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FRNeil Gaiman, self-proclaimed feminist. Colin McPherson/Getty Images
“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”.
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 – obsession with celebrity is one example; ‘white patriarchy’ 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.
I 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
I’m still stunned you never heard of Neil Gaiman.
My own reaction exactly!
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.
“omertas”. Great word. I had to look it up. Thanks.
I’m 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 didn’t run for the hills, but stayed on as his employee? I’m a feminist —actually a terf—but her story just isn’t 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.
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. It’s 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. You’ve expressed my view perfectly
“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.”
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?
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 he’s a scumbag, even if he hasn’t 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”.
Society’s 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 it’s not randomly selected ‘normal’ people who opt for strings of partners…
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
I’m 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 didn’t 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.
Biggest red flag is “male feminist”. The virtue hides the sin and I haven’t 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 they’re female? or does he have a thing for disabled women? Why isn’t 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…
Julie, whether he’s been silent on the matter or talked non-stop about it is irrelevant as to whether he’s guilty or not. You should know that. Not right to make that the key theme of your piece.
Well you can’t have it both ways. Either autism is a “mitigating factor” 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 they’re “obviously” really dangerous and we can’t 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 – ‘decades ago I had sex with someone but really didn’t want to’ – 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 – now here’s a novel idea – we should stop placing the entire weight of our sexual ethics on the willowy idea of ‘consent’ – 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.
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?