A Sense of Doubt blog post #3631 - Neil Gaiman Let Us All Down - I am so Heart-and-Soul-Crushingly Disappointed and Disgusted
I am posting this content with a heavy heart.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1953 - Men Have to do Better - More unpacking of the thing in comics - sexual misconduct - abuse of power
and the original
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1949 - Warren Ellis accused of sexual coercion
even MUSICAL MONDAY
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1952 - "Let it Be Me" - For Warren
Neil was on fan bulletin boards a lot in the 1990s, and I messaged with him many times about music, literature, and many other topics.
And then this news broke.
I know some people will want to claim that the women are lying.
VULTURE ARTICLE - NO PAY WALL
Neil Gaiman, Abuse, and Scientology
Hey patrons! "Enjoy" (it's not v enjoyable, sorry) this video early and ad-free until Thursday morning!
Transcript:
CONTENT WARNING: discussions of rape and sexual abuse.
Last July, I listened with interest to the newly released podcast from Tortoise Media, Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman. A friend had recommended it so I gave it a listen, though I’d never heard of Tortoise and went in with a naturally skeptical mind. I came out utterly convinced that Neil Gaiman, an author whose work I’ve enjoyed for more than 20 years, is a giant piece of shit.
For those who have not listened to that podcast, “Master” includes interviews with several different women who each accused Neil Gaiman of sexually assaulting and abusing them while they were in otherwise consensual (though problematic) relationships with him. By “problematic” I mean that one woman was first a fan of Gaiman’s, and another, Scarlett Pavlovich, his child’s nanny. All the women were decades younger than him. There was certainly a pre-existing power imbalance that meant a moral person with the upper hand would have to tread carefully to be sure that he was abiding by the “campfire rule” as Dan Savage has recommended: leave your partner better off than you found them.
But it became clear through interviews with the women AND statements from Gaiman that he did not, in fact, abide by that rule. As I posted on BlueSky after listening to the podcast, Gaiman’s response to the allegations was to merely shrug and say that it was consensual, but not to rebut any of the other details. So, taking that in the very best possible light, that means that in regards to his child’s nanny, Pavlovich, on the very first day that he met her at his home where she was employed to watch his son, he, a 60-year old millionaire, asked her, a 20-year old on the verge of homelessness, to get into a bathtub naked, then he got naked and joined her in the bathtub, and then they enjoyed a consensual sexual liaison before she wandered off to do the job of watching his child.
Honestly, not a great look! When you combine his feeble defense with the fact that this podcast was produced in England, one of the most libel-suit-friendly countries on the planet, personally I found absolutely no reason to doubt the testimony of the women involved. But many people responding to me did: they told me Tortoise Media is run by transphobes, that one of the hosts is Boris Johnson’s sister, that no other media was reporting on the story, and that it was not an admission of guilt that Gaiman had allowed several weeks to pass without releasing any public statement or taking the podcast’s hosts and producers to court for defamation.
Here’s the thing: I do not, in fact, you should literally Believe All Women, All the Time, in Everything They Say. I think that we as individuals and as a society should take women more seriously than we do, should listen to women, and then should consider their claims within the context that they exist. To make a determination based upon the evidence we have and may not have, and at the end of the day to simply withhold judgment if there is no preponderance of evidence or if making a hasty judgment could cause more harm than good.
That’s why I felt confident posting on BlueSky about my feelings on the case while giving Gaiman the benefit of the doubt, assuming that his response to the podcast was absolutely true. If so, wow, he still sucks. Even if those women are lying liars, two completely independent accounts that match up in a lot of ways, even if that’s all just a coincidence, that two women just happened to make up the exact same story of the same famous man violating their boundaries in the same way, and they both happened to tell a podcast with nothing to gain but infamy and online harassment, even then: Christ, what an asshole Neil Gaiman is.
Anyway, all of that is in the past now, because in the six months since that podcast debuted, more evidence has come out that those women are not, in fact, lying. Not only is Neil Gaiman an asshole by his own admission, but it certainly appears as though he is an abuser at best, a rapist at worst. And a terrible father who is setting his son up to be the same as he is, to boot.
Because this month, New York Magazine has published a detailed follow-up to the Tortoise Media story, and not only do they repeat and further confirm Pavlovich’s story, but they include more horrific details from her time with Gaiman along with the stories of several other women who weren’t included in the initial podcast series. As always, links to everything I discuss are found in the video transcript, which you can access for free using the link in the description, at patreon.com/rebecca, or at skepchick.org. So feel free to go read the entire gross story if you have the stomach for it, but it includes women saying that Gaiman insisted on BDSM without any of the safety protocols that BDSM requires like safe words, and that he penetrated them without consent or even after they clearly and repeatedly stated “no.” Gaiman has responded to this piece with a short post acknowledging that he “could have and should have done so much better. I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could or should have been. I was obviously careless with people's hearts and feelings, and that's something that I really, deeply regret. It was selfish of me. I was caught up in my own story and I ignored other people's.”
However, he insists that he has “never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone,” and therefore all these women are independently lying or somehow mistaken.
In the New Yorker piece, Pavlovich says that there were several times when Gaiman initiated sexual contact in front of his young son: fondling her while watching children’s television together, and even having sex with her in a hotel room while his son played on an iPad a few feet away. She says that the son started referring to her as a slave and demanding that she call him “master,” just like Gaiman did repeatedly with many of the women in the story.
The “master” thing is particularly interesting, because this piece goes into a possible reason for Gaiman’s seeming fetish for violating and dominating young women: the fact that he grew up in a high ranking Scientology family. “The Master,” of course, is the title of the 2012 Paul Thomas Anderson film fictionalizing the story of the founding of the Church of Scientology.
If you’ve been watching me for a minute, you know how I feel about Scientology: they’re a dangerous cult who have been responsible for actual murders, and most recently they were in the news for harassing Danny Masterson’s rape victims in the hopes that they wouldn’t testify against him. For more on that fun story, see this video I made about the topic in 2023.
I’ve been on this beat longer than you might realize. More than a decade ago, I had the opportunity to accompany my pal, writer Jon Ronson, to Scientology’s annual gala at their British headquarters in West Sussex, where they presented an award to some quack who thought they had discovered the cure for autism or something. It was weird. I gave them a fake name, just in case.
I had no idea until now that I had been in the home county of Neil Gaiman, where he grew up with parents at the top of the Scientology hierarchy, his father acting as the official spokesperson of the cult’s UK wing.
The New Yorker points out that L. Ron Hubbard was very much into torture as a punishment for Scientologists who stepped out of line, and he also decreed that children were just adults in tiny bodies, so they should be subjected to the same forms of punishment as adults. They cite someone who knew Gaiman’s parents, who claims that at one point they punished a young Neil by nearly drowning him in a bathtub of cold water, a story that Gaiman would go on to include in his book, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane.” According to the New Yorker, that book was written after Gaiman’s wife, Amanda Palmer, pushed him to talk about his childhood in the cult.
Which brings me to yet another villain. As with Gaiman, I was a fan of Amanda Palmer before I knew anything about her, personally. I lived in Boston at the same time she was there performing with her drummer as the Dresden Dolls, and I went to a show she put on at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, which I quite enjoyed. After the show I met the director, who informed me that Palmer was the worst person he had ever met and he couldn’t wait for the show to end. Since then, every single thing I’ve learned about her has supported that random frustrated exclamation: how she made loads of money from Kickstarter but refused to pay her backup band, how she used people and dropped them, and how she wrote a terrible poem about the Boston Marathon bomber. I stopped paying attention to her.
In this piece, she is a complicated character. She is clearly married to a monster, which gets her sympathy. She is upset to learn from Pavlovich that Gaiman had sex with her in a hotel room as their son played a few feet away on an iPad, not even wearing headphones. She tells the Pavlovich that she loves and supports her and doesn’t want her to kill herself when Pavlovich is at her lowest.
But also, women report Palmer handing them to Gaiman like a “toy” to be played with, broken, and thrown in the trash. She knew how he treated young women but sent Pavlovich to his house alone to babysit, anyway, choosing only to warn Gaiman to “keep hands off her.” When Pavlovich finally went to the police to report that Gaiman had raped her, they said they would need Palmer’s testimony in order to proceed. Palmer refused to talk to them, choosing instead to write a new song: “Another suicidal mass landing on my doorstep — thanks a ton / A few more corpses in the sack / You’ll get away with it; it’s just the same old script / This world is shaped to have your back / You said, ‘I’m sorry,’ then you ran / And went and did it all again.”
Palmer herself has said she has been sexually abused in her past, something that put Gaiman’s future victims at ease. Surely this feminist with a history of being abused wouldn’t marry an abuser, right? Wouldn’t hand them over to an abuser, right? But that’s the unfortunate history of victims of abuse, that many of them continue to end up right back in the hands of abusers. And in this case, it seems as though Palmer ended up as a victim who facilitated the abuse of others.
Much like the fans of the Foo Fighters made excuses for them in the comments on my video about them contributing to the deaths of AIDS patients, and Johnny Depp fans made excuses for him in the comments of my video about him being an obvious abuser, I have no doubt that there will be fans of Neil Gaiman who will continue to insist that this is all smoke, no fire. Maybe the New Yorker reporter is also transphobic, or has some unsavory political connections, or whatever. Maybe you can imagine some magical missing pieces that would somehow explain all of this in a way that justifies Gaiman’s documented behavior. Maybe it’s all just an elaborate conspiracy designed to take down one beloved author. For some reason. Oh! Maybe it’s the Scientologists?
When I was in school, we were taught the philosophy of separating the art from the artist: Death of the Author in one sense, in that it doesn’t matter what an artist means with any piece, but only what the audience understands a piece to mean. And in another sense, that as the audience we should set aside how we feel about the artist, about their personal life, their political stance, their actions in real life, and focus only on the work they produced and judge it on that merit. I’ve always abided by at least that second meaning: I can enjoy Rosemary’s Baby despite Roman Polanski being a rapist; Candide despite Voltaire being a racist; the acoustic version of Everlong despite Dave Grohl spreading dangerous HIV conspiracies in the early 2000s. The only decisions I make with regard to the author is whether or not the great art they produce is worth giving them money. Like, I’m sorry, but I do not care how much fun the Harry Potter video game is. I’ll pass. Seriously, not even worth raising the ol’ skull and crossbones and hitting the high seas for that shit.
But these days I realize there’s a third way we should all learn to separate the art from the artist, and it’s the other side of the coin from learning to appreciate art from an artist you find repugnant: learning to criticize an artist even though you enjoy their art. Yes, Neil Gaiman may have given you decades of joy from his stories. You can still appreciate that, while also acknowledging that he’s a monster. You can even watch the next season of Sandman if you want–my math equation says that that art is not worth supporting that monster, but your math may be different and that’s for you to decide. After all, there are also a lot of worthy actors and writers and directors who you’ll be supporting, too. It’s not black and white. I know that’s uncomfortable, but it’s life.
Oh, but just FYI the New Yorker article does end in a positive place: three of the women who Gaiman abused all flew to Georgia to meet one another on New Year’s Eve, where they gathered around a bonfire and shared their intentions for the coming year. The home where they met? MOTHER FUCKING MICHAEL STIPE’S HOUSE. That absolute king. My childhood queer icon. Vegetarian. Humanist. Pro-choice advocate. Captain Scrummy from the Adventures of Pete & Pete.
See? Sometimes the Artist is okay.
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- Days ago: MOM = 3495 days ago & DAD = 151 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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