Neil Gaiman, self-proclaimed feminist. Colin McPherson/Getty Images

âMen 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.â Neil Gaiman isnât just one of the worldâs most popular fantasy writers, heâs also a self-proclaimed feminist and defender of women.Â
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.Â
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 âjumped on her⊠out of the blueâ in an âaggressive, unwantedâ pass in London in 1986, when she was 22. Another, âKâ, 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 âshe neither wanted nor enjoyed.â In 2007, she claims he performed non-consensual penetrative intercourse on her after she had repeatedly asked him not to.Â
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 âcuddledâ and âmade outâ in the bath â and that the encounter was consensual. But Scarlett claims that Gaiman also assaulted her with ârough and degrading penetrative sexual actsâ she hadnât agreed to. When Scarlett attempted suicide, Gaimanâs 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 Gaimanâs fame and status, while at the same time not feeling at all sexually attracted or drawn to him. âI’ve never read any of his books,â Scarlett tells me. âHe just talked about himself all the time.â
For Scarlett, âGaimanâs superfans somehow seem to think that they have personally been betrayed by the allegations because they see him as sharing their own tick-box âprogressiveâ values,â she told me. âIt’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.â
Scarlett, as with the other women who have come forward, was vulnerable at the time she met Gaiman, and, as she describes it, âdesperate for loveâ. âPretending to myself I had fallen for him was a way to kind of trick myself to think that I had not been sexually exploited,â she said.Â
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 â which includes regular reminders that Gaiman denies any wrongdoing whatsoever â many of his fans have expressed their outrage at the podcast, claiming that Johnson is a âRight-wing Terfâ with an axe to grind. The podcast, they say, is an attempt by anti-trans activists to smear him. As Rachel Johnson tells me, âThe trans activist lefties discrediting the podcast as âterfâ made by the sister of Boris is purest misogyny. Itâs meticulously researched and itâs fair to a fault.â
Perhaps his impeccable Left liberal feminist credentials have confused people. A whole book has been written about how women-friendly Gaimanâs 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 sheâs 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 âgo to the wall for him on thisâ and be âstunned if the allegations were trueâ. Yet the same friend also said that Gaiman has autism, suggesting that perhaps âsome of his mistakesâ may be explained by its contribution to what she called his ânaivetyâ.Â
That she talks about âmistakesâ nods, perhaps, to the fact that these women were all in consensual relationships with Gaiman. But to claim that he was ânaiveâ 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 ânot really abuseâ 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 â 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 complaintâs lack of substance. But officers said they had made a ânumber of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoingâ.
How did the big corporations who profit from Gaimanâs 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. âI may be cynical,â Scarlett told me, âbut I donât 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.â
As ever with allegations of a sexual nature, we have a âhe said, she saidâ situation, complicated by highly asymmetric nature of the relationships, the vulnerability of the women and his claims of their âfalse memory syndromeâ. And unless â or until â there is a criminal trial, there will be no resolution.Â
As for Gaiman, he has said very little, only issuing a statement denying the allegations. The storyteller has fallen unusually silent.Â
The last I heard about Gaiman was that he accepted the encounters had taken place but claimed they were consensual. Given that the man would have been married at the time they took place, we can definitely say heâs a scumbag, even if he hasnât yet been proven to be a sexual predator.
That’s why you need moral standards in society and relationships to deal with this sort of things, and flag people like him.
Instead of trying to rely on the law or post facto wailing about coercion, often years after the women accepted being in a relationship with what is clearly a highly objectionable individual.
The whole liberation thingy, that replaced the concept of a settled marriage with a man who is willing to commit….hasn’t worked that well, too. All it does is devalue women and their ability to be selective. Statistically studies show a massive rise in abuse when you opt for a string of “partners”.
Societyâs that exist for millennia exist for a reason. Pretty ironic that the progressive wave is making everyone poor so old mores will have to be reapplied.
Societies don’t exist for millenia. They are constantly recreated.
But itâs not randomly selected ânormalâ people who opt for strings of partnersâŠ
She said. He said.
And it appears, at least in some of the cases, these women continued “normal” relationships, rather than immediately punch him, leave the place and raise hell.
Which was the case with Weinstein as well – one of his victims took him to visit her parents after being “assaulted”.
Of course, there would be the usual jargon filled attempts to explain it away, but you see cases like these – or campus reports of women willingly going to bed, often continuing the relationship, and deciding years later it was “coercion”.
Thing is, almost all men genuinely abhor sexual assault of women, which is why even in jail, even among criminals, rapists are considered the lowest of the low.
But all that the happenings of the last few years have done, is to inspire contempt and increasing distrust for their victimhood narrative.
Seems like the common theme with women who stay silent and stay with it for a time is that they, too, are getting something out of it. In the case of Weinstein they were clearly getting – or hoping to get – faster tracked careers. Who knows what these women thought they might be getting. Gaiman sounds like yet-another-scumbag but I have a hard time jumping on bandwagons years after the facts unless the crimes are pretty unambiguous.
It doesn’t matter how much “impeccable Left liberal feminist credentials” you have, ends the same way.
If anything, that type appears to more likely to be a sleazy cad, and prone to joining an employee 40 years younger, in her bathtub, on her first day of work.
The problem is, though, that being a cad, or “rough and degrading” stuff in your bedroom, isn’t exactly prosecutable, at least not yet. Especially in a society where women openly, avidly consume 50 shades of grey in trains and buses.
The key issue here is that “these women were all in consensual relationships”. Even the one case that appeared off, ended up not with the nanny kicking him out and leaving immediately, but rather with what she decided later was “pretending to myself I had fallen for him”.
And while these ladies decide that they were “coerced”, genuinely horrible cases get brushed aside, often with these same feminists in charge.
On one hand, they expect Neil to be punished, whereas we live in a society where just one of the Hamburg nine, in a violent, vicious incident involving a 15 year old, got a modest two year sentence, and eight got away free – the judge and key people involved, upper class, almost certainly feminist women.
And don’t even get me started on what’s happened (still happening?) in a dozen different British cities. While we go on about, as the report states clearly, women who “engaged in certain activity willingly”.
I am shocked that a man of his advanced age would be attracted to a young woman! (not)
But if he got into the bath with her, isn’t it also true that she got into the bath with him? That the encounter was consensual? And that she was 23 years old?
Also, for what it’s worth, Neil and his wife had an open marriage at the time.
But go ahead and roast the famous author. After all, we love to build them up, just so we can burn them down.
We just like it when holier than thou Lefties eventually fall from grace in a haze of hypocrisy.
We then can enjoy the spectacle as is our God given right as tax paying conservatives
Iâm left feeling quite sorry for Gaiman, ironically more so from reading this article. Everything seems to point to him being unable to satisfy a woman and none of the women telling him so. Open marriage? Implies wifey wanted to wealth and fame but went elsewhere for the thrills. These women who didnât know they could say no in the #metoo era? If he was good in the sack there is unlikely to have been any accusations of impropriety! Kiss and tells more like!
Gaiman’s wife, now ex-wife, is Amanda Palmer. You can Google her and check who she is. She’s pretty famous in her own right.
Before or since her marriage to Gaiman. I have heard of her but only since she tied the knot with him.
I’d never even heard of this so so famous Gaiman before reading this…. but if these allegations turn out to true Yes he would be a jerk and his ‘feminism’ otherwise known as bullshit. But there’s an elephant in the room here with this article and countless others like it….a feminist blindspot about how women actually flock to high status cads like moths to a flame? It’s one of Feminism’s many omertas about female sexuality. And in its version of reality the huge and enduring story of sexual oppression gets refracted through a prism of political correctness whereby it only really gets the attention it deserves if it can be partnered up with certain other agendas â obsession with celebrity is one example; âwhite patriarchyâ is another. And thus the regretted sexual encounters of some Western women on their way up the ladder of fame is a bigger story than that – say – of an Indian woman sentenced by village elders to be gang-raped as punishment for the supposed transgressions of her brother and now hiding in terror of her neighbours. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/life-in-the-shadows-of-metoo
Your link to that Indian story points to the strange inversion of morality in the West, but not the way you think. This might sound unpalatable, but all that it highlights is how genuinely serious crimes against women in the West are brushed aside for “me-too” incidents, or “something happened in India”.
The reason you have all these stories on BBC, is purely because even an one off incident in some corner of India becomes a massive furore politically, with large scale protests etc. Which are then picked up in the West. And just as well, because sunlight is the best disinfectant, and more the pressure, less likely further such crimes.
Here is a thought. Nobody in India has heard of Rotherham, migrant crimes on women or Jimmy Saville. Because you have vile crimes against women in the West, which create barely a ripple of protest or outrage. The BBC picks up Neil Gaiman being horrible or a couple of victims in some town in rural India, but is oblivious of thousands of minor girls victimised over here.
I think if you read the whole article, it is not so different from what you are saying….. although I think you are massively understating the sexual coercion/violence against women in parts of Indian culture.
ï»żI think you also misunderstand the implicit agenda of woke-partisan legacy media organisations like the BBC. If you were to rank the interest shown in sexual oppression by these Western media dinosaurs on a scale from 0 to 10 it would come out something like this:
rich world celebrity #MeToo stories involving white men 10
Rotherham-type non-white stories 2
mind-bogglingly dreadful places for women (like Afghanistan)1
Iâm still stunned you never heard of Neil Gaiman.
My own reaction exactly!
I’ve never heard of or seen a picture of him in my life. I have never heard of his books. I also haven’t heard of Tortoise Media who did the investigation or the host of the show Paul Caruana Galizia. I do know Rachel Johnson though as she is sister to Boris.
That you think Mr Gaiman is a household name makes me realise what echo-chambers we exist in nowadays.
I wouldn’t disagree with you on your last point, and it’s utterly ridiculous.
I was just commenting on the mindset of our betters – it’s not about fixing wrongs, but empty virtue signalling. And therefore they choose easy targets, not entirely because of “Whiteness”.
White western men feel v guilty about attacks on women, or slavery by their ancestors.
Indians, for instance, at least the urban educated lot I have observed, feel similarly shamed and horrified about even individual instances of sexual assaults or things like the caste system.
Hence, you will find relentless attacks on white men and Indians, at opposite ends of the globe, because it’s easy and safe. Yes, more intense against White men, but same principle.
Arabs and South Americans (who had far more involvement in slavery than the US or Britain, and never fought wars to end it either) feel no guilt or shame, so they get away with it.
Pakistanis or “Asians” in Rotherham feel no shame or guilt about what they do to women or minorities, so the same BBC / women’s right mafia that castigate India go all out to defend them.
You are right. I haven’t seen a cheep in We stern media on crimes of a brutal nature against women, especially from the minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
The Beeb looks the other way.
Sadly most Westerners are terribly ignorant about India, and take out their own ignorance of the reasons for crimes against women with generalised nonsense.
The kind of crimes you refer to regularly happen in India, the sunlight clearly isnât working. These stories are picked up by the western media because they are so shockingly abhorrent, and this shock makes for clicks due to our morbid intrigue.
You also say that there is barely a ripple of protest. How you can make such a statement? Since these issues came to light there have been endless articles, documentaries, and debates in parliament on both of these topics over the course of many years. There is still outrage that justice hasnât been served in these cases, and rightly so. But to state there is barely a ripple of protest is ridiculous.
“kind of crimes you refer to regularly happen in India”
Statistically not true, and if it were true, the sex crime rates, involvement in grooming gangs, etc for Indian immigrants in the West would not be near zero.
Unless you think Indians suddenly change culture and become feminists as soon as they reach Southall.
But that’s not the point. Whether true or unfair, having the spotlight is good because it deters such crimes.
The big issue is the feminists going on about “unsafe” India, where there were zero mass grooming gangs, suddenly become very scared of being racist when you actually see evidence of such crimes here.
“You also say that there is barely a ripple of protest. How you can make such a statement? Since these issues came to light there have been endless articles, documentaries, and debates in parliament”
Right. Thousands of cases of underage girls, and we had debates and documentaries.
You know why India doesn’t have Rotherhams, thankfully?
There was an incident in an Indian town the same size as Rochdale etc.
The number of victims was TWO.
Thousands of people (most of whom didn’t even know the girls) swarmed out on the streets, blocked trains, in a public, vigorous sense of collective fury, for days.
So far, ZERO police officers, council workers, politicians in UK have been sacked or jailed.
If there was an equivalent with even 1% of the number of cases in India, heads would roll, the police officers would be in jail, and the politicians responsible would never re-enter office
And of course, with no self reflection, the BBC and western feminists would pile on about “India unsafe for girls’.
“omertas”. Great word. I had to look it up. Thanks.
Biggest red flag is âmale feministâ. The virtue hides the sin and I havenât met a man who claims to be a feminist and be in no way patronising towards me.
Next up, who employs a vulnerable adult to look after your children? Or is she vulnerable because she is female and in her twenties? Why are so many of his victims considered vulnerable? Because theyâre female? or does he have a thing for disabled women? Why isnât he considered vulnerable if he is on the autism spectrum?
Beta male find fame then start pestering women for sex. Did I miss anything?
Very succinct–’twas ever thus…
Iâm confused. Scarlet had only known Gaiman a couple of hours when she went home with him, and she took a bath? In a strangers home? Then he raped her, and she didnât run for the hills, but stayed on as his employee? Iâm a feminist âactually a terfâbut her story just isnât plausible.
I think the article states that she was a nanny and therefore could be in Gaiman’s home in that capacity. Admittedly, the article isn’t clear on this.
Julie, whether heâs been silent on the matter or talked non-stop about it is irrelevant as to whether heâs guilty or not. You should know that. Not right to make that the key theme of your piece.
Gaiman has always been a case of separating the art from the artist for me.
I’m unashamedly a fan of his work. Sandman, Neverwhere, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Smoke and Mirrors – they were all works of absolute genius. His adaptations, less so (not liked _any_ of them).
But… I’ve always loathed him as a person since I first read an article he wrote many years ago. Preachy, sermonising, holier-than-thou. These accusations (and, they are just accusations at the moment) don’t surprise me at all – but that may just be my confirmation bias showing.
And I can still.enjoy reading his work. But I’d never want to meet him.
Never meet your artistic heroes. Itâs doomed to inspire disappointment.
I’m a middle-aged man who has been a fan of Gaiman’s work for decades, and (while I am certainly not a zealot on the subject, TERF is not a term I use and I certainly accept women’s right to single-sex spaces and recognise that in some areas there is a genuine tension between women’s rights and trans rights that cannot be solved by ignoring women, invading their services or trampling on their hard-won rights) am probably somewhat more pro-trans rights than Johnson or Bindel, while respecting their rights to hold different but entirely valid philosophical beliefs without being abused or vilified as bigots.
For the record, I am horrified by these allegations, consider them credible and hope that all that meet the level of criminality lead to a full investigation. I’m disgusted that anybody would seek to downplay or dismiss such serious allegations of sexual abuse by yet another man in a position of power; that seems like an emotional response motivated by tribalism and hero-worship than any reasoned position, and I suspect that the same people would have no problem condemning Tate, Brand etc. on the basis of equally credible allegations. Nobody gets a pass for sexual violence, whatever their stated politics, and anybody who willingly blinkers themselves to abuse by people they approve of needs to give their head a long, hard wobble.
I completely agree with you. Youâve expressed my view perfectly
Well you canât have it both ways. Either autism is a âmitigating factorâ in his perpetration of sexual exploitation of women. If this is the case then we need to think as a society about what to do with autistic people since theyâre âobviouslyâ really dangerous and we canât let them just out and about Because they might be predatory to women. Alternatively we can say that autism has nothing to do with it and that he is a grown man who made a series of choices to treat women that way. .
These stories â ‘decades ago I had sex with someone but really didn’t want to’ â are ridiculous. If you’re pretending to yourself that you’ve fallen for him, how is he supposed to tell that you haven’t? It’s all ‘he said she said’ unless he uses physical strength to force sex upon her. Otherwise, what distinguishes “he’s a disgusting lech who would’ve ruined me, so I had to go along” from “he’s an intriguing, powerful older man with much to offer me, so coyly I went along”?
Or perhaps â now here’s a novel idea â we should stop placing the entire weight of our sexual ethics on the willowy idea of ‘consent’ â a constantly-shifting state of mental self-examination that is often beyond us, particularly confused, young women. Just keep you’re pants on till your married and these problems magically disappear.
So, he is guilty? Your tone suggests so.
âItâs beyond belief for me that people just arenât 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.â
It’s beyond belief for me that you then continued working for him for what sounds like months and “pretended that you’d fallen for him” to justify your own poor judgement. Am I oversimplifying things if I think you might just be one of those ******* idiots who is helping to make it easier for men to sexually exploit us?
Two questions for the author — have you ever been able to actually create anything in your entire life? And how are you at all different from the people who tried to cancel you?
Quelle surprise- radical feminist can’t accept that groupie culture exists and that when attractive female employees are given a job for one reason, sometimes it doesn’t end there for the boss or the employee.
Autism now is a
new defense for rape?
Autism is now a defense against rape? Since when?
A feminist male… “Dagli amici mi guardi Iddio, che dai nemici mi guardo io”