The day before he was charged, Russell Brand used his podcast ‘Stay Free’ to discuss two of the more high-profile women on his romantic CV.
Wearing an unbuttoned leopard-skin shirt, with a medallion covering his chest, the 49-year-old father of three decided to heap praise on both his ex-wife Katie Perry and her ‘beloved’ successor Laura.
Brand had a point to make: while he’s nowadays cut from a very different political cloth to prominent Hollywood liberal Perry, he doesn’t believe her to be a bad person.
‘She’s not weird or off-key, and wasn’t involved in anything nefarious, as far as I can tell,’ he declared. ‘I have nothing but respect for her, even though I obviously disagree with her political views.
‘But I probably disagree with some of my wife’s, my beloved wife Laura’s political views.
‘So you always disagree with people, don’t you?’
That such things even need saying tells you everything about the highly-polarised nature of the online world that Brand these days inhabits.
Once a darling of the Left, who guest-edited both the Guardian newspaper – where he was a columnist – and the New Statesman, he has, in the last half-dozen years, executed a remarkable political and personal volte face.
In a video posted to X, formerly Twitter on Friday afternoon Russell Brand said he has ‘never been a rapist’ and thanked fans for their support
Brand married US pop singer Katy Perry from 2010 (pictured that year) but they split in 2012
Brand is now married to Laura Gallacher, sister of presenter Kirsty (pictured in 2018)
It has seen the celebrity, whose support was courted by then Labour leader Ed Miliband, and who dutifully laid into the Tories on the BBC’s Question Time, embrace New Age practices such as yoga, along with Christianity, and, more recently, the MAGA principles of one Donald Trump.
His Rightwards shift became apparent during the pandemic, when he built an audience of millions from social media content in which he expressed scepticism about vaccines, and suggested Covid was deliberately engineered by pharmaceutical companies hoping to achieve ‘power, profit and control’.
Clips in which he shared pro-Putin talking points about the Ukraine war, or suggested that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is at the centre of a secret cabal, attracted millions of followers, who have been monetised via adverts for cryptocurrency, gold bullion and debt advice.
After being booted off YouTube for promoting vaccine misinformation, he moved to Rumble, a video site where subscribers pay for priority access to his content. And by last summer, he was considered a sufficiently important ‘influencer’ to be invited to attend Trump rallies and the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Come February this year it emerged that he’d relocated from Henley, where he’d been living with Laura and their young children, to sunny Florida, where he’s recently popped up at the spiritual home of the Trump movement, Mar-a-Lago.
It capped a bizarre journey for the former comedian, who was born in 1975 to a working class couple in the Essex town of Grays.
Brand’s parents Ron and Barbara split up when Brand was six and he was largely raised by his mother, who was diagnosed with cancer multiple times, a period detailed in his bestselling mid-2000s memoir My Booky Wook. At 16, he started taking amphetamines, ecstasy and LSD. He also, in his own words, ‘got very obsessive about sex and women and pornography’, marking the start of a widely-documented sex addiction.
After playing Bugsy Malone in a school production, Brand went to the Italia Conti stage school at 16, but dropped out after a year.
Russell Brand interviewed Ed Miliband in the kitchen of his east London home for his YouTube series The Trews
The comedian spoke in Parliament Square ten years ago during a protest against the Conservative Government and it’s austerity policies in London
It wasn’t until his twenties that he found success as a stand-up comedian, helping him bag a role as a video journalist for MTV.
The alleged incidents over which Brand has been charged relate to the early days of his career, in which his burgeoning fame was occasionally hampered by high-profile controversies.
In 2001, MTV fired him for arriving at the studios dressed as Osama Bin Laden the day after the September 11 attacks.
The following year, he was dismissed from the XFM radio station for reading inappropriate material on air on a Sunday afternoon show.
After two stints in rehab, once to kick drugs and the next time in an effort to combat sex addiction, he started hosting E4’s Big Brother spin-off show, later named Big Brother’s Big Mouth.
And in short order he was appearing on mainstream stations such as BBC Radio 2 and Channel 4
My Booky Wook, which detailed heroin addiction and numerous sordid encounters, became a bestseller in 2007, and the following year he lost his slot on a BBC Radio 2 show after calling up Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs to boast about having slept with his granddaughter, Georgina Baillie.
At the height of that controversy, he moved to Hollywood, where he landed roles in a string of major films, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall opposite Kristen Bell, and Get Him To The Greek with Jonah Hill, both in which he plays the same anarchic British rock star Aldous Snow. He also starred in the remake of the Dudley Moore comedy, Arthur, alongside Dame Helen Mirren.
Russell Brand was seen during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last summer
His romance with Katy Perry, who he’d met at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2009, was of the whirlwind variety: Brand proposed outside the Taj Mahal two months after meeting her and they wed at a lavish ceremony in India in October 2010.
However the relationship faltered after just 14 months and he returned to the UK, where he was embraced by the chattering classes and, for a time, enjoyed a relationship with socialite Jemima Goldsmith.
Brand’s stock among British liberals peaked at the 2015 election, where he endorsed Ed Miliband. That year also turned out to be the one in which Brand met Laura, the sister of TV presenter Kirsty, who was a lifestyle blogger keen on meditating, crystals and making her own beauty products.
They married in 2017 and have children aged eight, six and 22 months. She remained by his side following the broadcast of Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary in September 2023 and she has embraced his conversion to Christianity, which saw him baptised in the River Thames by TV adventurer Bear Grylls last April.
