So I just heard about this through @bonifartius ... maybe im missing some details but let me see if i got this straight.
1) Russel Brand was accursed of some sort of sexually inappropriate activity, not sure what it is yet, but sounds serious. While serious as of yet no evidence has been made public, no trial, and his guilt is unknown.
2) Based on only accusation and rumer the UK parliment decided he should be treated as if he is guilty before a trial
3) the UK parliment has reached out to several platforms asking to deplatform him as punished for something we havent determined if he did yet
4) Platforms like YouTube saw no problem with this and agreed.
Is this seriously where we are at....
@freemo @bonifartius That’s almost correct:
The accusations happened a couple of years ago, the investigation only now got to a point when the evidence has been made public. I suggest taking a look at the publicly available evidence before saying anyone acted hastily, it might change your mind.
Perhaps relevantly Brand switched to championing much more right-wing cases after the accusations have been formally made, so a couple years ago. It might be a coincidence though, since he mostly came in there from the direction of COVID-related conspiracies.
And, in relation to another of your posts in this thread, you might want to be aware that the Depp situation is far from clear cut – he lost the cases in the UK and won the case in the US.
@freemo @timorl @bonifartius Apparently, the U.K. defamation case was against a newspaper, whereas the U.S. one was against her directly and involved far more evidence.
I've only heard of the case in passing though. I'm not familiar with it, so I might be mistaken.
Considering the first court found a significant portion of the allegations to be true, it doesn’t seem like lack of evidence was a problem there, so this kinda doesn’t add up. But I haven’t followed that whole situation that closely.
What do you mean, a lack of evidence from Johnnys side would have exactly that effect, he would be found guilty, especially if the other side did not have a problem there.
The UK libel law is stricter than the US one (free speech is less of a fundamental principle there), and requires the defendant to prove that the things they claimed actually happened. If you have enough evidence to show that something happened it doesn’t really make sense for more evidence to show that it hasn’t happened after all – proving a negative is harder in general, but proving it after the positive has been proven seems at least very weird.
I suspect that either the specific claims that were litigated in both cases were sufficiently different, or the fact that US-based litigation is more money-dependent impacted the result. In either case Depp has done some abuse. There is also the possibility that the UK courts simply decided badly of course (no reason to have that much faith in either country’s judicial system), so I don’t feel comfortable directly claiming that he definitely did something wrong. I could probably look into it deep enough to have a proper opinion, but it doesn’t seem worth the time.
It does bother me quite a bit that there was a propaganda campaign associated with the second trial, which makes me trust claims about this being cut and dry even less. (Source for the campaign: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ab3yk/daily-wire-amber-heard-johnny-depp .)
@timorl @bonifartius @freemo It could be the U.K. one hastily came to a conclusion with insufficient context / information.
I'm going to avoid speculating broadly here though. Not enough information.
@olives
Ahh yes I think i remember that.. if so I'd say that makes it a pretty cut and dry case of his innocence and her guilt
@timorl @bonifartius