Welcome to the Commune podcast. My name is Jeff Krasna. Okay, I'm deviating from regularly scheduled programming here.

In fact, today's episode initially and somewhat ironically featured Russell Brand on the topic of forgiveness.

Accomian was also primed to launch our 14-day wellness summit later this week that also prominently highlighted Russell.

However, given recent revelations, I simply did not think that these were appropriate pieces of content

to release into the world at this moment.

So our small and mighty team is doing a bit of last minute shuffling, for which I'm grateful.

Over the past couple of days, I've received hundreds of text messages and emails from commune members, from friends, from

coworkers, press, investors, and from other authors and teachers on the commune platform,

all asking me about Russell Brand.

These inquiries are, of course, connected to the recent allegations accusing Russell of sexual assault.

And in the case that you've missed it, four women have come forward accusing Russell of sexual assault

spanning the time period between 2006 and 2013.

One of the accusations includes rape.

The alleged rape victim has apparently provided medical records

confirming that she had been treated on the day of the incident at a rape crisis center. Another account

includes an abusive relationship between Russell and a 16-year-old girl. Russell was 31 at the time.

The age of consent in England is 16. So this relationship

does not appear to violate any laws relating to statutory rape, but the purported behavior is

morally questionable. The allegations were made in a joint year-long investigation between the

Times, Britain's oldest daily

newspaper, the Sunday Times, and Dispatches, a British current events documentary program on

Channel 4. A Russell released a YouTube video on Friday, September 15th, denying the allegations

...