GREG GUTFELD: Let a real court, not the court of public opinion decide Russell Brand's fate

Yes. Yeah. Thank you, very, very nice. Nice, control yourself. There's only one of me, but thanks for being here tonight because we're about to have a difficult conversation. Wow, if I had a dollar for every time I heard that from my urologist, but truthfully, this one's tough. So first, let's say this.

ANNOUNCER: Warning, what you're about to hear is a serious topic. If you don't think you can joke about a serious story, we suggest you consider spending the next 15 minutes doing some macrame, a few sets of sit-ups, or reading an online brochure about timeshares. But if you can handle a tough subject with a few jokes sprinkled in, then we've got a good one for you.

All right. Well, I'm glad you guys all stayed. Now, I need to start out by pointing out that Russell Brand and I are friends. Do I know him well? No. When I lived in London, I knew of him. His reputation was as well known as Winston Churchill, Benny Hill, and tooth decay. There was a time when we hated each other.

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RUSSELL BRAND, 2014: Greg Gutfeld vibrates as human being in hatred... Greg's a bit of a swine and a bit of a snide... You're a silly sausage. You're stealing oxygen, and you're wasting time... Your name, your weird facial orifice looks like a caving in anus and most importantly, you abuse, you're espousing of hatred, your emptiness, your echoing tub of your mind.

This does not look like an anus. But gradually that changed. He's been on the show. We've talked, we've corresponded. Hell, we even swapped skin care tips. So today, yes, I'd say we're friends, and I'm not walking away from that because it's easy to be a friend when times are good. So I want to talk about patience and refraining from trying someone in the court of public opinion, because that's part of this story. If you are sitting where I am, you know, on a pile of money, you have to ask, how do we report on this story accurately? How do we do it justice? And I mean actual justice, not social justice. How do we avoid trial by Twitter, which is now called X? How do we assess these allegations since the law has never been asked to investigate them until now? You see, what I'm getting at. 

The media is comparing Brand to Harvey Weinstein because both stories were doggedly reported first by journalists. But you never should make a comparison based on one variable. It's like saying Tom Brady and O.J. are the same because they both played football or comparing Hillary Clinton to Jack the Ripper just because they murder people, but you see how it works. That's not reporting, that's bomb throwing. And it's just more proof that we live in an era when investigative reporting is dried up like airplane glue on the inside of Hunter's nostrils, speak of the devil. Did we see this kind of meticulous search for sources and stories involving Hunter or the Steele dossier, Epstein's client list, or pretty much any story these days. Yet we now see some of the most thorough journalism in memory, all this energy devoted to a guy named Russell Brand, not Justin Trudeau or Joe Biden or Bill Clinton. And Clinton's charity seems shadier than Brian Stelter's feet. Because you know, yeah. Shade.

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And of course, it happens now, not a decade ago when the events were allegedly occurring, and I get it, people have their reasons for waiting, but the timing is impeccable, and I reject conspiracies, but it seems the most persuasive critics of those in power are in the cross-hairs. Literally, if you're RFK Jr. I wonder if Brand had lurched left instead of right, would this have become a story. Over in England, it began with reporters suddenly searching high and low for accusers against Brand. There are four accusers who have not been identified publicly and one alleged rape. None went to the cops. Then the producers had an actress portray one victim in an interview replete with dramatic background music. The story went viral, of course, but Rose McGowan, the founder of the MeToo movement, has now stepped up to raise an objection.

ROSE MCGOWAN: This is a concerted effort to bend journalistic rules that have always been in place, such as having to be on the record with who you are and what your name is in order to accuse. I didn't make these rules. These are the rules. They were the rules. So there's something very strange going on... You have to go on the record. It has always been that way. I didn't make it so. It didn't make me happy to have to do so. Neither did it make others happy to have to do so. But to blindly and anonymously accuse, none of these high level journalistic outlets would have ever let this be published before. So I have to ask why? Why now? What is a true narrative they're pushing?

That took guts, which are rarer in Hollywood than an original idea. But look, people don't go to the cops for their own reasons. And one big reason will always be what's called the gray area. The difficult to pin down region known as the provable facts. Cops hate gray areas, but the media loves them more than Joe Biden loves a freshly shampooed child. For gray areas, give them narrative freedom. They can do what they want, like stories like those celebrating Brand's over the top promiscuity, for instance, which for years they found to be just hilarious and certainly not worth investigating further.

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Everyone claims his behavior was an open secret, which is odd because if it's out in the open, it's not a secret. But at the same time, one woman states she went to a rape crisis clinic after her encounter with Brand. It's being reported as corroborated. So where is the truth? I don't know, but that's not the point. Neither do the rest of us. See, we don't need to come to conclusions now, we don't need to condemn Brand, and we don't need to condemn the accusers, because the presumption of innocence should be taken as seriously as the accusations. And the ultimate way to do that you try these cases in a real court, not the court of public opinion, because that court has ruined more lives than drugs and alcohol combined.

Look, to state the obvious, I'm not Russell Brand, I'm not even an off-Brand. I'm way too short and homely to have been a womanizer. Most of the sex I had was because I was a roadie for KajaGooGoo. Underrated band. But like anyone in the public eye, there's always the chance that knives will come out. Thankfully, I've only ever paid foreign hookers to stop peeing on me. But this should be about learning and following the facts. Because sure, we had Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly, but we also had Kevin Spacey, Johnny Depp and the Duke lacrosse team. So let's just remember how many times the media gets it wrong. 

And you know what? Maybe I have, too, but at least I'm willing to acknowledge that and wait for the truth.

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