Leftist Rape Apologists Chime In About Russell Brand

Ignoring or dismissing allegations of sexual misconduct is not confined to a particular political orientation or ideology, but is commonplace throughout the political spectrum

Denying Allegations of Wrongdoing by Ingroup Members: Not Just a Democrat or Republican Thing

Three years ago, near the end of the Democratic presidential primaries, Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of raping her when she was a member of his Senate staff in the early ’90s. The preceding year, eight women, including Reade, had accused Biden of various forms of groping or sexual harassment. The other seven women, not to mention the numerous girls and women who Joe Biden was caught on camera sexually harassing, were virtually ignored by the Democratic establishment. Reade, meanwhile, was so relentlessly smeared that, fearing for her safety, she ultimately sought and received political asylum in Russia. The double standard regarding the horrific treatment received by Reade from Democratic politicians and liberal media outlets and the extensive and highly favorable coverage given to Christine Blasey Ford, who accused a Republican of sexual assault, was off the charts.

Of course, supporters of Trump and other Republicans who have been accused of sexual assault have done the same thing. But refusing to acknowledge possible misdeeds by liked or admired others is hardly confined to members or supporters of the US’s two major parties. In 2019, a US socialist organization, the International Socialist Organization, dissolved largely because of the furor resulting from its Steering Committee’s coverup of a 2013 sexual assault allegation. Similarly, a huge scandal erupted in the British Socialist Worker’s Party in 2013 when party leaders not only dismissed female members’ rape allegations against a senior party member, but personally attacked them.

I’ve witnessed this sort of thing personally during my many decades on the political left. About 20 years ago, a dear friend and fellow activist, Lisa Spector, informed me and other friends that her ex-boyfriend Philip Anderson, who we knew because we were all part of a local environmental group, had raped and stalked her. To make a long story short, many who knew Philip well did not believe Lisa (who had a copy of a police report in which Anderson essentially confirmed one of the incidents of stalking himself), even if they also knew Lisa.

A few years later, when my partner and I were working with the animal rights organization Direct Action Everywhere, we met up with a group of people for an event in Chicago. Among those in attendance were Hugo, a member of the Chicago chapter, and Heather from the New York chapter. They hit it off, and began a relationship. A few months later, we learned that Hugo had allegedly shared nude photos of her (taken without her consent while she slept) with his male friends in the group when they questioned whether he had slept with her. Although to their credit, the overwhelming majority of people associated with the organization took her side, it was shocking how many Facebook followers of Direct Action Everywhere took Hugo’s side and either refused to believe that he had done it or dismissed it as no big deal.

In short, ignoring or dismissing allegations of sexual misconduct is not a phenomenon confined to a particular political orientation or ideology, but something that is commonplace throughout the political spectrum, including in what passes for the left in the West. And we are seeing it again in public reactions to the recent rape allegations against comedian and political commentator Russell Brand, who had become a household name in the UK and US during the early 2000s through his radio and TV comedy shows and subsequent roles in various Hollywood films such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Russell Brand Allegations

On Sept. 16, British media outlets The Times/Sunday Times and Channel 4 released a story, based on an investigation that they say began in early 2019, in which four women alleged that Brand had raped or sexually assaulted as well as emotionally abused them, and others made a variety of allegations about Brand behaving in a controlling, abusive, and sexually predatory manner. To be specific about the most serious allegations:

One woman alleges that Brand raped her against a wall in his Los Angeles home. She was treated at a rape crisis centre on the same day, according to medical records. Text messages show that in the hours after leaving his house, she told Brand that she had been scared by him and felt taken advantage of, adding: “When a girl say[s] NO it means no.” Brand replied saying he was “very sorry”.

A second woman alleges that Brand assaulted her when he was 31 and she was 16 and still at school. She said he referred to her as “the child” during an emotionally abusive and controlling relationship that lasted for about three months, and that Brand once “forced his penis down her throat,” making her choke. She says she tried to push him off and said she had to punch him in the stomach to make him stop.

A third woman claims that he sexually assaulted her while she worked with him in Los Angeles, and that he threatened to take legal action if she told anyone else about her allegation.

The fourth described being sexually assaulted by Brand and him being physically and emotionally abusive towards her.

The fourth accuser, Jordan Martin (the only one of the four to disclose her name), actually came forward years ago, having written a book (kNot: Entanglement with a Celebrity) in 2014 about her 6-month relationship with Brand in 2007, characterizing him as a “misogynist who abused me” and as “controlling and manipulative.”

All of the above allegations of sexual assault, as well as some that were made years ago or have been made since the Times article and the accompanying Channel 4 documentary (available only to UK viewers unless you have a VPN), pertain to a period in the Noughties and early 2010s during which Brand was a household name as a stand-up comedian, radio and TV personality, and actor. Irrespective of the validity of allegations about Brand’s private conduct with women, that he at times behaved in a highly inappropriate and disrespectful manner toward women (and sometimes men) in public—and even on national broadcast media—is beyond dispute.

In 2007, Brand interviewed fellow celebrity Jimmy Savile (exposed a few years later as a child molester) by phone on the BBC Radio 2 show that he hosted at the time, telling him that he would like to meet him someday. Savile replied that he “doesn’t usually meet fellas, but if you’ve got a sister then that’s okay.” “I’ve got a personal assistant, [name of assistant]” Brand told Savile. “And part of her job description is that anyone I demand she greet, meet, massages, she has to do it. She’s very attractive, Jimmy.” He then asked Savile what he would like for her to be wearing when she met him. Savile said he preferred that she be naked, and Brand responded “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

In 2008, during an episode of his Radio 2 show, Brand and his co-host Jonathan Ross made lewd prank calls to (the voice mail of) Fawlty Towers TV star Andrew Sachs in which, among other things, they let him know that Brand had fucked his granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. This resulted in the BBC receiving a huge fine and the cancellation of Brand’s show. Sachs wrote a newspaper column a few years later discussing the pain that this incident had caused him, his granddaughter, and the rest of the family. Baillie, too, publicly condemned Brand and Ross for their outrageous conduct.

Leftist Rape Apologism: The Russell Brand Edition

In recent years, although he’s continued to make some appearances on mainstream TV shows and in movies, Russell Brand has reinvented himself as a wellness guru and political commentator, launching a YouTube channel in 2017 that currently has about 7 million followers. He is perceived by many to be “anti-establishment,” and many of his views are indeed progressive—he has condemned the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians, spoken in support of political prisoners such as Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, condemned capitalism and advocated socialism, endorsed Jeremy Corbyn when he ran for Prime Minister, and condemned NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.

At the same time, he’s in the past few years increasingly moved toward promotion of conspiracy theories, particularly those related to COVID-19, such as the claim that COVID originated from a lab leak or that COVID lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates were part of an authoritarian effort by elites to impose tighter control on the masses, as well as promoting quack treatments for COVID such as ivermectin while disparaging the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

Although upon close examination, his politics are more vaguely “anti-establishment” than coherently radical, these stances have won him a great deal of popularity among a certain segment of the Western left, who have reacted to the publication of the allegations by proclaiming it to be part of a plot by the “establishment” to take Brand down because it supposedly perceives him to be a threat, and either paying little to no attention to the allegations themselves or the women who made them or outright disparaging them. Here are a few examples of this mentality:

A common theme in these sorts of reactions to the allegations against Brand by people who purport to be radical or leftist is that they have been brought forward because “they” are out to get him because he speaks truth to power—and, relatedly, that since the mass media have spread falsehoods (Russiagate, “Iraq has WMDs,” etc.) before, they must be doing so in this case, too. (Commonly, a comparison is made to Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who was accused of rape by the Swedish government despite no women reporting that he raped them, presumably to make it easier for the US to extradite him.) Additionally, there are complaints that he is being “tried [or even “lynched”] by media,” that it’s suspicious that the women waited so long to come forward or that they spoke to the media rather than going to the police, that it’s somehow the responsibility of the general public (rather than a court at the beginning of a trial) to presume he’s innocent, and that the accusers “shouldn’t” have chosen to remain anonymous. (Typically, the complainers don’t know that one of the four accusers, Jordan Martin, is not anonymous.) And finally, Dore and others implied that if there had been prior consensual sex, then the women couldn’t have been raped.

Many of these views, and others I’ve seen, appear in some form in “Rape Apologist Bingo” memes one finds online, like these:

Below, I look at each of these attempts to call into question the legitimacy or believability of the allegations.

“But they had had consensual sex!”

Let’s dispense first with the most disgusting of these rape apologist cliches, the notion that it’s somehow not a “real rape” if a sexual assault has occurred in the context of preceding consensual sex. One of the four accusers discussed in the Times article, “Phoebe,” says she had a brief relationship with Brand that had ended by the time of the alleged rape. Another, “Nadia,” says she had had sex once with Brand, and that the alleged rape took place in the context of him pressuring her to participate in a threesome and her refusing. A third, “Alice,” was 16 years old at the time of the alleged rape, while Brand was 31. Although the age of consent in the UK is 16 (same as it was in the mid-1800s), few of us (I hope) think a man in his 30s having a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old kid is acceptable. And she says the rape involved him forcing his penis deep down her throat, unexpectedly and without her consent, causing her to be unable to breathe, and that he only stopped when she punched him in the stomach. According to the fourth accuser, Jordan Martin, the assault occurred in the context of an emotionally and physically abusive relationship. Martin said in her 2014 book about the relationship that the alleged assault occurred when he became angry that she had spoken on the phone with an ex-boyfriend, snatched her phone away from her and broke it, and then, as she moved into another room to get away from him, came up behind her and unexpectedly shoved his finger into her vagina. The important point is that being (or having been) in a sexual relationship with a woman does not give a man a “golden ticket” to perform any sexual act he wants with that woman any time he wants to without even implicit consent. Maybe Jimmy Dore, despite not being that old (58), is too old-fashioned to be aware of this, but there’s even such a thing as marital rape. In the US (and in most other countries), non-consensual sex has been illegal in marital relationships since the late 1900s.

“Why didn’t they go to the police?” Why didn’t they report it sooner?”

“Why didn’t they report it sooner?” and “Why didn’t they just report it to the police?” reflect a lack of understanding of societal attitudes toward sexual misconduct and toward women generally. Women are the overwhelming majority (85-90% or more) of the victims of both rape/sexual assault and physical violence. One in six of America’s women and teenaged girls report having been raped or sexually assaulted. Only between 5 and 23% (depending on the study) of rapes are reported to the police. And out of those that are reported to the police, fewer than 1% result in a conviction. A recent study in the UK of over 2000 women who reported their rapes to the police found that they almost universally had bad experiences with the police, traceable largely to the police having the same attitudes toward rape victims that much of the general public does: They don’t believe them. This is quite ironic given that, according to other research, police departments themselves have only found between 2 and 10% of rape reports they receive to be false. The hashtag #BelieveWomen (which, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t mean “automatically believe all women regardless of the evidence”) became popular during the #MeToo movement precisely because it’s so incredibly common for women’s allegations of rape to not be believed. Rape victims often don’t even believe each other! Alyssa Milano, for instance, known for popularizing the #MeToo hashtag that resulted in unprecedented numbers of women coming forward on social media to talk about previously undisclosed incidents of sexual harassment and assault, refused to believe Tara Reade when she alleged that Joe Biden raped her, despite extensive corroborating evidence and a litany of other sexual misconduct allegations against Biden.

It is particularly difficult to have allegations against famous, powerful men such as Harvey Weinstein or Joe Biden (or Russell Brand) taken seriously, as not only is it even more likely than usual that the allegations won’t be believed, but it is also more likely that negative repercussions in terms of the accuser’s reputation or legal consequences will ensue. Brand allegedly threatened two of his accusers with lawsuits in an attempt to keep them quiet. Thus, it is completely understandable that women would seek a sympathetic ear in the media and try to publicize their allegation, rather than going to the police initially. Celebrities who were eventually convicted of rape such as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and R. Kelly might never have seen the inside of a courtroom had victims not gotten extensive publicity through media coverage first. The problem isn’t that there is a “trial by media”; the problem is that rape victims typically don’t get the opportunity for any type of trial.

“Innocent until proven guilty!”

You may have noticed that “innocent until proven guilty” and variants on the same theme such as “you can’t be judge, jury, and executioner” are in some of the “rape apologist bingo” cards above. The first phrase is a bastardization of the term “presumption of innocence.” Presumption of innocence is the important legal principle of beginning a criminal trial with the accused presumed to be innocent; that is, it is required that the prosecution present a compelling case of the accused’s guilt, and if that doesn’t happen, then “not guilty” is the appropriate verdict.

But the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” is absurd. Proving someone’s guilt doesn’t somehow magically transform them from someone who’s innocent of a crime into someone who’s guilty; they were guilty all along! And if there’s evidence that someone is guilty of a crime (and note that eyewitness testimony is a form of evidence, and in fact research suggests that it is a decisive form of evidence in most court cases), the public is completely entitled to discuss that evidence and express their opinion regarding the person’s guilt. The legal doctrine of presumption of innocence only applies to trials, and not anywhere else. For instance, defendants may be held in jail while awaiting trial either because they are a perceived flight risk or because they are thought to be a possible threat to the community—folks like Dylan Roof were held in prison prior to their trial for good reason. Of course, the fact that “presumption of innocence” is a legal doctrine that only applies to courtroom settings doesn’t mean that it’s okay for someone to publicly judge a man as a rapist without attempting to provide a convincing reason why they think so—any more than it’s okay to publicly judge his accuser as a “slut” or a liar (which in my experience is a vastly more common phenomenon) without attempting to offer a good reason.

But “innocent until proven guilty” isn’t something people say because of their support of the legal doctrine of “presumption of innocence”; rather, it’s invariably said by defenders of the accused to those who publicly discuss the merits of the allegation. Basically, what it actually means is “Shut up!” The hypocrisy of those who throw this phrase around is pointed out by journalist Edie Wyatt with regard to the Russell Brand allegations:

According to the prevailing wisdom of the heavily subscribed to men of YouTube, we are to extend an eternal state of presumed innocence to all men accused of rape, right up until the judge’s gavel hits the block. The same rule doesn’t apply to women who make accusations, [who] are freely being called sluts and liars in the public square.

Another aspect of the hypocrisy, of course, is the differing standards applied to allegations against men that some group of people like vs. the standards that same group of people applies in the case of men they don’t like. Many of the same people decrying the supposed “trial by media” (meaning, the fact that the allegations were disclosed and their merits discussed in the media) and carrying on about Brand being “innocent until proven guilty” are only too happy, given the existence of considerable credible evidence, to express their opinion that US President Joe Biden is corrupt or that he raped Tara Reade—and, to emphasize Wyatt’s important point, to opine that the women accusing Brand of sexual misconduct are lying.

Not only are women who make rape allegations pilloried in the public square, particularly if the alleged rapist is someone prominent, they are also often doxxed or otherwise bullied and threatened. As previously noted, Biden accuser Tara Reade ultimately felt compelled to seek political asylum in Russia due to concerns for her safety.

“Why did they remain anonymous?”

In this context in which women who go public with rape allegations against prominent people are invariably attacked by fans of the alleged perpetrator, it was quite astonishing to see Rose McGowan, an actress who was among the many women who accused former movie producer Harvey Weinstein (now serving what amounts to a lifetime prison sentence) of raping them, criticize Brand’s accusers for remaining anonymous. The reasons why they (except for Jordan Martin) did so are obvious in light of what I’ve said so far. And this is not at all uncommon with rape allegations against famous men. Some of the many women who accused R. Kelly, Bill Cosby—and, yes, Harvey Weinstein as well—were “Jane Does.” The informant in the Watergate political scandal during President Richard Nixon’s administration went by the pseudonym “Deep Throat.” Journalist Seymour Hersh recently reported on allegations of a Biden Administration plot to blow up Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline that came wholly from anonymous sources. Rose McGowan surely knows all this. Protecting sources through offering them the opportunity to remain anonymous should they be concerned about the impact of their identity being public knowledge is standard journalistic practice. Although it is true, as McGowan says, that accusers’ allegations are more likely to be believed by a jury if the accusers aren’t anonymous, we aren’t there at this point. Publicizing the allegations via the media is invariably the first step on the road to a trial involving allegations against high-profile individuals. Without that publicity—particularly, as noted above, with rape allegations—there is unlikely to ever be an investigation by the police or, if the allegations are found to have possible merit, a trial.

“Russell Brand is being smeared by the establishment because he speaks truth to power, just like Julian Assange was.”

Many in Russell Brand’s fan base claim that the publication of the allegations is part of a plot by the “establishment” to “cancel” him, “smear” him, “lynch” him, or “ruin [his] life.” Some compare the Brand affair to the case of Julian Assange, who was accused of rape by the Swedish government. In that incident, two Swedish women with whom Assange had had sex contacted the police because they wanted to insist that Assange be tested for sexually transmitted diseases, as he had had sex with them without a condom. Neither woman accused Assange of raping them, but the claim that Assange had committed rape made international headlines. It ultimately became clear that the rape claim was likely a ploy by the Swedish government, which has extradition agreements with the United States, to bring Assange to Sweden where he would in turn be extradited to the US, where a secret grand jury had already indicted him for criminal charges that amounted to political persecution in retaliation for his having outed the US’s war crimes in Iraq. For anyone reading this who is unfamiliar with the case, Assange sought and received political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London; that asylum was revoked in April 2019 and he has been detained in solitary confinement in the UK’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, without British charges against him, ever since, and the US government is seeking to extradite him to be tried for the charges here. He is the world’s best-known political prisoner, and it is completely understandable why people would conclude that the rape allegations are false.

In the case of Russell Brand, although it is certainly plausible to think that there are elements of the ruling class that would like to shut him up, given that he has taken numerous positions contrary to those of the majority of the “establishment,” such as condemning Israeli oppression of Palestinians or the war in Ukraine, and social media platforms have been pressured to censor or demonetize his content (with YouTube demonetizing him 3 days after the allegations were published), the comparison to Julian Assange doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The rape allegations against Assange were a small part of a concerted smear campaign against him that went on for years and began only months after Wikileaks’ release of the Collateral Murder video and other incriminating evidence of US war crimes in April 2010; there was a CIA plot to assassinate him; and the “investigation” of Wikileaks and Assange for their “crime” of releasing proof of war crimes, deemed a violation of the Espionage Act, began in November 2010. Counting the time when he was confined to the Ecuadorean Embassy in the UK due to US threats to extradite him, he has essentially been a political prisoner for more than a decade, a status that began in December 2010, following an international Interpol warrant for his arrest regarding the Swedish rape allegations. (Formal charges were never filed.)

Brand, on the contrary, had a longstanding reputation for sexually harassing women that began many years before he began his political YouTube channel in 2017. Some of the incidents that won him this reputation—the 2007 lewd phone call with Jimmy Saville that demeaned a female assistant, and the 2008 lewd phone messages left with Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs regarding Brand’s brief relationship with his granddaughter, both of which took place on his show on BBC Radio Two—were discussed above. In a 2006 interview with the Daily Mirror, Australian singer and actress Dannii Minogue called Brand a “vile predator” following an interview with her on MTV in which Brand had remarked on her “fabulous breasts” and made various other comments that she described as “shocking.” Echoing Minogue, comedian Katherine Ryan confronted Brand during the taping of a 2018 episode of the British comedy show Roast Battle, calling him a “sexual predator.” She repeated the allegation, without referring to Brand by name (citing fears of a potential lawsuit), in a 2022 interview in which she referred to him as a “perpetrator of sexual assault.” In another segment of his radio show, Brand made a series of sexual remarks about a newscaster at the station, Andrea Simmons, and implied to his audience that he would like to perform oral sex on her while she was reading the news. Brand even confessed himself to abusing women in his autobiography, saying that he once spat in a prostitute’s face and threw another’s phone against the wall and broke it. There were also rape allegations made against Brand many years before the Times story, one in 2006 and another in 2014. As noted above, the 2014 allegation was made by former girlfriend Jordan Martin, who was also featured in the Times story.

In short, even if one discounts entirely the three anonymous allegations reported in the Times/Channel 4 story—even if one accepts the premise that there is some concerted effort to bring Brand down that these media outlets are participants in—there is still ample evidence that Brand has a history of being a sexual predator who has harassed, abused, humiliated, and sexually assaulted women. But what reason is there to dismiss out of hand either these or any of the other allegations? There are a number of reasons why this makes little sense.

First, as I’ve already discussed, false rape claims are extremely rare, accounting for roughly 5% of total reports to police—and the vast majority of rapes are not reported to the police. A significant proportion of false allegations are not false reports of being raped per se, but misidentification of a perpetrator who is a stranger due to the unreliability of human memory. Of course, that does not apply to the allegations against Brand. One of the most common cases of false allegations, research suggests, are cases in which an adolescent girl tells her parents she was raped in order to avoid getting in trouble, such as for getting pregnant, or even for something as trivial as truancy or missing their parents’ curfew. In fact, almost half of all rape claims ultimately deemed false by police are lodged by someone other than the victim, usually parents. Among adults who make false rape claims, it is common for the accuser to have a prior history of bizarre fabrications or criminal fraud. Crystal Mangum, the accuser in the 2006 Duke Lacrosse team case, had a previous felony conviction as well as a previous rape allegation that was deemed to be false. That many people believe that false rape allegations are common rather than rare is attributable to the fact that when an allegation is made that does turn out to be false, it gets a lot of publicity. Thus, it stands out in people’s memory. Likewise, repeated claims that an allegation is false also stand out in memory. And people commonly judge the frequency of events not based on any objective evaluation, but based on a mental shortcut known as the availability heuristic—we judge events’ frequency (in this case, the frequency of false rape allegations) based on how readily examples of them come to mind.

Second, as political commentator Megyn Kelly, who was among the few journalists to interview and support Biden accuser Tara Reade, points out, the allegations reported in the Times article and Channel Four documentary were extremely detailed and contained a significant amount of corroborating evidence, such as text messages between Russell Brand and one of her accusers in which Brand is clearly apologizing for what she is describing as a sexual assault (and explicitly characterized it as “rape” elsewhere) and medical records from the rape crisis center she visited the very next day. The investigation began nearly five years ago. And British libel laws are very strict—Russell Brand, who is very wealthy, could easily mount a successful lawsuit if anything were amiss with the allegations or they seemed fabricated, so lawyers for the two media outlets undoubtedly went over the stories with a fine-toothed comb.

Conclusion

In short, the notion harbored by some on the left, and/or in conspiracy theory-promoting circles, that Russell Brand is a victim of a big “deep state” frame-up job a la similar efforts against Julian Assange does not stand up to scrutiny—there is as much reason to believe that Russell Brand is guilty of serious crimes against women as there is to believe the same of Joe Biden, Harvey Weinstein, or Bill Cosby, and any women who have been victimized by him deserve justice. That is not to say that there isn’t an effort by some members of the political elite to silence whatever aspects of his political commentary—such as his staunch opposition to the Ukraine War—are sharply critical of the policies of the ruling class. His YouTube channel was demonetized almost immediately after the allegations emerged, and pressure was brought to bear on other social media outlets such as Rumble to do the same. But there is a night and day difference between the amount of evidence that Brand has had a longstanding pattern of sexual misconduct, most of which became public years ago, and the allegations against Julian Assange.

Despite this, many within the faction of the Western left that is closely politically aligned with Brand and/or regularly view his commentary are convinced that this is all just a big frame-up. Some argue that some of the views Brand and his supporters promote, such as opposition to vaccines and vaccine mandates and various conspiracy theories about COVID (such as the claim, contradicted by a large body of scientific evidence, that COVID emerged in humans through a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab), disqualify them as being part of the left because they are fundamentally conservative views that are largely promoted by right-wingers in Western countries. They are the exact opposite of prevailing views in socialist countries such as China and Cuba that have very high vaccination rates and generally took COVID very seriously, enacting a plethora of public health measures that successfully limited the damage the pandemic did.

But the bulk of these individuals’ views (opposition to economic inequality and war, etc.) are left-leaning, and there is actually a long history of those who are broadly speaking on the left, including explicitly socialist groups, falling prey to some of the same tendencies—racism, homophobia, misogyny, extreme individualism, etc.—that afflict people of every political persuasion as well as those who are apolitical. As noted at the beginning of this article, that includes tendencies to engage in rape apologism. Ultimately, it’s not surprising that this happens. It is a basic human tendency, stemming from a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance (discomfort resulting from alleged or actual wrongdoing or mistakes), to deny or rationalize misdeeds or mistakes, whether by oneself or by members of an ingroup—including liked/admired celebrities. And for many people, what members of their ingroup say repeatedly is the gospel truth, irrespective of what the evidence may suggest. (Over 90% of the American public believed initially that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, despite there being no evidence that this was the case.) As I was writing this, I was reminded of the experience I had many years ago when I taught at a Black college at the time of the OJ Simpson trial. I was amazed how few of the students thought OJ was guilty. The majority thought he was being framed and was innocent. The times have changed, but human nature remains much the same.