No, I’m not talking about Dave Grohl; he went down awhile ago. I’m talking about Neil Gaiman. I didn’t know him, but I loved his stories. So much. Dearly.

An article about Neil Gaiman by Lila Shapiro hit the literary world like a bomb yesterday. It’s been published in Vulture and in New York Magazine. If you haven’t read it and feel so inclined, read this list of trigger warnings first. NOT RECOMMENDED if you have any history of abuse or trauma, or if you just ate.

Here is the article, both paywalled and not. Brace yourself.

Shapiro documented eight women who have accused Gaiman of some degree of gruesome abuse, sexual, mental, emotional, physical, economic. Some of it amounts to imprisonment and torture. His ex-wife Amanda Palmer is accused of being complicit in the abuse, of procuring victims for him.

Fantasy lovers were at ground zero in the article’s strike zone. Reactions on the microblogging platforms BlueSky, X. and Mastodon included the following:

• Nausea.
• Shock and horror.
• Inability to read the article or need to take breaks.
• Praise for the quality of the journalism and writing (whether readers got through it or not).
• Praise for the victims’ courage in coming forward despite having signed NDAs.
• Prayers and sympathy for the victims.
• Feelings of revictimization or being triggered; sensations associated with pain of past abuse.
• Overwhelm (“this article is a lot”).
• Feelings of betrayal.
• Warnings to others, whether TWs or “don’t read it.”
• Anger on the victims’ behalf, including OBO their child, toward Gaiman and Palmer.
• Anger at Scientology and Gaiman’s parents for traumatizing Gaiman in the first place.
• Calls for retribution, religious, legal, otherwise, against all abusers and enablers.
• Curses and other maledictions on the aforementioned.
• Questions about what to do with the works and adaptations of the artists responsible, with the usual social media race for the margins: I’m donating, well I’m throwing in the trash, well I’m having a bonfire. For adaptations, “I refuse to watch.” “Okay, maybe I’ll watch ‘Good Omens.’ since Pratchett was in on it.”
• Grief and mourning proportionate to the relationship or closeness to the perpetrator(s) or how much he/they and his/her works were loved.
• Attacks on the grieving, who apparently have no right to pause for even 24 hours before disavowing and pronouncing maledictions.
• Analysis of the works of the perpetrators to try to make sense of it all, including my BlueSky post ending with, “He’s Madoc (from “Sandman”) and on some level he wants retribution.”
• Denouncement of idolizing people: “That’s what I get for having a hero” or “This is why I have no heroes.”
• Summoning dead people whose work you can still revere (“We still have so-and-so”); hopes that associated beloved writers associated didn’t know about Gaiman’s character, so that they are innocent.

This being social media, there were attacks on other people on all of the platforms, aimed at those whose responses to the tragic allegations were seen as less than optimal, virtuous, or acceptable than the poster’s own POV.

How does one make sense of what Gaiman may have done to these women? He doesn’t deny most of it; he says it was consensual. There is no consent where massive power differentials exist, such as the ability to deprive someone of shelter or the employer/employee relationship where a much older man is wealthy and the young woman who supposedly consented is poor, so I am still left sickened at the sight of “Neverwhere” on my shelf if even a fraction of it is true.

As Eric O. Scott writes at Wild Hunt News:

                One thing that strikes me even now is how even if one were to take Gaiman at his word, to assume that Pavlovich, Caroline, and the six other women who have accused Gaiman of assault are all embellishing their stories for publicity, one is still left with a man who thinks it’s possible to have “consent” with women whose choices are to either assent to sex or find themselves homeless. This is the version of the story he wants the world to believe. This is his best-case scenario.

How is it safe to love any work of art when it may be irredeemably tainted by association some day? We want to understand, we want to feel safe, we want to not feel like we were duped by a predator. How did we get it so wrong? We want to rescue and redeem what value we can salvage.

I don’t feel as though money was mentioned enough in the discussion. Roxane Gay had it right when she called out labor exploitation as well as sexual abuse on BlueSky.

Also, you smug folks who always knew: I didn’t know. There may be more to come, which fills me with dread. There are almost certainly more victims yet to come forward. I am writing my way through this, and then I don’t want to know more. I can’t think less of Gaiman, or Palmer, or Scientology. I praise those women in advance for their bravery. I hope, with everything I have, for their healing and peace.

It would be less easy to believe victims if abusers were not ALL THE SAME. It’s like Lady Gaga’s “box” analogy on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2018, when she talked about Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh. Sometimes a survivor’s box where trauma has been stored opens, and the survivor is compelled to share it. And then some of us feel the truth of it in the marrow of our bones.

The same words, same tactics, and same actions, are in the “boxes” of all survivors. Different box, same old shit. Almost always men. They go by the same playbook. It’s wearying, exhausting, and enraging.

I won’t watch Season 2 of Sandman. And I was really looking forward to it. However, the part of Gaiman’s work that went into my heart and mind that felt good and right, and became part of me, I can’t expunge.

I wouldn’t if I could.

#NeilGaiman #AmandaPalmer #fantasy #abuse #LilaShapiro #Vulture #NewYorkMagazine #RoxaneGay #ladygaga

https://jillsreads.com/there-goes-my-hero/