Remember When Russell Brand Asked Katy Perry for a Divorce Via Text Message?

Content warning: This article talks about issues of rape and sexual assault.
Last week, Russell Brand was charged with rape, indecent assault and sexual assault. The former comedian turned right-wing “influencer” faces charges related to four separate women for alleged incidents between 1999 and 2005. Brand has been interviewed multiple times by police since an investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times, and the Channel 4 programme Dispatches in September 2023 revealed multiple serious allegations against him. He, of course, denies all allegations, telling his followers on Twitter that he was an alcoholic and a sex addict but never a rapist.

The investigations by British media exposed a years-long pattern of behaviour that spanned time and geography. It also claimed that Brand’s behaviour was one of the biggest open secrets in the entertainment industry. Many comedians like Daniel Sloss, Katherine Ryan, and Katy Brand have talked about knowing the stories long before they became front-page news. I’m not a part of that scene at all and even I’d heard the rumours.

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Now that Brand is a conservative pseudoscience-shilling creep who converted to Christianity as a cover for his crimes, he’s got plenty of people defending him. He claims he’s an anti-establishment hero who’s being smeared by corporate powers, as though he wasn’t a major part of that establishment for years. It’s now a horridly familiar pattern to see formerly “progressive” people go right-wing and rant about wokeness as soon as it becomes financially convenient for them to do so. Brand stopped being hired for big gigs in film and TV, so he pretended that this expulsion was due to his politics and decided to commit hard to quackery and incendiary rhetoric. I wish I was surprised by how well this tactic worked, or by how many people are rallying around Brand because they think this accused serial rapist is “one of them.” Alas, this is a whole thing now, the failed entertainment mogul to the hard-right talking-head pipeline.

The allegations had me, and many others, thinking about how wildly popular Brand was for a long time, and how his leering behaviour and open cruelty were so easily spun away as part of his eloquent cheeky British chappie shtick. And, inevitably, it got me thinking about Katy Perry. A lot of people forget that, for a couple of years, Brand was not only a viable Hollywood figure but the husband of one the biggest pop stars of the 2010s. The former Christian singer turned bubblegum pop maven shacked up with the shaggy stand-up who fancied himself as a modern-day libertine. Opposites attract, so they say. After a whirlwind romance, they got engaged and married in a Hindu ceremony, near the Ranthambhore tiger sanctuary in Rajasthan. But it didn’t last long, and the way that Brand chose to end his marriage became one of the most painful and unexpectedly candid moments in Perry’s career.

Katy Perry: Part of Me is your bog-standard documentary concert film. Released in 2012, the movie covered Perry’s California Dreams Tour, in support of her megahit album Teenage Dream. It’s a movie for Perry fans that’s not intended to be revealing or analytical. Rattle & Hum, this ain’t. It shows Perry in full Katy mode, working on a gruelling tour that included 127 concerts over the course of one year. A few of her friends and fellow pop divas, like Adele and Lady Gaga, turn up. It’s all as fluffy as a candy floss wig.

But then there are these quiet moments where Perry deals with the absence of Brand from the tour. She clearly misses him but doesn’t want to put too much of her private life on display. While Perry and Brand never hid from the spotlight, they didn’t go full power couple. We never got official images of their wedding, for instance (although she did show brief glimpses of it in a TV performance.) She was demonstrably more famous than he, although he wasn’t above showboating for the cameras and grabbing attention. And he didn’t want to be her plus-one on her world tour for months on end, which plainly sucked for Perry.

And then he broke up with her via text message. Right before she was set to go on stage and perform in front of over 25,000 people in São Paulo.

This moment in Part of Me is genuinely tough to watch. She lies in the makeup chair, sobbing and shaking. She never cries, says one of her crew. Her team stand around her, not sure of what to do. We don’t hear in this scene that Brand has asked for a divorce but the message is clear. She puts on a necklace Brand gave her that she thought she’d lost, which makes her cry harder. We also see the tens of thousands of fans chanting her name as they wait for the show. One team member tells her, “You have two options: you can cancel the show or you can do your best.”

After a few seconds, Perry says, “Start, Todd.” She’s glammed up into full Katy mode. They walk her to her spot. She’s still shaking and sobbing. On the podium, before she’s raised onto the stage, they turn on her spinning boobs costume. She takes a breath, does her pose, and smiles. The crowd goes wild.

I’m not even a Perry fan and this moment makes me tear up every single time. Watching her pull herself together in spite of the urge to fall apart, to make herself smile and do her job, is so painfully human. The sheer surrealness of that image, of the spinning candy titties on a woman who has received the most devastating news, is maybe the best advert for getting on with life since the “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters. Forget a stiff upper lip. This is what it means to fight back! Honestly, I usually hate the whole “power through your pain” faux-positivity we see so often in situations like this. I don’t like the idea that we have to put our own struggles second to mundanities like work, but jeez if I don’t find Perry in that scene to be kind of inspiring.

Your husband dumping you via text is obviously a move so staggeringly cruel that it doesn’t require much analysis. But there’s also so much going on in that moment that has always left me stunned by Brand’s cruelty. It’s not just that he didn’t even have the decency to tell her to her face he didn’t want to be married to her anymore. It’s that he did it so impersonally AND right before one of the biggest gigs in her tour. That doesn’t feel like an accident to me. That’s the move of a bully who wanted to cause the most pain at the most optimal moment in his now-ex’s life. He clearly knew that, if Perry had decided to cancel the concert at the last minute because she was too devastated to continue, she’d be painted as a diva. He knew the cameras were on her while this happened. This is the behaviour of a bully and a misogynist. This is the crap a man pulls when he cannot deal with his wife being more successful than he is. History is unfortunately littered with stories of this kind of crap.

In a 2013 cover story for Vogue, Perry talked about Brand and confirmed that, yes, the f*cker dumped her via text. “He’s a very smart man, and I was in love with him when I married him. Let’s just say I haven’t heard from him since he texted me saying he was divorcing me December 31, 2011.” She also talked about how he would make jokes about her in his stand-up and not know she was in the audience hearing it, and that Brand was never there while she toured.

In what might be one of the most naked revelations of her private life she’s ever given to the press, Perry zeroes in on why she thinks Brand left her, and did so with such callousness. “At first when I met him he wanted an equal, and I think a lot of times strong men do want an equal, but then they get that equal and they’re like, I can’t handle the equalness. He didn’t like the atmosphere of me being the boss on tour. So that was really hurtful, and it was very controlling, which was upsetting. I felt a lot of responsibility for it ending, but then I found out the real truth, which I can’t necessarily disclose because I keep it locked in my safe for a rainy day. I let go and I was like: This isn’t because of me; this is beyond me. So I have moved on from that.”

This really is the killer quote, right? He wanted a cool boss of a wife but then realized that meant she was on his level (let’s be honest, she was above it) and hated what he saw as a power imbalance. And what is the “real truth”? Knowing what we know now about Brand, I shudder to think of an answer to that.

Talking about Russell Brand now - the one who shills weird amulets over YouTube and prays on-stage with Tucker Carlson - it’s easy to forget why people so thoroughly embraced him in the mid-to-late 2000s. It was the era of indie sleaze. This was the era of my adolescence, and my teens were dominated by images of skinny guys in eyeliner and band tees who listened to The Libertines and maybe showered once a fortnight. Pete Doherty was hot, despite being an open heroin addict who sprayed syringes full of his own blood at cameras. Hedonism was in, blending faux-vintage styling with grunge, Victoriana, and hair bleach. Skins was the biggest show on TV when I was in high school (as an unpopular nerd who didn’t like booze and never got invited to parties, that series was as close as I got to the action!) Did you have a Brat summer? You owe some of that to indie sleaze.

Russell Brand wasn’t the only comedian in his scene - consider Noel Fielding and the surreal art-school vibes of The Mighty Boosh - but he was its court jester. He embodied that flash-in-the-pan moment with his look but also his verbose ramblings that blended together art, music, and nonsense, sounding smarter than they actually were. He presented shows for MTV and various Big Brother-related things. As an ex-addict who had no issues with confronting taboos, he got this reputation as a freewheeling free-thinker who was a cut above the lads who dominated the prior decade. That didn’t make him any less of a creep compared to the blokish comics who made all those “my wife” jokes. He still loved to talk about gagging women with his penis. On talk shows, he would openly call other guests sluts. But it felt like an act, a way to push the boundaries that people didn’t see as sinister because Brand was “too smart” for that.

This was a savvy rebrand because it wasn’t that long ago that Brand was largely known for being a gross troll. He was infamously sacked from his job at MTV UK for coming to work dressed as Osama bin Laden the day after the September 11th attacks. Years later, when he was an established TV and radio star, he got into a massive scandal with fellow jackass Jonathan Ross when they left weird phone messages live on-air for actor Andrew Sachs. Infamously, Brand used this opportunity to let Sachs know that he’d had sex with the man’s granddaughter. The public outcry from this was major enough for former BBC stalwart Ross to jump ship to ITV, where he’s remained to this day (he’s also a TERF who gave a glowing cover quote to full-time transphobe Graham Linehan for his whiny memoir, so there’s that.)

Brand didn’t take off in America until after this incident, and movie roles in films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and gigs hosting more shows for MTV made him richer and more famous than ever. He also started getting more politically involved, speaking at major protests and even being selected by the Dalai Lama to host the Buddhist leader’s 2012 youth event in Manchester. He testified in parliamentary committees, guest-edited the New Statesman and talked at Cambridge University. As he became less visible as a wacky persona, he gained more traction, and greater cultural legitimacy, as an ‘activist.’ But it wasn’t necessarily a surprise when his YouTube channel featured more and more contrarian takes on issues like the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Nobody was shocked when he started palling around with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

So, when I remember Katy Perry, on New Year’s Eve, sobbing in pain after Brand asked for a divorce via text message, I can’t help but wonder: if that was how he treated someone he ostensibly loved, a woman of immense fame and privilege, how did he treat his accusers?

And, let’s be clear, indie sleaze, even at its most culturally potent, was always super f*cking contrived. It was a façade of cool that felt as performative as an episode of Skins. The people who actually lived that life were sad and ill, like Doherty (who is, remarkably, still alive, clean from drugs, and touring once more with the band that once fired him.) I’ve seen some people claim that indie sleaze is coming back but I don’t buy it. Sure, I get the urge to wax nostalgically about a millennial thing that felt like a debauched f*ck you in the face of a worldwide recession (the more things change) but nobody really wants to go back to unwashed grime, do they? Brat summer was debauched but it was also ironic and retina-burning in its sound and vision. Indie sleaze was too up its own arse for that, but still cloaked in a kind of fake-intelligent smarm that provided ample opportunities to be a gross loser in the name of “art.”

Perry is now with Orlando Bloom, another industry figure less successful than her but one with enough self-worth and respect for his partner that he seems totally okay with it. They have a daughter, Daisy, and seem to adore one another. He paddleboards her around lakes with his d*ck out and that’s wonderful. Perry is not as massive a pop star as she once was (that new album - woof) but she’s still a bankable name to her fans and enough of a big deal to do another world tour. She doesn’t talk about Brand much, for obvious reasons. I do wonder how she feels about him or how much she’s confronted the ways in which rape culture disguises itself through the power structures of the entertainment world. Surely it’s crossed her mind a few times recently given her eagerness to once more work with accused rapist Dr. Luke. Or is the pain only relevant when it’s personal?

Russell Brand is, alas, not unique. As an alleged abuser, there is, unfortunately, nothing special about a man who cloaks his cruelties in faux-intellectualism and pretends that allegations of assault are smears against a “truth teller” who’s busy shilling quackery to his cultists. Watching him brashly embrace religion right as the truth came out was the oldest trick in the book. He’s shown there is no depth he won’t sink to. Perhaps justice can finally be done after so many years. In the meantime, his victims will have to hold their heads high and carry on. Turn on your spinning tits and smile.