People are falling for fake BBC clip of Russell Brand ‘responding to abuse claims’

The prankster had to point out the joke to some social media users

The 48-year-old, who has denied all criminal allegations put forward in a joint The Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatches report, said Friday that there had been "a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces and these kind of voices."

As the story has evolved and every interaction Brand has had in the last few decades has been unpicked, one social media user decided to see how easy it would be to trick people, using lines the actor said in a movie - Forgetting Sarah Marshall - that has also featured in a few reports in recent days.

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Setting up the gag, the social media user mazemoore, wrote: "I wasn't sure Russell Brand was guilty of the allegations against him until I saw this video on the BBC showing definitive proof. That guy is a sicko."

The video under the post contained a BBC video purported to feature audio from one of Brand's accusers saying his response to the accusations was "insulting". Instead, it contained audio from an exchange between Brand and another character in the 2008 comedy, Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

The clip has been viewed almost 100,000 times and has caught a number of people out, so much so that the poster felt the need to explain his joke to a number of them in the comments.

In a statement on Friday ahead of the report, Brand said the allegations against him “pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies, and as I have written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous.”

He continued: “Now during that time of promiscuity the relationships I had were absolutely, always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent, and I am being transparent about it now as well.

“To see that transparency metastasised into something criminal, that I absolutely deny, makes me question – is there another agenda at play?”

Brand has claimed that there is witnesses whose evidence “directly contradicts the narrative that these two mainstream media outlets are trying to construct.”

Related links:

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