Last summer, Tortoise Media released a podcast about one of the most famous authors in the world, Neil Gaiman. In the six-part series, five women allege that Gaiman assaulted them, physically abused them, raped them, and exerted coercive financial and emotional control to get them to submit to sexual relationships or acts with him. Many of these women were decades younger (Gaiman is 64). Some were fans. One was a woman who lived in a Gaiman owned property. One was his young child’s nanny.

The series is called ‘Master’, what Gaiman made these women call him.

The podcast made some waves in fandom circles and was lightly covered in mainstream media. Tortoise Media is not a well-known outlet. One of the journalists, Rachel Johnson, is Boris Johnson’s sister and TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), while Gaiman has been openly critical of Boris Johnson and is an outspoken supporter of trans-rights. That’s just enough muddling to question the source when the target is a feminist ally who has a history of supporting women’s causes, and whose work often has an overtly feminist stance. Even after #MeToo, the Gaiman podcast didn’t make the level of impact the seriousness of the allegations warranted. I would bet, though I have no proof, that a lot of fans simply didn’t listen to it.

Gaiman is not only one of the most famous and beloved writers in the world, he’s also one of the most readily accessible ones.

He started a blog in 2001 that he maintains to this day with a readership of over a million. He joined Twitter (X) in 2008. He joined Tumblr in 2011. Fans could reach him easily and they did. He responded to their tweets, answered their Tumblr questions, addressed rumours and media coverage on his website.

He is one of the most famous writers in the world, but he’s also just our friend Neil, who happens to be a really popular author and is just a click away.

Certainly, if he was a monster, we’d have noticed.

***

In a cold winter in the late 90s, I was a 19-year-old undergraduate. I scraped up money from my three part time jobs to buy a VIP ticket to a charity event benefiting the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund. The star of the evening was my favourite author, Neil Gaiman, whose award-winning series, The Sandman, was about to end its run. I was heartbroken over the impending end of the comics – it was so sharp, so clever, so intelligent in the way it layered references to folklore, mythology, religion, Shakespeare, literature and popular culture into plot lines. You could enjoy the stories on the surface level. But maybe if you were also sharp and clever and intelligent, you could unlock the extra layers of meaning. Perhaps you caught that the title of one of the story arcs was a reference to an Ibsen play. Maybe you found a slip of dialog referencing your favourite niche singer. She wasn’t popular yet. But Neil knew her, and you knew her, and maybe then Neil knew the kind of person you were, and you felt connected to a community of comic book fans and music lovers and readers.

At this point in my life, Gaiman was one of the authors who had made a huge impact on my creative journey. Aspirational journey, at 19. Pouring over Sandman, I thought that maybe I, too, could create intricate fantasy worlds. Maybe I, too, could be a writer. I just didn’t understand how to do it. There was no one in my immediate family who could offer me guidance. It seemed worth it to trade grocery money for a ticket that would not only allow me into the live reading portion of the benefit to say goodbye to a story I loved, but also to the reception Gaiman would be attending afterwards.

The afterparty was held in the now defunct Words and Pictures Museum of comic art. In a gallery lined with Dave McKean’s massive, multi-media paintings that he had created for Sandman cover art, I waited awkwardly on the edge of the crowd talking to Gaiman. He was patient with their questions and never seemed annoyed, even though the real reception with food and drink was actually several floors above this gallery, and we had to be keeping him from relaxing after his two hours on stage. People drifted away. Finally, it was just me and him.

I won’t pretend I remember exactly how our conversation went. However at one point, I asked what I had waited all that time for; how would I, some teenaged nobody in rural Massachusetts, break into the comics industry? “Well,” he responded, “let’s get you a job.” Gaiman took my arm and escorted me into the party, steered me through the crowd, and deposited me in front of a tall, middle-aged man. “This is Christie,” Gaiman said to the owner of an indie comics publishing company, “she wants to work in comics.”

And that was that. I had a job.

We interacted infrequently throughout my career. Every time we did, he was the same warm, kind man he was the night we met. He’d ask how I was doing when he’d call the office. Sometimes he’d suggest something I should read. When I got married, he sent a card.

I didn’t end up staying in the comics industry. Yet dozens of times over the intervening decades, I’ve thought of the generosity of that moment. I know that the kindness Gaiman showed to me opened doors and set me on an improbable path from a cold winter afternoon in Massachusetts to a professor’s desk in hot, urban Karachi. The memory of that moment has often felt overwhelming, as there’s no way Gaiman could have known how significantly his spontaneous intervention changed my life, and yet it so thoroughly did.

Sometimes I thought about writing him a thank you letter. I never acted on that impulse. It seemed silly. He’s one of the most famous authors in the world.

***

On January 13th, New York Magazine dropped a bombshell of follow up to the Tortoise series. “There is No Safe Word” provides additional details and reporting from not only the original five accusers, but three additional women. Multiple women go on record with their names about Gaiman’s behaviour, ranging from accusations of the boorish to the outright heinous. Scarlett Pavlovich, the then 22-year-old who became Gaiman and his wife Amanda Palmer’s nanny, emerges as a central figure of the article, especially vulnerable to predation as she was homeless and without family or friends to support her, until the job offer from Palmer. A job that Pavlovich is then stuck in as neither millionaire recording artist Palmer nor her multi-millionaire novelist husband, Gaiman, bothered to pay her for her work, leaving her completely dependent on their whims for housing and food.

The accusations are detailed, substantiated through contemporaneous evidence, and stomach churning. When I finished reading the article, I stared off into space for a long time, as my brain tried to process the magnitude of the allegations. I felt disconnected from my body. I felt offline.

We think that we can recognise monsters. That there’s a clue we could have seen. A tell. Especially when they’re committing such atrocities.

Intellectually, we know we’re lying to ourselves. Monsters get to be monsters by looking just like you and me. That’s what those stories we love tell us. And that’s also the cruelest rub. Art is about emotion. Art is about human connection. I tell you a story, and you take a bit of my creativity in, and maybe you see yourself somewhere in my tale, or you recognise a character who reminds you of someone you know, or you witness a heroine suffer and conquer a labyrinth that feels a little bit like the trials you’re going through, and feel less alone. You feel like you’ve been seen. You feel like you belong.

You felt like the Famous Author, who speaks out on feminist causes, who married a feminist musician, who was publicly on the correct side of progressive causes, who has a faculty position at Bard for heaven’s sake, was ‘on your side’. He saw you and he understood the challenges you face and you found connection, not only in his stories, but also in the fandom that sprung up around them.

And while we were loving the work, and in some case, loving him, Gaiman was using his fandom as bait.

There is no reveal to my story about Gaiman. There is no twist. To me, and to thousands of others, he was as I experienced him. There have to be lots of stories like mine where he seems like a fundamentally good guy because that’s what made people trust him, and allowed him to get close to his victims.

And the only thing fans are left to do is comb through his works to find clues that maybe we missed in a self-flagellating exercise of ‘if only’. Gaiman’s public persona that made him so accessible – the rock star writer who was only a tweet away, our very famous friend – is also what causes the fan to feel implicated in his behaviour. After all, we praised him. We showered him with affection. We bought his books, watched his movies, took his Master Class, streamed his talks, stood in line at conventions, and with our money he coerced and financially abused women, and paid them settlements to sign NDAs to allow him to keep taking our money and our love and our adoration, so he could keep assaulting our sisters. How can we not feel implicated? How can we not feel betrayed? Intellectually, we know we are not complicit. Emotionally, things are far more tangled.

In the best light, Gaiman is a creep, a probable sex pest, cruised his own fan base for sexual partners decades his junior, and started an intimate relationship with his child’s nanny within hours of meeting her. Gaiman has admitted to having a sexual relationship with Scarlett Pavlovich and other accusers, though he claims everything was consensual. This is the most generous read of the situation. At the worst, Gaiman is violent, predatory rapist, who assaulted women while his young son was present in the room, which in itself is a form of child abuse. Given the allegations and the contemporaneous evidence provided to the investigative journalists, there doesn’t seem to be any grey area at all. His behaviour is either terrible or sadistic. His behaviour. His.

Christie Marie Lauder is the Program Director and Assistant Professor in Communication and Design at Habib University. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University

All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author