There’s a photo of me with Neil Gaiman. It was taken in 2013 at the Cambridge Union, at one of the first events he did to promote his novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I am 22 and look anxious and manic – the kind of smile people who are aware they aren’t photogenic have when they know they’re going to want to show the photo to everyone. Gaiman, despite having just completed a five-hour event and book signing for 300 people, looks completely relaxed, as if he’s known me for years and we often take photos together like this.
To get this photo, I volunteered to steward the event. My hope was that standing around for hours shepherding the endless line of people who wanted their books signed might grant me a few minutes at the end to tell Gaiman how much his books meant to me, how important they had been to the formation of my adolescent identity, how there were moments as an angsty teenager when I felt his words were all that was holding me together. It did. I got my photo, and my snatched two minutes of tongue-tied conversation. I told him I had no idea what I was doing and sometimes wondered if I’d ever figure things out. In my copy of American Gods, tattered to the point of destruction by dozens of rereadings, he wrote in red ink “Rachel, Believe!”
I don’t know how to reconcile that memory, that photo, with Lila Shapiro’s disturbing piece about Gaiman, published in the latest issue of New York Magazine. Over 10,000 words she alleges that Gaiman abused several women in incidents that span multiple decades, and claims that he used his fame to pressure vulnerable young women into non-consensual and violent sex. Gaiman denies the allegations and insists the incidents described were instances of BDSM sex between consenting adults.
Among other things, the investigation explores how some women may reframe traumatic incidents as consensual as a defence mechanism. It raises the question of how consensual a violent power dynamic can truly be when the dominant partner is a multi-millionaire superstar author in his sixties, and the submissive partner is a broke babysitter in her early twenties. In a lengthy statement posted to his website, Gaiman said that the New York Magazine piece described “moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen. I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.”
The allegations against Gaiman have sent shockwaves through his fanbase – even a sense of betrayal. The sci-fi and fantasy writer is perhaps best known for the comic-book series The Sandman, and his novels Good Omens and American Gods. The Ocean at the End of the Lane won Book of the Year in the 2013 British National Book Awards. In 2015, Gaiman guest-edited an issue of the New Statesman magazine. He championed the rights of refugees, women and LGBTQ+ people on social media. He was celebrated as a feminist hero among many of his readers for his fiction’s depictions of vulnerable women.
And he was married to Amanda Palmer, the punk cabaret musician known for her raw, confessional music and the intimacy she cultivated with her fans. She would talk and sing openly about her own experiences with sexual assault. The online community she built was a safe space for recovering survivors, who found catharsis in her lyrics. One of her better-known songs, “Oasis”, describes a woman getting an abortion after being date-raped at a party. When she married Gaiman in 2011, their fanbases merged and an air of chaotic bohemian romance settled around them. For a decade, the couple had a kind of cult status for angsty nerdy misfit kids – and then angsty nerdy misfit adults – like me. There’s a photo of 22-year-old me with Palmer too: snapped in the aftermath of a gig, when she started playing impromptu ukelele songs on the steps of the theatre, straight after I told her how her music had helped me.
But before I ever heard her music I fell in love with his words. I discovered Gaiman’s books when I was at my most impressionable. I’d traipse across London following the path of Neverwhere; the first sex scenes I ever read were from American Gods. Of course, I was hardly alone in the pedestal I placed him on. Unusually for an author, let alone a sci-fi and fantasy author, Gaiman had rock-star status among readers in the 2000s and 2010s. One woman flew to the Cambridge book-signing from the US. She wasn’t a student, but a fan, desperate to see him in the flesh.
There was no shortage of women who would have volunteered to have consensual BDSM affairs with Neil Gaiman. The allegations in Shapiro’s piece describe something different: deliberate abuse of power, of degradation, where the thrill is not in the depravity of the acts themselves but seemingly in forcing them on someone unwilling but unable to say no, then goading them into retrospectively reframing their reluctance as enjoyment. Anyone in the kink community will tell you that an experience of such a nature is not BDSM, that any pressure or ambiguity over consent automatically turns risqué play into straight-up abuse.
The way Gaiman wrote his characters, you felt sure that he knew the difference between the two. As a teenager who felt damaged and broken and uniquely alone in the darkness (as all teenagers do), I remember how his books felt so safe. Which is odd, because there is nothing safe about them. The books, short stories and Sandman comics are full of disturbing scenes of sexual violence – men who dehumanise and brutalise women, men who fetishise little girls, men whose innermost desires have twisted them up inside and turned them into monsters. Yet it never seemed gratuitous, never seemed akin to the mindless torture porn in the likes of Game of Thrones. “Although his books abounded with stories of men torturing, raping, and murdering women, this was largely perceived as evidence of his empathy,” writes Shapiro. Yes, but it was more than empathy. Somehow it felt like whatever you might have suffered, he was on your side.
I never stopped to wonder where the inspiration for this kind of horror might have come from. Just after the Cambridge Union event, Amanda Palmer wrote about The Ocean at the End of the Lane on her blog. The book is a fantasy novel, in which a young boy fights a demon with the help of the family of witches that lives next door. It is semi-autobiographical – about Gaiman growing up in the Church of Scientology. In her blog, Palmer talks about the process of turning life experiences into art, using the metaphor of a blender. “We start off with all these fresh ingredients, recognizable (a heart, a finger, an eyeball, a glass of wine) and we throw them in the art-blender,” she writes. “I only let things mix very slightly. I keep my blender on 2 or 3… Neil puts his art-blender on 10. You wind up with a fantastic purée, but often you have no fucking idea where the experiences of his life wound up in the mix of his final product. If you see a finger, it’s not recognizable as a human one.”
When I read Shapiro’s piece, I thought of the blender. I’d always seen the darkness in Gaiman’s work – how could you miss it? – but taken it for granted that whatever had been blended up to produce tales interwoven with sexual violence and depraved desires came from a place of respect and compassion. That he could write in a way that spoke to the victims and the vulnerable because he somehow knew what the world looked like from the perspective of those on the wrong side of the power imbalance. That he wanted to build a sanctuary for them to escape to. That you could trust him. “Rachel, Believe!”
It never occurred to me that a finger could just be a finger.
[See also: Rewriting the story of Gisèle Pelicot]