From what I know his fame big time came after he got clean. Says a lot for how well he got clean if he's managed to stay sober after all this time in celebrity world. I have a feeling he substituted drugs for sex but 2003 onwards he was supposedly clean. Only he knows whether he was clean. I don't believe these allegations. I think he is anti establishment so some wef guy hired private detectives to find ex girlfriends and dalliance women to accuse him and package it to channel 4
Did you read The Times article I linked? The Sunday Times, The Times, and Channel 4 Dispatches are serious media outlets that are not likely to risk running a story like this if it can get them sued:
Over the past few years, reporters have interviewed hundreds of sources who knew or worked with Brand: ex-girlfriends and their friends and family, comedians and other celebrities, people who worked with him on radio and TV, and senior staff at the BBC, Channel 4 and other media organisations.
Along with these interviews reporters have seen private emails and text messages, submitted freedom of information requests, viewed medical and therapists’ notes, scrutinised Brand’s books and interviews, and watched and listened to hundreds of hours of his shows on the BBC, Channel 4 and YouTube to corroborate allegations.We all know that plenty of women make up bullshit allegations for various reasons. And it may well be that the motivation for them to speak out now is, at least in part, financial. However, Brand literally admitted to raping one of the women and apologized to her via text message, which has been confirmed as coming from his own phone.
It's very easy for people to now claim that "The Establishment" is coming for them because they've heroically stuck their head above the parapet and spoke truth to power. In some cases this is obviously true (e.g. Assange), and in other cases, it is quite clearly nonsense. I don't watch enough of Brand to know if there's any potential for that to be the case here. Is it possible? Sure. States collect information on people to be used as coercion all the time. As do media platforms. It's more likely that the British media wants to avoid a repeat of the Savile scandal, so they are now throwing everyone under the bus when it looks as though a story might get leaked and they appear to have been culpable in enabling the culture in which it happened.
As mentioned, these allegations have been around for years and he's been quite successful in silencing them before through injunctions. He's clearly narcissistic, reasonably intelligent, and calculating. It was a smart move to try and get ahead of the allegations and control the narrative, but it really doesn't look as though he's the innocent victim of a baseless smear campaign.