Wait. Navigator is Russell Brand? Who knew.
On Saturday, a documentary about
Russell Brand premiered in the United Kingdom. This documentary, the culmination of a yearslong investigation by the Times, the Sunday Times, and Channel 4’s investigative current affairs unit Dispatches, is hard viewing. Brand is accused of rape, sexual assault, and controlling, emotionally abusive behavior in a series of incidents between 2006 and 2013. One woman accuses Brand of raping her against a wall in his Los Angeles home, another of sexually assaulting her elsewhere in Los Angeles, and she alleges that he threatened to take legal action if she told anybody what happened. One of the alleged victims, known only as “Alice,” was 16 at the time of her relationship with Brand, then 30. (The age of consent in the U.K. is 16, but Alice believes that “it shouldn’t be legal for a 16-year-old to have a relationship with a man in their thirties.”) In an accompanying piece by the Sunday Times, Alice says she remembers arriving at Brand’s house in a taxi and that the taxi driver, after recognizing the destination, begged her not to go inside.