dammit, Neil Gaiman’s a creep, why can’t we have nice things

[erinptah]

So, this sucks.

There’s this podcast coming out with allegations against Gaiman, and their audience + affiliations are both pretty sketchy (the responses to their Twitter post were full of “of course a ~*~trans activist~*~ would abuse women”), so at first I was all “okay, it’s not that this couldn’t be bad, but I’m gonna sit back and wait for more information to shake out before I start having feelings about it.”

 

Welp, more information is shaking out.

FFA is talking about it extensively, as FFA does, which is where I found that Kathryn Tewson on bluesky is making high-quality transcripts of the episodes. Wasn’t sure I was up for listening to the series, so I read these.

So far: Episode 1: The Bath, and Episode 2: The WhatsApps.

Aaaaaand it’s terrible! Broad warning for boundary-breaking manipulation, unsafe sex acts, and general skeeviness.

It’s a touchy thing to talk about, because the woman who’s the central subject here is on-record (at the time, it started in February 2022) saying things like “it was undoubtedly consensual and I enjoyed it.” She says now that it was a lie — she was trying to convince herself it was all fun and okay. To be clear, I believe her. The sticky part is whether Gaiman was legally and/or morally obligated to notice she was lying.

All that said, the overall situation is, he’s getting her into a vulnerable position and then just…steamrollering her into things. In a way that would be creepy and Not Okay even if she did 100% genuinely enjoy it.

And she’s not the only one! She brought up the February 2022 encounter with Amanda Palmer, Gaiman’s wife at the time, who said she was “the fourteenth woman who had gone to her.” There’s a second woman who’s been interviewed for the podcast, who may or may not be part of that 14. Someone dug up this lol_meme thread about a similar situation “roughly a year ago,” which puts it around November 2022. (Heads-up, it’s all in capslock, and ends on a [reasonable] note of “an anonymous forum where anyone can post is not a good place to launch serious criminal allegations.”)

I had to double-check the Gaiman-Palmer timeline. They married in 2011, had a son in 2015, separated but jointly announced they weren’t getting divorced in May 2020, reconciled some time in 2021, and jointly announced they were getting divorced in…November 2022.

The only part of that I registered at the time was the 2020 one, because they were part of the national COVID lockdown in New Zealand, and Gaiman made the news by breaking the lockdown to fly all the way back to the UK. FFA had threads about that too (May 4 rubbernecking and May 5 continuation). Celebrity-drama fandom was talking like it was this juicy trove of gossip, but it was just a series of melodramatically-vague posts from Palmer, a brief “please respect our privacy in this difficult time” from Gaiman, and layers upon layers of wild speculation about what might be going on. With a few confident statements that Palmer would definitely spill more details eventually, because omg she’s such a dramatic attention-seeker, how could she not?

…Yeah. If that blowup was Palmer’s first time processing/confronting the idea that her husband was serially harassing their employees? (Inferring that it didn’t stick that time, but it happened again in 2022, and that time it did.)

In retrospect — her drama level was completely appropriate. And she was incredibly restrained about the details! And it’s hard to imagine anything she could’ve said, in terms of making accusations or whistleblowing, that wouldn’t have been written off as “ooh, look at that wacky Amanda Palmer, just being dramatic and seeking attention as usual.”

Ugh.

tl;dr everything about this is horrible and I hate it, the end.