Vindicated

Warning: this post discusses the allegations of sexual assault against author Neil Gaiman. While this post does not contain graphic descriptions of sexual assault, some readers may still find the content disturbing. For more information about the allegations, click here.

We all want to be the heroes of our own stories.

This statement is less of a cliche than it is an axiom: a principle so incorruptibly true that it exists without need of argument or reasoning. After all, no one likes being the bad guy. When we envision ourselves, it is always through the lens of self-righteousness—like angels guarding the Eastern gates of Eden, swords ablaze, wings so bright and luminous they cast shadows of the sun. And on the rare occasion when we do judge ourselves, we hardly ever apply the real, harsh criticism that incites actual change. It’s much easier to portray ourselves as martyrs. By this logic, even the serpent doesn’t seem so evil—he was abandoned by Heaven long before he ever desecrated Eve. 

---

In 2023, I paid a hundred dollars for a one-year subscription to Masterclass, which was pretty much the equivalent of placing ninety-nine dollar bills in a blender at high speed and then dumping the shredded concoction down the drain. I use the number ninety-nine very deliberately, because to say that I wasted every last dollar on Masterclass would be a mean disservice—or so I believed at the time—to Neil Gaiman.

He was my one lucky dollar well spent. 

Neil’s course wasn’t necessarily indispensable, but it was captivating. This was mostly due to his own disposition—gloomy and cryptic, yet underscored by a soft intelligence that lulled you into his world. He came off as a man perpetually sitting on a secret, and he gave the impression that, if you listened closely enough, he might just let you in on it.

One of my favorite episodes was a reading of his best-selling novel The Graveyard Book, the opening lines of which are as follows:

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.

(Gaiman, Neil, and Dave McKean. The Graveyard Book. First edition. HarperCollins Pub, 2008).

I quickly became enamored with Neil Gaiman, not only for the excellence of his writing but for the way he embodied it. His voice drifted through words like a fog; he was all smoke and mirrors. And I found a glittering reflection of myself in his mist. A version of me I was convinced I could achieve, if I could only borrow his tenacity—his ability to do the work and learn. I set my mind to becoming just like him. 

I never did finish Neil’s Masterclass, but I developed a curriculum of my own. I bought his books—all of them, even the collection of speeches and personal essays that no one really talks about—and carried him with me like a shadow. Neil Gaiman on the train. Neil Gaiman on the beach. Neil Gaiman on the grainy wood floor of a cabin in Vermont, illuminated by starshine and candlelight and the brightness in my own eyes. 

The more I read, the more I realized Neil Gaiman was not a perfect writer. His plots had a tendency to trip over their own feet. His endings, frankly, were underwhelming. But he was inventive. He was clever. And his work, it seemed to me, personified the joy of writing: the ability to take an existing story—like a fairy tale or a nursery rhyme—and alchemize it into something other. Something dark and meditative and primeval. If you’re familiar with Gaiman’s prose, you might recognize his influence in some of my recent writing. Maybe not in exact phrases—although occasionally I’ll catch echoes of him in words like “cobwebs” and “rhododendrons” and “filigree”—but in the essence of the thing. The conscious effort to shape my natural talent into technique. 

Like a magician performing a coin trick, Neil Gaiman took my silver dollar and showed me how to toss it into the light.    

---

I first became aware of the allegations against Neil Gaiman about a year ago. I didn’t know much—only that he was vehemently denying the charges, and that one of the instances involved an outdoor bathtub. But the information was there. I could have found it if I’d read the articles instead of stopping at their headlines. 

In the end, I chose to ignore the situation altogether.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe the accusations, and it wasn’t that I was afraid of them. More likely, I entered a kind of dissociation. I couldn’t reconcile the two truths in my mind, even though I understood that both were equally real. On one end of the moral spectrum stood Neil Gaiman, someone I deeply admired and looked up to. On the other was the ghoulish, abstract notion of Violence Against Women.

I think affirming sexual violence is difficult because it’s been sensationalized. It has become a story—and a hackneyed one at that. Because when women speak out against a socially prominent abuser, their accusation must be shattering enough to recast the protagonist as the antagonist. Otherwise, the narrative slips into limbo. The accused becomes an anti-hero. A complicated figure, slightly tarnished but still beloved.

Simply put: if it isn’t rape, it isn’t anything. And I could not imagine Neil Gaiman raping a woman. At least, not in the way the media tends to portray it. 

Modern depictions of sexual violence often feel fictional. More glorified than invented. Like a Homeric epic—rooted in lived experience but embellished with the thrill of demigods and fates. We’ve even come up with a name for this mythology: #MeToo. A name which, by its very construction, implies that the experience of one woman is the experience of all. As if the history of sexual violence sprang from a single feminist seed and, over time, crescendoed into a chorus where individuality dissolves and all that remains is the single tired refrain: Me too, me too.

The longer one narrative persists, the more it hardens into legend. We no longer need to read the story to understand the tale. We know it by heart and can recite it from memory. Eventually, the perpetrators begin to lose their luster. They are nameless, faceless. Or worse, they are like the Greek Hundred-Handed Ones, ravaging helpless women with their fifty different faces. And who in their right mind would ever believe that?

Of course, in addition to all this, there is also the matter of complicity. Wanting to clear oneself of collateral blame. I said earlier that no one likes to be the bad guy—but no one wants to be the one who brings the bad guy roses, either.

---

The podcast opens with a recording. The man’s voice is familiar—dark and reliable and unmistakably English—except here, it’s only one of those things. The voice is whining. Desperate. It stumbles and stutters, fracturing in places as it resists the urge to cry:

You know, I'd never thought of you with anything other than fondness and a little awkwardness. And, you know, actually feeling like I got the wrong end of the stick. But I thought you were terrific. And I was heartbroken seeing that I was giving you nightmares.

(Tortoise Media. Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman. Hosted by Paul Caruana Galizia and Rachel Johnson. July 1, 2024)

The podcast is called Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman, and it follows through on the title’s promise—though not in any conventional sense. The hosts shape the narrative through a series of interviews with the women who have come forward. So much of the story unfolds in first person, with the women talking directly into your ear. Some of these women arrive with youth and naivete, laughing awkwardly through the memories, through their shame. But others speak with tongues of hellfire—not angry, exactly, but burning with certainty. With the kind of knowing that comes after you’ve already accepted your fate. Like witches tied to the stake. Matches struck, the flames have already begun to lick their ankles, yet they’ve made a point to declare themselves anyway.

The podcast’s initial setup led me to expect a reckoning. It would be impossible, I thought, to hear these women’s accounts of assault firsthand and not have my perception of Gaiman violently cast away. Nevertheless, to my surprise (and, admittedly, some relief) the series was less a condemnation than an elegy—a reflection shaped by facts, contradictions, and faulty memory. It warned the audience of its own unreliability. But more than that, it used narrative fallacy as its lens. This story is littered with paradoxes that only women in this specific kind of situation could produce. Women who, upon meeting Gaiman, were socially isolated and financially unstable. Awe-struck lovers of fiction who, in most cases, were so very young. As a result, each of them could truthfully claim to have loved Gaiman. They could claim that his desire for them to call him Master—as well as his affinity for the sexually sadistic, violent, and perverse—was reciprocated. They could even express their permission with an enthusiasm that, in a court of law, would absolve Gaiman of guilt. And sure enough, they did. In text messages, in voice memos, in phone call recordings. Nearly all of these women explicitly gave their consent. 

So the general consensus is this: if the charges against Neil Gaiman are, legally speaking, sexual assault—which Rape Crisis England & Wales defines as when someone is touched by, or forced to touch, another person without consent—the answer is a definitive no. From a juridical standpoint, Gaiman is the victim. A man whose only crime is kink—and perhaps engaging with women half his age, which arguably falls under the same category. His official stance, supported by ample documentation, is that the graphic sexual encounters presented in this podcast may seem unorthodox to some, but they were undoubtedly consensual. Performed by two adults who dined together. Vacationed together. Bathed together. Both of whom were over the age of eighteen. 

However, if the charges against Neil Gaiman are not about the presence of consent but the context behind it—well, that is an entirely different verdict. Unfortunately, it is also an entirely different case.

Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman assumes the responsibility of exploring this alternate perspective. In doing so, it is able to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it avoids bias by fairly and accurately representing Gaiman’s account. And on the other hand, it nullifies his argument entirely. If the question is not one of consent, but of power, then any claims he has made about obeying the laws of consent are irrelevant. The podcast’s aim, then, is not necessarily to persecute Gaiman. Rather, it forces the audience to come to terms with how they perceive sexual violence and the methods with which they measure what is worth believing. 

Listening to the excerpt of Gaiman speaking above, it is obvious that he considers himself the hero of his story. Former fans of his have already drawn haunting connections between him and his works. The most obvious is The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a supernatural horror novel about an unnamed boy whom Gaiman claims to have modeled after his younger self. It is a grueling story even without the otherworldly elements, riddled with scenes like the boy nearly drowning in a bathtub at the hands of his father, which make one wonder about the condition of Gaiman’s actual childhood. 

However, more dedicated Gaiman fans have also noticed parallels between the recent allegations and an issue of his comic series, The Sandman. Struck by writer’s block, a British author named Richard Madoc trades another writer for the possession of Calliope, the Greek muse of epic poetry. It is said that the best way to garner the muse’s favor is to woo her, but an impatient Madoc forces himself upon her, keeping her as a slave, pillaging her body in an effort to propel himself to literary stardom. Of course, Gaiman has never openly compared himself to Madoc. Quite the opposite, he’s always preferred to align with the comic’s titular hero, The Sandman. Nevertheless, the similarities are there. Like Gaiman, Madoc is an author burdened by the insatiable desire for fame. Also like Gaiman, Madoc conceals his sadistic nature behind the mask of being a feminist writer.

Whether deliberate or not, Gaiman’s pervasion in his own writing gives him a fantastical, almost untouchable quality. He is the author, gifted with the ability to spin a story in any direction, and he utilizes this talent while speaking on the phone with the woman above. In that recording, he inserts himself into the victim role. He does this knowing that he has the advantages of wealth, evidence, renown, and—the most effective leverage of all—love.

Love is powerful, not only because it is a thing of power itself but because it grants power. After all, it is love that brought Gaiman in contact with these women—love of his genius, his fortune, his apparent generosity. In this transaction, love becomes a form of venerating, of worshipping. These women loved Neil Gaiman because they needed him. And because they needed him, they submitted to him. To his domination. His debasement. His desire to corrupt them in ways that far exceeded physical limitations. 

No one can say for certain if Gaiman raped these women—truthfully, some of the women themselves may never know; their understanding of bodily autonomy might have been subsumed in the degradation—but we can confirm that Gaiman exploited them. For example, one of the women was his child’s nanny. Another was a caretaker for his estate in upstate New York, a mother of three daughters and recently divorced. And yet another was a volunteer at a bookstore where he held a signing. Each of Gaiman’s relationships took place in different countries across different decades, but the dynamic remains the same: author and admirer, employer and employee, master and servant. It is only when faced with this disparity that one begins to wonder what consent actually means. Is it simply a synonym for yes? Or is there something more to it? Something vulnerable and abstract, capable of corruption? And in a reality where none of these questions can be answered, how is anyone supposed to trust their own ability to give permission? 

It is a terrifying fact that the Law does not recognize Gaiman’s abuse as criminal. But what’s even more terrifying—at least to me—is that Gaiman truly believes he is vindicated. He believes he got the short end of the stick. However, while I do not feel sympathy for Gaiman, I do understand why he has deluded himself into maintaining his innocence. It’s human instinct to be correct, even at the expense of others. This is why he has offered to pay his victims for their silence. Acting the villain goes against everything in Gaiman’s authorial nature. It isn’t a part of his script.

By writing this blog post, I don’t mean to suggest that we force a moral lesson out of the Gaiman case. Violence is violence, no matter how you choose to look at it. But in a world where we cannot rely on our legal systems to bring abusers to justice, and where we are burdened by a vague understanding of what constitutes bodily autonomy, we have to be able to establish some semblance of lawfulness within ourselves, otherwise the stubborn, inextricable knot of sexual exploitation will only become more complicated over time. 

Because it’s easy to vindicate yourself when there is no council of justice to convict you. But it’s difficult to look in the mirror and admit you were wrong. Maybe it is too daunting or unfair to deem yourself an evil person, but are you able to humble yourself enough to realize that you might be a good person capable of doing evil things? And if so, how much guilt are you willing to withstand before you supplant the blame onto someone else? Perhaps even the person you hurt in the first place. Questions such as these are the root of accountability. They are our first miniscule steps toward being better. And even if we are never able to reach perfection, at the very least, we might be able to start perceiving ourselves as we truly are. Not as heroes—not as villains—but as people: simple and flawed and so tragically self-important.