The most significant development in the ongoing reckoning with sexual exploitation comes from London, where Russell Brand has admitted to having sex with a 16-year-old when he was 30, describing his past conduct as “exploitative” while still denying any criminal wrongdoing. The 50-year-old comedian and actor, who faces seven charges of rape and sexual assault relating to six women, told the US journalist Megyn Kelly that his sexual behaviour had been “egoistic” and that he had rarely considered its impact on others. His trial is set for October, and he has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Viewed from London, this is a case that tests the boundary between admitted moral failure and alleged criminality, a distinction that prosecutors will now have to prove in court. Across the Atlantic, the cultural conversation around such power imbalances has taken a different shape. Jennette McCurdy, the former child star of Nickelodeon’s iCarly, has published her debut novel *Half His Age*, a dark academia story about a 17-year-old girl who pursues a relationship with her 40-year-old teacher.

McCurdy, who at 18 began a secret romance with a 32-year-old co-worker, has called that relationship “creepy” and “twisted” without labelling it abuse. Her novel dissects the intellectual elitism and moral decay of hierarchical institutions, suggesting that the post-#MeToo era has not eliminated the allure of such dynamics but has forced them into sharper literary focus. In Australia, a columnist for *The Canberra Times* recently described witnessing a man’s aggressive meltdown at a bank counter, noting that the teller said such behaviour occurred “every other day”.

The piece, titled in part “I’d rather have a minister for men than a single additional enrolment at the ‘rape academy’”, reflects a growing frustration with everyday male entitlement and the cultural scaffolding that enables it. These three threads—from the celebrity courtroom to the fictional classroom to the bank queue—converge on a single uncomfortable truth: the abuse of power, whether criminal or merely exploitative, remains a pervasive feature of social life. Analysts in Berlin point to the European legal frameworks that increasingly criminalise such conduct, while observers in Sydney note that public discourse is shifting toward demanding accountability not just in courts but in cultural narratives.

The question now is whether these separate reckonings will coalesce into enduring structural change, or whether they will become yet another cycle of outrage followed by amnesia. The Brand trial will offer one answer; the reception of McCurdy’s novel, another.