Andrew Sachs' granddaughter says Russell Brand is victim of 'cancel culture'
Andrew Sachs' granddaughter Georgina Baillie has said that suspending Russell Brand's YouTube earnings is "cancel culture".
The actress was at the centre of the so-called 'Sachsgate' scandal in 2008, after Brand and Jonathan Ross called her late grandfather Andrew Sachs during a pre-recorded Radio 2 show and left a voicemail detailing Brand's sexual encounters with Ms Baillie. Georgina, who had an on-off relationship with Brand, said she has found some of the evidence against Brand "compelling".
It comes after the actor and comedian was accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse – which the comedian strongly denies. Georgina has since shared that she doesn't see Brand as a rapist from her "own personal experience" but states "Women’s stories should always be believed and taken seriously".
Georgina said the halting of Brand's YouTube earnings is 'cancel culture' (SkyNews/Twitter)On her reaction to the allegations in The Times, Sunday Times and on Channel 4’s Dispatches at the weekend, Georgina said: "I don't know what happened there - I don't know because I wasn't there. He never did anything like that with me, everything was more than consensual, I promise." She added on the Politics Hub With Sophy Ridge: "I've seen some of the evidence and I do find it quite compelling, to say the least."
When asked about the halting of Brand's YouTube earnings, Georgina said: "No it's cancel culture, because look Russell made a mistake when he was younger and when he made his amends to me, he looked me in the eye and apologised. Russell was fairly newly clean and sober and I think it is very common for people to cross addict into sex addiction. When he made his amends to me, I felt that he took full ownership of that. He looked me in the eyes and apologised and he also sent me to rehab. That's all I can ask of somebody in recovery that's working the same steps that I am."
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At the time of their romantic relationship, Georgina was 20 and Brand was 30. Brand was sacked from his BBC Radio 2 show after thousands of complaints flooded in following the pre-recorded interview with talk show host Ross, 62. Speaking on TalkTV on Monday, Ms Baillie recalled the "Sachsgate" scandal and revealed Brand went on to pay to stay in a rehabilitation facility - seemingly as a way of making amends for leaving the voicemail on Sachs' mobile phone years previously.
"It wasn’t pleasant. I was very young at the time, I was 23 years old when this story broke. It was a very unnerving time. Not only had my grandparents heard what I had been up to sexually, which anybody would recoil at, but then it was all the ‘boys will be boys’ attitude. ‘She’s only a s**t anyway, so who cares’. That was their only line of defence, to slut shame me, basically," Ms Baillie told host Piers when looking back at the scandal.
She later went on to reveal: "I was struggling with addiction for about 10- 15 years and I was finding it very hard to get clean and sober. So one of my mutual friends between me and Russell called him up and said, ‘Georgie needs some help’, and so he sent me to rehab. So I was physically separated from my drug of choice and I got some therapy and I think that had a big part to play in my recovery journey.
"He looked me in the eyes and he made his amends to me… he acknowledged it was a private relationship and it shouldn’t have been made public. At the time he had two daughters and it really made him grow and change and I felt it was genuine and I felt he was sorry."
Brand denies the allegations made against him in the Channel 4 Dispatches investigation. Speaking to his social media followers in a video posted on Saturday, ahead of the show airing, Brand said: "I’ve received two extremely disturbing letters, or a letter, and an email, one from a mainstream media TV company, one from a newspaper, listing a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks, as well as some pretty stupid stuff like, my community festival should be stopped, that I shouldn’t be able to attack mainstream media narratives on this channel, but amidst this litany of astonishing, rather baroque attacks are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute.
"These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies, and as I’ve written about extensively in my books, I was very very promiscuous. Now during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely, always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent, and I’m being transparent about it now as well, and to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal, that I absolutely deny, makes me question, is there another agenda at play?"
* If you've been the victim of sexual assault, you can access help and resources via www.rapecrisis.org.uk or calling the national telephone helpline on 0808 802 9999
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