Russell Brand Is Bill Cosby For White People. Let Me Explain

The discussion behind sexual predators within the Black community is always a tough one to navigate, especially when it comes to famous Black people. You could loosen the lug nuts on a rusty wheel by hand sooner than you could loosen the grip R. Kelly has on Black R&B fans over 35. Diddy defenders pop up in our comment sections just as often as condemnation and funny, baby oil-based memes do.

And then there’s Bill Cosby. Black people of a certain age were so desperate to preserve Cliff Huxtable’s image of America’s dad that we constructed an entire urban fable about him attempting to buy a television network, and angering the nameless, faceless “powers that be,” who then conspired to have dozens of women come forward over a span of decades to tell the same lie about being drugged and assaulted by a perfectly innocent man. 

Yes, it’s a conversation that tends to be difficult to navigate — because I be wanting to punch these fools.

But what I will not hear is any notion that the urge to protect our rich, famous, or otherwise iconic predators is unique to Black people. Mind you, I cringe whenever I hear the words, “Black people are the only ones who…” regarding any subject, really. I mean, I get that Black people have a tendency to mind our own collective business more closely than anyone else’s, but that’s no excuse for why so many of us can’t reprimand the Black collective without placing outside races on pedestals they observably don’t belong on. 

I take special exception to the idea that we protect our high-status predators more than anyone else, because we live in a world where Donald Trump is president, the Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, are deified, and Casey Affleck has an Oscar. 

So, now, let’s talk about Russell Brand. 

As many of you know by now (or may not know, because, again, Black people be minding our own), British comedian Russell Brand has been sentenced to over 10 years in prison after being found guilty on one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault — which means there are now at least two actors/entertainers who have forever ruined one of my favorite mostly white comedies, Get Him to the Greek. 

From NPR:

Over the past four weeks, six women testified against the comedian in court in London, in a trial that garnered massive media attention.

A jury found Brand guilty last week on four of the seven counts against him. He was found guilty of raping a woman he’d met at one of his shows in 2009 and of sexually assaulting three women — at a bar, a radio station and a TV studio — between 2004 and 2009.

Brand denies all charges and said he never had non-consensual sex.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people vocally condemning Brand, just as Cosby and Kelly acolytes in the Black community stay busy mounting their absurd defenses against other Black people who don’t give a damn about preserving the images of celebrities if it means sacrificing victims, who are most often Black victims. 

But then there’s this:

 I’ll see your “Bill Cosby tried to buoy NBC” fiction, and raise you white people who think Brand was set up by the Who-ever-the-hell-uminati to distract us from Jeffrey Epstein victims and “the Pakistani rapist grooming gangs.”

And it’s not just random white dweebs, creeping from the bowels of Alex Jones’ internet to come up with absurd conspiracies to cope with a famous guy’s self-inflicted downfall. 

You see, Brand has largely been seen as, or maybe assumed to be, a left-leaning celebrity for most of his career, but I guess at some point, he began shifting towards conservative ideology and half-baked conspiratorial propaganda. And because right-wingers have a tendency to embrace whatever few celebs and semi-celebs are willing to associate with them, high-profile conservatives like Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr. — who is notably the son of our adjudicated rapist-in-chief — are publicly defending Brand.

 “When he was like married to Katy Perry, he’s one of the most famous actors in the world, no one seemed to have a problem,” Trump said. “No one seemed to think he was a rapist then. But he finds God, I guess, changes his ways, sees some aspects of conservative life and talks about them.” 

Here’s Musk insisting that it’s “a crazy legal standard” that allowed Brand to be convicted on allegations that are nearly two decades old. 

And, of course, here’s Megyn Kelly — who apparently didn’t gross the world out enough when she pondered on air about whether or not Epstein was technically a pedophile — saying, “I don’t believe the charges, and I don’t have to believe them just because the jury came through with the opposite conclusion,” and adding that, “I feel indignant that this obvious conservative stalwart has been targeted.” 

Say what you will about the Black community, but Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama aren’t out here wearing “Free Cosby” T-shirts. 

So, yes, Black people, we need to continue to have serious talks about the way we regard and fail to condemn predatory behavior within our communities, households, and fandoms, but we don’t need to fall into the trap of believing these are issues that are unique to us. Let’s not do that to ourselves arbitrarily. It’s a mentality that simply doesn’t match the reality around us.

Also, I’m just going to leave this here…

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