To be put off watching anything by Neil Gaiman

[WandsOut]

www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/07/03/exclusive-neil-gaiman-accused-of-sexual-assault

Neil Gaiman has been accused of violent sexual assault by two much younger women - just vile.

Anyone else feeling let down and pissed off by this news?

Fair enough. Maybe not all artists are unpleasant, but I'd hazard that most are. And have to be

• a high degree of self belief
• willing to focus almost exclusively on oneself

Both traits unlikely to produce 'nice' people. Caravaggio was a murderer. Does that mean I shouldn't love his work. Eric Gill was a truly horrible man, who sexually abused his own daughters (and the family dog) but I still like his work.

I'm not into cancel culture. If people want to read or watch his stuff, that's fine by me.

I just think this story needs to be told everywhere because it exposes coercive control in relationships and how perpetrators use the idea of "consent" against their victims. Ideally I'd like to see Neil Gaiman prosecuted in court. But apparently he has a huge PR and legal team working overtime to try to kill the story. Still no coverage in the guardian or BBC.

Sure, in the legal system. But there is a huge range of morally and socially unacceptable behaviour before an act gets to the point of being potentially illegal and therefore tried in court.

For me, the parts of the allegations he has willingly admitted fall into the morally repugnant category and that is enough to change my opinion of the man. Whether the legal side has legs, we shall see

Rowling was cancelled for saying vulnerable women needed single sex spaces.

Neil Gaiman, who notably said nothing to support her whilst she was being sent rape and death, is a man who sexually assaults women until
they are bleeding and passing out.
So much makes sense now about his behaviour. A man who wants to push young women's boundaries and assert his violent dominance over them would never have publicly supported a woman who gets in the way of his fetishes. He's done very well out of his tumblr youth by acting as though he's more enlightened than JKR because he can stir the alphabet soup as a cover for his predatory behaviour.

About as surprising as finding out Marilyn Manson was a wrong-un

JKR received rape and death threats that was meant to say

I've enjoyed some of his work, but I've had an awareness he was a very selfish and self indulgent person since he left his wife, and more importantly, 4 year old son, in New Zealand and travelled to Skye at the beginning of the pandemic. Imagine deserting your little son in the middle of a world emergency because you've had some kind of argument with their mother. My impression was the break up was somethings to do with their open marriage.

Beginning to deeply distrust all male feminists.

'@AyrshireTryer
Perhaps a little early with judgement.
Innocence until proven guilt and all that.'

The point is even if he ends up not guilty of sexual assault, he still thought it was appropriate to engage in sexual contact with a woman he had just hired to look after his kids and who was only in her 20s.

All his nonsense about open relationships has also put me off.

To me that is already enough to stop reading or watching anything he is associated with as he just comes across as a creep.

It is a shame as I was such a fan of the Sandman comics.

As a previous poster said, the things Gaiman has admitted to are incredibly damning. We can’t say he committed a crime yet because he’s had no trial. But the things he admitted to show that he’s not a good guy because of the grotesque imbalance of power.

He admitted to canoodling with his young nanny within hours of meeting her. She was his employee, nearly 40 years his junior, she was alone, vulnerable, a lesbian, and she certainly hadn’t set out that day to get sexually intimate with an old man. She was there to look after his young son.

A good guy would have done his best to make his young employee feel welcome and safe - and it wouldn’t even cross his mind to try it on with her.

The blackout on this story from the likes of the Guardian and BBC means that few people are even aware of these allegations. And the fewer who know, the less likely it is that more women will be emboldened to come forward. They will think no one will believe them.

As Gaiman himself once said, we should believe women. But if they make allegations against him, they must have false memory syndrome! 🙄

That. It always astonishes me how eager MNers are to declare an opinion & believe they "know" the truth, based on limited facts in public domain.

It is a difficult question isn’t it. Can you separate art from artist? There is a movie called Tar that you may like since it is asking the same question.

I would not compare his work with those you mentioned above though. He is a good writer, but hardly an original, heavily inspired by a lot of other fantasy writers.

Prince Andrew didn’t have a trial. So he’s innocent, right?

Or based on an admission Gaiman has made? Did you miss that bit?

Classic beta male behaviour. Hoover up the girls who are clearly misfits with low self esteem. As long as they’re young and fawning, men like NG (rich, white, powerful, charismatic) exploit their lack of boundaries then move on with no consequences.

Amanda has gone really silent in the past year or so, and for such a bolshy over-sharer, her silence has been deafening and it speaks loud NDA volumes imho.

She will have had no choice but to button it because of her love for her young son.

Narcs love breaking strong women down.

In her autobiography, she wrote a chapter about how NG completely ignored her the first time she was really poorly around him.

She uses word salad to justify and excuse his shitty behaviour but for me that would have been the only red flag I needed to split.

It’s a good job I’ve never really liked his writing, and therefore screen adaptations of his work. I feel let down by Susanna Clarke though who is a good friend of his, whose books I adore.

Ditto Saville.

Are you not even reading the replies?
They've been astutely tossing the 'But this is TRIAL by SOCIAL MEDIA!!' nonsense into the bin.

Maybe, instead of parroting an already trashed trope, you could have a go at effectively and comprehensively engaging with and challenging the thoughtful critical responses to it?

I remember a thread on here a while ago. It was about a children's book which had some questionable parts.

I believe Gaiman's contribution was a page about Mrs Santa Claus and how kind she was. He mentioned how 'kind' she was about 20 times in three paragraphs.

It read like it was written by a sexist pig, hardly surprising he has turned out to actually be one.

Disliking and being disgusted by the person is something I can 'sometimes' separate from their art. Thinking here that much we do and have watched, enjoyed, read, is often produced by damaged and thoroughly unlikeable individuals, with truely awful lives. I also think that those that cover up and condone, until someone blows the whistle, on this behaviour are just as unlikeable and dire and perhaps have a great deal to answer for, especially to those damaged by the behaviour! Maybe the issue is why so many are able to do as they do and get away with it for so long. I will still watch what has been produced by his imagination but I will wonder if who he is led to what he produced?

On the face of it I agree it's off-putting. But as a pp said - he's not yet been found guilty, so I suppose we need to wait for a judgement.

But honestly, some of the greatest authors have been absolute shits. Evelyn Waugh was a horrible, horrible man but a complete genius as a writer. Charles Dickens emotionally abused his wife and was creepily selfish and controlling over his very young mistress. Tolstoy admitted to taking advantage of (may have been a euphemism for raping) peasant girls on his estates when a young man.

It's a slippery slope when we start conflating the writer with their art. We'd have no-one left (except Beatrix Potter perhaps!) if we did that.

I don’t think it’s a matter of reasonable or unreasonable - your feelings are your feelings. I look at these things differently, though, especially if it’s something like TV or film where many people contributed to the creative process.

I think of TV and film - where one work is made by many people - as something like a person whose traits come from many ancestors. Sometimes people have awful ancestors, but that doesn’t make them personally awful, even if you can tell very clearly which ancestor a particular trait is from. I can’t stand my husband’s dad. He’s a serially adulterous, allegedly-recovering alcoholic who doesn’t deserve to be related to my favorite person on the planet. But there are aspects of my husband - hobbies, facial features, even food preferences - that obviously come from his dad, and I don’t look at those aspects and revile them. They’re part of his DNA.

In any adaptation of a work by Neil Gaiman, Gaiman is a big contributor to the adaptation’s DNA. But I don’t think of the work as being Gaiman, and therefore something to automatically reject. I’ve read maybe two books by him, and watched the Coraline movie once, so I don’t have any big emotional investment here. But I’ve gone through this whole process with a beloved film where one of the principal actors turned out to be, though not criminal, pretty unsavory.

Books can be more difficult, because they’ve got one author. (Good Omens exempted, in this case.) But if I previously enjoyed a book, I tend to have the attitude that the morally horrible author doesn’t deserve the power to “take it away” from me. Why do I have to lose something because of someone else’s sins or crimes? I didn’t commit them. The author deserves adverse consequences, not me. I might decide to never buy a new copy of a book so the author doesn’t financially benefit, but I wouldn’t refuse to read it again.

People have different mindsets towards these things, though, and as long as you’re not trying to shame anyone who does still like Gaiman’s work, I don’t think you’re unreasonable.

I suppose you have to remember he started out as a comic book writer. I mean he was the thinking man’s comic book writer but still it’s a medium that encourages a very male adolescent form of storytelling.

I used to love Sandman though. I’ll be pretty disappointed if these allegations are true.

Well quite. So many turn out to be deeply predatory and misogynistic, but seem to think if they say the “right thing” it’ll all stay neatly hidden.

Always found he had a creepy vibe and was always disappointed that he had a guest role in Arthur!

Nobody is suggesting we lock him up and throw away the key without a trial. We are saying they the things he says himself he did are pretty grim. Many manipulative predators manage to stay on the right side of the law, doesn’t make them nice people who I want to give money to.