Neil Gaiman accused of sexual assault

[WandsOut]

www.yahoo.com/entertainment/sandman-writer-neil-gaiman-denies-142813982.html

Story still unfolding in the news

Publishers Weekly has just picked it up. No MSM yet that I can see, have to assume they're doing some VERY careful legals. Possibly more to come?

I found this point very interesting:

I didn’t think about that. It makes so much sense.

It's been in the MSM - telegraph had it, and I thought some others?

It's easier to pretend you're ok with it than admit that whether or not you wantthis thing to happen won't matter a jot in determining whether or not it actually happens. You can feel like a fully bodily autonomous human being, the sort of human being who really matters, for a while longer.

Yes this describes how I felt in my relationship with my long term ex too. I stopped saying what I wanted because it was too painful knowing what mattered to me, and my feelings about things, would be ignored or slapped down by my partner who was supposed to love me. It was easier to not say anything so he didn’t have so many opportunities to make his lack of respect and care so clear, and I could carry on trying to convince myself things were ok.

I’ve sometimes wondered if there’s something related going on with the excusing of paedophilia by parts of the queer/trans movement. We know identifying as trans (at least for young people) seems to have strong statistical link to being sexually abused. If paedophilia isn’t wrong, then you can convince yourself nothing bad happened to you.

Not RTFT so sorry if this ha already been picked up, but the Guardian published a piece by Gaiman on Saturday (https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/06/an-explosion-of-talent-iain-bankss-the-wasp-factory-at-40?CMP=share_btn_url )

While I don't think people should be cancelled at the drop of a hat (we've seen enough of that ourselves), I do think the paper should have maybe paused putting his name on their content when such unpleasant allegations are being raised.

Exactly this. Why would women make up lies like this, when we know there are thousands and thousands of men who behave that way, and we know that the more famous and rich they are, the more extreme their abuse becomes?

Of course anyone could make up a lie about a celebrity, but creating ones that show a similar pattern of behaviour to one that's been known about in the industry for years?

"Male feminists in the arts" = massive red flag

It's been in the DM, Telegraph and Metro

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13598325/The-Sandman-Good-Omens-author-Neil-Gaiman-denies-allegations-sexually-abusive-behaviour-against-two-women-consensual-relationships.html

Its almost like it their modus operandi... how many has it been now?

But but but mALe fEmiNiSt

Such a tired old story, isn't it?

I note that below the line, most of the commentary is "Disgusting. These women consented, are clearly just regretful and after his money. Shameful. Trial by social media" etc etc.

Keeping it classy as usual, eh, DM. I am just so fed up with the depths and prevalence of misogyny across society in general. Also the ignorance. So many people just don't give a shit.

I hadn't looked BTL. Fucking hell how depressing. Rachel from NZ trying her best.

I noticed that. Totally tone deaf.

He seems too, to have that great fear and loathing of incipient old age that so often characterises predatory men who seek to assuage their terror by brutally insinuating themselves into non consensual sex with vulnerable young women.

I'm not so sure that's to do with ageing/death. More the fact that young women are way more likely to be vulnerable and have fewer resources. He knows exactly what he's doing.

It's not often you'll find me defending The Guardian, but supplements like 'Saturday' are often planned weeks ahead and printed days in advance during press downtimes.
You're right, somebody should have picked up on it, but they're journalists - always thinking about the next issue, not the one they've already signed off.

The cynic in me thinks his PR team knew what was coming and wanted to get on the front foot with the Guardian article...

I guess he will have known this was coming. He left NZ (and his four year old kid) when he realised that Scarlett was going to be more troublesome than he'd thought. And the podcast contacted him with lots of very specific questions, so he would have known that this was all going to come out. He would have been hoping to get in front of it somehow.

But then again, maybe in his arrogance, he thought nothing would stick to him. He has text messages from Scarlett 'proving' she consented so what can she actually do. He knows, like everyone knows, that a woman's word is worth only a 50th of a man's when that man is a famous celebrity. And he's been cultivating his female friends for a while, grooming them to stand up for him.

I actually think AP is the key to all of this. She could completely unravel NG if she chose to. But she will be risking her own reputation. At the moment, it seems she's staying silent. I wonder if she will find a way to damn Neil without incriminating herself - or whether he knows too much and will take her down with him. I'm not sure either of them are especially interested in protecting their son.

This is a loooong time without a lengthy wordy statement - probably because he knows it will explode across social media in a way that the news hasn't yet.

Plus a social media purge of his and Amanda's posts.

Only seeing a few people defending him now compared to a few days ago and the ones who are getting a lot of pushback.
Questions floating around:

Is his "goodness" carefully curated?

How can you be for socially "double plus good" causes but also exploit a power dynamic that is more than obvious to someone of his supposed vast intelligence? That's got most of his fans in circles.

Was it like this for Saville at the time? All those good causes.

But they have crisis teams in place for exactly this kind of scenario, plus a list of who to watch no doubt. Unless there's no investigative journalism going on at the Guardian anymore and all they are doing is sitting in the bedrooms playing Roblox in their underwear and getting Chat GPT to write their articles.

@WandsOut How did you get hold of that footage of Guardian journalists in their own homes? 😂

I was talking to someone who says they’ve known him socially for a long time, who had no idea. If it’s true he must compartmentalise very tightly.

That's par for the course, is it? My former brother-in-law was abusing my sister for two years before I had any inkling of what was going on. Which is less time, obviously, but an awful lot closer than "kind of knows them socially." I thought he was a jolly, charming bloke whose worst fault was laziness. These men are masters at what they do. They're not slipping into committing these atrocities by accident.

Oh, god, @VictorianBigot, your mention of the cat made me remember what it was like at one point in my life when I lived in a shared house and one of the others became a crack addict and invited his crack addict, thieving, pimp mates in, too. I sent my cat away to be fostered by a friend (after the crack addict had sold all the catfood I'd bought...) but I had friends saying "what about YOU, though, and I just couldn't see it.

Well, it's not the sort of thing he's going to drop into everyday conversation, is it? "I just happened to be abusing the nanny the other day and it occurred to me that someone should do a retrospective piece about 'The Wasp Factory'" At some level they know it's something that the rest of us would find objectionable so they're pretty careful about not letting it slip. Curate the narrative carefully!

Anyway, way back in the day, I was a Gaiman fan, of sorts - and if anything, more a fan of other fans of his, as in the days before being a nerd was cool, shared nerdy books helped you connect with people like you, and NG facilitated this - he had a forum on his website, he attended events like (almost) a normal person, etc etc. He had bags of charm, and really spent time on cultivating his fan base. The lines for book signings were so very long because he'd doodle in your books, use two different pens, etc. It was easy to be charmed, and to connect with other Gaiman fans who were also charmed. I didn't like everything he wrote, far from it (Neverwhere was pedestrian at best, and Ocean a total bore) but I did really enjoy some, and loved Good Omens.

But, but, but. As time went on he really seemed to buy more and more into his own fairly unpleasant self-image of the Rock Star Author, someone who wasn't bound by the trite rules of conventionality that us normies lived by, and I drifted away. He left his wife (and the mother of his now-adult kids), and threw himself into the train-wreck open marriage with AP. (Though he'd allegedly tell female fans that he was in an open marriage with his first wife, too, which I bet she didn't know about.) Rumours of women in publishing warning each other about him at events, the flight from NZ, AP and his most recent child during covid, the endless "wise" (read: trite and usually sexist) pronouncements on the social justice issues of the day, it all just got grimmer and grimmer.

Tl;Dr as an ex-fan, I'm totally unsurprised by these allegations, and believe every word.