Rachel O'Dwyer: The Russell Brand verdict brought up memories of an incident I’ve never shared

“Okay. Here goes. #MeToo”. The Facebook post was by an acquaintance, a woman I sometimes saw at conferences. I came across it at 4am, scrolling my phone with a baby in my arms. I remember reading friends’ #metoo stories in 2017, with curiosity, with recognition, but without much surprise. “What?” I probably thought, jostling my infant son. “You too?” My editor rings on Tuesday to commission a piece on Russell Brand. The former comedian has been sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison for the rape of one woman and the sexual assault of three others. My son will soon be 10, and I’m shopping for Christmas presents, clinging to innocence even as I worry about how I’ll talk to him about desire, refusal, consent. Can I file Thursday morning? “I like calling you,” she says. “You always say yes.” I make my way to the self-checkout as she speaks of how Brand was in many ways a predator hiding in plain sight. How did no one seem to see it? Why did his industry allow it? I slide a small pair of pyjamas across the till and fumble to pay, a little distracted, as she continues: “I’m sure, like me, there have been times when you didn’t say something to a man to keep the peace.” It’s not a question. The summer I was 20 was spent waitressing in San Francisco. It was 2004. I was living with my brother, and my friends had an apartment with 12 other Irish students in the Tenderloin neighbourhood. One night they invited their coworker “J” to hang out. He was from Texas and looked and sounded like a young Matthew McConaughey. I was thrilled when he paid attention to me, so much that one of the other girls (who fancied him too) told him I had a boyfriend back home. READ MOREWhen I ran into him alone in the kitchen and he kissed me, I was happy to put that rumour to bed. But suddenly J was tugging me by the arm into one of the communal bedrooms and flipping the lock, announcing: “Race to get naked!” I felt so stupid and young then. I’d given him the wrong idea and now I was going to have to keep my big girl pants on and do some explaining. “I’m not going to have sex with you,” I said, or maybe it was “I don’t want to have sex with you”, something mortifying but unequivocal. In the end though, it didn’t matter that I’d said no. The following day, J would ring our landline and ask to speak to me while my big brother made goofy faces, as if J were just another boy ringing to talk nonsense. My rapist spoke about how much he wanted to take me to the beach that weekend, how he’d love to see me in a bikini. It’s just one #metoo story. It’s a story I didn’t share then, not because it was exceptional, but because it wasn’t. Journalists are now asking if Russell Brand’s conviction represents a tipping point. The comedian was convicted of three counts of sexual assault, in 2004, 2005 and 2009, and on one count of rape, in 2009. That victim was 21 when they met after his stand-up performance in London’s Hammersmith Apollo. She subsequently went to his home. What started as consensual sex turned into something else and Brand anally raped her. “I didn’t feel I had as much right to feel as bad about it as I did,” she told the court. She had admired the comedian. She had, initially, consented. Judge Joel Bennathan was unequivocal: The women, he said, “took perfectly reasonable decisions to go to a party and have a few drinks, or to go to your house for one type of consensual sex ... whatever women wear, wherever they go, whatever they drink, they retain the right to say no”.But cases where consent is given and then revoked are notoriously difficult to prosecute. Brand’s 10-year sentence is thus being hailed as a milestone in the prosecution of sexual violence. Brand presented himself as a lovable sex pest, avaricious but not coercive or violent. “I’m a bloke who’s been given a Wonka ticket to the lovely sex factory because of the ol’ fame,” he boasted in his 2007 memoir, now withdrawn from print. He was acquitted of two of the rape charges brought against him and the cross-examination that complainants underwent in court has been described as “deeply uncomfortable”. I’d call it actively regressive. “None of them resisted or screamed, or had even tried to leave,” the defence barrister told the jury, like some throwback to 1950. Brand’s conviction may be a win for consent, but how much change has occurred since the height of #metoo? I’m struck by the judge’s closing depiction of Brand’s “casual, arrogant disregard of any woman’s right to say no”, of how “fame meant you could act how you liked, unimpeded by the rules”. I think here of another infamous man with no fewer than 27 allegations of sexual assault made against him. I’m glad the discourse has shifted. In 2004 I felt culpable. In 2017, I thought these experiences – saying no, not being asked to say yes, giving verbal consent when sex is still unwanted – were too ordinary to point to. Somewhere in the intervening decade, I saw the lack of exception is why we must keep talking. [ Beware the manosphere guys who, on the brink of disgrace, discover JesusOpens in new window ]But I’m not sure if my 20-year-old self would have believed that the president of the US would one day be a man found civilly liable for sexual abuse or that I, a new mum at 32, would have foreseen how thorny consent and entitlement might soon become. And I wonder now what lessons my son will take from a world that has become so much better at seeing sexual violence, but still so willing to accommodate it.