Russell Brand is requesting that his followers support him financially after YouTube blocked him from being able to earn any money via the website’s advertising.
Earlier this month, news of a joint investigation by Channel 4, The Times and Sunday Times broke, which looked into a host of allegations against comedian and actor Russell Brand.
Channel 4’s Dispatches broadcast an extended documentary covering the allegations, with the newspapers also publishing their reports.
Brand was accused by 4 different women of assaulting them between the years of 2006 and 2013, during the height of his fame. The allegations include r*pe, emotional abuse and sexual assault. All 4 of the women have chosen to remain anonymous.
One of the women accused Brand of r*ping her at his Los Angeles home, and sought treatment at a r*pe crisis centre the next day.
A second said that she entered into a relationship with him when she was sixteen years old and he was thirty-one. She claimed that during their time together Brand was emotionally abusive and controlling.
A third woman said that he assaulted her at his Los Angeles house, and threatened legal action if she told anyone.
The fourth accuser said that Brand sexually assaulted her, and also claimed that he was physically and emotionally abusive.
The investigation took place over several years, with journalists having accessed text messages, medical files and Brand’s biography.
Brand has denied all the accusations against him. In a statement shared to his social media, he said the accusations “pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream.”
“As I have written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous,” he said.
“Now during that time of promiscuity the relationships I had were absolutely, always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent, and I am being transparent about it now as well.
“To see that transparency metastasised into something criminal, that I absolutely deny, makes me question – is there another agenda at play?”
In the wake of the allegations, companies and brands have been reassessing their relationship with the comedian.
YouTube, where Brand has 6.6 million subscribers, has banned him from being able to earn any income from their advertising streams. They said that he had violated the platform’s policies.
Addressing his followers on alternative video app Rumble, Brand called for his followers to provide him with direct financial support by subscribing to his channel for an annual fee of $60 (£49).
“You now know that I have been demonetised on YouTube… fully well aware that the government wrote to social media platforms to demand that I be further censored,” he said during a livestream, per The Independent.
This was seemingly in reference to a letter from Dame Caroline Dinenage, chair of a parliamentary committee, who asked if Rumble would follow in the footsteps of YouTube and demonitize Brand.
“Although it may be politically and socially easier for Rumble to join a cancel culture mob, doing so would be a violation of our company’s values and mission,” Rumble chief executive Chris Pavlovski said in response to the letter.
“We emphatically reject the UK parliament’s demands.”
