Russell Brand rape charges expose the good deal between Maga and “Christian” celebrities

Friday, a little less than a year since Russell Brand was an showcase baptized in the Thames, the Metropolitan Police of the United Kingdom charged the British actor who became-influencer-influencer of a rape chief, an oral leader, two chiefs of sexual assault and an indecent chief of exhibition.

At the time of his conversion in 2024, Brand declared that he had repeated himself from his past and that he “would recognize that I am in a battle against myself”. A few days before the accusations of this week, he told Sean Hannity de Fox News that he “went to a higher goal”. So, for people outside the Maga bubble, it is a bit strange to hear the brand react to the charges by rejecting responsibility, rather denying the accusations of the theories of the conspiracy so strange, it is difficult to buy that it believes it all.

“We are very lucky, in a way, to live in a time when there is so little confidence in the British government,” said Brand in a video of response on X. “We know that the law has become a kind of weapon to use against people, institutions and sometimes entire nations who will not accept and not tolerate the unprecedented levels of corruption.” Even if he insisted that he now lives in “The Lord’s Light”, the brand has insinuated that he is the victim of a corrupt conspiracy to supervise him.

The more likely explanation of accusations is that there are just a lot of evidence against the brand. A collaboration between The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4, produced over the years, has produced allegations of rape and other sexual abuse. They spoke with hundreds of sources, including four accusers. They collected medical records, SMS, emails and internal documents from employers, all showing a model of alleged sexual abuse which is often frightening in its violence. The report was released in September 2023. Shortly after, Brand was launched YouTube. He then quickly joined the rumble network affiliated with Maga. In the coming months, he moved to the United States and was baptized, completely referring as a right-wing Christian influencer.

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This chronology does not seem to have given the new audience of Maga of Brand a doubt of a single moment that he could have ulterior motives. On the contrary, his fans encouraged the conspiracy theory that depicts him as a political prisoner and accusations as “a political prosecution”, as Charlie Kirk complained.

“We know that you are innocent, Russell and all this is clearly politically motivated,” insisted a fan. “They are ready to sacrifice Russell because it will make others remain silent,” said another. My favorite, however, could be the guy who replied: “It was only when you decided to clean your life and find the faith and the peace they decided that you should be deleted.”

Of course, this obtains the chronology behind. The accusations have been surfaced since 2006, when the Australian singer Dannii Minogue spoke for the first time that Brand is a “vile predator”. The Big Times on display was released at the end of 2023, but Brand did not “find the faith” before the spring of 2024. Not like the other excuses for the brand. Maga followers talk a lot about how “they” do this to the brand, but it is forever clear that are “they”. Journalists? Police? Four alleged victims? Hundreds of witnesses? Crown prosecutors? But Maga prefers to believe that hundreds of “they” conspire to eliminate an actor from Has-Ben than to accept the more likely explanation: Brand found Jesus just in time to obtain a new flow of income and a new source of attention and validation, that for which he would never be installed when he still had access to general public.

The professor of religion Bradley Onishi, animator of the podcast “Spirit and Power”, underlined at the show that there is “a long history of the evangelical subculture and conservative Christian subcultures who wish to find general public legitimacy” by entering all the celebrities that they can claim to be one. In the 90s and early 2000s, the evangelicals noted, the evangelicals aroused everyone from U2 and Creed to Jessica Simpson and Katy Perry as “Christian personalities” who could sell the greater world on the idea that Christianity is hip and cool.

The brand, however, represents a disturbing touch to this saga: the will, in the era of Donald Trump, of the right to scratch the absolute background of the barrel to obtain this validation.

Not that many of them engage with the real allegations against the brand, for fear that their vision of him as a pious man being disturbed, but frankly, the details are shocking even in the #MeToo era. An alleged victim said that she was 16 when she had sex with the 31 -year -old brand. She says that she raped her by orally so violently that she began to choke, only escaping by hitting her stomach. Others report that the brand threatened them if they have spoken out, a more likely explanation of the delayed report than a dark conspiracy of the all -powerful “they” against the brand.

The brand belongs to a long line of celebrities which, because of the scandal or simply the fall in fashion, discovered the advantages of money and the ego of conversion to the church of Maga. The return of Roseanne Barr’s television derailed because of the online racist diatriber, so nowadays, she spends her time on Tucker Carlson’s show speaking of her “conversation that goes with God”. Carlson himself was a figurehead of Maga as a rule, but since the loss of his Fox News concert, he has taken possession of demon and other subjects that work well in the social media flows of the Christian right. The Kat von tattoo superstar has canceled its Sephora makeup line after anti-vaccination statements and marry a guy with a swastika tattoo. Now she gets brilliant writings in the right media on her conversion to Christianity. Mark Wahlberg became much stronger to be a Catholic FEV shortly after the stories about his arrests for hatred crimes resurfaced.

Christianity emphasizes redemption, which makes it an attractive framework for celebrity needing to rehabilitate a bad image. In theory, however, it is supposed to be repentance before redemption. But this is the era of Trumpian Christianity, so jumping the part where you say that you are sorry is optional. After all, Trump is treated not only as a Christian colleague, but also something closer to a savior figure by the religious right. He never said he was sorry for the victims of his fraud, or for the people on whom he lied, or for E. Jean Carroll, that a civil jury found him responsible for sexual assault. On the contrary, Trump’s response to the people he injured is to degenerate abuse if they are expressed against him, which is why Carroll won a second defamation pursuit against him. Being a tyrant is admired in the Maga movement. In Maga Christianity, real repentance would be rejected as “awake”. No wonder it is the perfect landing point for the Russell brand.