This snoop is going to be controversial. It goes against the herd, the baying crowd demanding blood. The media is capable of whipping up a frenzy, elevating people from nowhere, creating stars and in doing so creating the stories that pay salaries and keep newspaper and media executives more powerful than the people and stories they create.

My thoughts centre around the two big stories filling our feeds and newspapers, News Channels and documentary options available right now. Stories that are being lapped up globally because they carry the heavy weight of seeing big names in the public eye being brought down and or brought to justice.

I question whether the punishment fits the crimes in a world where women are nurtured on society’s diet of love, romance and Disney in an unequal environment where penetrating the boardroom and the higher echelons of status and power are still a much tougher climb for women than men.

A world where mothers burying the pain, humiliations and general second class citizen treatment of men even handed out by husbands and partners committed to worship them until death do us part, is the norm. I think it would be better if women faced the reality instead of choosing the fairytale but that doesn’t happen ladies does it?

I am not suggesting Russell Brand and David Walliams have not exploited their positions, what I am saying is I cannot see this behaviour as anything new. Certainly nothing I haven’t already experienced and learned to navigate around, earning my own money and not using my sexuality to get something I wanted from a man without understanding their drivers and their ultimate goals. I am not saying I haven’t done it in the past; and been burned, who hasn’t? With age came wisdom.

The truth is men chase women, it’s inherent, they cannot help it and the sooner women start accepting that reality and take some responsibility for educating younger women to the fact, nothing will change. As women we have to accept our part in why men find themselves in court rooms and the subject of countless television exposes and documentaries believing they have done nothing wrong. Our male dominated system of inequality between the sexes sets both men and women up for it. Men chase as much skirt as they can get away with until they “settle down” and find a mistress or prostitute to do the job and women participate in the search of our very own Prince and then choose to ignore the extra curricula activities like Jenson Huang and countless others, so normal it’s another open secret, women do cheat but men cheat more. Women in business and in the boardroom know secretaries buy the gifts and all those business trips away invariably include extra curricular activities. So much so in France the mistress is an open secret everyone accepts as a reality so women retain their security, men get to have their cake and eat it too and money stays in families.

I am not a fan of either Russell Brand or David Walliams, I don’t subscribe to their version of comedy, I don’t find them funny, they don’t make me laugh and I haven’t purchased a book authored by David Walliams or Russell Brand. I never watched Little Britain or Britains Got Talent so I did not participate in either’s celebrity status or commercial success except watching the St Trinians and Arthur remakes that starred Russell Brand and knowing their names, neither fall within my entertainment radar.

I watched the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary Russell Brand In Plain Sight first aired in September 2023 after the jury returned their verdict of guilty on one of the three counts of rape charged. I did think at the time how did they manage to select an impartial jury when the case had already been tried in the press.

Whilst the evidence and women’s anonymous testimony was shocking and compelling and no one should be physically overpowered and forced to have sex my first question is where the line is drawn between consent being given at the beginning of a sexual encounter and then withdrawn towards the end. I can see why women feel shame and find it difficult to come forward after a sexual assault. When a date with someone you like goes bad basically. And how often does this happen because women don’t look at the evidence “in plain sight” ahead of time about the individual in question.

I am guilty myself in my younger years of chasing hot guys, rugby boys with reputations, musicians and “men with money” impressed by cars and status. And whilst I have not been raped I have experienced grooming at school by a young popular teacher 26 whose early attentions on me were extremely flattering until they weren’t.

Like most women I learnt the hard way, through experience and whilst I enjoy men’s company I am aware the chasing is what they do and I choose not to lay down on a platter with my legs a kimbo anymore.

Men like young women, always have and always will. Was it grooming when Prince Charles met Diana Spencer at 16, courted her and married her at 19?

Was it grooming when Johnny Depp met a 17 year old Winona Ryder and started dating her?

This is nothing new, so many well-known figures in entertainment and the public eye entered relationships with older partners at age 16, drawing significant media attention and later discussion around age-gap dynamics in Hollywood.

Notable Examples

Cher and Sonny Bono. Cher was 16 years old when she met 27-year-old Sonny in 1962. They soon became romantically involved, held an unofficial wedding ceremony when she turned 18, and later legally married in 1969. Hilary Duff and Joel Madden. Actress Hilary Duff began dating Good Charlotte frontman Joel Madden in 2004 when she was 16 and he was 25. The couple remained together for three years before splitting.

Lorde and Justin Warren. Singer Lorde was 16 when she began dating music executive Justin Warren, who was 24 at the time. Documentation notes that Warren had originally signed her when she was 13, and that her parents were aware of the relationship.

Media personality Courtney Stodden married actor Doug Hutchinson at age 16 while he was 51. They were married for nine years, and Stodden has since spoken publicly about experiencing grooming and abuse during the relationship.

Actor Paul Walker was 33 when he began dating Jasmine Pilchard-Gosnell, who was 16 at the time. The two remained together for seven years until Walker's death in 2013.

Singer and actress Mandy Moore met actor Wilmer Valderrama when she was 15 and began dating him around age 16 or 17.

Poison frontman Bret Michaels was 21 when he started dating 16-year-old Tracy Lewis. Their three-year relationship inspired the band's hit song "Every Rose Has Its Thorn".

Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler dated 16-year-old Julie Holcomb when he was 26. Tyler later wrote in his memoir that he had her parents sign paperwork granting him guardianship so he could travel across state lines with her

There are loads of examples, my point here is this is nothing new. Older men wooing younger women with the promise of fast cars, career advancements, gifts, dinners, is older than time as they say in Beauty and The Beast.

I watched David Walliams Power and Silence the documentary that was produced from a three year investigation by The Guardian and ITV News and whilst this statement is going to be highly controversial I didn’t see anything highlighted that constitutes behaviour, whilst unsavoury, that women haven’t been participating in for decades even centuries.

We all watch dramatised version of Victorian novels and imagine Poldark or Mr. Darcy throwing us on the bed and ravaging us, we demurely chase men, flirt with them, encourage them and when they dare to put a hand on our leg, or try to steal a kiss we say we’ve been groomed twenty years later.

I am not disputing Mr. Walliams may be a creep but that doesn’t make him a criminal. It makes him just like so many others of his gender, in a world where men hold most of if not all the power. He’s lost his job, he’s lost his credibility and any chance of ever making a living again, isn’t that enough for alleged in bad taste behaviour if we are honest all men have bought into and most women have allowed or facilitated at some point in their lives.

There’s a reason prostitution is and continues to be the oldest profession on the planet because sex, how ever much we as women romanticise it, is always transactional in a world without equality.

Would I recommend the documentaries? I’d say if you can watch them with an open mind and question how they have been edited to tell a one sided story against the alleged perpetrators of sexual abuse and remain balanced in your opinion then sure.

They are both interesting from the standpoint of what the journalists have presented. I think these two individuals stories over a long period of time hold up a mirror to the higher standard we expect from people in the public eye when we stand on the moral high ground but never thought to question their risky dark derogatory humour when we were laughing, buying tickets to their shows and wishing for a private audience with our favourite naughty boys.