But he was lovely to me

On Russell Brand, the comment section and the conditioning that keeps abusers safe

Last Monday, a London judge sentenced Russell Brand to ten and a half years in prison for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others between 2004 and 2009. A jury sat through weeks of evidence, acquitted him on some counts, convicted him on others, and the court did the slow, imperfect work courts exist to do.

What has held my attention since his conviction is the commentary that has followed. Comment sections are a kind of public nervous system. They show us, in real time, how a collective body metabolises something it would rather spit out. Reading through them this week, I watched two reflexes surface again and again, and both deserve to be looked at in daylight.

"But so many women said he was lovely"

The first reflex arrived in many forms, all carrying the same reasoning: so many women have spoken about their good experiences with him, so how could he possibly be guilty?

I understand where this comes from. It is the logic of a child who needs the adults around them to be either safe or dangerous, because a world in which the same person can be both is too destabilising to hold. Yet anyone who has sat with survivors, or lived through abuse themselves, knows that abusers are very often charming. Warmth is frequently the very thing that grants them access. Their kindness to many is what makes their cruelty to a few so hard to name, so easy to disbelieve, and so isolating for the person who lived it.

Nobody is abusive to everyone. Abuse is selective by nature. It finds the person with less power, less protection and less chance of being believed. A man can be generous with his friends, tender with his children, magnetic on a stage, and still have harmed someone behind a closed door. Both truths can live in the same body. The good experiences of some women are real, and they carry no weight as evidence against the testimony of others.

Even the court felt the pull of this. The judge reduced Brand's sentence on the rape count by a year, citing his lack of a criminal record and the good work he had done helping people through addiction. That work may well be genuine. It sits alongside the harm, in the same man, and neither cancels the other out.

The drama triangle defence

The second reflex was subtler, and I want to spend more time with it because it wears the clothing of discernment.

One commenter wrote that it is very rare to see anyone protect abuse, and very common to be indirectly accused of it when defending justice, the same justice created to protect victims and to protect all of us from injustice. He went on to invoke Karpman's drama triangle as the deeper truth, showing how any of us can move from one role to another.

Stephen Karpman's model maps three positions, victim, persecutor and rescuer, and shows how people rotate through them in conflict. It is a genuinely useful lens for relational patterns where both parties are co-creating a dynamic. Laid over a criminal conviction for rape, it does something else entirely. It levels the ground. It suggests that the woman who reported, the man who was convicted, and the people who speak up for her are all simply players swapping hats in a shared drama, each as implicated as the next. That flattening is itself a form of protection, and it is far more common than he believes.

This was my reply:

There is a different mechanism in place for protecting victims than there is for protecting abusers. They are not equivalent or comparable. The reality is, the deeper conditioning we inherit is typically protective of abusers and inhibitive towards advocating for victims. And this is purely to maintain survival.

Why we protect the powerful

I want to unpack that last line, because it sits at the bottom of everything I saw in those comments.

For most of human history, belonging to the group meant staying alive. And the person who caused harm was very often the person who held power within that group: the chief, the father, the priest, the provider, and in our era, the celebrity. Speaking against him risked exile, and exile could mean death. So our nervous systems learned a brutal and efficient lesson. Side with power. Keep the peace. Let the one who was hurt carry it quietly, because her truth threatens the cohesion everyone else depends on.

This is why the softening narratives feel so soothing to so many. Isolated incidents. He went too far. She must have misremembered. It was a different time. Each one restores equilibrium to the group by asking the person who was harmed to absorb the cost. In somatic terms, it is the fawn response playing out at a collective scale, a whole culture appeasing the threat in order to feel safe again.

The judge named this dynamic directly when he observed that Brand's fame had shielded him for more than a decade. Fame is simply the modern tribe's version of the chief's seat. It buys a man years of laughter at behaviour that should have been called out, and it buys him a chorus of defenders long after the verdict is read.

The mechanisms that protect victims are recent, hard won and fragile. Courts, reporting pathways, the slow cultural permission to be believed. The mechanisms that protect abusers are ancient, wired into the body and largely unconscious. Treating them as two equal forces on a level field ignores which one has had thousands of years of practice.

What justice actually asks of us

I value due process deeply, and in this case it ran its full course. Brand was tried, acquitted on some charges and convicted on others. Honouring justice means honouring that outcome too, including the parts that are uncomfortable for people who loved his work.

So here is my invitation. The next time someone you admire is named, notice what happens in your body before your mind gets involved. Notice the flinch, the urge to defend, the reflex to reach for a framework that makes everyone equally responsible. That reflex is old. It kept your ancestors alive. And it no longer has to run the show.

We can hold complexity without collapsing into equivalence. A person can have helped many people and harmed others. Our loyalty belongs to the truth, and to those who had to pay the most to tell it.