in time to get a new income stream and source of attention and validation, one he would have never settled for when he still had access to mainstream audiences.
Religion professor Bradley Onishi, host of the “Spirit and Power” podcast, pointed out to Salon that there is “a long history of the evangelical subculture and the conservative Christian subcultures wanting to find mainstream legitimacy” by grabbing onto any celebrities they can claim are one of them. In the 90s and early 2000s, Onishi noted, evangelicals hyped everyone from U2 and Creed to Jessica Simpson and Katy Perry as “crossover Christian figures” who could sell the larger world on the idea that Christianity is hip and cool.
Brand, however, represents a disturbing twist to this saga: the willingness, in the era of Donald Trump, of right-wing Christians to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel to get this validation.
Not that many of them will engage with the actual allegations against Brand, lest their view of him as a godly man get disturbed, but frankly, the details are shocking even in the #MeToo era. One alleged victim said she was 16 when she first had a sexual relationship with the 31-year-old Brand. She says he orally raped her so violently that she started to choke, only escaping by punching him the stomach. Others report that Brand threatened them if they spoke out, a likelier explanation for the delayed reporting than a shadowy conspiracy by the all-powerful “they” against Brand.
Brand belongs to a long line of celebrities who, because of scandal or simply falling out of fashion, have discovered the cash and ego-fluffing benefits of converting to the Church of MAGA. Roseanne Barr’s TV comeback got derailed because of racist online ranting, so nowadays she spends her time on Tucker Carlson’s show talking about her “conversation going with God.” Carlson himself was a MAGA figurehead in good standing, but since losing his Fox News gig, he’s taken to talking about demon possession and other topics that perform well in the social media feeds of the Christian right. Tattoo superstar Kat Von D got her Sephora makeup line canceled after anti-vaccination statements and marrying a dude with a swastika tattoo. Now she gets glowing write-ups in right-wing media about her conversion to Christianity. Mark Wahlberg got a whole lot louder about being a devout Catholic shortly after stories about his arrests for hate crimes resurfaced.
Christianity emphasizes redemption, making it an attractive framework for a celebrity needing to rehab a bad image. In theory, however, there is supposed to be repentance before redemption. But this is the era of Trumpian Christianity, so skipping the part where you say you’re sorry is optional. After all, Trump is treated not just as a fellow Christian, but something closer to a savior figure by the religious right. He has never said he’s sorry to the victims of his fraud, or to the people he’s lied about, or to E. Jean Carroll, who a civil jury found him liable for sexually assaulting. On the contrary, Trump’s response to people he’s harmed is to escalate the abuse if they speak out against him, which is why Carroll won a second defamation suit against him. Being a bully is admired in the MAGA movement. In MAGA Christianity, actual repentance would be dismissed as “woke.” No wonder it was the perfect landing spot for Russell Brand.
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