I am not following the details, so this isn't about him being guilty or innocent.
But Youtube demonetized him based on accusations.
Accusations.
That is just awful.
Yeah, it's a sorry state of affairs. It's all over our mainstream news, so I've read a fair bit of it. Russell has always been a deviant, but a lot of this could quite easily be viewed as baseless accusations from scorned women and dismissed legally. There's no doubt he behaved terribly, and the BBC enabled him, however, the rape allegation is the compelling one and he’s going to have to defend himself against that.
The woman kept records from the rape crisis center she attended, along with doctor's notes, text messages, and dated letters sent to Russell. A good lawyer would likely try to claim the conversation was regarding her objecting to his lack of condom use as opposed to rape, but regardless, there should be due process. What should not be happening is what we are witnessing now with the media campaign and our government ministers acting as judge and jury.
Just as my own personal speculation on a gay message board, I suspect that Russell was smart enough to take some control of this by leaving for the US and being extra theatrical with the conspiracy theorist/enemy of the state angle in order to play that card. He knew this was coming.
Enjoy while you can. The Brand allegations will be leveraged to smear and ban Rumble. "Online Safety."
I remember reading Ronald Dworkin's
A Bill of Rights for Britain, in which he criticized the UK Government’s increasing restrictions on free media (amongst other things) back in the 1990s. It's never stopped. GCHQ run smear campaigns on the biggest threats (as is the norm for all states), once-outspoken newspapers have effectively been silenced, and we now have 'Online Safety Bills' and full-time military units utilizing social media to 'influence behaviour'. Scary times.