THE GAIMAN CONTROVERSY

 I've recently finished listening to the six-part "Master" podcast series from the British news outlet Tortoise, which collated interviews from five women, all claiming that they had been sexually assaulted in differing ways by famed comics-author Neil Gaiman.                           

First, though there have been many public "he said she said" allegations that lacked corroborative evidence-- not least the 2018 accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey-Ford and her copycats-- I must admit that the Tortoise reporters generally seem to play fair. They present both evidence that supports and evidence that does not support the allegations of the five women. That doesn't mean that Tortoise's conclusions are correct. But the journalists are not guilty of constructing a hit-piece.                                                                         

  All that said, of the five women who spoke with Tortoise, only two prove consequential. This Wikipedia article provides a summing-up of the testimonies. Two of them report their getting nonconsensually kissed or groped by Gaiman, while the third, a tenant on land owned by Gaiman and his then-wife, alleges that Gaiman required sexual favors in exchange for her tenancy. But these three don't have nearly as much punch as the other two testimonies. One woman said that in 2003 she began a romantic relationship with Gaiman (he was about forty, she had just turned twenty), but she was distressed by an incident in which he initiated anal sex with her despite her stipulation that he should not do so. The other of the two, and the one who provided Tortoise with the original testimony, alleged that she became a nanny for Gaiman's young child in 2022 at Gaiman's house in New Zealand. Gaiman, then a little over sixty, encouraged the woman to take a bath to relax. The nanny says that Gaiman then inserted himself into said bath and fingered her. This woman did not state that she refused his attentions, however. And I believe the last two are the only ones who reported that during their experiences with Gaiman, he required that each woman call him "Master"-- hence the name of the Tortoise podcast.                       

   Gaiman insists in a recent response that even though he wasn't always as "caring" as he should have been in his relationships, everything that transpired was consensual. This may be a rationalization, but as one of the podcasts explains, under British law at least, consent does not protect the accused from the law if the law determines that the accused has wrought harm. Yet some of the testimonies don't support the allegation that the rough sex was non-consensual, and thus the New Zealand police, after the nanny filed a change of sexual assault against Gaiman, declined to charge the author precisely because the nanny's own texts and recorded phone calls suggested that she had consented.                                                                                                                                                                                       As a reader who only spoke briefly with Neil Gaiman once, I have no idea of the true nature of his character. The testimonies certainly indicate that he likes rough sex and rough talk in his relationships, which for some might seem a one-eighty away from the affable, literate persona Gaiman adopts in public. At the same time, I think it's important to note that all the faux-horror generated by the use of the term "master" does not indicate Gaiman's devotion to the principles of a full-time sadist like the Marquise de Sade. I think Tortoise did slant their reportage somewhat to reflect a horror of whips and chains, much as Frederic Wertham did when he accused comic books of turning all juvenile readers into budding young sadists. In one podcast, Tortoise raises the topic of BDSM, but only to make an invidious comparison: regular practitioners of BDSM have "safe words" and even contracts, and Tortoise comments that Gaiman had no such restrictions. But none of the testimonies allege anything about rituals of dominance and submission except that of the New Zealand nanny, who said that in the past she had indulged in "light BDSM." But none of the five women testify to being whipped or placed in bondage. So the only connotation of "master" is one of playing a humiliation-game: "I have power and you don't," "You need me more than I need you." Maybe Gaiman, reacting against the nice-guy persona he projects as a celebrity, enjoys acting like a jerk in private. But at present I'm not seeing that anything Gaiman had been alleged to have done rises to the level of criminality. However, he probably will suffer some economic penalties for these accusations, and for once I can't entirely say that's a morally wrong response. This situation isn't comparable to the cowardly vilification-in-advance of Kevin Spacey, where he was denied employment years before he met his accusers in court, and their testimonies were shot down. I think Gaiman's too important an artist to suffer total cancellation for being a horndog-- but I could be wrong on that.