Comedian, actor and wellness influencer Russell Brand is facing an increasing fallout from the accusations of sexual assault made against him — all of which he has firmly denied.
On Monday, it emerged the remaining dates of his live tour would be indefinitely postponed, and on Tuesday, YouTube blocked him from making money from his videos on their platform.
The Met Police has said it received a report of an alleged assault in 2003, following an investigation by the Times, Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatches into alleged sexual assaults between 2006 and 2013.
Brand has called the allegations a “litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks” that he “absolutely refutes”.
But as the scandal rumbles on, episodes of his previous trademark shock-comedy are being revisited, including one instance in which he took umbrage with Queen Elizabeth II.
In an excerpt from his 2014 book Revolution, which he shared on his Facebook profile in 2015, Brand called the Queen “just a person…a little old lady in a shiny hat — that we paid for.”
He wrote: “I mean in England we have a Queen for f***’s sake. We have to call her things like ‘Your Majesty’ like she’s all majestic, like an eagle or a mountain.”
His tirade continued, saying the Queen appeared “high up, above us, at the top of a class pyramid on a shelf of money with her own face on it”.
The rant then took a bizarre turn, where Brand said: “We should be calling her Mrs Windsor.
“In fact that’s not even her real name, they changed it in the war to distract us from the inconvenient fact that they were as German as the enemy that teenage boys were being encouraged, conscripted actually, to die fighting.
“Her actual name is Mrs Saxe-Coburg-Gotha…No wonder they f***ing changed it! It’s the most German thing I’ve ever heard — she might’ve well as been called ‘Mrs Bratwurst-Kraut-Nazi’.”
According to the official Royal Family website, the name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha came into the British Royal Family in 1840 with the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert, son of Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Queen Victoria was the last monarch of the House of Hanover.
The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as a British dynasty was short-lived. It encompassed the reign of the first seven years of the reign of the Queen’s grandfather, King George V, who replaced the German-sounding title with that of Windsor in 1917 during the First World War.
The name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha survived in other European monarchies, including the current Belgian Royal Family and the former monarchies of Portugal and Bulgaria.
