Russell Brand raised eyebrows on Friday evening by releasing a video in which he preemptively denied criminal allegations he says are going to be made against him soon. 

Brand currently hosts a highly-rated podcast, covering controversial topics such as COVID-19 mandates. Before that, he was most known for being a popular comedian and starring in several big-budget films, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek. 

In the video, Brand says that he refutes "these very, very serious, criminal allegations," though he doesn't go into detail about what they are. 

This is happening pic.twitter.com/N8zIKLbJN2

— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) September 15, 2023

BRAND: I've received two extremely disturbing letters, or a letter and an email. One from a mainstream media TV company, one from a newspaper, listing a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks as well as some pretty stupid attacks like my community festival should be stopped, that I shouldn't be able to attack mainstream media narratives on this channel. But amidst this litany of astonishing, rather baroque attacks are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute. 

These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. As I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous. 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'm being transparent about it now. And to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny makes me question, is there another agenda at play, particularly when we've seen coordinated media attacks before like with Joe Rogan when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of and we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same language. 

I'm aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, "Watch out Russell, they're coming for you, you're getting too close to the truth, Russell Brand did not kill himself." I know that a year ago, there was a spate of articles [saying] "Russell Brand is a conspiracy theorist, Russell Brand's right-wing." I'm aware of news media making phone calls, sending letters to people I know for ages and ages. It's been clear, or at least it feels to me there's a serious and concerted agenda to control these kinds of spaces and these kinds of voices, and I mean my voice along with your voice.

Reading between the lines, Brand is definitely alluding to criminal charges related to sexual misconduct. He mentions that they relate to his "promiscuous" past and insists that any relationships he had were fully consensual, multiple times throughout his statement. 

As to the timing of all this, he's certainly right to be suspicious. Brand was already a celebrity, but he's become a different kind of celebrity over the last several years, challenging mainstream press narratives and speaking against policies that are otherwise supported by the left-wing ruling class in Europe. Why dredge this stuff up now? Why not a decade ago when all this stuff was already out in the open as far as his promiscuous nature, which he again claims was consensual? Why wait until he's a married man doing political commentary to coordinate these attacks and try to take him down? 

I think we all know the answer to that. That doesn't mean that Brand's past behavior was good. He himself has said it wasn't. That doesn't make him a criminal, though, and media outlets trying to put that perception out there, likely based on hearsay, is exactly the kind of illiberal nonsense that happened all too often at the peak of the "Me Too" movement. If there's actual evidence of Brand doing something criminal, let's see it. One-sided allegations pushed by biased media outlets decades after the fact aren't that. We'll see how this plays out, though.