“Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to be believed, at the ballot box; with art; by listening, and change this world for the better.” Neil Gaiman isn’t just one of the world’s most popular fantasy writers, he’s also a self-proclaimed feminist and defender of women.
All the more shocking, then, to hear the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him in recent months. And how strange the silence that they were met with. Until now, that is.
In a six-part podcast series by Tortoise Media, hosted by Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia, a succession of women air allegations of sexual impropriety or abuse against Gaiman, author of Good Omens and The Sandman series. They raise serious questions about consent within relationships that were, at best, highly asymmetrical. Writer and broadcaster Julia Hobsbawm, for example, says Gaiman “jumped on her… out of the blue” in an “aggressive, unwanted” pass in London in 1986, when she was 22. Another, “K”, claims she and Gaiman began a romantic relationship in 2003, when she was 20 and he was in his mid-40s. She alleges she was subjected to rough and painful sex “she neither wanted nor enjoyed.” In 2007, she claims he performed non-consensual penetrative intercourse on her after she had repeatedly asked him not to.
Scarlett, another accuser, claims Gaiman assaulted her in a bath at his New Zealand home, hours after they had first met. He was 61, she a 22-year-old nanny. Gaiman said that they “cuddled” and “made out” in the bath — and that the encounter was consensual. But Scarlett claims that Gaiman also assaulted her with “rough and degrading penetrative sexual acts” she hadn’t agreed to. When Scarlett attempted suicide, Gaiman’s response was to say that he was also suicidal. In May 2022, after her employment with the author had ceased, Scarlett signed an NDA with Gaiman which was backdated to her first day of work.
When I spoke to Scarlett last week, she told me how it felt impossible to not be impressed by Gaiman’s fame and status, while at the same time not feeling at all sexually attracted or drawn to him. “I’ve never read any of his books,” Scarlett tells me. “He just talked about himself all the time.”
For Scarlett, “Gaiman’s superfans somehow seem to think that they have personally been betrayed by the allegations because they see him as sharing their own tick-box ‘progressive’ values,” she told me. “It’s beyond belief for me that people just aren’t acknowledging that a man in his Sixties has admitted that he got into the bath with his 23-year-old employee within the first few hours that they met.”
Scarlett, as with the other women who have come forward, was vulnerable at the time she met Gaiman, and, as she describes it, “desperate for love”. “Pretending to myself I had fallen for him was a way to kind of trick myself to think that I had not been sexually exploited,” she said.
Given the seriousness of the allegations made against such a famous author, you might have expected the Tortoise podcast to have been met with righteous anger. And it was. But not the sort that you might think. Despite the careful reporting — which includes regular reminders that Gaiman denies any wrongdoing whatsoever — many of his fans have expressed their outrage at the podcast, claiming that Johnson is a “Right-wing Terf” with an axe to grind. The podcast, they say, is an attempt by anti-trans activists to smear him. As Rachel Johnson tells me, “The trans activist lefties discrediting the podcast as ‘terf’ made by the sister of Boris is purest misogyny. It’s meticulously researched and it’s fair to a fault.”
Perhaps his impeccable Left liberal feminist credentials have confused people. A whole book has been written about how women-friendly Gaiman’s work is: Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose. The podcast also found two female advocates. One says she’s known Gaiman for 12 years, and that while she’s alive to his faults, doesn’t believe him capable of sexual misconduct. She says she would “go to the wall for him on this” and be “stunned if the allegations were true”. Yet the same friend also said that Gaiman has autism, suggesting that perhaps “some of his mistakes” may be explained by its contribution to what she called his “naivety”.
That she talks about “mistakes” nods, perhaps, to the fact that these women were all in consensual relationships with Gaiman. But to claim that he was “naive” is to disregard the fact that the vast amount of sexual abuse takes place within consensual relationships. I have heard women who should know better describe the allegations against Gaiman as “not really abuse” because there was no force involved, and the women did engage in certain activity willingly. But each of the women who has come forward about Gaiman described instances of coercive control.
At least one of the women that have made allegations against Gaiman has approached the police — but with limited success. In October 2022, Scarlett filed a complaint with New Zealand police. In response, Gaiman has claimed the police have not taken him up on his offer to assist the investigation, claiming this showed the complaint’s lack of substance. But officers said they had made a “number of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoing”.
How did the big corporations who profit from Gaiman’s work respond? While Disney and Netflix quietly paused their Gaiman adaptations, it took Amazon until last week to announce that filming of the final series of Good Omens had been halted due to the allegations. “I may be cynical,” Scarlett told me, “but I don’t imagine that Amazon or Disney have paused production because they altruistically care about allegations of abuse. Amazon and Disney have likely suspended production because they are a business, and the only thing that drives a business is cost. This is about cash and not care.”
As ever with allegations of a sexual nature, we have a “he said, she said” situation, complicated by highly asymmetric nature of the relationships, the vulnerability of the women and his claims of their “false memory syndrome”. And unless — or until — there is a criminal trial, there will be no resolution.
As for Gaiman, he has said very little, only issuing a statement denying the allegations. The storyteller has fallen unusually silent.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/