Some years ago, a friend of mine became a mistress to an Oscar-nominated director. She confided that he did not treat her very well. She also confided that his wife knew everything, and was being treated even more horribly.
I didn’t want to offer any half-baked advice in the midst of an ugly situation – this director could make or break my friend’s career – but I did marvel at how a man who made powerful, thoughtful movies could be such a thoughtless prick.
“That’s just the thing,” my friend said at the time, “Everything good in him goes into his films, there’s nothing left for the rest of us.”
The terrible, graphic account of Neil Gaiman’s alleged sex crimes, which features everything up to and including an allegation from a young employee that Gaiman raped her mere feet away from his young son, made me think of that old conversation.
American Gods is one of my favorite books. I was always a little skeptical of the wild adulation that followed Gaiman everywhere he went, but his work has had an impact on me. Gaiman, like many good writers, always struck me as someone who understood the mechanisms of brutality, but to consider he could have engaged in it, and to the horrifying degree that reports are suggesting, is bitter.
To get some things out of the way first: Lila Shapiro’s in-depth, but unusually written piece (I’m not sure of the point of publishing an accuser’s selfies, for example) contains an important clue as to Gaiman’s potential culpability. Based on the account, some people interviewed allege that Gaiman’s ex-wife, musician Amanda Palmer, was largely aware of his violent proclivities, but turned on Gaiman when he was said to have exposed their child to this horror.
Palmer and Gaiman’s marriage counsellor told Vulture that Gaiman had agreed to sign himself into a psychiatric facility at this time. While Gaiman’s team claims that the behavior he engaged in was consensual, a preserved digital trail could confirm this timeline in court; the text messages seen by Lila Shapiro that were sent back and forth between Gaiman and his alleged victim detail what could be described as a stunning degree of manipulation, if the accusations are true.
We can do “he said, she said” all day, but involving a psychiatric facility (not that Gaiman appears to have followed through) leads me to believe that Palmer had reached her breaking point. Why would this power couple retreat into the old, “he’s just sick, he needs help” excuse if not to cover up a fiasco they couldn’t make go away with money alone?
There is also the sheer volume of women who’ve had something to say about Gaiman’s alleged violence, including on the Tortoise Media podcast, Master. Just check out this account by a single mother that alleges he blackmailed her into sex under the threat of eviction. People have argued that Shapiro’s main interview subject, Scarlett Pavlovich, is an unreliable narrator – she sent him horny texts while depending on him and his wife financially, she suffered from recurring mental illness (who wouldn’t at that point?), etc. – but it’s hard to believe that everyone else is conveniently unreliable too.
A wealthy and famous man who gets multiple women to sign NDAs should always be a red flag, and I don’t think that many of Shapiro’s critics would want to be alone in a room with Gaiman either way.
“It’s a heartbreaking grief” – Tori Amos
All of this brings me back to Gaiman’s work and the monsters and tricksters in it. Shapiro has noted the rapist Madoc from Sandman, but I keep going back to Mr. Wednesday/Odin in American Gods – seductive and sly, full of cruel and devious plans, corrupted by American money and power (that was my read on him, anyway).
We’re meant to empathize with Shadow, the main character, ensnared in the gods’ plans from his conception, but I do wonder if Gaiman empathized with Odin and his need for sacrifice after all. Odin couldn’t survive without it.
There is also another version of Odin in the book, whom Shadow meets in the end. This Odin lives in Iceland, and is humbler and more cheerful. Someone will probably write a research paper eventually on what it could possibly mean, but the way I’ve always read it is that the smaller versions of ourselves are better. Which just goes to show.
I’m not a book burner by nature, and I’ve been around enough talented people to know that they, like my friend said all of those years ago, often give the good parts of themselves to their work. Goodness can live on right alongside the darkness. That part should never be a surprise, not after a certain age, anyway.
But just because a thing is not surprising doesn’t mean it hurts any less.
I think musician and rape survivor Tori Amos, whose friendship with Gaiman fascinated me as a young woman, probably said it best to the Guardian last December, before Shapiro’s article came out but after the Tortoise Media podcast had hit: “It’s a heartbreaking grief.”
Neil Gaiman has denied all charges and accusations against him.
Image: Topher McCulloch
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