If Gaiman was innocent, he’d be shouting it from the rooftops. He’d be suing Tortoise and all the other media outlets, suing the women for defamation, and fighting with every fibre of his being to clear his name. He’s got money, after all.
Instead, he says he half-recognises some of the things and realises he needs to work on himself and do better. And he hasn’t spoken out earlier out of “respect” for his accusers. Those are not the words of an innocent man who has just been unfairly smeared as an abuser.
I am disappointed in Rachel Johnson for being shaken by these consequences for Gaiman. I don’t much like cancellation either and we know people can be cancelled for ridiculous things like having the wrong opinion, but Gaiman has admitted to enough bad stuff to merit a fall from grace in the public eye.
In the absence of proper criminal procedures, social cancellation is a kind of justice. Why should those women have to see him being fawned over in the media as some kind of comic book darling, raking in millions from all the TV and film adaptations of his work, when they know what he did to them?
A decent 61-year-old guy does not get in the bath uninvited with his new 23-year-old employee and stick his fingers up her. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she was a lesbian, she was alone and vulnerable, and had no intention of getting it on with Gaiman.
Was he a rapist? Difficult to prove one way or another, but we do know he’s a sleazy creepy bugger who treats women like meat while pretending to be a feminist ally.