Brand scandal is still clearly not the UK’s magic #MeToo moment

They reduce the bravery of the women who came forward, and the tireless investigative work of the journalists who supported them, to an opportunity for the flaunting of wit. They make those women the butt of yet more hilarity.

Though they affect to take aim at the perpetrator, they are not so different, in essence, from Jonathan Ross telling an audience that the British Comedy Awards ceremony is 15 years old, “and like all 15-year-olds, it’s drunk, unpredictable, and it’s probably going home with David Walliams.”

By making light of abuse, they replicate the entitled banter culture which enabled and encouraged Brand’s offences.

The fact such one-liners come, for the most part, from those who would see themselves on the side of the angels is depressing. So is being asked to accept the belated reckoning with Brand and Walliams – alleged in an ITN/The Guardian documentary to have used his fame to groom teenage girls – as a watershed. It’s depressing because I would so like this to be the moment when attitudes change and men are finally held accountable for their actions. But we have been here before, and it wasn’t.

When I hear people say: “Let’s hope this is the UK’s #MeToo moment,” I no longer understand what they mean. What? The #MeToo moment, prompted by the Harvey Weinstein revelations, which triggered a backlash, vomiting forth Andrew Tate and the manosphere? The #MeToo moment that allowed a sexual abuser of a president to be elected?

The #MeToo moment that made so little lasting impact that, in the US, not a single high-profile client has ever been charged with exploiting the girls trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell? Forgive me if I feel less than reassured.

Let’s dig deeper into the details of these supposedly “landmark” cases. For as long as Brand and Walliams were making money, they were effectively untouchable.

'Fiscal model'

ON last week’s BBC Question Time, stand-up comedian and founder of The Guilty Feminist podcast, Deborah Frances-White, called #MeToo a “fiscal model”.

So long as Brand and Walliams were commercial assets, she pointed out, they were protected: by other TV personalities, by their employers, by the solicitors they paid to issue threatening letters on their behalf, by the Non-Disclosure Agreements they forced young women to sign.

Brand was held up by men and institutions who knew his behaviour was inappropriate as a cultural and political iconoclast. Walliams was anointed as a “national treasure”. Only when their reputations were already on the slide, was any action taken. And even then, it took the kind of intensive journalistic investigation few media organisations could afford before the allegations were aired.

As far as Brand is concerned, there have been guilty verdicts, and a ten-and-a-half-year jail sentence: a victory of sorts, and something to celebrate in a context where few allegations reach court, and convictions are difficult to secure.

The judge, Mr Justice Bennathan, made a sentencing statement which has been rightly welcomed. “Whatever women wear, wherever they go, indeed whatever they drink, they retain the right to say no and to demand justice from the criminal courts when sexual predators like you act without their consent,” he said.

But the “piercing clarity” for which he has been lauded is a truth women have been trumpeting for 50 years. And Bennathan’s words were spoken after a trial in which Brand’s defence KC, Ian Winter, had been allowed to freely peddle rape myths, including asking the complainers why they did not scream, fight back or report sooner.

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One might have drawn comfort from the jury’s decision to convict Brand of one rape and three sexual assaults, had he not also been found not guilty of two rapes and one attempted indecent assault. We will never know whether Winter’s tactics played any part in those acquittals.

Winter was also allowed to put it to the jury that it was strange so few women had come forward to accuse Brand, given his promiscuity (though Winter surely must have known there were other allegations pending against his client).

Open secret

IT is true that another judge threw out Walliams’ application for an injunction on the reporting of his alleged behaviour on the basis of his potential suicide. But any comfort to be drawn from that ruling was quickly overridden by the extent to which his alleged behaviour had been an open secret, even at his own publishing house. Yet HarperCollins launched no internal inquiry until nine years after concerns were first raised and six years after the peak of #MeToo. This is the #MeToo we’re told was so far-reaching that men can’t even flirt any more. If you say so, dude-bros.

The dude-bros have kept on saying, ramping up their anti-feminist rhetoric after each new revelation. Even as women like Frances-White powerfully spelled out the need for a cultural shift that would turn high-profile abusers of power dynamics into pariahs, online apologists were marshalling their troops. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail blamed the left for reifying Brand (partially true, but there’s no shortage of right-wing offenders).

The Spectator described the outpouring of angst as a “social media frenzy”, and made a dog-whistle comparison between Brand’s sentence and those given to “grooming gangsters”.

Since Brand’s trial, more women have come forward, amongst them his ex-girlfriend Jemima Goldsmith, who has accused him of violence and coercive control. In the wake of the documentary, a police investigation has been launched into Walliams, who denies any illegality.

Broader ethical questions are also being raised about figures such as Jonathan Ross, who appears to have fostered the culture of shagathon laddishness in which Brand’s and Walliams’ behaviour flourished.

And yet it is misleading to present this as a bygone product of the unenlightened 1990s. Just a few weeks ago, the Belfast comedian Vittorio Angelone was forced to apologise for a rape joke he had made the previous year, when fellow comedians Daniel Sloss and Freddy Quinne, who were on stage with him, failed to call him out.

Nor should our lens be trained exclusively on the comedy circuit as if it were the last bastion of misogyny. Even as the ITN/Guardian documentary on Walliams was airing, author and social commentator Darren McGarvey was handing back his honorary degree to Abertay University as a protest against it offering a platform to Justice for Innocent Men Scotland.

Trojan horse

MCGARVEY is to be commended for pointing out that JIMS use “the serious (though extremely rare) issue of false accusations against men as a Trojan horse to launder their crackpot reactionary ideas into public life.” As a result of his intervention, Abertay looked more closely at JIMS’ online mockery of survivors and issued an apology.

But we can draw our own conclusions from the fact that it took a high-profile man to force a concession on an issue women had tried repeatedly to raise without success.

Elsewhere, men are still drugging and raping their unconscious wives, and strangers are still paying to watch or participate. Young women are still being harassed in nightclubs and being told that choking is a normal part of sexual intercourse.

Though both the UK and Scottish governments have introduced some new legislation and channelled funds into awareness-raising campaigns, there is still no mandatory recording of hate crimes against women in England and Wales, and Scotland is still waiting for its stand-alone Misogyny Bill.

Maybe, after so many false dawns, a degree of expectation management is what’s required. Maybe it’s time to resign ourselves to the reality that there will be no magic #MeToo moment when the world changes like Kansas from black and white to colour.

All there will ever be is women and their male allies, with their inadequate little picks, hacking away at the cliff face of misogyny, hoping against hope that every tiny chip they dislodge takes them one step closer to its destruction.