Neil Gaiman, self-proclaimed feminist. Colin McPherson/Getty Images
“Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to be believed, at the ballot box; with art; by listening, and change this world for the better.” Neil Gaiman isn’t just one of the world’s most popular fantasy writers, he’s also a self-proclaimed feminist and defender of women.
All the more shocking, then, to hear the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him in recent months. And how strange the silence that they were met with. Until now, that is.
In a six-part podcast series by Tortoise Media, hosted by Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia, a succession of women air allegations of sexual impropriety or abuse against Gaiman, author of Good Omens and The Sandman series. They raise serious questions about consent within relationships that were, at best, highly asymmetrical. Writer and broadcaster Julia Hobsbawm, for example, says Gaiman “jumped on her… out of the blue” in an “aggressive, unwanted” pass in London in 1986, when she was 22. Another, “K”, claims she and Gaiman began a romantic relationship in 2003, when she was 20 and he was in his mid-40s. She alleges she was subjected to rough and painful sex “she neither wanted nor enjoyed.” In 2007, she claims he performed non-consensual penetrative intercourse on her after she had repeatedly asked him not to.
Scarlett, another accuser, claims Gaiman assaulted her in a bath at his New Zealand home, hours after they had first met. He was 61, she a 22-year-old nanny. Gaiman said that they “cuddled” and “made out” in the bath — and that the encounter was consensual. But Scarlett claims that Gaiman also assaulted her with “rough and degrading penetrative sexual acts” she hadn’t agreed to. When Scarlett attempted suicide, Gaiman’s response was to say that he was also suicidal. In May 2022, after her employment with the author had ceased, Scarlett signed an NDA with Gaiman which was backdated to her first day of work.
When I spoke to Scarlett last week, she told me how it felt impossible to not be impressed by Gaiman’s fame and status, while at the same time not feeling at all sexually attracted or drawn to him. “I’ve never read any of his books,” Scarlett tells me. “He just talked about himself all the time.”
For Scarlett, “Gaiman’s superfans somehow seem to think that they have personally been betrayed by the allegations because they see him as sharing their own tick-box ‘progressive’ values,” she told me. “It’s beyond belief for me that people just aren’t acknowledging that a man in his Sixties has admitted that he got into the bath with his 23-year-old employee within the first few hours that they met.”
Scarlett, as with the other women who have come forward, was vulnerable at the time she met Gaiman, and, as she describes it, “desperate for love”. “Pretending to myself I had fallen for him was a way to kind of trick myself to think that I had not been sexually exploited,” she said.
Given the seriousness of the allegations made against such a famous author, you might have expected the Tortoise podcast to have been met with righteous anger. And it was. But not the sort that you might think. Despite the careful reporting — which includes regular reminders that Gaiman denies any wrongdoing whatsoever — many of his fans have expressed their outrage at the podcast, claiming that Johnson is a “Right-wing Terf” with an axe to grind. The podcast, they say, is an attempt by anti-trans activists to smear him. As Rachel Johnson tells me, “The trans activist lefties discrediting the podcast as ‘terf’ made by the sister of Boris is purest misogyny. It’s meticulously researched and it’s fair to a fault.”
Perhaps his impeccable Left liberal feminist credentials have confused people. A whole book has been written about how women-friendly Gaiman’s work is: Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose. The podcast also found two female advocates. One says she’s known Gaiman for 12 years, and that while she’s alive to his faults, doesn’t believe him capable of sexual misconduct. She says she would “go to the wall for him on this” and be “stunned if the allegations were true”. Yet the same friend also said that Gaiman has autism, suggesting that perhaps “some of his mistakes” may be explained by its contribution to what she called his “naivety”.
