If you haven’t read the New York magazine story about superstar fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, in which several women accuse him of grotesque sexual abuse, you probably shouldn’t. I read it to write this column, and now have pictures in my head of human depravity that I wish I didn’t have.
Think of the typical rapist’s domination and degradation of his victim, and triple it. Urine is involved. Gaiman demanded his partners (from his point of view) or victims (from theirs) call him “Master.” What better way to demonstrate Mastery over another human being than to force her to agree to do something humiliating she did not want to do?
The story raises the questions these stories do: How do we know who’s telling the truth? Why do these people matter so much to us? And — this is the most distressing question — how could such a good guy do that?
Is he guilty?
Did he do these things? Gaiman denies it. “I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever,” he said on in a statement on his website.
The statement itself — admitting he’d been a bad man but insisting he wasn’t a rapist — makes sense and could be true, especially with his use of the slippery category of “consent.” It may all have happened the way he claims.
Against his plausible defense, the story, by experienced journalist Lila Shapiro, is heavily researched with subjects speaking on the record, and with evidence from texts and other sources. Her previous exposes have not been challenged, as far as I can find. The magazine’s lawyers undoubtedly vetted it very closely and thought it safe to publish.
Suggestively, few of his friends have come to his defense. He has also not threatened to sue the writer and magazine for libel, which would seem the natural response to being accused of such actions.
Granting the inevitable ambiguity of the evidence, I think Shapiro’s story substantially (and possibly completely) true.
Why does he matter?
That leads to the second question: Why do people care so much? Why are thousands of very distraught and very angry people blasting him on the web? He’s just one writer in a world filled with them.
I think his admirers feel betrayed. One common complaint is that he called himself a feminist and supported trans and LGBT people, and seemed on the side of all that is good, yet was living a secret second life where he abused women.
I can understand liking Gaiman. I have never read his fiction or seen the television productions, but I have read some of his essays and addresses. He seems to me, as he said of G.K. Chesterton’s detective Father Brown, a “prince of humanity and empathy.” (In, let me be clear, his writing.) In the nonfiction writing of his I’ve read, he’s as humane as Kurt Vonnegut and even more genial.
People loved his stories and the humanity and empathy they saw in them. Not every writer supplies that and does so in very entertaining stories, and with such public stature.
He wasn’t just a guy who wrote stories. He was a hero, a kind of wartime leader of unique gifts and power standing up for the good, like Churchill, and people invested themselves in him.
Whether that was wise is a question, but we all do it, because it’s human to admire heroes. His readers naturally feel betrayed, grossly betrayed, and people so abused rightly feel angry.
How could he be that person?
This leads to the third question: what made him the man who would do that and how could he be one man in public and another in private?
Not many people have been asking this question, compared with all those condemning him. But it’s still an important question, if only to be alert to such people and (uncomfortable as this is) to be alert to the ways in which we can be like them.
We all want to manipulate others and have some skills at it. Gaiman writes that on a billboard so we can see it.
Shapiro reports that Gaiman grew up the child of parents who were at the top of the Church of Scientology. Its founder insisted that children be punished as if they were adults, and the list of offenses for which they could be punished seem to have been great.
“If a child laughed inappropriately or failed to remember a Scientology term,” she writes, “they could be sent to the ship’s hold and made to chip rust for days or confined in a chain locker for weeks at a time without blankets or a bathroom.” Someone who knew the family then said that his father put him in a cold bath and “drowned him to the point where Neil was screaming for air.”
You can see how a childhood like that could create a man who needed to feel that he was the master, the one in charge and not the one being drowned in cold water. It’s an uncomfortable fact, but there but for the grace of God (or for the accidents of the universe) go we.
You can also see how he could live his life as two different people. He could genuinely be the writer people loved and the man who abused women in private without seeing any contradiction.
One was his work, his calling, the place he could be his best self. The other was recreation, enjoyed on his own time and nobody’s business, the place he could be his instinctive self, especially since the domination he enjoyed was (he could tell himself) consensual.
Shapiro writes that Gaiman’s ex-wife disagreed with his belief that people didn’t fall in love, and pointed to the stories he’d written of people falling in love. “‘That’s the whole point, darling,’ he said. ‘Writers make things up.’”
David Mills’ previous column was “Why Donald Trump talks about taking over Panama and Greenland.”
First Published: January 15, 2025, 10:54 p.m.
Updated: January 16, 2025, 3:00 a.m.