Tag: People: Neil Gaiman

If you haven’t read the recent news about sexual assault allegations against author Neil Gaiman, NPR has a good summary. If you want the details, the Vulture article has them, but you should exercise caution as there are detailed descriptions of sexual assault and abuse, including sexual assault in the presence of a child. Gaiman’s ex-wife, Amanda Palmer, is also implicated in putting women in Gaiman’s way, and has issued a statement of her own, mostly saying she can’t talk about it.

I’m watching a lot of people wonder who in SFF authorial circles knew what and when about Gaiman. Apparently Gaiman was known as a missing stair who had sex with young female fans, but nothing has come up that suggested he was known to be a rapist. Most of the fannish people, like other authors, who know Gaiman deal with him in a professional context, and only know his professional persona. Tori Amos, the first spokesperson for the sexual assault hotline RAINN, was a close friend of Gaiman’s and addressed the allegations against Gaiman after the news first broke in July. If a woman who was close enough to Gaiman to ask her to be a godparent to her daughter didn’t see it, how was anyone else supposed to?

I’ve read a lot of people wondering what to do with Gaiman’s work: his books, his comics, the TV shows based on his works. For me it’ll be on a case-by-case basis. I was once a fan of the Darkover books, but parts of the stories I loved were recast by finding out her history with her husband and her abuse of her daughter. With J.K. Rowling, I came to the books as an adult with life experience and some feminist classes in college under my belt, so I noticed some hinky gender politics that many of her fans who got the books in childhood reasonably missed. Rowling’s heel turn into radical transphobia was disappointing but not shocking to me. Gaiman is going to fall somewhere in between for me. I’ll figure out how I feel about the collaborative works, particularly the Good Omens TV series, when I try to watch them.

Meanwhile I’m rereading Claire Dederer’s essay What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? again and moving her book on the same subject further up my TBR pile.