“I was full of self-pity, self-hatred. I wasn’t eating,” Baillie said last week of the immediate aftermath. “I went back to using [drugs]. I turned to an eating disorder… It went on for weeks. I’m terrified to this day of newspapers, I can’t look at them.” She confirmed she received no apology from Brand or the BBC. Ross wrote her a letter she never saw.Brand and Ross were suspended (with Brand then quitting before he could be fired), and the controller of Radio 2, Lesley Douglas, resigned. Again though, Brand didn’t seem too fussed, instead enjoying the attention. This was, after all, a man who wrote in his autobiography that, as a child, he was told by a park keeper not to step on the flowers – so did it anyway, just for the thrill.Perhaps the greatest rebuke in “Sachsgate”, as it became known, was delivered by former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, at the GQ Awards five years later. Brand, presenting, had shocked the audience by commenting that the night’s sponsors, Hugo Boss, had once made uniforms for the Nazi Party. Moore, newly awarded “writer of the year”, chose his target and didn’t miss.“I was very interested when Russell Brand chose to praise the stylishness of the Nazis,” Moore told the room. “Because of course that fits with the fact that when they persecuted the Sachs family in the 1930s, Andrew Sachs, who was only young, then fled to this country. He was then persecuted by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross in their disgusting phone call.” The room broke into thunderous applause.“What I’ve learnt – to my cost – on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you’re giving them what they want,” Brand once mused. “But the minute you’re not, you’re f—ed. They’ll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.”The many rebrandsTo say that Sachsgate damaged Brand’s career would be to misunderstand how rarely a fly landed on him during the first four decades of his life. He was moving far too fast, building a CV that took in comedy, radio presenting, TV and, increasingly, Hollywood films (including 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which he largely played himself; Rock of Ages, in which he largely played himself; and the remake of Arthur, in which… you get the idea).By 2011, he had also married American pop star Katy Perry at the height of her career. Their wedding, a closely guarded traditional Hindu ceremony, took place at a luxury resort in Rajasthan, India, with the bride and groom sitting atop elephants. Their marriage lasted for 14 months. In an interview in 2013, Perry, who would call Brand “very controlling” and “really hurtful”, told Vogue: “I haven’t heard from him since he texted me saying he was divorcing me [on] December 31, 2011.”
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