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THE WIFE OF THE MAN behind the hugely successful viral video ‘Stop Kony’ campaign has denied that his sudden admission to hospital on Thursday was connected to drug or alcohol use.
Jason Russell, 33, was taken to hospital on Thursday for medical evaluation after police detained him briefly for being drunk, vandalising cars and masturbating in public. He was reportedly only wearing underwear when police arrived on the scene.
He was not arrested and no charges are expected to be filed.
Late yesterday, his wife Danica Russell said that he “did some irrational things brought on by extreme exhaustion and dehydration”.
“We thought a few thousand people would see the film, but in less than a week, millions of people around the world saw it. While that attention was great for raising awareness about Joseph Kony, it also brought a lot of attention to Jason and, because of how personal the film is, many of the attacks against it were also very personal, and Jason took them very hard,” she said in a statement.
Danica Russell said the the current focus is on her husband’s health and “protecting our family”.
“The message of the film remains the same: stop at nothing,” she added.
The CEO of the Invisible Children group co-founded by Russell said earlier yesterday that the campaigner is receiving medical treatment and is focusing “on getting better”. Ben Keesey said that Russell was suffering from a combination of “exhaustion, dehydration and malnutrition” and said that the past two weeks of campaigning “have taken a severe emotional toll on all of us”.
He added that the “toll manifested itself in an unfortunate incident” on Thursday.
The Kony 2012 video calling for people to make alleged Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony ‘famous’ in order to help bring him before the International Criminal Court has been watched over 80 million times on YouTube since it was uploaded earlier this month. The ICC issued a warrant for his arrest in 2005 for crimes against humanity.
Critics of the campaign have questioned the organisation’s motive and its distribution of funds, and accuse it of oversimplifying Ugandan history.
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RTE did record a lot of stuff on tape, which was at the time prohibitively expensive, and was as a matter of course, recorded over, in order to cut costs.
Sad, but nothing unusual, as even the BBC did likewise, consigning much of their earlier stuff to the dustbin of history. Even now, many BBC releases, such as Dad’s Army, are partly comprised of home recordings made by viewers.
What stood to RTE was that they were more reliant on film, and as such that tended to survive.
As a matter of fact, RTE have an excellent repository, as borne out by much of Brendan Balfe’s work, down through the years. It’s a fairly safe bet that he will have a hand in this project. I have to give them credit for this, as a history buff myself, I’ll find it interesting.
Balfe relies on audio, and probably a personal archive too, video is very different. My problem is not with reusing tape but recording over significant footage blithely.
Haven’t they wiped most of the stuff before 1980? No Late Late archive to speak of and hardly any home produced programming from 60s has survived.
We’ll soon find out.
Think of the physical space required to keep long running shows like the Late Late or the Den archived – it’s no surprise they couldn’t keep it all!
Wonder if they’ll have that Prime Time Investigates show up?
Seriously though, I can’t imagine an organisation as overpaid and inept as RTE having the amount of organisation and talent it takes to organise a serious archive.
Haven’t they wiped a huge amount of stuff? No Late Late archive to speak of and little or no home produced programming from 60s has survived.
Yep.
Would they show the famous prime time interview c. 1997 of the fine gael leadership candidates. specifically enda kenny babbling waffle when he was asked about his economic policies. The look on his face was like a kid doing the leaving cert just realising he had studied the wrong paper. And that will explain why I could NEVER vote for FG
Don’t we see enough of Gay Byrne? Young people leaving by the thousand and he has so many income streams it is immoral. Just because his greed got him into trouble financially RTE and The government bail him out. Just like the developers he gets helped out by the taxpayer all because he gambled. He is a greedy guts with a smirk on his face because he can get away with this appalling behaviour. I bet he goes to mass on Sunday’s as well as he is typical of our politicians,developers,and bankers – all smug immoral cheats. I think Gay would let his kids emigrate instead of giving one of them just one of his jobs. RTE equal opportunities employer my xxxx
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