Russell Brand is a convicted rapist. On 5 November a jury at Southwark Crown Court found him guilty of raping one woman and sexually assaulting three more. On 9 November he was jailed for ten years and six months.

Three days later The Spectator published an editorial about it. It did not ask how a rapist stayed famous for twenty years. It asked whether the people condemning him were really angry about his politics.

His crime was rape. Twelve jurors said so.

This is the same magazine that, in January 2025, blamed grooming gangs on "Pakistan's rape culture" and demanded a backlash from the whole Pakistani community. So we put the two articles side by side, we dug into the figure the first one was built on, and we read 1,279 headlines from 11 outlets and 159 full articles from five of them to see how the rest of the press handled the two.

What we found:

• The "four times more likely" figure covers 717 offences, which is 0.6% of the child sexual abuse crimes police recorded that year.
• It is a figure about group-based offences, meaning two or more perpetrators. The Spectator dropped that word.
• Police recorded ethnicity for only about a third of suspects, and said the breakdown was "limited".
• "Four times" is the top of a range. The same data for the full year 2023 put Pakistani suspects at 6.9%.
• Across all recorded child sexual abuse in 2024, Pakistani perpetrators were 2.2% of those whose ethnicity was recorded. Pakistanis are 2.7% of the population. White perpetrators were 88%.
• Five outlets, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, GB News, The Spectator and The Telegraph, published 16 articles that blamed grooming gangs on ethnicity, religion, culture or migration in their own words. The same five ran 16 pieces sympathetic to Russell Brand.
• When the rapist is Pakistani, the press makes it a story about Pakistan. When he is white, it makes it a story about the Left.

What The Spectator wrote about Russell Brand

The editorial ran on 12 November, in The Spectator's US edition and on its website, under the headline "We don't need another #MeToo moment". It opens by calling the reaction to Brand's conviction one of the British public's "periodic fits of morality".

On what he did:

On why people are condemning him:

On his sentence:

On what Britain needs:

The Spectator says it has no "great wish to defend Russell Brand, or any other celebrity pervert", and then spends the editorial doing it. Rape and sexual assault become "the antics of men such as Brand". The people angry about it are having a "fit". The answer it offers is "forgiveness".

That is a conspiracy theory. Brand was not convicted by commentators. He was convicted by a jury, in a case covering 1999 to 2009, years before he changed his politics.

The Spectator's other headlines that week did condemn him: "The welcome downfall of Russell Brand" and "The grossness of Russell Brand". Seven of its pieces made his crimes a story about the Left, which we come back to below.

What the court found

The jury convicted Brand on four of seven counts: one of rape and three of sexual assault. It cleared him on the other three. Judge Joel Bennathan told him he had "become a sexual predator" as he became famous.

The Spectator read that and wrote "boorishness".

What The Spectator wrote about Pakistanis

On 19 January 2025 The Spectator published "How Pakistan's rape culture led to the UK grooming gangs", by the Pakistani journalist Kunwar Khuldune Shahid. The Spectator chose to publish it and put that headline on it.

On the cause:

On what the community owes:

The article says Pakistanis who do not speak out are part of "a conspiracy of silence".

Notice the different standards.

When Pakistani men rape, The Spectator blames a culture and a religion, and demands a backlash. When Russell Brand rapes, it calls the backlash a moral panic and asks for forgiveness.

What the "four times" figure was

The Spectator's "rape culture" article opens with a statistic:

The figure does not cover all "child sex grooming offences". It covers group-based offences, which police define as involving "two or more individuals" who are known to one another. The Telegraph report it came from said so: "Grooming, which is defined by police as a form of group-based child sexual exploitation, accounted for 717 offences reported to police in 2023".

The Spectator dropped "group-based" and kept "Pakistani".

The Telegraph published the figure on 10 January 2025 under the headline "Pakistanis up to four times more likely to be behind grooming". The headline does not say gangs, does not say suspects and does not say a third of the data.

This is what the figure sits inside:

Within those 717 offences, police recorded the ethnicity of about a third of suspects. The Telegraph reported the warning fourteen paragraphs down:

The same report said "the majority of grooming offences reported to police involved white perpetrators". Here is the breakdown The Telegraph printed:

The police officer who released the figures gave three possible explanations, according to The Telegraph: that Pakistanis were more likely to commit these crimes, that their victims were easier to identify, or that it was a statistical sampling quirk. The Spectator picked the first and called it a culture.

In June 2025 Baroness Casey's national audit found "disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects" in three police force areas. It also said ethnicity "is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators", so it could not give a national picture. Neither finding turns a third of the suspects in 717 offences into a verdict on Pakistan.

What the police data says about all child sexual abuse

Grooming gangs are 0.6% of recorded child sexual abuse. The police publish the ethnicity of perpetrators for the other 99.4% too. The Spectator has not built an article on that.

In 2024 police in England and Wales recorded 122,768 child sexual abuse and exploitation offences. Where a perpetrator's ethnicity was recorded:

• 88% were white. White people are 81.7% of the population.
• 2.2% were Pakistani. Pakistanis are 2.7% of the population.
• 83.4% were White British. White British people are 74.4% of the population.

Ethnicity was recorded for 34% of perpetrators, about the same share as the grooming figure. If a third of the data is enough to write "Pakistan's rape culture", it is enough to write that Pakistani men are under-represented among child abusers and White British men are over-represented. The Spectator has not published an article on Britain's rape culture.

The sentences

The Spectator used the grooming gangs a second time, to argue that a rapist got too long. It said Brand's sentence "seems harsh" next to "some" grooming gang members.

The most recent Rochdale gang got between 12 and 35 years each. The ringleader, Mohammed Zahid, got 35. The shortest sentence in that case was longer than Brand's.

The "two-tier" line came from Donald Trump Jr., who asked why Brand's sentence was more severe than "sentences handed to Muslim grooming gangs across the UK". The Spectator said he "is not wrong". Megyn Kelly, whom the editorial also quotes, called the trial "insane" and an "outrage".

What the rest of the press did

The Spectator is one magazine, so we read the rest. We took every headline in the NewsCord archive from 11 UK outlets between June and 14 November 2026 that named Russell Brand or grooming gangs: 1,083 on Brand and 196 on grooming gangs.

Then we read the full text of 159 articles from the five outlets that did the most of it: every grooming gang article in the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and GB News, and every Spectator and Telegraph piece we could find that discussed grooming gangs or Russell Brand. We counted two things. How many articles blamed grooming gangs on the offenders' ethnicity, religion or culture, or on migrants, in the outlet's own words. And how many pieces were sympathetic to Russell Brand.

Between them the five outlets published 16 of each. The Daily Express ran six articles blaming ethnicity, culture or migration, and eight sympathetic to Brand. The Daily Mail ran four and six. GB News ran three and one, The Spectator two and one, and The Telegraph one and none.

In their own words:

• The Telegraph, 5 August 2026: "the methodical and organised rape and, even murder, of thousands of white, working-class girls by largely Muslim Pakistani gangs across the entire country."
• The Spectator, 7 October 2026: foreign cultures are "typified by female genital mutilation, cousin marriage, doctrinal contempt for outsiders, rape gangs, sexual abuse".
• Daily Mail, 28 June 2026: "many of the abusers identified in other parts of the country are predominantly Pakistani Muslim men".
• Daily Express, 2 October 2026: "gangs of predominantly Asian men of Pakistani heritage were carrying out 'industrial scale' child abuse".
• GB News, 29 August 2026: the gangs "must invite questions about the cultural factors that led to these crimes".

None of those sentences gives a source. The police data above says ethnicity is not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.

What that looks like in the same paper:

The numbers are small next to the total. Of the 925 headlines about Brand's case across all 11 outlets, 314 condemn him and 25 are sympathetic, and most of the 25 are stories about his wife and his father. Nobody wrote that kind of headline about a grooming gang offender's family.

The bigger difference is in who gets the blame.

• A Pakistani rapist becomes a story about Pakistan. 52 of the 196 grooming gang headlines (27%) are about deporting him, visas, sanctions or migration.
• A white rapist becomes a story about the Left. 29 headlines blame Labour or the Left for Russell Brand, which is more than the 25 that sympathise with him. In The Spectator and The Telegraph, 12 of the 22 pieces we read on Brand blame the Left, the BBC or the Guardian for him.

Much of this was one story. In July a Rochdale ringleader, Shabir Ahmed, was released and Pakistan refused to take him back. That is news. But look at where it went: "Tough visa sanctions 'to be slapped on Pakistan'" (The Sun), "Reform's Zia Yusuf issues furious 'blanket ban' threat to Pakistan as grooming row grows" (Express). One man's crimes became a case for punishing a country.

The misinformation kept coming too. In the week Brand was convicted, the Daily Mail and The Sun both told readers that Baroness Casey's review "found that Asian Muslim men were overwhelmingly" responsible for the abuse. We could not find that finding in the audit. It says ethnicity "is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators".

And the same week, The Spectator's own pages were making Brand somebody else's fault: "Russell Brand's New Statesman apostles", "The rank hypocrisy of Russell Brand's left-wing defenders", "Should Labour apologise for courting Russell Brand?". The Telegraph ran "The Left must reflect on its relationship with Russell Brand".

So the press has a rule for who answers for a rapist. If he is Pakistani, his country and his religion answer. If he is white, their political opponents answer. His race, his culture and his community are never asked anything.

Rupert Lowe and the number The Spectator knows is a guess

The "four times" headline was not the end of it. On 16 June 2026 the MP Rupert Lowe published a 219-page document he called the Rape Gang Inquiry Report. Its headline claim is that at least 250,000 girls were raped by what he calls "Pakistani Muslim rape gangs".

Nobody counted 250,000 victims. We traced the number in A Quarter of a Million Lies. The Spectator's own director of research traced it too:

So The Spectator knows where the grooming gang numbers come from. Four months after printing that, it reached for "Britain's infamous grooming gangsters" to argue that Russell Brand's sentence was too harsh.

What it did to Muslims

Tell MAMA, which records anti-Muslim hate, logged 6,313 cases in 2024, the most in its history. In January 2025, the month of the Telegraph headline and the Spectator article, it put out a statement about the grooming gangs coverage. Its director, Iman Atta, said:

Three days after Lowe published his report, five men were stabbed in Edinburgh. Two of them, both aged 22, had just left prayers at their mosque. A 36-year-old man has been charged with five counts of attempted murder, all aggravated by a terrorist connection. He has not entered a plea and the case has not been tried.

Footage of the arrest appears to show the man shouting that he was protecting the country from Muslims "raping our young daughters". The then Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, said the suspect "appears to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred".

No court has said what that man read. What is on the record is the sentence he appears to shout, and it is the claim the press had been printing since January 2025.

Who the rape is about

All rape is abhorrent. It does not matter who the rapist is. That is the one point The Spectator cannot make, because its two articles depend on it mattering.

This is how white supremacy thinks about rape. Women are "our" women. When a Pakistani man rapes one, it is an invasion, proof of what his whole people are, and everyone who shares his background must answer for it. When a white man rapes one, it is "boorishness" and "antics", and he is owed forgiveness.

The man in Edinburgh does not appear to shout about children being raped. He appears to shout about "our young daughters". The Spectator did not ask whether ten and a half years was right for what Brand did to the woman he raped. It asked how his sentence compared with a Pakistani man's.

In both cases the woman is not the subject. The rapist's race is.

The Spectator accused Pakistani culture of treating "women deemed property of men". A magazine that measures a rape by who committed it is doing the same thing.