Russell Brand

Russell Brand mocked after sharing hoax file saying Penelope Keith shot JFK

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Comedian has been called a ‘global embarrassment’ after falling for prank

Russell Brand‘s attempt to peddle a JFK conspiracy theory backfired after he shared a hoax post claiming British star Penelope Keith assassinated the president.

Brand posted the fake document believing it was a part of the newly released files about the assassination, which have been classified since President John F Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963. Their release was ordered by [twice impeached] President Donald Trump.

Historians, journalists and amateur sleuths have been scouring the pages looking for a scrap of anything new, but Brand’s investigation backfired when he posted a fake file that “named the assassin” as Keith, 84, who played Margo Leadbetter in British sitcom The Good Life.

Brand shared a screenshot of the bogus file on social media, pedalling the conspiracy theory that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald “or any member of any organised crime syndicate” did not kill JFK.

What Brand had failed to spot, though, was the line that read: “The lone shooter in Dallas Texas on 22 November 1963 was Miss Penelope Keith, star of the BBC television program The Good Life.”

Realising he had been duped by the fake, which had the same typeface as the words in the actual files, Brand swiftly deleted the social media post – but not before his blunder caught the attention of numerous X/Twitter users

.Russell Brand shared fake file saying Penelope Keith assassinated JFK

The gaffe has now gone viral, with the comedian being branded a “global embarrassment” while being mercilessly mocked online.

BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh wrote: “Russell Brand posted and then deleted a completely fake document which he thought was from the newly released JFK files and proved British actress Penelope Keith, not Lee Harvey Oswald, killed JFK.”

This led to a flurry of comedic tweets, with one person writing: “If Russell Brand thinks Penelope Keith killed JFK then wait until he hears what Felicity Kendall did to Lord Lucan.”

“Margo Leadbetter is an anagram of ‘targeted mob real’, adding further incontrovertible evidence to the picture of what happened there on the grassy knoll,” another chimed in

An additional commenter posted: “Russell Brand is now investigating whether Joanna Lumley assisted Penelope Keith in the JFK assassination, or whether she was just a Patsy.”

Last week, it was revealed that Brand is being sued for £220,000 by publishing house Pan Macmillan after reportedly failing to write and deliver two non-fiction books.

The first book was due by May 2021 and the second before the end of that year, but neither had been delivered by September 2023 when the Metropolitan Police launched an investigation into a string of sexual assault allegations made against Brand. The comedian has vehemently denied the allegations and said all of his relationships have been “consensual”.

Others declared the error as one of the wittiest things to have happened on X/Twitter, with one user writing: “We have finally reached peak internet, and Twitter has justified itself unto the ages. It is impossible that this will ever be surpassed.”

.Source: Russell Brand mocked after sharing hoax file saying Penelope Keith shot JFK | The Independent

Russell Brand Wasn’t an Anomaly

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The former TV host and actor was a mascot, at best, for a media culture that routinely dehumanized and hypersexualized young women.

By Sophie Gilbert

In the summer of 1999, when I was 16 years old, I remember walking to a train station in West London from a babysitting job when a 40-something man in a Range Rover pulled up, told me he was on television, and then announced to his young son (also in the car) that I was “Daddy’s new girlfriend.” I don’t know who the man was; I didn’t get in the car, not because I was afraid but because I’d just bought Californication for my minidisc player and wanted to listen to the album on the way home. But what he did wasn’t abnormal for the time. This was two years before the 35-year-old TV presenter and radio host Chris Evans (not the actor) married the 18-year-old pop star Billie Piper in Las Vegas, after a months-long relationship that started when he gave the teenager—so young, she hadn’t yet learned to drive—a Ferrari filled with roses. A year later, in 2002, the BBC Radio 1 host Chris Moyles offered, live on air, to take the singer Charlotte Church’s virginity on her 16th birthday, claiming that he could “lead her through the forest of sexuality” now that she was legal.

I’ve often wondered how Millennial women in Britain survived the aughts: not just the incessant fat shaming and the ritualized alcohol abuse, but also the cheerful, open predation that was everywhere in popular culture then. This weekend, the London Times and the TV documentary series Dispatches revealed coordinated allegations that the TV star turned conspiratorial wellness personality Russell Brand had victimized multiple people from 2006 to 2013, including a 16-year-old girl who says he picked her up on the street when he was 30, referred to her as “the child” and cradled her like a baby when he found out she was a virgin, and then later choked her with his penis until she—fearing she would actually suffocate—punched him in the stomach. The dual reports also allege that Brand raped a woman he knew at his home in Los Angeles and attempted to rape another until she screamed so hard that he flew into a rage. (Brand has said he “absolutely refutes” what he describes as “a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks.” [ . . . ]