Neil Gaiman, broken people, deviance, and making Gods out of ordinary men
Should we be surprised when our heroes turn out to be villains?
As children, we often gravitate to people, places, and items that have nostalgic meaning, especially if these things we have experienced came during moments of stress, shock, maturation, or other turning points in our lives. Growing up during the early aughts through the early teens, anyone that liked science fiction or fantasy likely had at least heard of Neil Gaiman.
He’s a talented writer, and the recent scandal that broke out in the summer of 2024 bears some examination, as new allegations around his behavior were detailed quite gorily in a Vulture piece, which you can read in the footnotes.1 It’s perverse, grotesque stuff, especially if the account of multiple forced sexual acts on a non-consenting adult in front of Gaiman’s then-five-year-old-son are true.
Accused of being a fuddy-duddy and a prude at the best of times, it becomes difficult to often know where to tow the line between “adults are free to engage in whatever sexual activities they want” and “these specific actions are debased, repulsive, and gross”, since we live in a culture that still actively makes fun of virgins—some who choose because of religious observance and others simply because opportunity and/or the right person has not presented itself. Because of the sexual gray area and laiz a faire attitude toward all sexual activity as good, but only if both parties are consenting and have specifically laid it out in exacting legal terms … people can get caught in the uncomfortable position of saying, “this grosses me out” only then to be openly school-marmed by others who inform them, condescendingly, that we cannot judge other people for their choices.
It has become a terrible social sin that we don’t approve any and all lifestyle choices as good. Well. Pfft. No thanks.
But with the nature of the internet, taking a stand has never been easier, and requires little in blood or sweat, outside of using one’s thumbs to equivocate one’s beliefs in solidarity. We must ourselves known to others, that we believe as they do, mostly for performative measures to be in the-know, hip-to-the-crowd, and pulling the appropriate party line of acceptance to show that we are also of the right ilk and morally superior to those who oppose or do not stand with us.
Per Carl Truman, well-known for “The Triumph of the Modern Self”, for First Things,2
Gaiman, once a vocal supporter of the #MeToo movement, fits into that category of performative feminists whose commitment to the cause doesn’t extend beyond social media platforms. I have always found such cheap piety to be deeply implausible. Not to mention, the existence of ex-wives (two, in Gaiman’s case) is always a rather troubling sign. What do they think of their erstwhile husband’s vocal online advocacy for women, women’s rights, and “the gynocracy”? The proof of a passionate commitment to respecting women is not some cost-free recitation of feminist clichés on social media that garners congratulatory retweets or Instagram likes. It is how these men treat real women in real time. Ex-wives are likely expert commentators on such matters, something that applies to the famous, such as Gaiman, as much as to the unknown online wannabe.
In very short summation, Gaiman has been publicly exposed for engaging in nonconsensual BDSM acts with various women—most of them in their early to mid 20s up to their 30s—women who were in his or his wife’s employ, were fans, or were individuals he knew and met through his work as a writer and creative. When the news broke in July, it was disappointing to read the allegations coming out. Gaiman is a deft weaver of stories and characters, with heart, energy, humor, and clever turns in the fantasy genre. Stardust and Coraline remain fond favorites from childhood and early reading years.
Despite his skill, however, therein lie a darkness of the soul, one which his second ex-wife Amanda Palmer, relates, as well as the “real truth” behind writers, if not creatives as a whole.3
“He’d believed for a long time, deep down, that people didn’t actually fall in love,” she wrote in her book. “‘But that’s impossible,’” she told him. He’d written stories and scenes of people in love. “‘That’s the whole point, darling,’ he said. ‘Writers make things up.’”
Whenever scandals relating to the personal lives of our modern heroes break out, the public reaction of heart-ache, garment rending, and proverbial wailing is somewhat astonishing. In the modern age, we’ve replaced the pagan gods of various pantheons—take your pick amongst the Viking, Druidic, Roman or Greek, or eastern religions—with secular men and women who have attained unfathomable fame, glory, and notoriety. It is good to remember that the word fan is shorthand for fanatic.
The excesses of fervor in the Vulture article demonstrate the level of obsessive love and admiration lauded onto a very human man—and I am in no way going to defend Gaiman’s actions. From the article:4
Women would turn up to his signings dressed in the elaborate Victorian-goth attire of his characters and beg him to sign their breasts or slip him key cards to their hotel rooms. One writer recounts running into Gaiman at a World Fantasy Convention in 2011. His assistant wasn’t around, and he was late to a reading. “I can’t get to it if I walk by myself,” he told her. As they made their way through the convention side by side, “the whole floor full of people tilted and slid toward him,” she says. “They wanted to be entwined with him in ways I was not prepared to defend him against.” A woman fell to her knees and wept.
Over the summer, I had the opportunity to work with a group of skilled musicians of some renown; potential participants would audition, and if selected, you paid the fee for the week-long workshop. All week, other students of the program referred to the group members not only by their first names, but in a personal, more intimate tone of friendship and familiarity, chums who had been separated for a time and knowing one another on a first name basis, were catching up after a long while. Some were returning student participants from previous years, but most of us had not been. The blurring of boundaries of familiarity with total, rather famous strangers, seemed perverse. We knew nothing really personal of our teachers, and there was a contingent of the hangers-on, those who desired to be closer to the fame, that revealed a strange hunger. Others just couldn’t read the room and didn’t pick up on the friendly and kind but subtle emotional distance of the instructors from being too personal or friendly.
Cases like Neil Gaiman strike a nerve, especially in light of watching the experience of others fawn and behave in a chummy way with people they have never met before in a learning setting and assume a level of comfortable intimacy that, with other random perfect strangers in any other situation, wouldn’t be socially acceptable without first having developed an actual relationship.
The article gives a taste of this, a phenomenon that is common across multiple industries and disciplines, regardless of what it is:5
People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community,” one of Gaiman’s former friends, a fantasy writer, tells me. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works.
People who feel a little (or a lot) unloved, abandoned, neglected, lonely, or misunderstood often flock to people that they think or feel in some way speaks to their experience of the world, and they project this belief that the artist/creator is deep, insightful, and they have a meaningful connection to that person’s work since they have adopted it as a part of their identity, as the quote above details. They’re seeking a taste of the transcendent in the work of a mere mortal, to connect them to God in some greater way.
But these works are the works of human hands, humans who are fallible, flawed, and sometimes, so deeply selfish and perverse to the point that their actions cannot be described as anything other than evil.
I’m a believer in calling a spade a spade. The problem lies with the audience, who buy into the illusion that the heroes they have lifted up are Herculean—although most people have likely not read of the adventures of Hercules/Heracles, and all of the selfish, cheating, foolish activities he engaged in before he attempted redemption in the 12 Labors as atonement for his sins. Then again, Neil Gaiman didn’t murder his wife and children in a drug-induced rage.
People enjoy an illusion; magic tricks and sleight of hand are entertaining distractions, after all. Unfortunately, we run the risk of believing that what we see is reality, and not the manufactured image to support the act. Gaiman was known for being a slightly awkward, mild-mannered liberal feminist Brit with a flop of messy hair. That he enjoyed, allegedly, engaging in sadistic non-consensual BDSM with vulnerable young women, some of whom may have been (and probably likely were) blinded by the sheen of his fame and the opportunity of being graced with the attention of this well-known and gifted storyteller. To be flattered by the attentions of someone well-known for their talent is a terribly human thing; it means that we are special to them, one who has been graced with talent or fame that we, as a misplaced desire for love and adoration, desire for ourselves. We humans are wired for attention and connection. Every interaction and look is processed by our brains, constantly sifting information to make connection and form relationships; in good theory, it’s a great evolutionary strategy for survival and the forming of bonds for stable societies.
But being blind to the predatory nature of others is, if nothing else in the roster of this story, a flaw in the individual with a bad radar system, a.k.a., a bad sense of judgement. Feminists often will point to the idea that women are groomed and trained from an early age to be the social lubricant between people, that we can’t turn others down because it would be rude. In the instance of the primary accuser of the Vulture article, the woman clearly says no repeatedly to the advances Gaiman. It isn’t that she doesn’t know how to say no. She’s young and naive, to be sure, a sin many of us are redeemed of through difficult experiences, growth, and maturity. The sin she commits is against herself for not listening to her own instincts.
Often when we have figures we look up to, or simply are wowed by, we swallow our instincts down and ignore them, rather than pay attention to the warning signs.
Shapiro’s article explores moderately deep—as far as one may be able to go when the reported parties relay standard messages through their legal teams—into the marriage. She even looks at a facet of Gaiman’s life that has generally been ignored: his parent’s involvement in the Church of Scientology. More to the point, that his father acted very much as the spokesperson and face for the UK branch of the religious cult, and likely knew the founder L. Ron Hubbard, who lived down the street from the family for two years before going on the lam from various governmental ABC agencies.
It is supposition, but if the allegation that the darkness that rules Gaiman’s heart and festered deviant sexual proclivities manifested in at least two decades worth of predation on five (or more, there may be more, we don’t know) different women of varying ages is surprising, it probably shouldn’t be.
The public’s fan’s tendency to be shocked at the revelations that their heroic idols are selfish and broken individuals should come as no surprise. There’s likely a good bit of overlap between those who’ve read Harry Potter and those who’ve read Gaiman’s work, but Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape are incredible examples of people who can and do good, whilst still being blinded by their own egos, pride, and foibles. Characters more often than not are taken from real life people or composites, and serve as vehicles to explore the depths of humanity.
That our favorite creators have skeletons in the closet should not be a surprise. Simply because they are famous and their works are revered or well-done, by no means indicates any level of virtue on the part of those people in their personal lives, despite the lip-service they peddle to the media.
Marion Zimmer Bradley (MZB) is considered a well-regarded and phenomenal writer in her own genre of fantasy—probably best known for her work “The Mists of Avalon” and its subsequent sequels. The big scandal that broke out about a decade or so ago was the memoir written by her daughter of her mother and step-father’s sexual abuse of the girl and her sibling. This included being shopped out to the couple’s pedophilic friends and their sexual appetites for tender young flesh.
A similar revelation came out about the same time on Picasso—not only his wildly fragrant womanizing—but the longterm emotional and psychological abuse of one of his longtime partners and muses.
Our problem is not that there is more or less evil in the world, that people have become coarser, likelier to indulge their tastes and try to convince us that their self-destruction through drugs or wanton indiscriminate sexual attitudes are enlightened and make them superior in their life experience.
It is that we have bought into the hype that these people we admire are virtuous and are just like us in the most idealistic way possible.
What they are is as prone to doing selfish, stupid, wicked things as anyone else. They’re just wealthier with better notoriety. It is our naiveté to believe otherwise. In a world devoid and stripped of symbolic meaning through ancestral culture (culture that would teach us to be wary of the predatory men and women through oral tales), that has been colored neon and packaged in cheap celophane and plastic, we’ve lost the narrative thread to understand the substrate of the complexity and nuance not only of people, but even the language and ability to identify, define, judge, and name what is good and what is evil. The terms have been watered down to irrelevancy and it is social sin “to judge”—a point Libes’ makes, since the cultural waters of today’s modern morals are as grey as soapy dishwater.
It is to this point that Truman highlights Gaiman’s sexual degeneracy. In a culture where right and wrong no longer have meaning, that it be a terrible mark upon us to “yuck someone’s yum”, we have lost the courage and yardsticks to determine when an action has devolved into a travesty. Such, perhaps, is the inevitable endpoint of the arguments made in “The Culture of Narcissism”.
Artists certainly do create and entertain us, but it does bear reminding that they are deeply imperfect figures. The hurt and sense of betrayal and shock we may feel is real, but only because we idolize too much and believe too strongly in the fantasy. Cases of this nature are a reminder that even banal, unassuming faces can hide terrible darkness, as much as beauty can reveal an ugly heart in truly unmasked moments.
Perhaps, we should take a beat and return to reading our children the old fairytales, rife with symbolic meaning about spotting predators and black hearts that intend only the worst for us. To Libes’ point, she insinuates that a return of culture to traditional values of family, fidelity, and virtue would set us straight. Unfortunately, human depravity has existed since the pre-Christian era of the Western cannon. Caligula and the supposed excesses of Nero and other Roman emperors are quite well-documented. Even my beloved Roman Catholicism has been dealing with the scourge of pedophilia since at least 1100. There is nothing new under the sun, and we exist in not a post-modern society, but a post-pagan one, with a return to sexual attitudes of old that all things are acceptable, subjectively depending on the context.
In Gaiman’s case, rape and sexual assault is at present norm, still deplorable. To be surprised that humans, even and especially those with fame, wealth, power, and glory to their name, should still engage in despicable acts reveals how naive we as a society have become to the darkness that lives in the souls of men. All actions are a choice, and even our brightest stars can still be tainted by inner darkness.
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Lila Shapiro: There Is No Safe Word: How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades, Vulture, Jan. 13, 2025
Carl Truman: Neil Gaiman and the Failure of Modern Sexual Ethics, First Things, Jan. 23, 2025
Sorry, I did rip-off her title a bit. Liza Libes: Neil Gaiman, #MeToo, and the Moral Crisis of BDSM, Pens and Poison, Jan 23, 2025
Shapiro, Vulture.
Ibid.
Ibid.