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      Sean Combs Accused of Raping 17-Year-Old Girl in 2003 in Lawsuit

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      In the complaint, an unnamed woman says she was flown from the Detroit area to New York on a private plane and gang-raped in a recording studio. Mr. Combs denied the allegations.Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul who has been named in three recent lawsuits accusing him of rape, now faces a fourth complaint, by a woman who says that Mr. Combs and two other men gang-raped her in a New York recording studio 20 years ago, when she was 17 years old.In the latest lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the woman, who is not named in the court papers, described a nightmarish scene on a night in 2003, when she was in the 11th grade. The woman says in the complaint that she met two associates of Mr. Combs at a lounge in the Detroit area, and they took her on a private plane to New York. There, the suit says, the three men gave the woman copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, and took turns raping her in the studio’s bathroom as she drifted in and out of consciousness.When they were done, the suit says, the woman fell into a fetal position in a bathroom, lying on the floor in pain, and she was soon driven to an airport and put on a plane back to Michigan.In a statement, Mr. Combs said: “Enough is enough. For the last couple of weeks, I have sat silently and watched people try to assassinate my character, destroy my reputation and my legacy. Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday. Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”Through his lawyers, Mr. Combs has denied the allegations in the three earlier suits.Douglas H. Wigdor, a lawyer for the unidentified woman, released his own statement that said: “As alleged in the complaint, defendants preyed on a vulnerable high school teenager as part of a sex trafficking scheme that involved plying her with alcohol and transporting her by private jet to New York City where she was gang-raped by the three individual defendants at Mr. Combs’s studio.”“The depravity of these abhorrent acts,” he added, “scarred” the woman “for life.”The first of the recent lawsuits against Mr. Combs, who has been known as Puff Daddy or Diddy, was filed on Nov. 16 by Casandra Ventura, a singer once signed to Mr. Combs’s label, Bad Boy, who was also his longtime girlfriend. In a graphic 35-page complaint, Ms. Ventura, who performs as Cassie, accused him of rape and forcing her to have sex with a series of male prostitutes, as well as subjecting her to violent beatings that took place over nearly a decade. The case was settled in just one day. Mr. Combs denied the accusations and Ms. Ventura said in a statement that the case had been resolved “amicably.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Former Grammys Head Michael Greene Accused of Sexual Assault in Lawsuit

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      In a complaint, Terri McIntyre, who worked at the Recording Academy in the mid-1990s, says the organization’s then leader, Michael Greene, subjected her to ongoing misconduct.A woman who worked at the Grammys organization in the 1990s has accused its former chief executive, Michael Greene, of drugging and sexually abusing her nearly 30 years ago and of making sex a condition of her employment, according to a lawsuit filed in California on Wednesday.Terri McIntyre, a former executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Recording Academy, the nonprofit group behind the Grammy Awards, sued Mr. Greene in Los Angeles Superior Court, in the latest of a wave of lawsuits accusing powerful men in the music industry of past misconduct.In her suit, which also names the Recording Academy as a defendant, Ms. McIntyre says that from 1994 to 1996, Mr. Greene caught her in a “trap” in which he regularly pressured her into sexual contact, and forced sex on her against her will.Mr. Greene could not be immediately reached for comment but has previously denied allegations that he sexually harassed employees while an executive with the Grammys.In a statement, the Recording Academy said: “In light of pending litigation, the academy declines to comment on these allegations, which occurred nearly 30 years ago. Today’s Recording Academy has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to sexual misconduct and we will remain steadfast in that commitment.”In her lawsuit, Ms McIntyre says that while attending a Grammy board meeting in Hawaii in May 1994, soon after she got the job, Mr. Greene gave her Champagne in his hotel room. She “quickly began to feel unwell and began to lose control of her physical movements,” she says in the court papers. She later woke up nude in Mr. Greene’s bed and realized she had been “violated,” according to the suit.On another occasion, she says in the complaint, she was driving with Mr. Greene to a business meeting when he unexpectedly took her to his home near Malibu, Calif., and forced her to perform oral sex in his kitchen.Throughout her time at the Recording Academy, Ms. McIntyre says, Mr. Greene made it clear that enduring his harassment was part of a “quid pro quo proposition” in which she could succeed at the organization, and in the music industry, only if she had a sexual relationship with him. In her complaint, the woman said she was a single mother and needed the job to care for her young daughter.The suit was filed a month after another case in New York against Neil Portnow, Mr. Greene’s successor as the Grammys’ chief. In that suit, an unnamed woman accused Mr. Portnow of drugging and raping her in a New York hotel room in 2018. Mr. Portnow denied the accusations.Ms. McIntyre’s suit offers a new perspective on a tumultuous period in Grammys history. In 2002, Mr. Greene was forced out of the academy after 14 years at its helm, during which he was widely credited with expanding the organization and transforming its annual ceremony into a lucrative, must-see television event. At the same time, Mr. Greene was dogged by a series of scandals, including multiple accusations of sexual harassment and discrimination, and allegations that MusiCares, a Grammy charity founded under his watch, had spent less than 10 percent of its donations on its stated purpose of helping suffering and indigent musicians.The tipping point for Mr. Greene’s ouster was an accusation by the academy’s human resources officer that he had sexually abused her in a parking lot; he denied the accusation, and the academy said that an investigation had cleared Mr. Greene of wrongdoing. According to news accounts at the time, that woman was paid $650,000 to settle her allegation, a reported payment that Ms. McIntyre cited in her suit.According to reports in The Los Angeles Times in 2001 and 2002, the academy’s human resources department was created because of an earlier accusation against Mr. Greene. A spokesman for the Recording Academy did not answer a question about when the human resources department was created.In 1996, Ms. McIntyre says in her complaint, she left the academy and the music business overall because Mr. Greene had blackballed her in the industry. Ms. McIntyre’s lawyers gave The New York Times a copy of her resignation letter, which reads: “I am compelled to leave due to what I perceive to be serious problems in my work environment.”In her suit, Ms. McIntyre also says that years later, she became an anonymous source for Chuck Philips, then a reporter at The Los Angeles Times, whose articles investigating Mr. Greene’s conduct precipitated the executive’s ouster. In 1999, Mr. Philips and another Los Angeles Times journalist, Michael A. Hiltzik, shared a Pulitzer Prize in beat reporting for a series of articles about the music industry. The articles included discussions of Mr. Greene’s power and compensation at the Grammys; the problems at MusiCares; and complaints from Grammy insiders about the organization’s accounting practices.Mr. Philips could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.After leaving the Grammys, Mr. Greene — who began his career as a saxophonist — founded a company called Artist Tribe, which he has described as a “creative production, technology, education, database and philanthropic enterprise” that serves “creative and cultural communities.”A call on Wednesday to a number associated with Mr. Greene was answered by a man who said that Mr. Greene was on a plane and was not available to comment on the lawsuit.In her suit, Ms. McIntyre says that after her resignation, Mr. Greene and the Recording Academy offered to pay her severance money in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement, but she refused.Ms. McIntyre’s suit is the latest in a series that have accused powerful men in the music industry of sexual harassment and abuse. In addition to Mr. Portnow, those men have included the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and the producer L.A. Reid; Mr. Combs and Mr. Rose denied the allegations, while Mr. Tyler denied one accusation and did not respond to a second, and Mr. Reid did not respond.Many of the suits were filed under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that gave a one-year window for people who say they were the victims of sexual abuse to bring a civil suit even if the original statute of limitations for their case had expired. That window expired last month. But a similar law in California, under which Ms. McIntyre brought her case, allows cases to be brought until the end of the year.Julia Jacobs contributed reporting. More

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      Former Model Sues Axl Rose, Accusing Him of 1989 Rape

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      Sheila Kennedy filed a complaint in New York State Supreme Court that says the Guns N’ Roses singer “overpowered” her in a hotel room. A lawyer for Mr. Rose said “this incident never happened.”Axl Rose of the band Guns N’ Roses was sued on Wednesday by a woman who accused him of dragging her by the hair, tying her up and raping her in a New York hotel in 1989.The suit was filed in New York State Supreme Court, in Manhattan, by Sheila Kennedy, a former model who has appeared in Penthouse magazine. She accused Mr. Rose of sexual assault and battery, and her suit seeks unspecified damages.Ms. Kennedy’s suit is the latest in a series of cases against powerful men that have been brought under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that created a one-year window for people who say they were victims of sexual abuse to file civil suits after the statute of limitations has expired. That window ends this week.In recent weeks, such cases have been filed against Steven Tyler of Aerosmith; the music executive L.A. Reid; and Neil Portnow, the former head of the organization behind the Grammy Awards. Last Thursday, the singer Cassie filed an explosive suit against Sean Combs — the producer and executive also known as Diddy and Puff Daddy — but it was settled in one day. (Mr. Portnow has denied the accusation; Mr. Tyler and Mr. Reid have not responded. A lawyer for Mr. Combs said that the settlement was “in no way an admission of wrongdoing.”)In a statement, Alan S. Gutman, a lawyer for Mr. Rose, said: “Simply put, this incident never happened.” He added: “Though he doesn’t deny the possibility of a fan photo taken in passing, Mr. Rose has no recollection of ever meeting or speaking to the Plaintiff, and has never heard about these fictional allegations prior to today.”In her suit, Ms. Kennedy says she met Mr. Rose in early 1989, when she went to a New York nightclub with a friend who was a fan of Guns N’ Roses. The band was at perhaps the peak of its fame — and its members relished their reputations as hard-partying bad boys — but Ms. Kennedy says in her suit that at the time she did not know who Mr. Rose was.According to Ms. Kennedy’s complaint, Mr. Rose invited her and another woman to a party at his suite in a hotel on Central Park West, where he offered them cocaine and alcohol. According to the complaint, the party “was in full swing” until Mr. Rose called for everyone to leave except Ms. Kennedy, the other woman and a man.According to the complaint, Mr. Rose began having sex with the other woman, in an “aggressive” way that Ms. Kennedy says in the suit “appeared painful” for the woman. Ms. Kennedy says that she went to another room in the suite, where she could hear the sounds of breaking glass and objects being thrown in Mr. Rose’s room, and that she heard him yelling at the other woman and calling her a “whore.”According to Ms. Kennedy’s suit, Mr. Rose stormed into the room where she was, knocked her down, “grabbed her by the hair and dragged her across the suite back to his bedroom.” Her knees were bleeding from being scraped against the rug, the suit says.In Mr. Rose’s room, the suit says, he threw her facedown on the bed, tied her hands behind her back with pantyhose and sexually assaulted her, forcing anal penetration. The suit says that Mr. Rose never sought Ms. Kennedy’s consent, and that she “did not consent and felt overpowered.”In her suit, Ms. Kennedy says that she has suffered anxiety and depression as a result of the incident with Mr. Rose, and that her career as an actress and model has suffered. Ms. Kennedy catalogs her success as a Penthouse model, mentioning that she was Pet of the Year in 1983 and was on the cover of the magazine four times.Ms. Kennedy has discussed her encounter with Mr. Rose in the past, including an interview on the website of The Daily Mail in 2016, and in a memoir, “No One’s Pet,” published that same year. She also appeared in “Look Away,” a 2021 documentary about sexual abuse of young women in the music industry.In her memoir, Ms. Kennedy also described her encounter with Mr. Rose as a violent one, which left her “crying and bleeding.” But she added in the book: “Weirdly enough, I was okay with this. I had wanted to be with him since the minute I’d first laid eyes on him, and now I was getting him.”When asked about that account, Ann Olivarius, a lawyer for Ms. Kennedy, said in a statement: “Like many victims of sexual assault, it has taken Sheila time to come to terms with her experiences and to be able to talk about it fully and openly.” More

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      Cassie Settles Lawsuit Accusing Sean Combs of Rape and Abuse

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      The R&B singer Casandra Ventura and the music mogul did not disclose terms of the settlement, which came one day after Ms. Ventura filed an explosive complaint.Sean Combs and the singer Cassie have reached a settlement just one day after she filed an explosive lawsuit accusing the hip-hop mogul of rape and numerous instances of physical abuse.The parties announced on Friday evening that they had reached an agreement to resolve the case, though they disclosed no details about the terms of the settlement.“I have decided to resolve this matter amicably on terms that I have some level of control,” Cassie, whose full name is Casandra Ventura, said in a statement. “I want to thank my family, fans and lawyers for their unwavering support.”In a statement, Mr. Combs said: “We have decided to resolve this matter amicably. I wish Cassie and her family all the best. Love.”For Mr. Combs, the settlement quickly shuts down what could have been a risky and potentially embarrassing process of legal discovery — in which reams of evidence are made public — and a possible trial. And Ms. Ventura, who has already aired her accusations through a public complaint, avoids a cross-examination by Mr. Combs’s attorneys.In a lawsuit that drew international attention, Ms. Ventura — who signed to Mr. Combs’s Bad Boy label in 2005, when she was 19, and dated him for about a decade — accused Mr. Combs of what she said was years of beatings, controlling behavior and various forms of sexual abuse, including a rape. In response, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, Ben Brafman, said, “Mr. Combs vehemently denies these offensive and outrageous allegations.”According to Ms. Ventura’s suit, which was filed on Thursday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. Combs assaulted her numerous times, leaving her bloodied and bruised; she said his employees sometimes took her to hotel rooms for days to recover out of the public eye.In one of the suit’s most disturbing allegations, Ms. Ventura said that for years she was forced to participate in sexual encounters with a succession of male prostitutes, as Mr. Combs watched, masturbated and recorded videos. According the suit, Mr. Combs called these events “freak offs,” and they took place in a number of high-end hotels throughout the United States.According to Ms. Ventura’s suit, Mr. Combs controlled nearly every aspect of her life, paying for her homes, car, clothes and other necessities, and even had access to her personal medical records. The suit says Ms. Ventura never went to the police because she feared it “would merely give Mr. Combs another excuse to hurt her.”Mr. Combs, who started Bad Boy in 1993, became one of the most powerful and successful figures in the hip-hop industry, working with stars like the Notorious B.I.G. and Mary J. Blige, and helping to transform rap music and culture into a global pop phenomenon and a major business.Still, his rise to fame has been dotted with allegations of violence, including that he and his bodyguards beat a rival music executive, Steve Stoute, with a Champagne bottle and other items.Last year, Mr. Combs received a lifetime achievement honor at the BET Awards, and in September he was given the global icon award at MTV’s Video Music Awards.Even with the settlement, however, the damage to Mr. Combs’s reputation and legacy may be substantial. In the day since Ms. Ventura’s suit was filed, past allegations of violence and abuse have been resurfaced, and various musicians have publicly signaled their support for Ms. Ventura.In a statement, Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer for Ms. Ventura, said: “I am very proud of Ms. Ventura for having the strength to go public with her lawsuit. She ought to be commended for doing so.” More

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      Sean Combs Is Accused by Cassie of Rape and Years of Abuse in Lawsuit

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      In the suit, the singer says Mr. Combs, known as Puff Daddy or Diddy, subjected her to a pattern of control and abuse over about a decade. Mr. Combs “vehemently” denied the allegations.Sean Combs, the producer and music mogul who has been one of the most famous names in hip-hop for decades, was sued in federal court on Thursday by Cassie, an R&B singer once signed to his label, who accused Mr. Combs of rape, and of repeated physical abuse over about a decade.In the suit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura — and who had long been Mr. Combs’s romantic partner — says that not long after she met him in 2005, when she was 19, he began a pattern of control and abuse that included plying her with drugs, beating her and forcing her to have sex with a succession of male prostitutes while he filmed the encounters. In 2018, the suit says, near the end of their relationship, Mr. Combs forced his way into her home and raped her.“After years in silence and darkness,” Ms. Ventura said in a statement, “I am finally ready to tell my story, and to speak up on behalf of myself and for the benefit of other women who face violence and abuse in their relationships.”In response, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, Ben Brafman, said: “Mr. Combs vehemently denies these offensive and outrageous allegations. For the past six months, Mr. Combs has been subjected to Ms. Ventura’s persistent demand of $30 million, under the threat of writing a damaging book about their relationship, which was unequivocally rejected as blatant blackmail. Despite withdrawing her initial threat, Ms. Ventura has now resorted to filing a lawsuit riddled with baseless and outrageous lies, aiming to tarnish Mr. Combs’s reputation and seeking a payday.”Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer for Ms. Ventura, said the parties had spoken before the suit was filed. “Mr. Combs offered Ms. Ventura eight figures to silence her and prevent the filing of this lawsuit,” he said. “She rejected his efforts.”Ms. Ventura’s case is the latest in a series of sexual assault civil suits filed recently against prominent men in the music industry, including Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, the executive L.A. Reid and Neil Portnow, the former head of the organization behind the Grammy Awards. (Mr. Portnow has denied the accusation; Mr. Tyler and Mr. Reid have not responded.)Mr. Combs, 54, founded Bad Boy in 1993 and became one of the primary figures in the commercialization of hip-hop, working with stars like the Notorious B.I.G. and Mary J. Blige. His net worth has been estimated as high as $1 billion, and last year Forbes calculated Mr. Combs’s annual earnings at $90 million, attributing that amount largely to his former partnership in a liquor brand, Ciroc, that is owned by the spirits giant Diageo.Mr. Combs, who in his career has variously been known as Puff Daddy, Diddy and Love, may be the most famous music executive of his generation. But the suit depicts Mr. Combs as a violent person who, beyond repeatedly assaulting Ms. Ventura, asked her to carry his gun in her purse, and the suit suggests he was responsible for blowing up the car of a rival suitor. In one incident, the suit says, Mr. Combs dangled a friend of Ms. Ventura’s over a 17th-floor hotel balcony.In naming additional defendants, the court papers assert that others who worked with Mr. Combs had helped him to control Ms. Ventura, at times by threatening her with retribution — like suppressing her music if she did not obey his orders — or by helping to conceal his behavior. The suit, which names Mr. Combs and a number of his associated companies as defendants, seeks unspecified damages.“After years in silence and darkness,” Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, said in a statement, “I am finally ready to tell my story.”Karwai Tang/WireImage, via Getty ImagesAccording to Ms. Ventura’s suit, she was swept into Mr. Combs’s jet-set lifestyle not long after meeting him and signing with Bad Boy, which released her debut album in 2006.But, the suit says, he soon began to assert an extraordinary level of command over her life. In addition to controlling her career, he paid for her car, apartments and clothing, and even had access to her personal medical records. According to the suit, the results from an M.R.I. scan she had — for memory loss, possibly caused by drug use or by a beating she said she suffered from Mr. Combs — went directly to Mr. Combs.Mr. Combs also provided Ms. Ventura with “copious amounts of drugs,” including ecstasy and ketamine, and urged her to take them, the suit says, and often became violent, beating her “multiple times each year.” The suit says Ms. Ventura never went to the police because she feared it “would merely give Mr. Combs another excuse to hurt her.”In one incident in Los Angeles in 2009, the suit says, Mr. Combs became enraged when he saw Ms. Ventura talking to another talent agent, then pushed her into a car and kicked her repeatedly in the face, making her bleed. According to the suit, Mr. Combs then had his staff bring her to a hotel room to recuperate for a week. She asked to go home to her parents, but Mr. Combs refused, the suit says.The suit says that after seeing the violent repercussions of rejecting Mr. Combs, and the extent to which he would isolate her from her support network, “Ms. Ventura felt that saying ‘no’ to Mr. Combs would cost her something — her family, her friends, her career, or even her life.” And though she tried to leave Mr. Combs, the suit says he sent his employees to lure her back.In one incident described in the court papers, Ms. Ventura says that in early 2012, Mr. Combs grew so angry about her dating the rapper Kid Cudi that he said he would blow up the rapper’s car. “Around that time,” the suit says, “Kid Cudi’s car exploded in his driveway.”Through a spokeswoman, Kid Cudi confirmed Ms. Ventura’s account that he had a car that exploded. “This is all true,” he said.A few years into Ms. Ventura’s relationship with Mr. Combs, the suit says, he began coercing her “to engage in a fantasy of his called ‘voyeurism,’” in which she was directed to have sex with a succession of male prostitutes, while Mr. Combs watched, masturbated, took pictures and shot video.According to the suit, Mr. Combs called these encounters “freak offs,” which involved costumes, like masquerade masks and lingerie. They continued for years, taking place at high-end hotels across the United States and in Mr. Combs’s homes. The suit says that he instructed Ms. Ventura to search the websites of escort services to procure male sex workers.Drugs were supplied at these events, which Ms. Ventura’s suit says she took because they “allowed her to disassociate during these horrific encounters.”According to the suit, Ms. Ventura would delete videos from these incidents that had been shot on her phone, but Mr. Combs told her he still had access to those videos, and on a flight once made her watch a video she thought she had deleted.The suit says that as a result of these sexual encounters in different cities, Ms. Ventura was a victim of sex trafficking. The suit also accuses Mr. Combs of sexual battery, sexual assault and violations of New York City’s gender-motivated violence law.Ms. Ventura’s suit includes several accounts of her unsuccessful attempts to escape Mr. Combs’s control.In one example, the suit says that during a “freak off” at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016, an intoxicated Mr. Combs punched Ms. Ventura in the face, giving her a black eye. He fell asleep and she tried to leave the room, but Mr. Combs woke up and followed her into the hallway, where he threw glass vases at her, sending glass shattering throughout the corridor, according to the court filing. The hotel’s security cameras captured that incident, but the suit says Mr. Combs paid the hotel $50,000 for the footage.The court filing says that in 2018, after Mr. Combs and Ms. Ventura met for dinner, he forced himself into her apartment and raped her while she “repeatedly said ‘no’ and tried to push him away.” After that, the suit says, she left him for good. Ms. Ventura married Alex Fine, a personal trainer, the following year and now has two young children. According to the complaint, her association with Bad Boy ended in 2019.Ms. Ventura’s case, like other recent sexual assault lawsuits, is being brought under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that allows people who say they were victims of sexual abuse to file civil suits after the statute of limitations has expired. The one-year window to bring cases under this law ends next week.That law is cited in Ms. Ventura’s complaint, and in a statement she addressed its importance.“With the expiration of New York’s Adult Survivors Act fast approaching,” she said, “it became clear that this was an opportunity to speak up about the trauma I have experienced and that I will be recovering from for the rest of my life.” More

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      Who Is Cassie, the R&B Singer Suing Sean Combs?

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      The R&B singer was poised for a big breakout after her 2006 hit song “Me & U.” But her second album never arrived.Cassie, the singer, model and actress who is suing the music mogul Sean Combs for physical and sexual abuse, was supposed to be the next Britney Spears or Janet Jackson.Such a high bar for success was set by Combs, who in addition to dating the singer for more than a decade beginning around 2007 was also her label boss at Bad Boy Records until 2019. “Those two great artists have paved the way,” Combs said in 2008, while hyping up the singer’s much-anticipated second album.But it never came.After a promising start to her career in pop and R&B — including an infectious debut single, “Me & U,” that peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2006, and a well-reviewed first album — the singer, whose full name is Casandra Ventura, subsequently struggled for years to regain her footing as an artist. In pop music circles, she has long represented a “what if?” of unfulfilled artistic potential, even as she gained cult-favorite status among R&B obsessives and turned to releasing music independently.Ventura’s lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Thursday, may cast her abbreviated career in a different, darker light. According to Ventura’s claims, Combs, whom she met when she was 19, began a pattern of control and abuse that fused the singer’s personal and professional life as he plied her with drugs, beat her and forced her to have sex with male prostitutes while he watched and recorded. As their relationship was ending in 2018, the suit says, he raped her after pushing his way into her home.Through a lawyer, Combs, 54, has denied the accusations, calling the lawsuit “riddled with baseless and outrageous lies, aiming to tarnish Mr. Combs’s reputation and seeking a payday.”When they first became acquainted, Ventura, now 37, was an aspiring singer and sometime model from New London, Conn., while Combs was a larger-than-life hitmaker — known as Puff Daddy or Diddy — who was credited with developing the careers of the Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige and more. In February 2006, according to the lawsuit, Ventura signed a 10-album deal with Bad Boy. That summer, her debut studio album was released, with writing and production from the R&B polymath Ryan Leslie.“Just what we need: a young singer and a young producer who want to be the next Aaliyah and Timbaland, or maybe the next Ciara and Jazze Pha,” the critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New York Times, praising her minimalist R&B sound. “No, seriously: It is just what we need.”“Cassie,” released by Bad Boy and Atlantic Records, reached No. 4 on the Billboard chart, selling more than 100,000 copies in its first week. But promotional appearances on shows like MTV’s “Total Request Live” and BET’s “106 & Park” were rocky, with Ventura citing “significant performance anxiety” in her lawsuit.Combs, at the time, was her public defender, telling MTV, “It made me really appreciate what I really love about her: She’s a regular person.” He added, “You’ve got to understand that success for her is coming out of nowhere.”In the years that followed, despite singles featuring Lil Wayne (“Official Girl”) and Akon (“Let’s Go Crazy”), Ventura became known as much for her relationship and public appearances with Combs as for her music. A second album was routinely teased in the press — with Combs touting her artistic development: “she’s really cocooned into a butterfly” — but never materialized.Still, Cassie remained a pop culture presence. In 2008, she appeared as an actress and dancer in the film “Step Up 2: The Streets.” The following year, she signed a record deal with Interscope Records, in association with Bad Boy, but got even more attention for an experimental hairstyle in which she shaved half of her head. “I wanted to go all the way and kind of land in punk,” she said at the time.By 2012, with the release of the single “King of Hearts,” Ventura was still touting a comeback. “I’m just a laid-back person,” she told GQ of the six-year gap between albums. “Maybe laid-back to a fault.” She added, “It’s been too long, I know, but I got to start over and over again. It would be awesome to stay popular, but if I was only an underground artist, I would be OK with that.”In 2013, Ventura released a mixtape, “RockaByeBaby,” that was not promoted with the force of an official studio album, but was met with praise nonetheless. With appearances by the rappers Wiz Khalifa, Rick Ross and Meek Mill, the album showcased Ventura as “an on-mic presence that’s the equal to any of the rappers she’s recruited for features here,” a critic for Pitchfork wrote.It would be years before Ventura released music again. According to the singer’s lawsuit, on at least two occasions in 2009 and 2015, Combs beat her after seeing her speak to music managers at parties. “She had hoped speaking to this manager would allow her to further grow her career, and that Mr. Combs would be happy for her, but instead he became extremely angry,” the suit says of the 2009 incident.Following the filing of the lawsuit, two former Bad Boy artists expressed support for Ventura online. “Been trynna tell y’all for years,” the singer Aubrey O’Day, formerly of the Combs-backed group Danity Kane, wrote on Instagram. “Prayers up for this queen.” Dawn Richard, another former member of Danity Kane, wrote on X, “praying for Cassie and her family, for peace and healing. you are beautiful and brave.”In 2019, Ventura married the wellness consultant Alex Fine while pregnant with the couple’s first child; the “intimate backyard wedding,” with just 14 guests, was documented by Vogue. That year, Ventura also began releasing music again, putting singles online via her own Ventura Music label in what she called the Free Fridays Playlist.“I feel supported so I make decisions based on what’s best for me,” Cassie said in an interview about beginning a new creative phase as a mother. “I used to spend the most time overthinking the smallest things and always worrying about how people felt that I neglected how I really felt and what would make me happy. I wasn’t creating from the heart.”“The most valuable thing I’ve learned in starting a new chapter,” she added, “is that it’s OK to ask for help.” More

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      Russell Brand’s Alternate Reality

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      On Sept. 12, four days before he was expected at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theater for another sold-out show, Russell Brand asked his fans for a favor. “I’ve always struggled with authority and being told what to do,” he wrote to ticketholders, attaching a questionnaire for a planned bit with his audience. “Even when it comes to something small like being offered a seat by a doctor, I’ll purposefully refuse rather than comply. Tell me about your relationship with authority — whether you tend to yield to authority or fight it.”Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.At the time, Brand’s more-than-two-decade quest for lasting attention had been proceeding apace along two tracks. In mainstream entertainment circles, at home and abroad, he remained the fading but still bankable British comedian whose selectively confessional accounts of heroin addiction and promiscuity made him an avatar of a very mid-aughts sort of fame — the guy who played a rocker version of himself in the 2008 film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and would later marry Katy Perry (it was brief). But for those partial to Brand’s midlife canon, he had come to resemble something more like a political sage.With Jesus-length hair, multidenominational tattoos and promises of unspecified revolution, Brand, 48, had in recent years been reaching millions daily across a media and wellness empire, fusing the downward-facing dogmatism of a proper guru with the cold efficiency of the YouTube algorithm. His remit was nothing less than “a social-political-spiritual movement,” he told listeners. His prime offering was a trove of foreboding and regularly misleading videos from his flagship series, “Stay Free with Russell Brand,” lobbed at a cumulative social media following of more than 20 million. His episode titles charted the ideological swerve of a man who once used his celebrity to elevate progressive causes: “STATE OF FEAR! COVID Propaganda EXPOSED!” “Leaked Audio PROVES Trump Right!”For the past year, Brand’s recording studio in the Oxfordshire countryside has been blessed as an emerging nerve center of the American right, or at least the anti-anti-right, with a procession of presidential candidates beaming in. In July alone, Brand interviewed Ron DeSantis, who compared Brand favorably to loathsome “corporate journalists”; hyped a pull-up contest with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., conservative media’s favorite lapsed Democrat and Covid conspiracy theorist; and scored the first sit-down with Tucker Carlson after the host’s dismissal from Fox News. “Maybe I’ve just been called a right-wing crazy for so long that I thought I was,” Carlson told me recently. “But if I agree with pretty much everything Russell Brand says, I don’t know what I am.”In July, Brand scored the first sit-down with Tucker Carlson after the host’s dismissal from Fox News.Screenshot from RumbleLike Joe Rogan, the carnivorous pooh-bah of this intellectual space, Brand appeared interested in teaching a certain kind of man how to be a certain kind of man, mining the tension between think-for-yourself riffs and listen-to-me conclusions. (Brand has been a repeat guest on Rogan’s podcast.) Unlike Rogan, he appeared to model a more expansive vision of manhood — vegan, sober, Aldous Huxley-quoting. The event in Wembley, part of a tour scheduled for late summer and early fall, seemed designed to accentuate Brand’s overlapping profiles: electric live performer and terminally online click-hunter. As with much of his output lately, the marketplace would help dictate his direction. The tour was called “Bipolarisation” for two reasons, he joked: because people would be polled and “because I’m severely mentally ill.” His September email to attendees requested answers to several related prompts. “What’s the strangest way you’ve yielded to or gone against authority?” the first question read. “What’s the weirdest/naughtiest/most embarrassing thing you’ve done in reaction to being told what to do?” another asked.Three days later, Brand’s followers received a less whimsical communication. In a prebuttal video posted across his social media, Brand said he was about to face “very serious allegations that I absolutely refute,” without detailing them. He insisted that all past relationships were consensual. He darkly suggested that “another agenda” might be at play, noting that supporters had long warned him about “getting too close to the truth.” The next day, Sept. 16, The Sunday Times, The Times of London and Channel 4 Dispatches published a yearslong joint investigation in which four women accused Brand of sexual assault between 2006 and 2013. The accounts were specific, revolting and, in some cases, bolstered by medical records and other contemporaneous evidence. The accusers included a woman who was 16, the British age of consent, during her relationship with Brand, who was in his early 30s. She said Brand once forced her to perform oral sex as she strained to push him off, stopping only after she punched him in the stomach. There was a time, as recently as a few years ago, when this sort of reputational earthquake almost certainly would have followed the dutiful rhythms of celebrity crisis management: performative introspection, nominal contrition (often paired with a narrow denial of the most grievous offenses), a pledge to disappear for a while. Instead, Brand’s story quickly became a self-evident data point in two divergent realities. In the first, the one still tethered at least somewhat to traditional notions of scandal and consequence, Brand was an overnight pariah and criminal suspect. The police in London opened investigations. More women came forward, including an extra on Brand’s 2011 film “Arthur,” who filed a civil suit in New York claiming that Brand assaulted her in a bathroom on set. Brand’s management company almost immediately dropped him. YouTube suspended him from making money from his channel, which has more than six million subscribers. A parliamentary committee chairwoman wrote to Rumble, the video platform that caters to the right and exclusively carries Brand’s full episodes (shorter clips still appear on YouTube), expressing concern that he might continue to profit there and “undermine the welfare of victims.”In the second reality, the victim was Brand, and his welfare was suddenly the concern of many, from the powerful new friends he has made to the “awakening wonders” (as he addresses his flock) refusing to abandon him. His example has become a repentance-free case study in a very 2023 template for public survival, a post-post-#MeToo lesson in the spoils and fortifications available to those who are thought to be scorned by the right people. “Criticize the drug companies, question the war in Ukraine, and you can be pretty sure this is going to happen,” Carlson said of Brand on X (formerly Twitter), to which Elon Musk, the site’s reply-guy owner, responded: “Sure seems that way!” Rumble also posted on X, calling the parliamentary letter a “deeply inappropriate” intrusion of the state. Already, for those who support Brand and those who do not, his fate is being processed as a kind of referendum — on who gets to decide what happens to the accused; on what a preternaturally charismatic figure can talk himself into or out of; on the limits, or limitlessness, of tribal loyalty.Brand leaving the Troubadour Wembley Park theater in London in September. He performed just hours after sexual assault allegations were made public.James Manning/Press Association, via Associated PressThough the balance of his live tour was scrapped within days, Brand kept one last date, Sept. 16 in Wembley, hours after the allegations landed. “You came,” he said to a crowd of about 2,000, according to the BBC, walking out to “You Don’t Own Me,” the feminist standard performed by Lesley Gore. He told his guests he loved them and talked about teaching his young children to be skeptical. One fan held a sign reading, “We stand by you.” Another threatened to kick down a ladder carrying paparazzi outside. And by the end of the night, the room had a new answer to Brand’s preshow queries.How had they most memorably snubbed authority? How had they responded when told what to do and think?With a standing ovation for a freshly accused predator.More than a week after the allegations, “Stay Free” returned, unbowed but discernibly altered. Brand appeared alone, his bare chest visible beneath a largely unbuttoned white button-down. The show credits, which once ran about 20 names deep, were gone — not necessarily because Brand’s whole team was but perhaps because associating with him had become more complicated. “The corporatist state and global media war against free speech is in full swing!” Brand told his listeners. “How do I know? Take a guess.”Seated at a desk, with a “Daily Show”-style prosecutorial montage of videos and text, Brand blamed the “collusion between big tech and government” and a “centralist state and globalist elite” that he suggested was persecuting him. He discussed the letter from Parliament, alleging ties between its author and Google (“a competitor to Rumble”). He welcomed Jimmy Dore, another conspiracy-theory-minded comedian-podcaster, for a remote interview, thanking him for a mood lift “at a time where I plainly need it.” “Stay strong,” Dore said. This booking choice was notable. Dore, who has himself been accused of sexual harassment, is among a cluster of high-profile Brand supporters who seem particularly invested in the idea that false or agenda-led accusations are an occupational hazard for their lot. Andrew Tate, the misogynist mega-influencer awaiting trial on rape and human-trafficking charges in Romania, tagged Brand on X: “Welcome to the club.” Donald Trump Jr., whose father has been serially accused, posted a meme on Instagram showing the former president, Brand, Tate and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, who was accused of rape. “Notice a pattern?” the meme read, alongside Trump Jr.’s caption: “One day they’ll be coming for you. I don’t believe in this much coincidence and neither should you.” For Brand’s audience, long encouraged to consider his voice too dangerous for entrenched interests to abide, the allegations stand as proof of concept, only making him more credible. “Enough of us know what’s going on here,” one commenter assured him upon his return. “No wonder they’re trying to silence you,” another posted on an October video that criticized President Biden.“It’s almost like cancel capital,” Nick Marx, a professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University and the co-author of a book on right-wing comedy, told me. “It’s something he recognizes as having a value distinct from money.” With Trumpian verve, Brand has reframed accusations against him as an act of war against everyone who backs him. “They’re out to get you,” he told his audience in November, citing “censorial forces” like YouTube and quoting from Kafka’s “The Trial.” “I’m just in the way.” And like the former president, Brand has channeled lessons from his early rise, betting on his basest self — and on the accommodations and calculations that those around him have always made.Since his public beginnings, Brand has derived his power from appearing to get away with something, from saying and doing what others never would. His fame was entwined with an almost ostentatious misogyny, a sizzle reel of mistreated women and gleefully poor taste for which he was broadly celebrated. His best-selling 2007 memoir relayed such rollicking tales as breaking the phone of a Turkish sex worker mid-encounter because the ringing bothered him. The British tabloid The Sun saluted him as its Shagger of the Year from 2006 to 2008. A breezy 2008 GQ profile winked at the “souvenir” that Brand acquired at a photo shoot (“her name is Penny”) and shared an anecdote from another romantic partner who claimed he told her, “I’m Russell Brand — I can do anything I like.” Brand denied this, semantically. “That may be the informing attitude,” he told the magazine, “but that’s never explicitly stated.”Brand with the singer Katy Perry, to whom he was briefly married, at the premiere of “Get Him to the Greek” in 2010. Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesEven scandal generally served Brand’s ends. In 2008, he and a co-host set off a national uproar after broadcasting on Brand’s BBC radio show the prankish voice messages they left for Andrew Sachs, a beloved former actor on “Fawlty Towers.” Sachs’s granddaughter Georgina Baillie was in a relationship with Brand in her early 20s. The messages to Sachs included singsongy Brand lyrics: “It was consensual/and she wasn’t menstrual.” Suspensions followed. Gordon Brown, the sitting prime minister, scolded him. Brand eventually resigned. His cad-for-the-masses legend grew anyway. “He was being very much rewarded,” Baillie, now 38, told me. “It didn’t even occur to me that I deserved an apology.”In interviews, people who know Brand described him to me as someone almost pathologically incapable of not having an audience and willing to do virtually anything to keep it. He has often admitted as much, joking that he could be whatever his followers wanted. “Are you unapologetically yourself?” he asked in August. “Because I’m not. I’m apologetically myself. ‘Hello, I’m me. Is this OK with everyone? I can change it if you want.’” (Brand and a longtime associate did not respond to an interview request or fact-checking queries.)In the 2008 GQ piece, Brand identified one clear gift (“attracting attention”) and warned playfully that his wider influence should be curbed. “I don’t think for a minute that I should be the person that comes up with how we organize a new postapocalyptic order,” he said, “because I think I’d exploit it to get girls.”When Brand speaks now about forging a new social order, he attributes his rise as a media force, accurately enough, to a collapse of faith in traditional institutions. Left unsaid is that Brand himself was a creation of legacy gatekeepers and their customers — the media companies that employed him, the outlets that toasted him, the viewers who couldn’t resist — and a leering testament to their priorities. What has lingered for some lately is not how so many people missed the signs about him but why they seemed so eager to ignore them. In recent months, two former employers, the BBC and Channel 4, announced internal inquiries into Brand’s past workplace behavior. Channel 4, where Brand was accused of flashing a female colleague, aired the investigative documentary about him in September. Its title: “In Plain Sight.”“It was this wash of devil-may-care, it’s-exciting-to-push-boundaries-or-just-have-no-boundaries, and women were less than,” Shaparak Khorsandi, an early peer of Brand’s on the comedy circuit, told me of the era that made him. “Yet a man behaving absolutely appallingly was given endless television and radio contracts.”The subject of the day in December 2014 was immigration, and the lineup for a BBC political panel was suitably formidable: a Conservative member of Parliament, another from Labour, a Sunday Times columnist. But two combatants stood out: Nigel Farage, then the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, reprising his argument that new entrants to Britain were a dangerous resource drain, and Brand.“There is a corrupt group in our country using our resources, taking away our jobs, taking away our housing, not paying taxes,” Brand agreed. But it was “the economic elite” funding Farage’s party. “His mates in the city farted,” Brand continued; Farage was “pointing at immigrants” and “holding his nose.” The studio audience roared.Raised as a working-class “bloke” in his frequent telling, Brand had long angled to amplify his voice on the left, infusing early appearances with sometimes deliberately shocking allusions to global affairs. He has delighted in claiming that on Sept. 12, 2001, while employed as a presenter at British MTV, he showed up at work dressed as Osama bin Laden. The following spring, he was detained by the police after fully disrobing at a protest in Piccadilly Circus, “explaining himself by mentioning ‘ecological,’ ‘Armageddon’ and ‘culture’ without making a great deal of sense,’” according to a news report from the time. (“Oh, God,” an MTV spokeswoman said then. “That sounds like Russell.”)Brand speaking in Parliament Square in London during a protest against the Conservative Party’s austerity policies in 2015.Tim Ireland/Associated Press“Even before he was famous, he sort of fancied himself a bit of a Che Guevara,” Khorsandi told me. After he was famous, Brand expanded his political footprint proportionally. In 2012, he was invited to testify before a parliamentary committee on drug policy, walking the halls in a black tank top and bolero hat. The same year, he developed a short-lived talk show for American TV, FX’s “Brand X With Russell Brand,” appearing with Matt Stoller, a liberal policy researcher. (The men met while Brand was shooting “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which Stoller’s brother, Nicholas, directed; they reconnected in 2011 at the Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park in New York.) “They wanted to do a more radical version of ‘The Daily Show,’” Stoller told me of “Brand X” in August. “It was a bad show.”Brand’s political breakthrough came in a viral BBC interview in 2013 with Jeremy Paxman, one of Britain’s most fearsome questioners. Paxman appraised Brand as a “trivial man” whose calls for revolution and apathy about voting gave him away. “You’ve spent your whole career berating and haranguing politicians,” Brand responded. “Then when someone like me, a comedian, goes, ‘Yeah, they’re all worthless — what’s the point in engaging with any of them?’ you sort of have a go at me because I’m not poor anymore.” The exchange enshrined Brand as perhaps the nation’s foremost lefty. “It had a massive impact,” George Monbiot, a well-known environmentalist and writer, told me. “It galvanized people. It galvanized me.”In short order, Brand was hailed as a kind of crossover intellectual, validated by authors and thinkers who schlepped to his East London home to appear on his popular YouTube series, “The Trews,” a portmanteau of “true” and “news.” Academics said they could become entranced by Brand’s free-associative conviction on their subjects, even when he sounded only semi-sensical — absorbing the quick-draw wit and baroque vocabulary of a host liable to deploy “perspicacity” or “effulgent” off the cuff. “I actually remember thinking at the time, Oh, this is how a new religion would start,” Edward Slingerland, an expert on ancient Chinese thought now teaching at the University of British Columbia, told me of their interview.For activists, Brand became a treasured ally, showing up at rallies — to oppose austerity, protect tenants, support firefighters — and invariably attracting cameras. He also began ingratiating himself with more mainstream politicos, at one point initiating a correspondence with Bill de Blasio, whose 2013 mayoral victory in New York had briefly stirred the left. “I do remember thinking of him as a fellow traveler,” de Blasio told me. In 2015, Ed Miliband, then the Labour Party’s leader, made a pilgrimage to Brand’s home for the web series, hoping to reach younger voters within its seven-figure following. Both men came to rue their choices. “Obviously knowing what I know now, I regret doing it,” Miliband said after the assault allegations. Brand’s second thoughts arrived sooner, when his imprimatur could not prevent a Conservative election triumph. “My only regret,” he said afterward, “is I thought I could be involved.”If Brand felt disillusioned, he was not alone on the British left. “They used Russell,” Monbiot said of Labour. “But they never embraced him.” Brand has since resolved to live “beyond all political systems.”Among onetime admirers, the most generous interpretation for Brand’s political transformation is bleak but straightforward: Today’s version of him is the logical upshot of social media incentives, boundless ego and a bespoke personal radicalism that was always a little ominously amorphous. (“I don’t know how to describe Russell’s politics,” Marianne Williamson told me in August, warmly recounting the fund-raiser he helped host for her during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.) In this reading, Brand is simply who we told him to be — or at least what the algorithm did. He has been known to track his trend lines on social media obsessively, staying apprised of follower counts and video performance. A job posting on Brand’s website earlier this year for a “YouTube Optimiser” was bracingly explicit: The task was to juice viewership and propose topics “based upon topics covered by similar channels and those that our audience watch.” This is the path from interviewing favored commentators of the right, like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson, to having those videos recommended to fans of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, to sounding increasingly like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.“You can either try to drive the masses or be driven by them,” Faiz Shakir, the 2020 campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, told me after appearing on Brand’s show in August to push his labor-supporting nonprofit. “He’s more driven by them. It’s ‘Here’s where I think they already are.’”Brand has said that at least half his viewers are in the United States. After he interviewed DeSantis last summer, a person close to the campaign’s decision-making told me the host was seen as a conduit to men under 45, especially those who were not lifelong Republicans. On air, Brand can sound occasionally uncomfortable with his new constituency. Last year, he pressed Peterson to “prioritize compassion” rather than antagonize trans people. In the otherwise slobbering session with DeSantis, Brand almost begged him to agree that imposing an ideology on others was illiberal. “What about the freedom of those opposed?” Brand asked. But such flashes have been rare. In 2015, Brand called Trump a joke whose “punchline is a worse world for everyone”; by this February, he was posing with Trump Jr. at a Rumble event in Florida. He once quoted Gandhi on nonviolent protest; now he mocks those “clutching their pearls over Jan. 6.” Jeff Krasno, a former manager of Brand’s, suggested on his own podcast in September that Brand has by now “likely drunk his own kombucha,” adding, “there’s a clear business rationale for the content that Russell generates.”The Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis appeared on “Stay Free With Russell Brand” in July.Screenshot from RumbleOnstage, Brand has prided himself on a thrill-seeking gameness. “You have to be truthful and honest,” he has said of his comedy, “self-aware and willing to take risks.” Yet in many ways, Brand’s reinvention was exceedingly safe. He would be rewarded for playing the hits, for doing the expected. He would be cancel-proofed, if it came to it, with an army of backers primed to distrust anyone who attacked him.This is the less charitable read on Brand’s evolution: His alt-rightward drift — and his escalating insistence that mainstream outlets were corrupt agents of the status quo — has coincided roughly with the investigative journalism of mainstream outlets he now calls corrupt agents of the status quo. According to The Times of London, the reporting began in 2019, and Brand’s team was made aware of one assault allegation in 2020. In the years since, Brand has been “setting himself up more and more as the lone voice of truth,” Monbiot, Brand’s former progressive ally, told me. “It would definitely align with an attempt then to exonerate himself using the same argument.”Even privately, though, Brand’s orbit seems increasingly paranoid. After the allegations were made public, Brand’s father, Ron, wrote to Monbiot, who previously criticized Brand’s political shifts, to suggest that no one was safe from whatever plot had ensnared his son. “Do you think you could be next?” Ron Brand asked, according to messages Monbiot shared with me. The elder Brand later sent a conspiracy video about the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum, two favorite targets for Brand and others who use “globalist” unironically. Tucker Carlson, who said that he and Brand have been speaking often, told me the allegations against Brand were “inevitable,” suspicious and cynically engineered to play on the debauched past of a man who is now remarried with children. “We’re leaving the part of history where people try to persuade each other in good faith,” Carlson said. “We’re entering the part where we just throw our opponents in jail or accuse them of crimes.”So far, Brand’s podcast guests have likewise stayed loyal. In an industry rife with voices insisting they are about to be silenced, loudly saying the things they swear you can’t say anymore, Brand represents a rousing spectacle, Staying Free despite the designs of a sinister “they.” “The cancelers of the world seem with each passing week to become more and more crap at their jobs,” the writer Matt Taibbi said on Substack in October, promoting his interview with the “conspicuously still-breathing Russell Brand.” Teasing an interview in November with Alex Jones of Infowars, who has described the assault allegations against Brand as a vast conspiracy, Brand suggested a kinship: “Have you noticed,” he said, raising two fingers for scare quotes, “how many of the wild Alex Jones ‘conspiracy theories’ have come to pass?”More than anything else, Brand is testing a tantalizing kind of liberty before a group that reveres the word. He has hinted about a financial crunch since YouTube began blocking his profits, telling viewers on Rumble that he is “plainly in a position where your direct support is going to be incredibly valuable.” But if Brand’s strategy is successful — if he can subsist without the institutions that long sustained him, the collaborators who abandoned him, the former fans who might wince through his movie scenes now — there is a new kind of power in that freedom, and a new kind of freedom in that power.“We’re planning a movement so that we can form new communities as the apocalypse apparently unfolds before our very eyes,” he told listeners on Oct. 26. “Without you, we are nothing.” The episode turned moments later to another aspiring movement leader: Vivek Ramaswamy, a returning guest and the first presidential candidate to appear with Brand after the allegations. Speaking from Iowa, midcampaign, Ramaswamy called for a “great uprising” against establishment forces. “It’s when they tell you to shut up that you have to actually grow the spine to be more vocal than ever,” Ramaswamy said.“I can see why there would be an appetite to censor you,” Brand replied admiringly. The host thanked his guest for “elevating the caliber of the conversation” in his “stream of freedom.” He previewed future episode subjects: the Covid lab-leak theory, another chat with Jordan Peterson, “the necessity for radicalism in politics.” Then he made a promise.“Next week,” Brand vowed, raising his open hands, “the revolution will grow a little stronger.” More

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      ‘How to Have Sex’ Considers Assault Survivors

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      In new films, including “How to Have Sex,” female British directors emphasize the impact of sexual trauma, rather than portraying the act itself.When Molly Manning-Walker was a teenager, her favorite film was Gaspar Noé’s “Irreversible.” In a recent interview, she remembered being impressed by the film’s infamously brutal, nine-minute rape scene, and how “immersive” it was.But now 30, and a director herself, she questions Noé’s approach to that scene. With such graphic — and prolonged — violence onscreen, she said, “you’re almost abusing the audience.” When it came to depicting sexual assault in her debut feature, “How to Have Sex,” which won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Manning-Walker resolved to do things differently.“How to Have Sex,” which opens in theaters in Britain and Ireland on Nov. 3 and in the United States in February, follows three British teenagers on a party vacation in Greece. Manning-Walker said that, like Tara, the film’s protagonist, she was sexually assaulted when she was 16 (though in a different scenario), and that she wanted the audience to understand what was happening “through Tara’s face and her reaction,” rather than putting the act onscreen.Manning-Walker’s debut is one of several new films directed by British women that offer fresh perspectives on sexual assault by focusing on its varied impacts. Adura Onashile’s “Girl,” which opens in theaters in Britain later this month, asks what happens when women don’t talk about their experiences. And in the documentary “The Taste of Mango,” which recently played at the London Film Festival, Chloe Abrahams discovers her family’s buried history of sexual abuse and domestic violence, which triggers a revelation about herself.These movies arrive as violence toward women and girls continues making headlines in Britain. Recently, the comedian Russell Brand denied accusations of sexual assault from four women. In January, a London police officer admitted to 49 charges of sexual abuse. Around a quarter of women in England and Wales have experienced sexual assault since the age of 16, according to the Office for National Statistics.Déborah Lukumuena as Grace, and Le’Shantey Bonsu as her daughter, Ama, in “Girl.”via Studio SohoIn an interview, Onashile described this climate of violence against women as “an epidemic.” Her film, “Girl,” centers on a young immigrant mother, Grace (Déborah Lukumuena), and her 11 year-old daughter, who live in a Glasgow tower block. Grace’s erratic behavior implies a traumatic past, but Onashile doesn’t make this explicit. As part of her research for the film, Onashile said she learned from social workers that you can spot sexual assault survivors by their body language, which gives the “sense that something is held, and tight, and wound up.” In the film, Lukumuena plays Grace with stooped shoulders and a downcast gaze.Abrahams said that the act of recording her family members gave her the courage to ask difficult questions about long-hidden abuse. With “The Taste of Mango,” she was seeking to heal divisions between her mother, Rozana, in England, and her maternal grandmother, Jean, in Sri Lanka, but along the way she learned that Rozana is suspected to have suffered at the hands of her stepfather.The movie pairs audio of her mother’s testimony with poetic images, including the moon and a road rushing by, glimpsed from a car window. Its meditative pacing was designed to allow the audience “to breathe, and not get sucked down by the heaviness of it,” Abrahams said.But equally, she added, she wanted to show how her mother “finds joy in life” — including in country music and manicures — so Rozana isn’t defined by the things that were done to her.In the documentary “The Taste of Mango,” Chloe Abrahams, right, discovers her own family’s history of sexual abuse and domestic violence.Chloe AbrahamsAll three filmmakers considered the impact of the subject matter on the people making their movies and had support on hand from therapists during production. Manning-Walker, who also works as a cinematographer, recalled filming an assault scene for someone else’s film, in which there was no acknowledgment of the toll it might take on the person behind the camera. On her film, she said, her team could stop filming if they felt uncomfortable, which they did several times.Manning-Walker said she didn’t want the character of Tara, who goes on vacation intending to lose her virginity and flirts her way into an unwanted scenario, to be a helpless victim. At the end of “How to Have Sex,” she picks herself up and carries on. But that doesn’t mean she’s not affected by what happened, Manning-Walker added.Sexual assault “happens everywhere, and in all situations,” she said. By making a film that confronted it, she said she hoped to challenge a culture of shame and silence around a common experience. All three filmmakers described tearful, post-screening encounters with male and female audience members who saw elements of their lives reflected onscreen.After one screening, Manning-Walker recalled, a woman in her 70s had told her that watching “How to Have Sex” had made her reconsider a teenage sexual encounter: “‘I just realized that I’ve been assaulted, from watching your film,’” Manning-Walker remembered the woman saying.There was “a lack of conversation around female pleasure and what sex is for women,” Manning-Walker said, which also meant a lack of education about consent. If people aren’t taught that sex is an act of negotiation, she said, “of course it’s going to go horribly wrong.” More