Russell Brand says he "consensually" sexually exploited a 16-year-old when he was 30

Brand has faced numerous allegations of sexual harassment over the last five years, which worsened with the release of a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary. In the documentary, four women accuse Brand of sexual assault and emotional abuse, including one accuser who was 16 at the time of the abuse, and Brand was 31. He currently faces trial on two counts of rape, one count of oral rape, three counts of sexual assault, and one count of indecent assault. He’s also accused of exposing himself and assaulting a woman on the set of Arthur in 2010. He denies the charges. 

“I recognize that my sexual conduct in the past was selfish and I did not apply enough consideration, barely any, I suppose, really, to how that sex was affecting other people,” he continues. “While I was transgressing lines of being a person that was sleeping with people because I had availability to, not only by the way, waitresses and strippers and fans, but, like you know, powerful women, as well like powerful professional women that had gravitas.”

But circling back to the case, which doesn’t really touch upon the powerful professional women Brand has slept with, Brand says, “Consent is what’s important, and what fame gave me and what addiction fueled was opportunity for endless consent, which made me a hedonist and a fool and an exploiter of women. And that is wrong. That is something that needs to be redeemed, and addressed, and atoned for. What I’m obviously not only querying but violently or aggressively or assertively opposing is the idea that this is a criminal justice matter.” 

Kelly was initially disgusted by the allegations against Brand, believing that the conservative movement didn’t need someone (or another) person like him. But after realizing that these were the actions of governments attacking people it doesn’t like, such as conservative truth-tellers, she decided to be more “open-minded to having been wrong about [her] initial assessments.” This isn’t the first time Kelly has defended men who prey on teens on the radio. “He liked 15-year-old girls,” Kelly said of late pedophile Jeffery Epstein. “I’m not trying to make an excuse for this, I’m just giving you the facts—that he wasn’t into, like 8-year-olds, but he liked the very teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”