Dispatches/Sunday Times investigation: Russell Brand accused of rape and sexual assault

mancity2012_eamo said:
I appreciate the difficulty in getting a conviction in cases of this nature;
1. Historical cases.
2. One word against another.
3. The wish to remain anonymous.

But my fear of what happens now is summed up in my middle paragraph of what you replied to;

The ball is in their court now and this is where I stand by my impression of how justice is best served.
I think you will always have a divided opinion, not least amongst columnists who will thrive on divisiveness, if these allegations are left hanging in the ether.

If this is left to fester you run the risk of it being exploited by the more salacious elements of the media. You see it in all aspects of social media. I am talking about social media as a separate entity to the social justice, you revere.
We give out about sports columnists latching onto what sells, basically anything anti-City, well in the interview the lady specifically points out that unscrupulous columnists that automatically jumped to Brands defence, admitted not even reading their report.
That is what you will be left with. And the longer you are left with this the more divisive the issue will become and the more entrenched opinions will be.

I know your trust in social justice and let’s hope it’s not unfounded, but I perhaps because of my work, have a little more faith in the legal process.
I like to believe that we all have to have faith in it working for the people, the majority of the time.

I don’t think these women’s anonymity is guaranteed either if trial is left to social media.
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I think it is because of my work (data analytics/science, at one point in financial fraud detection and prevention, which involved a lot of failed litigation, and some pro bono work as of late for various nonprofits for outcomes benchmarking, including a crisis outreach organisation), that I am far less confident in the formal justice system, especially in the case of sexual and domestic abuse crime, which, statistically, has some of the worst reporting, investigation, and conviction rates of any offence not only in the UK, but across the world.

I have seen first hand that powerful people are largely able to insulate themselves from legal consequences for all manner of offences.

And, as I said in my original response: historically, victims of sex crimes are most often effectively punished for reporting the violations, even in the infrequent cases where investigations and subsequent trials take place. And that is largely a result of said powerful people acting to discredit and/or suppress them, or powerful institutions (often state authorities) doing it on their behalf.

If you leave cases solely to a system that has hard (not anecdotal) data indicating it does not benefit victims in the vast majority of cases, then you are essentially advocating for the status quo, which is a pretty horrific situation when we step back and scrutinise it.

I also want to share this post I made further back in the thread to explain in more detail the main reasons why most women do not report offences—these are not addressed by merely letting the legal process run its course.

SebastianBlue said:
@inbetween I saw your reply to me but now it has disappeared for some reason, but I wanted to say that the vast majority of women choose not to go to the police when they have been sexually abused or raped for many, many reasons that “education” will have very little impact on.

These reasons include:

1) the abuse is often perpetrated by someone they know (often their romantic or legal partner) so there are very real, very immediate consequences for reporting the abuse to the police.

2) even when the abuser is not known by the accused, historically reporting the abuse or rape to the police, even immediately, has lead to no consequences for the perpetrators and very real negative consequences for the victims.

3) even when charges are brought against perpetrators, historically very few cases have lead to convictions because the standard of proof is well beyond simply “did they likely do it”; perpetrators also often get off on technicalities, frequently because of the ineptitude of investigators (i.e. they may make procedural mistakes that lead to evidence being barred from being used in proceedings).

4) the police or other authorities have historically not taken accusations of sexual abuse and rape seriously and/or they have been unable to properly investigate the accusations due to poor training, staffing, or resourcing (for example, many authorities—including local clinics—still do not have valid “rape kits” and proper storage for them on premises).

And again, beyond all that, historically, many instances of sexual abuse and rape were only even investigated by authorities after they were reported in the media, even though some instances had been officially reported months or years earlier.
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Rape Crisis England & Wales has some very compelling analysis of the incident, reporting, and conviction rates in the UK specifically, as well as the implications of that data and the way incidents are usually handled. It makes for some pretty dire reading and I can vouch for their underlying data.

rapecrisis.org.uk

Get informed

Info about rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual harassment and other types of sexual violence, and the scale and impact of sexual violence in England & Wales.
rapecrisis.org.uk rapecrisis.org.uk

Here are a few important statistics:

How many people are raped, sexually assaulted and sexually abused in England and Wales?​

  • 1 in 4 women​

    have been raped or sexually assaulted as an adult
    (6.54 million women in total)

  • 1 in 6 children​

    have been sexually abused

  • 1 in 18 men​

    have been raped or sexually assaulted as an adult
    (1.34 million men in total)

​

67,169 rapes were recorded by police in 2022.​

By the end of the year, charges had been brought in just 1,276 (1.9%) of these cases. This means that less than 2 in 100 rapes recorded by police in 2022 resulted in a charge that same year, let alone a conviction.​


And survivors face long waits for their cases to reach a courtroom​

After being reported to the police, adult rape cases take an average of more than 2 years to complete in court.

Meanwhile, there's currently a record number of sexual offence cases that are waiting to go to court: 8,741

(This includes a record number of adult rape cases: 2,210)
 
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M18CTID said:
The thing that has stuck out for me in that video that Brand put out on Friday ahead of the Dispatches programme is that he claims he has witnesses who can back up his claims of innocence. I said on here the other day that I find it very difficult to believe that there were other people in the same room at the same time that all these alleged incidents took place. But that's not all - in saying that, he's basically placed himself at the scene of each alleged crime and while he's not admitting guilt, he's going to look a right **** if - as I suspect - he hasn't got any witnesses after all.
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There was one incident where he allegedly tried to coerce the woman he allegedly raped into a threesome.

Is he letting too much information slip in admitting he'd actually arranged a threesome?

Presumably he means alibis but how would he know exactly where he was when the alleged events occurred unless he is an obsessive diarist, a savant or was falsifying records to cover up for a crime?
 
SebastianBlue said:
I think it is because of my work (data analytics/science, at one point in financial fraud detection and prevention, which involved a lot of failed litigation, and some pro bono work as of late for various nonprofits for outcomes benchmarking, including a crisis outreach organisation), that I am far less confident in the formal justice system, especially in the case of sexual and domestic abuse crime, which, statistically, has some of the worst reporting, investigation, and conviction rates of any offence not only in the UK, but across the world.

I have seen first hand that powerful people are largely able to insulate themselves from legal consequences for all manner of offences.

And, as I said in my original response: historically, victims of sex crimes are most often effectively punished for reporting the violations, even in the infrequent cases where investigations and subsequent trials take place. And that is largely a result of said powerful people acting to discredit and/or suppress them, or powerful institutions (often state authorities) doing it on their behalf.

If you leave cases solely to a system that has hard (not anecdotal) data indicating it does not benefit victims in the vast majority of cases, then you are essentially advocating for the status quo, which is a pretty horrific situation when we step back and scrutinise it.

I also want to share this post I made further back in the thread to explain in more detail the main reasons why most women do not report offences—these are not addressed by merely letting the legal process run its course.



Rape Crisis England & Wales has some very compelling analysis of the incident, reporting, and conviction rates in the UK specifically, as well as the implications of that data and the way incidents are usually handled. It makes for some pretty dire reading and I can vouch for their underlying data.

rapecrisis.org.uk

Get informed

Info about rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual harassment and other types of sexual violence, and the scale and impact of sexual violence in England & Wales.
rapecrisis.org.uk rapecrisis.org.uk
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I fully appreciate all that and you’re not wrong about the statistics around sexual assault cases.
I do think however that the status quo you feel I’m advocating is actual what you’re left with in the absence of a formal legal proceeding and it is this that will be exploited.

What I see and hear in my daily job is that cases of a sexual nature such as this , if they do get to trial, usually have a very strong case built and in my experience have had quite a high success rate because of this strength of evidence.
I agree, what goes to trial may be a small percentage of crimes actually perpetrated on women, but do feel if you have the evidence then justice serves you best by bringing the accused to face the consequences in a court of law.
 
M18CTID said:
The thing that has stuck out for me in that video that Brand put out on Friday ahead of the Dispatches programme is that he claims he has witnesses who can back up his claims of innocence. I said on here the other day that I find it very difficult to believe that there were other people in the same room at the same time that all these alleged incidents took place. But that's not all - in saying that, he's basically placed himself at the scene of each alleged crime and while he's not admitting guilt, he's going to look a right **** if - as I suspect - he hasn't got any witnesses after all.
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I had a listen to it again, what he actually says is 'there are witnesses that directly contradict the narratives that these MSM news outlets are trying to construct'.

To me this comes across more like he has character testimonies of women who had a 'positive' experience with him rather than witnesses specifically to the situations in mention.
 
Postman Pep said:
Mad to to think so many 'sensible' people indulged him as a serious political thinker.

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or even went into bat for him dismissing allegations by an ex as a hatchet job.

IMG_20230920_153740.png
Obviously the man who is never wrong doesn't do introspection so fair play to Hyde for offering up a mea culpa. No surprise that she doesn't offer up a link to what she wrote at the time.

 
mancity2012_eamo said:
I fully appreciate all that and you’re not wrong about the statistics around sexual assault cases.
I do think however that the status quo you feel I’m advocating is actual what you’re left with in the absence of a formal legal proceeding and it is this that will be exploited.

What I see and hear in my daily job is that cases of a sexual nature such as this , if they do get to trial, usually have a very strong case built and in my experience have had quite a high success rate because of this strength of evidence.
I agree, what goes to trial may be a small percentage of crimes actually perpetrated on women, but do feel if you have the evidence then justice serves you best by bringing the accused to face the consequences in a court of law.
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One of the major issues that the data supports is exactly what you describe: women need to have evidence that is often unattainable for sexual abuse (and even often rape) in order to have a “strong” enough case to even bring to court. Hence why 98% of sexual assualts recorded do not lead to charges, much less conviction. And the vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported.

So whilst according to recent research by UCL the conviction rate for all sexual assaults was ~75% in 2021, the overwhelming majority of sexual assault is not prosecuted largely because of structural and social barriers. And the latter is heavily informed by the the former.

Again, the formal justice system is not structured to benefit the victims—all data supports that conclusion, even from the government’s own office of the Victims Commissioner.

I know you prefer to look at things as dispassionately as possible, and see me as overly passionate, but I have actually spent my life dispassionately analysing data and underlying trends for many fields, operations, topics, situations, systems, and events, because I believe that is were insights for real change originate. I come off as very passionate in this and other debates because I get frustrated that people fixate on what they personally see or experience rather than what is actually happening for most people, most of the time. It can be disheartening for someone that has studied large data universes that conflict or outright disprove the personal observations being used as a basis for debate.

And if we want to scrutinise this issue dispassionately, as I know you want to do, we have to look to hard, reputable, verifiable data, not our own limited, inherently biased (and anecdotal) observations.
 
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Bazzmand Show said:
I had a listen to it again, what he actually says is 'there are witnesses that directly contradict the narratives that these MSM news outlets are trying to construct'.

To me this comes across more like he has character testimonies of women who had a 'positive' experience with him rather than witnesses specifically to the situations in mention.
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Which is a very common tactic from abusers.

Just look at Greenwood, Antony, or the recent Barry Masterson scandal involving many prominent celebrities, including Ashton Kutcher and his wife Mila Kunis (which he began working with when she was 14 and he was 20 on “That 70s show”).
 
Mr Kobayashi said:
There was one incident where he allegedly tried to coerce the woman he allegedly raped into a threesome.

Is he letting too much information slip in admitting he'd actually arranged a threesome?

Presumably he means alibis but how would he know exactly where he was when the alleged events occurred unless he is an obsessive diarist, a savant or was falsifying records to cover up for a crime?
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Pizza Express in Woking
 
SebastianBlue said:
One of the major issues that the data supports is exactly what you describe: women need to have evidence that is often unattainable for sexual abuse (and even often rape) in order to have a “strong” enough case to even bring to court. Hence why 98% of sexual assualts recorded do not lead to charges, much less conviction. And the vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported.

So whilst according to recent research by UCL the conviction rate for all sexual assaults was ~75% in 2021, the overwhelming majority of sexual assault is not prosecuted largely because of structural and social barriers. And the latter is heavily informed by the the former.

Again, the formal justice system is not structured to benefit the victims—all data supports that conclusion, even from the government’s own office of the Victims Commissioner.

I know you prefer to look at things as dispassionately as possible, and see me as overly passionate, but I have actually spent my life dispassionately analysing data and underlying trends for many fields, operations, topics, situations, systems, and events, because I believe that is were insights for real change originate. I come off as very passionate in this and other debates because I get frustrated that people fixate on what they personally see or experience rather than what is actually happening for most people, most of the time. It can be disheartening for someone that has studied large data universes that conflict or outright disprove the personal observations being used as a basis for debate.

And if we want to scrutinise this issue dispassionately, as I know you want to do, we have to look to hard, reputable, verifiable data, not our own limited, inherently biased (and anecdotal) observations.
Click to expand...

One thing I do agree on is that the analytical scrutiny of veritable data is the way to have change enacted within governance and within the legal system itself.

I believe the law as it stands, is tilted the way it is for very good reasons.
That doesn’t mean it has to be static and it should change to keep up with the times.

What you prescribe, is the way to go about it, and in so doing the law will serve justice to the people as a whole.

Well Seb, keep fighting the good fight.
 
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