Suits and Litigation (Civil)

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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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      Second Woman Accuses Steven Tyler of Sexually Assaulting Her in the 1970s

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      In a lawsuit, a woman says that the Aerosmith frontman groped and fondled her in a New York phone booth when she was about 17.For the second time in the past year, Steven Tyler has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting a teenage girl in the 1970s, when his band Aerosmith was rising to fame.In the new lawsuit, which was filed in New York on Thursday, Jeanne Bellino accuses Mr. Tyler of assaulting her twice in one day in approximately 1975, when she was about 17 years old and a model living in Queens. He would have been in his late 20s at the time.While Ms. Bellino was visiting Manhattan for work, the lawsuit says, a friend arranged for them to meet Aerosmith. As Ms. Bellino was walking down the street with Mr. Tyler and his entourage, which included his bandmates, he forced her into a phone booth, where he aggressively kissed, groped and fondled her, according to the lawsuit.“Others stood by outside the phone booth laughing and as passers-by watched and witnessed, nobody in the entourage intervened,” the lawsuit says.Because Ms. Bellino did not have money for transportation home, according to the suit, she was taken to the Warwick Hotel with Mr. Tyler and his entourage. The lawsuit says Mr. Tyler pinned her against a wall in a public area and again assaulted her. Shortly after, a doorman at the hotel helped her get into a cab and flee.“He never even asked me what my name was,” Ms. Bellino said of Mr. Tyler in a news conference on Thursday.A representative for Aerosmith did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Bellino’s lawsuit was filed under a New York City law that in March opened a two-year window for people to accuse someone of gender-motivated violence that would otherwise be beyond the statute of limitations.In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles in December, Julia Misley accused Mr. Tyler of using his status and power to “groom, manipulate, exploit” and “sexually assault” her over the course of three years, starting in 1973, shortly after her 16th birthday. Ms. Misley said in her lawsuit that she had met Mr. Tyler at an Aerosmith concert in Portland, Ore., and that the musician had persuaded her mother to let him become her legal guardian.Mr. Tyler, who is now 75, wrote about sexual encounters with a teenager in his 2011 autobiography, “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?,” saying that he gained custody of a person who nearly became his “teen bride.” More

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      Kanye West and Adidas: How Misconduct Broke a Lucrative Partnership

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      A year ago, after producing hundreds of shoe styles and billions of dollars together, Adidas broke with Kanye West as he made antisemitic and other offensive public comments. But Adidas had been tolerating his misconduct behind the scenes for nearly a decade. B35309 2015 AQ4832 AQ2659 AQ4830 AQ4831 AQ4829 AQ4828 AQ4836 AQ2660 BB1839 AQ2661 BB5350 […] More

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      Actress Julia Ormond Accuses Harvey Weinstein of Battery in Lawsuit

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      Ms. Ormond also sued Creative Artists Agency, which represented her at the time, and Disney, which owned Mr. Weinstein’s Miramax.The actress Julia Ormond, known for “Legends of the Fall” and “Sabrina,” accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual battery in a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in a New York court, claiming that the former film producer forced her to give him oral sex during a business meeting in 1995.Ms. Ormond also sued Creative Artists Agency, which represented her at the time, saying in the complaint that two of its senior agents cautioned her from speaking out — and informed her of the “going rate” for settlements paid to women who accused Mr. Weinstein of sex crimes. She said the sum was $100,000.Mr. Weinstein, now 71, was convicted in 2020 by a New York jury on charges of rape and criminal sexual assault and sentenced to 23 years in prison. He was later convicted of similar crimes in Los Angeles and sentenced to 16 years, to be served after his New York term. Mr. Weinstein has denied the claims against him, saying all encounters were consensual, and is appealing both convictions.“Harvey Weinstein categorically denies the allegations made against him by Julia Ormond, and he is prepared to vehemently defend himself,” Imran H. Ansari, a lawyer for Mr. Weinstein, said in a statement. Mr. Ansari added that her lawsuit was “yet another example of a complaint filed against Mr. Weinstein after the passing of decades.”CAA did not respond to requests for comment. Lawyers for Ms. Ormond said her complaint was the first to sue the powerful agency for what the suit claims was its role in covering up and enabling Mr. Weinstein’s behavior.Ms. Ormond’s complaint, filed in New York Supreme Court, also named the Walt Disney Company and Miramax, which Disney owned from 1993 to 2010. Ms. Ormond claimed the companies also knew about Mr. Weinstein’s predation and failed to protect her from him.Disney declined to comment. Miramax, now owned in part by Paramount Global, did not respond to requests for comment.According to the complaint, CAA secured a two-year production deal between Ms. Ormond and Miramax. She claims that Mr. Weinstein sexually assaulted her in 1995 after a business dinner. According to the suit, Mr. Weinstein said he would discuss a project she was interested in only at the apartment that Miramax had provided for Ms. Ormond as part of her deal.At the apartment, the suit said, Mr. Weinstein stripped naked and forced Ms. Ormond to give him oral sex.Afterward, Ms. Ormond told her agents, Bryan Lourd, now the chief executive of CAA, and Kevin Huvane, now a co-chairman of the agency, about what had occurred, according to the complaint.“Rather than take Ormond’s side and advocate for her interest, they suggested that if she reported Weinstein to the authorities, she would not be believed, and he would seriously damage her career,” the complaint said.Ms. Ormond did not pursue further action, the complaint said, but Mr. Weinstein terminated her contract at Miramax. CAA also transferred her to a younger, less experienced agent, diminishing her career potential, the lawsuit said.In a statement, Ms. Ormond said her lawsuit was a “way to shed light on how powerful people and institutions like my talent agents at CAA, Miramax and Disney enabled and provided cover for Weinstein to assault me and countless others.” More

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      Legal Arrangement in ‘Blind Side’ Case Is Terminated

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      A judge ended a nearly 20-year-old conservatorship that had given a couple broad authority over the affairs of the former N.F.L. player Michael Oher.A probate judge in Memphis ended an unusual legal arrangement on Friday between Michael Oher, a former National Football League player and the subject of the hit movie “The Blind Side,” and the people who took him in when he was a teenager, which had given them broad authority over Mr. Oher’s affairs.Mr. Oher, 37, filed a petition in August to terminate the nearly 20-year-old conservatorship, claiming that he had been tricked into signing away his decision-making powers under the pretense that he would be adopted. The petition stated that Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy, with whom Mr. Oher started staying when he was 16, were given power of attorney and access to his medical records, and that he could not bind himself to any contracts without their approval.The move by the judge was largely expected; the Tuohys had said at the time the petition was filed that they were happy to have the conservatorship end.Based on the book by Michael Lewis, “The Blind Side” is one of the most popular and highest-earning sports movies in American history, grossing more than $300 million upon its release in 2009 and earning Sandra Bullock an Academy Award for her portrayal of Ms. Tuohy. But it has also been criticized for perpetuating stereotypes about Black athletes like Mr. Oher needing help from white, wealthy benefactors like the Tuohys.Mr. Oher is also seeking money that he has said he should have earned from the movie, an injunction preventing the Tuohys from using his name and likeness, and an accounting of all the times that the Tuohys enriched themselves from “the lie of Michael’s adoption,” the petition said.The judge did not dismiss the case. The deputy clerk of the court said that no date had been set for another hearing. Lawyers for Mr. Oher did not immediately return requests for comment. A spokesman for the Tuohys did not respond to a request for comment.The Tuohys have denied wrongdoing. They have said that they sought the conservatorship only so Mr. Oher would be able to attend their alma mater, the University of Mississippi, to play football. The aim, they said, was to appease the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which had been suspicious of the fact that the Tuohys were prominent boosters of the school and had taken Mr. Oher in.In a legal filing on Sept. 14, the Tuohys said that they had never intended to legally adopt Mr. Oher and that they never told Mr. Oher that they would adopt him. In a 2010 book they wrote, however, the Tuohys refer to adopting Mr. Oher, and they have publicly referred to him as their adopted son.Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy took Mr. Oher in when he was 16.Gerald Herbert/Associated PressSandra Bullock won an Academy Award for playing Ms. Tuohy, in the 2009 film “The Blind Side.”Ralph NelsonThe conservatorship was created under unusual circumstances. It was granted despite a finding that Mr. Oher had “no known physical or psychological disabilities.” In Tennessee, a conservatorship is designed to protect an individual “with a disability who lacks capacity to make decisions in one or more important areas.”On Friday, the judge in Memphis, Kathleen Gomes, said that she could not “believe it got done” and that she had never seen a conservatorship granted under such circumstances.The judge in the original petition for the arrangement, Robert Benham, told The New York Times last month that he disputed the idea that a conservatorship could be granted only under such circumstances. But he said he ultimately granted the conservatorship because there was no opposition to the arrangement from the people at the hearing, including the Tuohys, Mr. Oher, the lawyer filing the petition and Denise Oher, Michael’s mother.Ms. Oher said in a recent interview that she didn’t recall a conservatorship being discussed at the hearing. She said that she thought she was present only to approve a name change for Michael, whose birth name was Williams. More

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      Designer Files New Lawsuit Against Lizzo and Her Wardrobe Manager

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      The singer, who already faces one lawsuit alleging a hostile work environment, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.A former wardrobe designer who worked briefly on Lizzo’s 2023 tour before being dismissed filed a lawsuit on Thursday alleging that the tour’s wardrobe manager had created a hostile work environment that tour management and Lizzo failed to address.In the complaint the plaintiff, Asha Daniels, who worked on the tour for less than a month, names Lizzo as a defendant, but does not accuse her directly of harassing behavior. In a news release accompanying the lawsuit, Ron Zambrano, her lawyer, said, “Lizzo is the boss so the buck stops with her.”The filing comes more than a month after three of Lizzo’s former dancers, who are also represented by Zambrano, sued the singer and her production company, accusing them of creating a hostile work environment. Lizzo has denied the allegations, and her lawyer has said she plans to countersue. On Thursday, a spokesman for Lizzo called the latest suit an “absurd publicity stunt” and noted that the singer had never met the plaintiff.In the court papers submitted on Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Daniels said she was asked to join the tour in early 2023 by the wardrobe manager, Amanda Nomura. The lawsuit alleges that throughout Daniels’s employment, Nomura had made “racist and fatphobic” comments and mocked both Lizzo and Lizzo’s background dancers “by doing an offensive stereotypical impression of a Black woman.”The lawsuit also alleged that a backstage manager on the tour sent a photo “graphically depicting male genitalia” to a group text message that included the plaintiff, tour management and other crew members; the lawsuit said the singer’s management failed to properly address the message, responding to it with humor in a way that encouraged an “unsafe, sexually charged workplace culture.”The plaintiff also said she was subjected to long hours and frequently denied breaks, alleging that Nomura required her to be on her feet all day despite an ankle injury.Attempts to reach Nomura on Thursday were not immediately successful.In response to the lawsuit, a spokesman for Lizzo, Stefan Friedman, said that Daniels never had any contact with the pop star during her time with the tour.“As Lizzo receives a humanitarian award tonight from the Black Music Action Coalition for the incredible charitable work she has done to lift up all people, an ambulance-chasing lawyer tries to sully this honor by recruiting someone to file a bogus, absurd publicity-stunt lawsuit,” Friedman said.He went on, “We will pay this as much attention as it deserves. None.” More