(Daily Wire) YouTube suspended actor and comedian Russell Brand from making money on the platform on Tuesday, days after several women accused him of sexual assault over a decade ago in what Brand has called a “coordinated attack.”
Brand’s channel with 6.6 million subscribers has been suspended from monetization “following serious allegations against the creator,” YouTube said.
The Google-owned social media platform’s decision means Brand can no longer make money from YouTube ads on his videos. Brand’s other smaller channels with several hundred thousand subscribers were also suspended from monetization. It is not clear how long the suspensions will last.
YouTube said Brand was suspended for violating YouTube’s “creator responsibility policy.”
“If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community,” a YouTube spokesperson said.
Brand, 48, denies four unnamed women’s allegations of sexual assault that were published in a joint investigation by British outlets The Times, Sunday Times, and Channel 4 television on Saturday. The women made their allegations after the outlets reached out to them. The assaults allegedly took place between 2006 and 2013.
One of the accusers claims she was sexually assaulted by Brand when she was 16, the legal age of consent in the U.K., during a relationship with him. Another woman claims Brand raped her in Los Angeles in 2012.
On Monday, London’s police force said it had received a fresh sexual assault claim against Brand “alleged to have taken place in Soho in central London in 2003.”
Brand was a major television and radio star in Britain in the early 2000s. He has written memoirs opening up about his struggles with drugs and alcohol, and he appeared in several Hollywood movies, including “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Brand was also married to pop star Katy Perry between 2010 and 2012.
Brand said “I absolutely refute” what he described as “very serious allegations” against him in a YouTube video on his channel on Friday.
“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,” Brand said in the video. Brand added that the allegations make him “question, is there another agenda at play, particularly when we’ve seen coordinated media attacks before.”
