Russell Brand in his own words: How comedian publicly humiliated women

As a self-confessed narcissist, Russell Brand revelled in the attention his more offensive ‘comedy’ and stunts gathered from his often shocked audiences.

But as a disturbing series of allegations about sexual attacks and disgraceful behaviour grow day by day, fans may well be asking if the joke was on them all along.

While Brand strenuously denies any illegality or criminal activity, it is unavoidable  that his more provocative material is being re-examined with fresh eyes – particularly as his endless public and stage-performed boasts of sex and womanising appear to echo some of the more unpleasant claims being made against him.

Here MailOnline looks at his most outlandish appearances and remarks to try and sort fact from fiction.

Brand has spoken in the past about how his ‘sexual endeavours causes all the problems’.

Having got clean of drugs after his agent John Noel insisted he went to rehab, his addictive personality turned to sex. 

He said: ‘It’s the scale of my sexual endeavours that causes all the problems. I’m a bloke from Grays with a good job and a terrific haircut who’s been given a Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory cos of the ol’ fame.’

Whilst travelling across the UK in 2006 as part of his Shame tour he spoke about how ‘now that I can’t do it [drugs] anymore, I like to have it off’. 

‘Sex is a hobby, I like it,’ he said. ‘Do you believe there are people trying to spoil that for me now.’  

The former Big Brother’s Big Mouth host pointed to his father Ron Brand’s influence for super-charging his ‘rapacious’ sex addiction.

He talked about watching porn movies at his father’s house whilst in primary school, and how he lost his virginity aged 17 to a prostitute paid for by Brand Snr while in Hong Kong.

In his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wooky, he wrote about how his father had paid for three prostitutes to come back to their hotel: ‘My dad set about unwrapping his two prostitutes.’

He attempted to impress the remaining one, although he found the ‘bedlam’ from the neighbouring bed unsettling.

He adds that ‘during the rest of that holiday I f****d loads more prostitutes and never wore a condom… it had hardened me… my sexuality had morphed for ever from bewildered innocence into something more complex and rapacious.’ 

He talks about watching porn videos at his dad’s house when he was in primary school. He was precociously interested in women’s breasts, and even before he was a teenager would attempt to guess women’s cup sizes.

He says that as a small child he contrived to watch his Auntie Josie, a friend of his mother, washing her ‘glorious breasts’ in the bath – she had reasoned that he was too young to notice. ‘That’s it, I thought. Keep washing, after all I’m only a little boy…. I really was quite manipulative, even at that early age.’

During his Doin’ Life stand-up tour in 2007, Brand said ‘I can pretend to be nice for a little of time, you know at the beginning of relationships, pretending to be nice’. 

He called it the ‘n*bstacle course’. 

He has openly admitted how he has used ’emotional blackmail’ to get what he wants from women. 

‘I was allowed to sleep in her [a girl called Penny’s] bed top to toe,’ he wrote in his memoir. 

‘I spun gags and yarns till she let me turn round, I painted verbal pictures and begged until she kissed me, I lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till reluctantly she removed her bra, I used tears and emotional blackmail to secure the immolation of her knickers.’ 

While he grimly recounted how he once broke a sex worker’s phone having ‘paid a lot of money’ for ‘half-hearted’ sex.

‘This girl was a sorry, fair-weather excuse for a prostitute … then the phone rings again, and I, and this is the worst act of misogyny I’ve committed since the spitting debacle, took the phone out of her hand and threw it at the wall,’ he wrote.

Another time he told of how Michaela [a lap dancer] had slapped him after they had sex. ‘I felt very strongly that I needed to avenge the slap . . . I spat in her face,’ he wrote. 

Brand would move to LA to pursue his Hollywood career after he resigned from the BBC in 2008.

He started dating Katy Perry and married the star before their whirlwind romance ended in 2011 in acrimonious fashion when he sent her a text message saying he wanted a divorce. 

The heartbreaking moment was captured during the I Kissed A Girl And I Liked It star’s ‘Part Of Me’ documentary and showed Perry sobbing before she was due to go on stage. 

It is also in America where the most serious accusation of rape is suggested to have taken place.   

In an interview on Lorraine in 2017, Brand spoke about his time in Hollywood. He said: ‘I suppose if you are in a position of some success people will let you be a nutter as long as they are making money out of it…

‘There’s a certain point where they don’t really like it… in a way it’s not good to live like that but it was sort of exciting experience.’ 

In his 2010 follow-up, Booky Wooky 2: This Time It’s Personal, Brand discusses his internal battles with how he treats women.

He wrote: ‘What kind of man was I? Treating women in this way? If this is what I’m telling you, can you imagine what’s being left out?’  

In 2013, Brand admitted to being a ‘sex narcissist’ when speaking with Richard Herring for his theatre podcast. 

Talking about helping others to give his life some ‘kernel of truth’ he said: ‘I’ve f***ed lots of people, I’ve had loads of money, I’ve been in some – terrible – films. I know nothing works. 

‘I know none of it is real, my last shot at anything that might mean something. That might make my life have some value is to live lovingly to people and try it, even though it’s against some of my instincts.

‘I’m narcissistic and I want to f*** people and I love attention. All them things are true. I’ve always wanted that, I love showing off.’  

Brand would later make a crass joke about rape during the chat with Herring as he said it ‘wasn’t the extraordinary I’m trying to protect [about myself], it’s the mundanity’.

‘Oh, I also raped someone once,’ he said, before pausing. ‘I killed her after, so.’ 

One of the more unusual things Brand has done in his varied career appeared in a recently re-emerged video. 

It saw him befriend a homeless man James and invite him into his home to stay the night.

In extraordinary scenes Brand at once point shares a bath with the gentleman and washes his hair.

Later he is seen cutting his toenails and giving him a shave before they retire to a sofa.

Brand then puts on Simon and Garfunkel’s emotional hit Bridge Over Troubled Water as the camera zooms onto James’s face. 

The tight crop on the homeless man’s eyes appear to show him becoming emotional in what seems to be something of an exploitative moment.