He’s denying the worst of the claims, while admitting that he did have sexual relationships with his accusers. They were all consensual, he says.
As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are 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.
I went back to read the messages I exchanged with the women around and following the occasions that have subsequently been reported as being abusive. These messages read now as they did when I received them – of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships and wanting to see one another again. At the time I was in those relationships, they seemed positive and happy on both sides.
This is the “bitchez be lyin'” defense written in the gentle romantic style of Neil Gaiman. It doesn’t add up. So he was in a happy, positive, respectful, consensual relationship with women who have all mysteriously changed their minds and started misrepresenting his sensitive style of making love as brutal sadomasochistic assaults? Why? What changed “positive and happy” to tears and trauma? There’s a massive plot hole in his fantasy.
His real sin was not being open and feminist enough.
And I also realise, looking through them, years later, that I could have and should have done so much better. I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could or should have been. I was obviously careless with people’s hearts and feelings, and that’s something that I really, deeply regret. It was selfish of me. I was caught up in my own story and I ignored other people’s.
I’ve spent some months now taking a long, hard look at who I have been and how I have made people feel.
Like most of us, I’m learning, and I’m trying to do the work needed, and I know that that’s not an overnight process. I hope that with the help of good people, I’ll continue to grow. I understand that not everyone will believe me or even care what I say but I’ll be doing the work anyway, for myself, my family and the people I love. I will be doing my very best to deserve their trust, as well as the trust of my readers.
This is a dim acknowledgment that gosh, he did something wrong in his past relationships. He’s not sure what, but maybe he wasn’t as emotionally available as he ought to have been. Yeah, demanding that he be called “Master” is a sign of his clumsiness in relationships. But he’s learning! He’s a better person now!
At the same time, as I reflect on my past – and as I re-review everything that actually happened as opposed to what is being alleged – I don’t accept there was any abuse. To repeat, I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.
Some of the horrible stories now being told simply never happened, while others have been so distorted from what actually took place that they bear no relationship to reality. I am prepared to take responsibility for any missteps I made. I’m not willing to turn my back on the truth, and I can’t accept being described as someone I am not, and cannot and will not admit to doing things I didn’t do.
Something sordid went on. We don’t know all the details, fortunately (the Vulture story had more than I could stomach as it is), but “Yes, I had sex with the babysitter, but it wasn’t as rough as she claims, and besides, she wanted it” isn’t the strong defense he thinks it is.
Ahhh, the “she wanted it defense.” That makes it OK to have sex with your babysitter. You can disregard everything else in your life if “she wants it.”
Wasn’t the babysitter 15 years old? Or am I misremembering?
No, I think all the women he monkeyed about with were in their 20s. He can’t be accused of being a pedo, at least.
Getting distinct Richard Carrier vibes off this guy.
Hopefully I can say that without PZ getting sued. Again.
i bet the only thing the babysitter wanted, was to get paid for babysitting
Is there anyone talented and creative who is NOT a colossal pile of shit?
Akira MacKenzie @6
I suspect that if you keep telling someone that they’re very talented and creative it turns them into a colossal pile of shit.
I was once told that first rank geniuses tend to consider themselves equal to all other people, second rank tend to look down on all others and the third rank tend to look up to everybody else.
I recently re-read Ursula Vaughan Williams’ book ‘RVW’ and he seemed a thoroughly decent and considerate human being. I suppose that his great uncle Charles would now be frowned on as racist but he seems less so than the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries.
There’s a massive plot hole in his fantasy.
Yeah, it’s the same plot hole we find in every “no, she really wanted it” defense: a woman who had a consensual relationship or affair, and then came to regret it, is VERY unlikely to go to all the trouble of suing the guy or pressing criminal charges. It’s far more likely that a woman in such a situation would simply put it all behind her, get the disappointing/asshole guy out of her life, and move on.
I’m no great understander of women, but I have heard them talk on occasion about past affairs, relationships and boyfriends that went wrong in some way or other. And what all those stories have in common is that the women wanted nothing more than to put all that crap behind them and move on to more enjoyable activities and people. Hell, even women who explicitly claim to have been violently raped sometimes choose not to press charges, for that same reason.
And yes, I know women can be cold and calculating and vindictive at times; but in cases like this, I think the cold, calculating response would NOT be to try to pursue any sort of charges against a rich and famous person who has access to better legal services than any of his accusers might. I really don’t see how even a stupid woman would see a real chance of success in such a fight; let alone one who knows who she’s getting in bed with.
So yeah, in cases like this I’m inclined to think that, while things may have started consensual, the guy crossed a bunch of lines (to put it mildly), and did a lot of harmful things the women did NOT consent to. So I’m not buying Gaiman’s defense.
Starting to sound a bit like the Jian Ghomeshi saga in Canada, where Ghomeshi tried to get ahead of the story by posting a self-serving “they hate me for my BDSM interests” statement on Facebook, then going to his employer, the CBC, to show them his cellphone video footage of his BDSM acts with women, thinking it would exonerate him with them. The CBC promptly fired him.
When he went on trial, he was of course found not guilty because his victims didn’t have perfect recall of what car he was driving. Canada is filled with shit humans too.
I could believe that Gaiman really believes (mistakenly) that all his sexual relationships were consensual were it not for the NDAs.
On a related issue, stories like that of Gaiman, and that of Jian Ghomeshi, have made me somewhat sceptical of the claims that were common a few years ago that consensual BDSM is just AOK, and in fact the BDSM community are tops (pun intended) when it comes to ensuring informed consent. How far is it really possible to separate playing at extreme power differentials from there actually being such differentials in relationships, making consent problematic, particularly when the roles taken in “play” align with real-world power differences around gender, age, wealth, employer/employee…? I’m by no means claiming all BDSM relationships are abusive, but I wouldn’t any longer simply take the word of those involved that what they are involved in is not.
He reread messages?
Is he referring to those in the article or a private stash?
Three initial notes:
• Akira @6: Wait a minute, that’s my client base! At least six of them weren’t/aren’t colossal piles of shit! OK, that’s not a very good percentage, but at least it isn’t all of them; and it’s better than politicians.
• I have no personal knowledge of the situations with Mr Gaiman so at most I could say “I believe [this person’s] account.” I don’t even go that far; I haven’t even heard/seen any direct statements from any “participant” because I’ve been avoiding the whole thing.
• Back in my first profession, I had to deal with several what Daffy Duck would call “despicabilities,” variously as the CO (both “sides” at various times) and/or outside investigator.
All of that said, much of the time these situations have four things in common:
People thinking with portions of their anatomy that have no grey cells.
Impairment of time and/or substances and/or social pressure that actively interferes with both immediate conduct and later recall.
Failure to communicate (without assessing “fault”) about the fact and/or limits of consent, including fundamentally different concepts of both what “communicate” would mean and what “consent” would mean.
For at least one of the “participants,” how that individual describes the incident — whether in the immediate aftermath or much later — does not/would not match a “purely objective” description… such as one would find in a lab notebook in a particularly observationally acute but ethically challenged lab (that no doubt never consulted the IRB). This is not necessarily blameworthy; this is the combined effect of “faulty eyewitness recollection,” “the effect of perceived self-interest on communication,” “trauma/conscience-led revision,” and confabulation (conscious or otherwise).
tl;dr There are no winners. There never are. All that leaves is compassion and efforts at facilitating closure/prevention, which will never be 100% effective.
@5. Robbo :“i bet the only thing the babysitter wanted, was to get paid for babysitting.”
yes -plus maybe a good reference, decent hours and some fun enjoyable shifts. Porbly NOT a sexual affair with him showinmg again the importance of NOT just consent but enthusaiastic consent and mutual desitre for a sexual rel’ship.
@6. Akira MacKenzie : “Is there anyone talented and creative who is NOT a colossal pile of shit?”
Yes. Dolly Parton, Kamahl, Carl Sagan, no doubt many more.,
Taylor Swift still seems okay so far.
Really?
Neil Gaiman makes a living–a pretty good and highly-compensated living at that–using his words and words in general.
What part of NO did he not understand? Was it the N or the O?
Predators choose victims carefully, not randomly. Gaiman had his chosen victim trapped on an island with no immediate or easy means of escape, had her in his house, alone, and continued to push her boundaries until he violently crossed them.
https://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/another-post-about-rape-3/
Amanda Palmer is looking increasingly sketchy too.
https://www.salon.com/2014/10/31/amanda_palmer_refuses_to_take_a_stand_on_jian_ghomeshi/
Apparently she warned her husband off of the nanny but didn’t bother to warn the nanny about her husband’s penchant for sexual assault.
Also from the above link:
iFWIW . Saw a post on fb today noting that Neil Gaiman seems to have taken inspiration from – put politely -or outright copied – quite a lot from Tanith Lee :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanith_Lee
Who apparently already published books with quite similar characters and ideas before Gaiman did.
In fairness, I haven’t personally read either author so I don’t know how true this is – anyone here done so and can vouch for or refute that claim?
Somehow, I doubt that.
It’s something I’ve read before in these kinds of “apologies”: “I didn’t do anything bad, but if I did, I’ll learn from it and ‘grow’, so it’s actually a good thing.” Disgusting.
StevoR @18: that’s funny. I have his Norse Mythology. Now, for better or for worse, I went to the Waldorf School for all except the first couple of years of my school career and ignoring all its flaws, it did instill a love for the Edda in me. As such, as a kid I bought the Dutch translation of Dan Lindholm’s Götterschicksal, Menschenwerden: Aus der Edda nacherzählt and as I was reading Norse Mythology, I recognised turns of phrases, even with one book having been written in English and the other in Dutch.
At the time, I just figured it due to a close translation of the original texts, but now it makes me wonder. I couldn’t find an English version of the book (if anyone takes up searching, the Bigfoot books are by a different Dan Lindholm, despite what Goodreads thinks), and I don’t know if Neil Gaiman speaks any language other than English.
[SQB]
For better, I think.
Well John, I like to think it inoculated me against religion, in a way. And they do tend to focus on arts & crafts a bit more, as well as foreign languages from an early age onward. It’s not all bad. But it was before the mid-nineties push to scrub all the casual “white men’s burden”-style racism from anthroposophy, to just name one of the bads.
@18 Tanith Lee’s Flat Earth books involved the personification of death, madness, fate and wickedness and the personifications were demons, which were the equivalent of gods in terms of power and influence.
Gaiman’s Endless were the personification of death, dream, desire, despair, delirium, destiny and destruction and were considerably more powerful than gods, demons, etc.
There are some similarities but nothing that would hold up in a copyright infringement case.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Gaiman had read Lee’s works but there is a world of difference between “inspired by” or “similar to” and actual infringement. Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books both deal with wizard schools but Rowling is telling a White Male Savior story and Le Guin is world building and telling stories about the human condition via the context of magic.
Tanith Lee’s Flat Earth series were basically inspired by 1001 Arabian Nights, so it’s entirely possible that the similarities between Lee’s work and Gaiman’s work stem from the same source material–Gaiman has stated multiple times that he was a fan of various myth stories (Norse Edda in particular) and I would be extremely surprised to discover that he never read 1001 Arabian Nights. A lot of Lee’s work involves retelling myths or fairy tales with a twist–Red As Blood or Tales From the Sisters Grimmer is a flat-out reworking of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
I can’t state categorically that Gaiman ripped off Lee’s work but there are obvious similarities. That said, there have got to be millions of stories about the personification of certain concepts, death in particular (Meet Mr. Black, Death Takes A Holiday, etc) and some are going to be more similar than others. Infringement cases are hard to prove, because the bar for originality is set pretty low–James Cameron clearly ripped off Dances With Wolves and the artwork of Roger and Martin Dean (Magnetic Storm in particular) for his Avatar movies but the courts still sided with Cameron and not the Dean brothers. Go figure.
Firstly, I am not invested in demonising or defending Neil Gaiman. I enjoyed his writing, but I never met the man and it’s unambiguously the case that he’s in exactly the position of privilege that lends itself very easily to sexual assault. I am not interested in vicariously absorbing endless minutiae regarding these allegations, but there’s no obvious reason to doubt them of which I am aware.
That said, it’s very disappointing to see that people whose opinions I generally respect still believe that ‘a happy, positive, respectful, consensual relationship’ is somehow incompatible with ‘brutal sadomasochistic assaults’. Never mind the absurd characterisation of both, you will find any number of personal accounts of varied individuals attesting to their need or desire to experience violence, both sexual and otherwise. The willingness to dismiss that testimony is not only willfully ignorant, it’s actively dismissive of the needs of real people, and condemns anyone outside your personal perception of ‘acceptable’ relationships.
The obvious equivalent to ‘of course he’s a rapist, he’s into BDSM’ would be ‘of course they abuse children, they’re gay.’
Not every sadist is a rapist, not every masochist is being abused. A lot of people are out there working very hard to find some joy in their lives without slipping into either. Perhaps Gaiman wasn’t trying hard enough, or perhaps his actions were the result of premeditated psychopathic desire to inflict harm, either way there’s no reason or excuse to throw a bunch of other people under the bus just because they’re not like you.
I’m a big fan of Tanith Lee — I like her work much better than Gaiman’s — but stylistically they are so different from each other that I find the idea that Gaiman plagiarized her laughable. Sure, there’s the same idea of personified human attributes, but that’s so common it’s not a good basis for comparison.