Since a London jury convicted Russell Brand of rape and sexual assault on Thursday, book publishers and streaming services have taken different approaches to dealing with the onetime comedy and acting star’s output.
Some publishers immediately pulled Brand’s books from sale while Netflix and Amazon still had movies that feature him available to stream and rent on Friday. And YouTube did not terminate Brand’s channel, where he has posted over 6,000 videos for his more than six million subscribers.
The different choices illustrate the challenges of dealing with a performer’s output after a criminal conviction, especially when their movies and books are years old. And in cases of films, Brand often appears as only a supporting character.
The reactions also reflect a divide in approaches between traditional and contemporary media on the question of whether the public should choose what to consume or publishers should decide for them.
Among the book publishers to immediately cut Brand from their roster was the British imprint Hodder & Stoughton, which published his 2007 memoir, “My Booky Wook,” about his rise to fame and his past addictions to drugs, alcohol and sex. The company also published his “Irons in the Fire,” a soccer book, that year.
A company spokeswoman said in an email on Friday that the publisher had “removed the two books it published by Russell Brand from sale,” and declined to comment further.
Henry Holt & Company, the U.S. publisher of Brand’s 2017 “Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions” and 2019 “Mentors: How to Help and Be Helped,” also on Thursday removed his titles from sale. A spokeswoman said in an email that one of those titles was already out of print.
“We are pulling all stock from sale — including print, audio and e-book editions — and will remove him from our website,” she added.
At least one publisher has said it will continue to market Brand’s books. Tony Lyons, the publisher at Skyhorse, which published Brand’s “How to Become a Christian in 7 Days” under its new Tucker Carlson Books imprint this year, said in an email that the company “had no plans to withdraw Russell Brand’s books.”
“To the extent that any other publisher does cancel his books, we would be pleased to publish them,” Lyons said. “As the pre-eminent free-speech publishing company in the world, we publish a wide range of voices and take a firm stance against any form of censorship,” he added.
In recent years, streaming services have sometimes moved rapidly against stars accused of sex crimes. For example, YouTube removed two of R. Kelly’s channels in 2022 after the singer was convicted of sex offenses.
But several streaming services have retained Brand’s content.
On Netflix on Friday, subscribers in the United States could watch the 2022 movie “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” an installment in the hit franchise in which Brand voices a character called Dr. Nefario. And on Netflix’s British service, users could stream several movies featuring Brand, including two in the “St. Trinian’s” series and Kenneth Branagh’s 2022 “Death on the Nile.”
Netflix declined to comment on Brand’s titles on its service, and Universal did not respond to a request for comment on whether it planned to alter that Minion movie to remove Brand, although in 2024 Brand was dropped from the movie franchise.
Amazon, which includes some of Brand’s movies for sale and rent on its Prime service, did not respond to several requests for comment.
Brand is perhaps more complex for streaming services to deal with, given that he was often a minor character in movies, and so removing content would also punish the actual stars of those films, some of which were made almost two decades ago.
Robert Topinka, an academic at Birkbeck University in London who has researched Brand’s YouTube videos, said in an interview that since about 2020, Brand had largely stopped acting or making mainstream comedy shows. Instead, he has focused on producing conspiracy-minded videos for his YouTube channel on issues such as U.S. and world politics and the pandemic.
“Even before the accusations came out against him, he had already shifted to this other world,” Topinka said, highlighting Brand’s desire to present himself as someone willing to say on YouTube things that mainstream news media outlets would not allow.
A YouTube spokesman declined to answer questions about the future of Brand’s channel. But the site stopped allowing Brand to make money from his channel after a 2023 investigation by three British news outlets into Brand’s past behavior, in which four women accused the comedian of sexual assault, including one accusation of rape.
A spokeswoman for YouTube said at the time that Brand had violated YouTube’s “creator responsibility policy,” adding: “If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community.”
Ashley Wu contributed reporting.
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