Russell Brand with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz last year (Via Instagram)

In late September, a few days before his trial for rape and sexual assault was scheduled to begin in London, Russell Brand was a featured guest at the MAHA Summit in Washington, DC.

For some reason, the English comedian, YouTube conspiracy theorist, and recent convert to Christianity was there to moderate a conversation with Dr. Mehmet Oz about reform at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Russell Brand was backstage hugging the secretary of agriculture, but here he is,” said Oz, the CMS administrator, as Brand joined him on stage. “Took MAHA to a whole new level!”

“She initiated that contact,” Brand said, referring to Brooke Rollins, who had appeared in the previous panel. “I shall make that clear, doctor.”

Evidently amused by Brand’s joke about sexual assault, Oz let out a hearty guffaw and slapped both knees before proceeding to talk to Katy Perry’s ex-husband about tackling health care waste and fraud.

Little more than a month later, Brand, once the star of blockbuster Hollywood comedies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, was convicted on one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault in a London court. On Monday, he was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for the crimes, which occurred in 2004 and 2009.

In remarks at the sentencing, Judge Joel Bennathan described Brand as a sexual predator and man of “staggering arrogance” whose entourage indulged his “dreadful behavior.” He described the “damage and the humiliation” Brand caused the woman he was found guilty of anally raping, who was then a twenty-one-year-old fan, by forcing her to change his soiled sheets after the attack.

Bennathan also paid tribute to “the determination and bravery” of Brand’s accusers. “I do not increase your punishment because of it, but all those women had to face being confronted and being told they had lied or twisted the truth.”

At a time when millions of women remain outraged over the botched handling of the Cornell 7 case — not to mention the presence of an adjudicated sexual predator in the White House — Brand’s conviction felt like a rare moment of catharsis and accountability. And it was particularly gratifying, given how Brand not only got away with being a creep for decades, but profited enormously off of his lascivious, sexually entitled persona, leveraging it to become one of the biggest comedy stars of the 2000s.

Following the conviction, some publishers in the UK and the US pulled his books from sale, but his YouTube channel, with 6.6 million subscribers, remains intact, as do many of his films on streaming services.

A vocal contingent of MAGA personalities have rushed to Brand’s defense, including habitual rape apologist Megyn Kelly, who claimed Brand, an “obvious conservative stalwart,” was the victim of a “political witch hunt.” Elon Musk called the conviction “unjust.” As they see it, Brand is being persecuted because of his conservative beliefs — even though rumors about his behavior have swirled for decades and long predate his political conversion.

Neither Oz nor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has commented on Brand’s conviction, and HHS has not responded to a request for comment from The Contrarian.

But it’s safe to assume that the leaders of the MAHA movement have not had a dramatic change of heart, given that Brand appeared at the summit little more than a month ago. On the contrary, Tony Lyons, Kennedy’s publisher and head of the MAHA political action committee, even accompanied Brand to court, where 24 witnesses provided evidence backing up the account of the woman Brand raped in 2009, while the comedian had no one to testify on his behalf. Apparently, making America healthy again does not mean making women safe, fighting sexual violence, or paying attention to empirical evidence.

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More than an open secret

Brand rose to fame in the U.K. in the mid-aughts by cultivating a wildly debauched persona, regaling audiences with graphic tales of his sexual exploits. “I like them blowjobs where it goes in their neck a little bit,” he said in a 2006 comedy (?) special, making gagging sounds for emphasis. “Them blow jobs where mascara runs a little bit.” In his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, Brand wrote about persisting in his pursuit of women “until I received my birthright orgasm” (a line used as evidence against him at trial).

In a 2010 follow-up, he talked about how his boss at BBC Radio ensured the contest winners who came to the studio to claim their prizes were always women, and allowed him to use the disabled bathroom for sex — “an additional aspect to the prize which could never be explicitly stated,” he explicitly wrote. As early as 2006, other celebrities were publicly denouncing Brand as a “vile predator.” His sexual predations were less of an open secret than his entire brand.

Yet his fame only continued to grow, with help from enablers in the British media and, later, in Hollywood. In 2008, Brand starred in the Judd Apatow-produced romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which catapulted him to stateside stardom. He was soon hosting the VMAs on MTV, and in 2010 married Katy Perry, who was then at the pinnacle of her pop career.

After some box office flops and a failed late-night talk show on FX, Brand’s star began to fade in the U.S. Brand, who once called George W. Bush a “fucking retarded cowboy,” pivoted to political commentary in the U.K., writing a book about the need for social revolution and going on TV to argue that socialism was necessary to save the planet. He appeared sporadically in Hollywood films, but was usually sidelined to supporting roles or voice work in animated features.

As his showbiz career dried up over the last half-decade — and rumors about his sexual misconduct grew louder than ever — Brand steadily remade his image into that of a Bible-toting vaccine skeptic and wellness influencer who railed against pandemic lockdowns, Anthony Fauci, and “the globalist master plan.” In September 2023, the Times of London and Dispatches, a news program on Britain’s Channel 4, published a joint investigation in which numerous women accused Brand of raping or sexually assaulting them between 2006 and 2013. (One of the accusers was sixteen at the time of the alleged assault.)

The investigation gave credence to the longstanding rumors about Brand (The Onion ran an article with the headline “Nation Could Have Sworn Russell Brand Was Already Convicted Sex Offender.”)

It opened up the floodgates to other accusers, including a woman who filed a civil lawsuit claiming Brand sexually assaulted her on the set of the romantic comedy Arthur in 2010. The Metropolitan Police in London received separate allegations from multiple women following the broadcast and opened an investigation, which ultimately led to rape and sexual assault charges against Brand in 2025.

Finding Jesus (at just the right time)

Much as the Tate Brothers did in the wake of rape and sex trafficking charges, Brand aggressively pursued alliances with influential figures on the right, including Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Alex Jones, Donald Trump Jr, and especially RFK Jr. Brand invited Kennedy on his podcast in 2023, and was reportedly paid $68,000 to appear at a Kennedy campaign event in 2024. Last year, he helped Kennedy’s wife Cheryl Hines plug her book at an anti-vaccine conference hosted by Kennedy’s nonprofit. He often appears on MAHA Action Zoom calls (sometimes from his bathtub).

Later that year, Brand moved with his wife and three young children from Oxfordshire to Florida, MAGA’s homebase, where the former vegan proudly dined on steak at Mar-a-Lago.

During this period, he also converted to Christianity in a highly public fashion, getting baptized by TV adventurer Bear Grylls in the River Thames in 2024, and even began shilling Hallow, a Catholic prayer app, on his show. Last December, he spoke at a Turning Point USA event in Arizona, where he prayed for the eternal soul of Charlie Kirk and complained that his ex wife, Katy Perry, was now dating Justin Trudeau, “that globalist stooge.”

Yet his commitment to the Christianity bit was not terribly convincing: in April, when Piers Morgan asked Brand to recite the “relevant passages” from the Bible he had taken to carrying around in public like a Real Housewife showing off a designer bag, Brand paged through the book for an excruciating 90 seconds, failing to recite a single verse. (Not even something obvious, like John 3:16.)

Brand, who has long operated on the mistaken assumption that using big words makes you appear intelligent, is smart enough to realize one thing: American conservatives love nothing more than a washed-up, once-liberal celebrity who defects to their side. They’ve enthusiastically embraced Brand, despite allegations of sexual assault dating back decades and a thoroughly unconvincing religious conversion, because they long for the approval of anyone famous, even someone who peaked 15 years ago. What he didn’t account for is that cozying up to MAGA, if anything, only made him seem more guilty by association.

According to the Times of London, Brand was honored as a “global defender of freedom” at a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago in February. That award, about as meaningful as Trump’s FIFA Peace Prize, will do little for Brand as he begins to serve a decade in prison, and while London police investigate “more potential criminal allegations” against him. Brand may realize that MAGA isn’t the cure for his problems — and that, like so many others, he was a convenient, expendable tool for a movement with a chronic persecution complex.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Russell Brand’s Cynical MAGA Conversion