"we don't send young women into their dressing room."
Nish Kumar has said the presence of sexual predators in the comedy industry is an “open secret”, revealing that young women have been advised to stay clear of their dressing rooms.
The claims amid allegations against Russell Brand, who has been accused of rape, sexual harassment and abusive behaviour towards four women between 2006 and 2013.
Russell Brand has denied the claims.
On his Pod Save the UK podcast, Nish said:
“This stuff is still happening, there are still people working in comedy who are the subject of open secrets.
“There are still people who work in comedy that we can’t name because again, of the threat of lawsuits.
“And there are still people working in comedy who people will say, ‘Oh, we don’t send young women into their dressing room’.
“Now at that stage for me, you should be sacked from that job.
“If you can’t have someone be around young women, they have no place in any kind of workplace.
“The tolerance of it is something that we are going to have to actually have a reckoning with.”
Nish revealed that he first heard about Russell’s alleged wrongdoings in mid-2017 and “from that point onwards it was well known”.
But he said the “very specific and serious allegation” against Russell that he had first been made aware of was not one that was discussed in the Channel 4 Dispatches programme.
For that reason, Nish Kumar thinks “it is possible that there’s more allegations to come”.
Nish also gave the reason he believes Russell Brand’s TV work appeared to diminish after 2019.
He said: “I think if you look at Russell Brand’s IMDb page, you see that his television work in Britain starts to dry up around 2018, 2019.
“And that’s simply because increasingly people were just not willing to work with him.”
“Everyone was afraid to talk about it because of the threat of lawsuits, you know?
“And so, the only power people had was to withdraw participation from shows involving Russell Brand.”
He said that as a comedian, he also felt a sense of “guilt” and “complicity”.
Nish elaborated: “Watching it as a cis-gendered, heterosexual male comedian, you feel a certain sense of guilt and a certain sense of complicity because you’ve been working with production companies and producers who are providing an infrastructure that allows predators to thrive.”
He stated that the “indulgence” of top talent was “an issue that cuts across all of the industries” and which needed to be addressed.
Nish Kumar concluded: “The only people to come out of this with anything approaching any credibility are the victims who have been brave enough to step forward and the journalists who have worked extremely hard to produce rigorous pieces of journalism so that they could get around the threats of a very powerful man’s lawyers.”
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