Russell Brand is a familiar story | Rebecca Solnit

Can we really be surprised when rich and powerful men are accused of sexual abuse?

There's nothing new but the details about what the Times journalists uncovered about Russell Brand in their investigative report published this weekend. We've been through this so many times, the story finally uncovered of a rich or powerful or celebrated man being accused of sexual abuse for years or decades. Russell Brand says all of his relationships were absolutely always consensual.

That's the first piece of the familiar story - that they got away with it for years because one of the forms inequality takes is inequality of voice -the voice with which you say what's happened, the voice that's listened to and believed and respected, the voice that determines what happens.

Rebecca Solnit's most recent books are Orwell's Roses and the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, co-edited with Thelma Young Lutunatabua