Every time a celeb is in the spotlight for sex-related offences, sex addiction usually rears its head – but is it a genuine illness?
Writing in his 2007 autobiography, My Booky Wook, Russell Brand wrote about an episode that, in his words, “defined my relationship with women”.
He was 17 and on holiday in Hong Kong with his father, whose third marriage had just ended. On their first night, father and son took three prostitutes back to their hotel room. While his father had sex with two of the women in one of the twin beds, the teenage Russell had sex with the third in the other bed. For the rest of the holiday, Brand writes, he “had sex with loads more prostitutes”. On the way home, his father told him: “I went away with a boy and came back with a man.”
Brand claimed the trip caused his sexuality to go from “bewildered innocence into something more complex and rapacious”. What followed was a sexual appetite that saw him winning the Sun’s Shagger of the Year and his eventual treatment for sex addiction at a clinic in Philadelphia in 2005. “I was on the brink of becoming sufficiently well-known for my carnal overindulgences… to cause me professional difficulties,” he explained.
The irony of that line won’t be lost on him today, as he is accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse against four women between 2006 and 2013. He has denied all the allegations against him.