Russell Brand, Sobriety and the Reborn Man
On the partiality of amends
Michael Winterbottom and Russell Brand taking questions after the world premiere of The Emperor's New Clothes. Image credit: Ben Sutherland.
A lot of people have been curious about Russell Brand’s wife since news broke of the sexual-assault allegations against him, and I’m one of them. As I googled her, I predicted that she would be beautiful and at least 10 years younger that him. And, yes, she is both, though it’s 12 years. When she and Brand met, she was 19 and Brand was 30. They were briefly involved at that point and then became partnered when they met again several years later. She’s currently pregnant with their third child. In more than one interview, Brand describes her as ‘beautiful’ and ‘calm’.
Of course, there’s nothing remarkable about a famous man deciding in his late 40s or 50s that it’s now time to find his much younger wife and start having kids. Brand’s case is not exceptional so much as instructive, because it makes the standard dynamics particularly visible. Despite having been as loud as possible about making the opposite choices for decades, Brand was able to pivot to political pontificator, wellness guru and family man as soon as he felt like it, without any meaningful pushback. If anything, the distance he travelled from his previous persona just made the new one appear more praiseworthy. Clearly, Russell had grown.
Try, for a moment, to think of a parallel trajectory for a woman celebrity. Someone promiscuous, charismatic, and possessed of zero impulse control. Someone working class, who didn’t go to university and routinely wins ‘shagger of the year’ in the tabloids. Someone who you can still watch shooting heroin on video, if you take the time to google it.
Then, after some success in TV and film, this woman gets sober and reinvents herself, publishes a book on revolution and gets taken seriously as a Leftist. Gets invited to guest edit an issue of The New Statesman. Shares stages with and is praised by Left-dude royalty like Michael Winterbottom and George Monbiot. Makes millions on Youtube telling people not to trust the MSM that made her famous. Marries a man 12 years her junior and routinely describes him as beautiful and calm.
Of course, you can’t think of this woman, because she could never exist in the world we currently inhabit. Arguably the female equivalent to Russell Brand in terms of noughties-era British fame was Amy Winehouse, and the difference in public reaction to their drug use is large enough to be seen from space. And that difference was skewed in Brand’s favour despite the fact that Winehouse was a once-in-a-generation genius, and Brand was ultimately a guy with big hair and no filter. Even the most brilliant women do not get Brand’s sort of second chances, because they don’t even get his first chances. His life reads like checklist of things for which men can safely expect a blanket immunity never extended to women.
All of which is to say: it’s not just Brand’s own actions and statements over the years that make the rape allegations against him sound unsurprising to many of us. It’s the consistent, resounding lack of significant consequences for his behaviour in general.
I’ve seen people online insisting that Brand wouldn’t have raped anyone because clearly he already had access to as much sex as he wanted. I could spend the next six hours explaining all the things wrong with that assertion, but I’ll restrict myself to pointing out that it gets the issue of motivation exactly backward. Being routinely indulged, given whatever you want and allowed to behave anyway you please does not make you more inclined to respect other people’s boundaries. It makes you more inclined to see other people’s boundaries as a violation of the natural order. It makes ‘no’ sound less like the autonomous choice of an equal individual and more like an outrageous denial of your birthright.
To be clear, I don’t say any of this to absolve Brand of responsibility for whatever he may have done. My point is that our view of his responsibility has been shaped not only by the way we think about men’s sexual access to women, but also by the way we think about gender, wildness, addiction and consequences. And that in turn says something about the way we think about spiritual rebirth and second chances.
II.
As I read the news about Brand over the past few days, I kept thinking about the work of two writers I admire: Holly Whitaker, author of Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice Not to Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol and Kate Manne, author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. And I also kept thinking about several other men with high-profile experiences of recovery—like a former media infant terrible who now writes popular email newsletter on sobriety, or the creator of a meditation-based alternative to AA, whose community split over allegations of sexual misconduct on his part. One thing these trajectories have in common is a tension around what exactly recovery should remove from consideration—either by rendering past behaviour irrelevant or by rendering current behaviour explicable as part of ‘the disease’.
In Quit Like a Woman, Whitaker examines the relationship between gendered socialisation and the Alcoholic Anonymous approach to sobriety, which places a premium on breaking down the ego, being humble and serving others. She points out that the program was expressly designed for white men who were self-aggrandising, pissed off that they weren’t receiving their supposed due in life, and largely uninterested in others’ wants or needs. Their substance-use disorder was fuelled by a desire to drown out the difference between their grandiose self-concept and the reality of their experiences in the world. When you look at it this way, all the AA talk about shutting up and listening, taking direction, and fulfilling ‘service commitments’ starts to make perfect sense. This kind of self-aborbed, me-first guy actually needs to be the one to wash the fucking coffee cups at the end of a meeting for once. (Part of Whitaker’s argument is that for women, washing the cups and everything symbolised therein is already the default.1)
All of which means that at its best AA is like a technology for turning narcissistic, self-absorbed men into actual, complete people.2 If you’ve ever seen this process unfold in real life, you’ll know how remarkable the shift can actually be. Suddenly a guy friend who was never much of a listener remembers to ask about your mom’s knee operation and offers to pick you up from the airport. It’s like he’s now developed that radar that female socialisation instills in women by about age 10—the one that constantly scans other people to assess what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, and what they might need from you.
And this is, in a word, great. Long may it occur. Let all the men with substance-use disorder and/or underdeveloped empathy find true healing. Let all the guy friends remember all the knee operations, and always show up to the airport on time!
I’m not interested in denying this transformation can happen or that it is a good thing for the men involved and the people in their lives. But I am interested in how our cultural assumptions about spiritual rebirth and forgiveness align with another cultural narrative, the one about how men can’t really be ‘that bad’ and/or shouldn’t be punished for badness when it does exist. I’m interested in who gets how many chances when it comes to public wildness, promiscuity and ‘hard’ drug use. And I’m especially interested in why certain attitudes toward women seem to persist, even for those otherwise committed to spiritual awakening, rebirth and recovery, and what we want to do about it.
In Down Girl, Kate Manne attributes our unwillingness to hold men accountable to what she calls himpathy. She argues that we’re uncomfortable with men paying costs or experiencing punishment for violence against women, in part because we see those consequences as removing from a (white) man something that should be his right: freedom, power, authority, and having his experience treated as the defining and most important one in any situation. Himpathy is what drives someone to worry more about a multi-millionaire losing some earning power than they do about the women he allegedly raped. It’s what makes a woman feel guilty for correcting a man even when he’s wrong, as if she has violated the rules of authority by having any. It’s what makes us see a man’s tears as a sign of profound authenticity and a woman’s as forced and manipulative.
Although Manne’s focus is on himpathy in regard to what we think is owed to men, I think it can also arise from what women want from men. So often, women project onto men the things we would feel in their shoes or that we would prefer to be true about their mental landscape. This is the kind of the himpathy that makes us believe a guy when he says that next time—unlike the previous 457 times—he really will clean up the kitchen after dinner like he promised. It’s the kind that guarantees every hair-raising post on Reddit about some woman’s appalling husband ends with her insistence that ‘he’s actually a really good guy’. If himpathy means men always get the benefit of the doubt, then the benefit isn’t just for the men in question. Women would benefit so much if the men we routinely conjure in our own minds actually existed. Nobody wants it to be #Notallmen as much as the women who live amongst and with them.3
III.
I thought about this strand of himpathy while reading a wrenching article about what was called Sachsgate here in the UK. I’ll let you google all the details, but in brief Brand and his fellow BBC radio presenter, Jonathan Ross, recorded themselves leaving messages for Andrew Sachs, an actor known for the UK comedy Fawlty Towers, in which they crowed about the fact that Brand had slept with the man’s granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. Baillie was 20 at the time time, while Brand was 10 years older and sober. It’s not an exaggeration to say that after the segment aired Baillie’s life was destroyed for many years, while Brand went on to use the episode and its fallout as a centre piece in a successful comedy tour. Baillie has recently shared that Brand apologised to her and paid for one stint in rehab, which is frankly the fucking least he could do.
But that’s the thing: the least is often more than women can realistically expect, which means men who meet that bar get to look like the good ones. Compared to Ross, who has never even apologised, Brand did do better. And I have zero doubt that Brand made his apology and footed the rehab bill because of the moral training he received in sobriety, specifically 12-step programmes. But Brand also allegedly committed sexual violence, in sobriety, over years, including against a woman he met in AA4. And the very fact of ‘working a programme’ arguably makes that sort of behaviour easier to enact, by giving men like Brand an aura of self-awareness and the language of self-critique.5 Likewise, the practice of amends may have prompted Brand’s apology, but it also necessarily closed the case on his misdeeds, at least for Baillie. As Baillie puts it, ‘I have forgiven Russell because he made amends to me and that’s all I can ask of someone in recovery’.
To be 100% clear, I do not mean to criticise Baillie in any way by pointing this out. Rather, I want to suggest that Brand’s apology—watering eyes and all—is an example of how the moral technology of AA works, in ways both good and bad. That Brand made seemingly heartfelt amends is not nothing. But when nothing is so often what victims receive, ‘not nothing’ can look larger than it is. Another way to say this is: amends exist within a cultural framework of expectations that include the dynamics of himpathy. And those dynamics place a high moral value on moments when men humble themselves on purpose in any way. Combine that value with the profound wish that a certain type of man can be successfully reborn as someone with a functioning moral compass, and you have a perfect recipe for accountability that is partial, in both senses of the term.
III.
Although Baillie received Brand’s apology through the lens of her own recovery, you don’t need direct experience of 12-step programmes to have internalised the view of sobriety as moral rebirth. In Brand’s successful self-reinvention, it’s possible to glimpse the way that a cultural desire to let men off the hook—which for women is so often a desire that men just stop hooking themselves in the first fucking place—dovetails perfectly with the cultural conviction that hitting bottom and becoming sober is a kind of slate-wiping that creates new, enlightened beings. And it’s also possible to see the selective way this slate-wiping works when it comes to the belief that women essentially exist for men. To service them sexually, consensually or otherwise. To be the butt of their on-air jokes and then gracefully accept their amends. And, in due course, to provide them with family, beauty, calm.
In the world of 12-step recovery, we can see the persistence of this view among the sober in what’s called 13th stepping. 13th stepping is when an older man with much longer sobriety uses his position in the programme to sleep with much younger, usually newly sober women. That this behaviour is common enough to have been assigned a moniker tells you quite a bit. And this tendency not specific to 12-step programmes, of course. Sexual abuse among supposedly enlightened men has plagued the yoga community and the world of therapeutic psychedelics. Of course, you can find men in every type of community who successfully leverage power differentials for sexual access to teenagers and children; on a certain level, it’s how we know we’re in a patriarchy. But the difference in the recovery, yoga and meditation communities is that members seem to present themselves as self-reflexive and committed to shared values, which means there’s implicit expectation of better than usual behaviour.6 And, for that very reason, people can be more prone to a wishful belief that this expectation is being met, despite evidence to the contrary.
I wish I knew how to end this essay on a constructive note or with some kind of positive suggestion for the future. But the fact is, I see more evidence every day that our culture doesn’t really think that men should encounter significant consequences for rape or sexual assault, much less for legal but revolting actions like dating a 16-year-old when you’re 31.7
And inside the 12-step paradigm, the position of consequences is particularly vexed, because the programme invites members to seek both accountability and grace. In the Christian framework in which AA was built, grace is understood as ‘unmerited favour’. It’s about receiving more help, forgiveness and blessings than can be earned or deserved. While the framework comes from Christianity, experiencing grace doesn’t require religious faith. In fact, the absence of a religious belief system can make the experience of grace more profound. In a culture structured by capitalist exchange and hyper-rational cost-benefit analysis, there is something immensely powerful and moving about an interaction that defies the calculus of earning and due and tit-for-that. To give or receive grace can crack that calculus open in the best possible way.
But when some people enjoy an escape from consequences by default, I don’t think we’re dealing with grace anymore. I think we’re dealing with the sacrifice of some people’s autonomy and wellbeing to the desires and consequence-free existence of others.
I also think we have it in us to discern the difference between these two situations. But we have to want to see it first.
Whitaker’s argument is complex and doesn’t deny that AA works for many, including women and minoritised people, who after all are used to adapting frameworks not designed with them in mind. Part of her goal is to consider what an approach to recovery designed for people suffering from a lack of self-trust—rather than overblown confidence—might look like.
If you have ever listened to comedian and podcaster Marc Maron talk about his life before and after he got sober, you’ll have heard an excellent example of how successful this approach can be for a certain kind of guy. For example, Maron has addressed the question of religion in 12 step programs by saying, ‘I may not know who God is, but now I know it isn’t me’.
Hilariously, British radical feminists coined the phrase ‘Not my Nigel!’ to describe this tendency, in reference to women who try to exonerate their husbands preemptively from whatever behaviour is being subjected to feminist critique. #NotallNigels
See the account given by ‘Phoebe’ (a pseudonym).
See for example the text-message apology from the thread obtained by The Times. The Times reporting is paywalled but you can see images of the texts here.
See the podcast The 13th Step, which explores the accusations against a man who is in recovery and has made millions running recovery houses. On abuse in the world of shamanistic and therapeutic psychedelics, see the podcast Cover Story: Power Trip.
Only 1% of reported rapes in the UK result in conviction.