Fiction writers live in the tension between two extreme writing dicta: write what you know, and lie through your teeth. In recent months, Neil Gaiman has returned to the public consciousness, not because a new work of fantasy, but because of all-too-real accusations of sexual abuse, including claims of rape. In fact, in early February, a story finally broke about a $100 million lawsuit against Gaiman from one of his accusers. These allegations, which Gaiman has half-recognized whilst denying that there was any non-consensual sexual behavior, have raised the question of what to do with his works going forward. But they have also raised the question of what indicators may have been present in the past. To be blunt, were there any red flags in his writings that should have given readers pause? To what extent was Gaiman simply inventing imaginative narratives as opposed to writing what he knew?
In another current celebrity scandal, Chelsea Handler has described the ongoing tiff between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, which also involves legal action, as a welcome distraction from the Trump tornado. And while joking about serious matters is a complicated subject, there’s much more levity in conversations about Baldoni/Lively than there is with the Gaiman situation. The reason, of course, is that in the Lively case, many people have evaluated the publicly available evidence and have concluded that Lively has far overstepped the bounds of this personal disagreement, with basically no evidence to support her claims of Baldoni’s abuse, whereas Gaiman’s situation contains many credible accounts.
To be fair, Gaiman has not yet been convicted of any crimes, and some may see comments about Gaiman’s guilt as premature, given the present lack of legal due process. Additionally, by accounts on both sides, many of these sexual relationships began consensually. What’s more, texts between Gaiman and his current accusers reveal a complexity to the accusations. As Gaiman writes in his response, personal texts show both parties “enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships and wanting to see one another again.” Even Tortoise Media, the podcast that first broke the story in July 2024, began each episode with the acknowledgement that the alleged facts do not lead to easy conclusions: “this a story of conflicting accounts.” While psychologists and trauma specialists note that it’s common for victims to resort to a variety of survival tactics—such as fight, flight, freeze, or faun—there’s still something uneasy about retroactively rescinded consent.
At the same time, not all sins are crimes, and Gaiman has never hidden the fact that in his open marriage to Amanda Palmer (his second wife), he has had many extra-marital sexual encounters, many of them involving BDSM activity. According to one source, Gaiman’s now ex-wife Palmer has acknowledged that more than a dozen women have disclosed to her similar accounts of consent-bending and even sexual abuse. Palmer, who is a musician, even released a song in 2024 that contains the following lyrics:
You’ll get away with it, it’s just the same old script
This world is shaped to have your back
You said, “I’m sorry,” then you ran
And went and did it all again
Furthermore, Gaiman’s writings, from novels to comics, include numerous occurrences of graphic sexual deviancy and abuse, making this the appropriate time to discuss what connections may be there. In short, while the criminal activity remains to be deliberated, the accusations of sexual perversion carry an immediate plausibility.
I won’t go into all the salacious details recounted in multiple sources, but a brief background involves the aforementioned podcast by Tortoise Media that first brought these allegations to light. In that six-part series, titled Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman, listeners were first introduced to Scarlett and “K,” later to be revealed as Scarlett Pavlovich and Kendra Stout, both of whom first met Gaiman while in their early twenties—Scarlett in 2022 and Kendra in the early 2000s. At this point, Pavlovich is the only one to have filed a lawsuit against Gaiman.
Tortoise Media further reported that three other women had come forward to tell their stories of abuse: Caroline Wallner, Julia Hobsbawm, and “Claire” (Katherine Kendall). Hobsbawm’s account is the earliest, going back to 1986. This year, these stories were amplified by “There Is No Safe Word,” a mid-January story in New York magazine by Lila Shapiro (online at Vulture and available in archived form), which includes “Call Me Master” on the cover photo (echoing the emphasis in the 2024 podcast) and adds details from women going by “Brenda” and “Rachel.” The multiple NDAs and payments made to accusers (one payment as much as $275,000) are enough to make the forensic details smell fishy, but perhaps the most significant supporting detail is that while these women had never met each other before coming forward, their stories include similar details of straining the consent boundary, BDSM, and “call me master” language over the span of about twenty years.
It’s worth noting that Gaiman’s comic book series The Sandman employs this “call me master” language in an issue from May 1990, preceding almost every accuser’s encounter with Gaiman by at least a dozen years. In the story “Calliope” (Sandman #17), a character named Erasmus Fry uses the semi-mythical herb moly to kidnap Calliope (the mythical muse of epic poetry) and tells her, “You can call me master.” Another character named Richard Madoc gains ownership of Calliope in exchange for a bezoar and rapes her to escape writer’s block and obtain literary inspiration, just as the original owner had done. Eventually, Calliope is freed, and Madoc is punished by the Sandman (a personification of dreams and stories). One odd omission from Shapiro’s article, which mentions this episode of Calliope’s rape, is that there’s no mention of this relevant “master” language from the story, although Shapiro does acknowledge that audiences have historically identified Gaiman with the Sandman and not the rapists.
In many of his stories, Gaiman seems obsessed with aberrant sexuality in the way that sword and sorcery films from the 1980s were obsessed with scantily clad women. In his Smoke and Mirrors collection from 1999, three stories exemplify this obsession. “Foreign Parts” tells of a man whose excessive masturbation leads to a unique blending of a venereal disease and a psychological condition in which his sexual organ no longer seems to be his own. “Looking for the Girl,” first commissioned by Penthouse in 1985, covers another man’s infatuation with a Penthouse girl who remains forever nineteen, despite his own obvious aging over twenty years. “The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch,” apparently inspired by a Frank Frazetta picture of a seductive woman flanked by tigers, follows several London characters down into an underground circus fantasy in which Miss Finch transforms into a nude huntress.
Other works with unnecessarily provocative elements include American Gods and the film Beowulf. In a sex scene at the end of the first chapter of American Gods (2001), a man worships the body of the Queen of Sheba (a goddess named Bilquis), initially entering but ultimately being consumed by her. Gaiman also wrote the screenplay for the 2007 digitally enhanced live action Beowulf film, which was rated PG-13 in part for “some sexual material and nudity.” A nude Angelina Jolie, basically covered only in gold paint, plays Grendel’s mother. According to the BBC, “Jolie’s character was a wizened hag in the original poem, but is here presented as a sultry, slinky temptress.” Mercifully, Gaiman’s children’s novella Coraline (2002) is free from sexual deviancy, although the 2009 animated film contains an awkward scene in which a large, elderly woman bounces onstage wearing only the tiniest of glittery covering (this after Coraline has walked past lewd theater posters punning on Shakespearean titles such as “Julius Sees Her” and “King Leer”).
One of Gaiman’s most disturbing works of fiction, especially for fans of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, is “The Problem of Susan,” first published in Flights in 2004 and adapted for comics in 2019. In this short story, an elderly woman dreams about a Narnian battlefield. As a character standing on the field, she stares at a dead centaur’s genitals and wonders how centaurs mate, while a lion and a white-clad witch have a conversation on a nearby hill. The woman is Dr. Hastings, a retired professor of literature, and when she wakes, she prepares for an interview at her house. She has few extravagances, but she washes with scented water, puts on lipstick, and dresses in a suit before having breakfast, only to be greeted by a present that the next-door cat has left on the doormat: a mouse’s head and paw.
Just before the young interviewer arrives, Hastings reminisces about old flames, including one who took her virginity in Spain in the early 1950s. The young man wanted to get married, but she had said no. The interviewer, Greta Campion, arrives and asks boilerplate questions about Hastings’s work, including her book The Quest for Meaning in Children’s Fiction. When Greta asks about Hastings’s family, the professor replies that her family members died in a train accident: “Were killed. I should say.” Greta is reminded of C. S. Lewis’s children’s book The Last Battle, in which Susan Pevensie is left alive after the deaths of her family members. Greta remembers being angry at age twelve that Lewis would punish a character for “lipstick and nylons,” although Greta’s English teacher argues that there is still time for Susan to repent. When Hastings interrupts to ask what Susan would need to repent of, Greta replies with “not believing” and something vague about “the sin of Eve.”
Greta wonders aloud if Susan might have been consoled by the thought of her family being in Narnia again, and Hastings suggests, based on her own experience, that Susan likely had to identify the mangled bodies from the wreckage. Hastings’s younger brother, she discloses, had been decapitated. Before cutting the interview short, Hastings describes a God who would punish someone for liking party invitations as a kind of cat playing with a mouse before finally killing it.
That night, Hastings decides to sleep in the bed in the spare room of her house, the room with an applewood wardrobe. She looks at old photographs of her two brothers, her sister, and her parents, and she sees on a bedside table a children’s book published in the mid-twentieth century. When she notices that the cover picture shows two girls braiding a daisy chain into a lion’s mane, she knows that she is dreaming, because does not keep “those books” in her house.
Greta also dreams that night, and it is as if she has replaced Hastings in the earlier dream about the lion and the witch. From the perspective of Susan Pevensie, standing on the battlefield with her siblings, Greta watches the approaching lion and witch and notes that the lion is not a tame lion. The lion devours the two girls, leaving only Susan’s head and hand, while the witch deforms her brothers. After the lion and the witch engage in oral sex and intercourse, the lion finally eats Susan’s head, causing Greta to awaken and realize that Professor Hastings is the surviving Susan Pevensie.
This short story contains many opportunities for philosophical reflection. Numerous critics, including J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, have latched onto “the problem of Susan” terminology, as if Lewis were displaying a prudish unease with female sexuality. One of the most compelling responses to this charge appears in Life on the Silent Planet, a recent collection of critical essays on Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy in which Susannah Black-Roberts argues that the problem of Susan mirrors the problem of Jane (in That Hideous Strength) and has nothing to do with sex: it’s a problem of false maturity (282–85). Additionally, as we’ve seen, Gaiman weaves into “The Problem of Susan” a theme of “feline fate,” from an actual cat who plays with a mouse before killing it, to the professor’s consideration of the justice of a God who mangles humans in a train wreck simply to punish a girl who likes lipstick, to the Narnian lion who toys with his prey before devouring it.
But while the fan fiction and theodical musings are interesting, what emerges from this and the other examples is the reality that sexual obsession in Gaiman’s fiction is not a bug—it’s a feature. “The Problem of Susan” comes across as the work of someone who has fantasized about the sex life of Susan Pevensie in her early twenties, recalling the fact that Gaiman has had numerous sexual encounters with women in their early twenties (Stout, Kendall, and Pavlovich). The subtitle of Shapiro’s article indicates that Gaiman “hid the darkest parts of himself for decades,” but a glance at his fiction suggests that the veil was a thin one.
The focus on some of Gaiman’s writings leads to the question of what to do with them now. On the one hand, if we’re honest, we separate the art from the artist all the time, either because of ignorance, apathy, or something in between. King David, author of about half the psalms, basically violated the entire second table of the Decalogue. Martin Luther King, Jr. was sketchy on social issues, bad on his personal marriage issues, and heretical on theological issues. Cormac McCarthy had a sexual relationship with an underage girl, and some details of that experience appear in his semi-autobiographical novel Suttree.
And yet we haven’t thrown out all their work. In fact, despite the angst surrounding confederate monuments, President Obama still sent a wreath to be laid at the Confederate Memorial in 2009, a memorial that was removed in 2023. About a year ago, a progressive Christian professor’s tweet went viral for daring to suggest that, even with J. K. Rowling’s public opposition to trans ideology, her books were still worthy of academic consideration. We must, he argued, distinguish between novelist Rowling and Twitter Rowling. Absolute “package deal” thinking doesn’t work, because no writer could survive if one bad characteristic poisoned the well for everything that person writes.
On the other hand, either because of inconsistency or the natural tendency to do so, readers often connect authors’ biographies to their works. Some literature scholars have consciously avoided biographical criticism and the attendant “fallacies,” but many readers find it impossible to avoid making any connections between art and the artist. One literary example is Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein (written in 1816 and published in 1818), who records in her journal that she lost a newborn baby in 1815, leading to depression and traumatic dreams in which she would rub her baby’s dead body by the fire, and it would revive. In her introduction to the 1831 edition, she explicitly references her waking dream about “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” It’s not unreasonable to connect Shelley’s experiences to several plot details of her novella, in which Promethean fire brings to life Victor’s creature.
As Black-Roberts writes in her essay on “The Problem of Jane,” readers regularly do this with Lewis and “the problem of Susan”: “The canonical interpretation [of the problem of Susan] is down to Lewis himself having a problem with women’s sexuality” (272–73). Even within Gaiman’s story “The Problem of Susan,” Greta’s concluding epiphany is that the reason Professor Hastings’s family history matches Susan Pevensie’s experience so well is that the professor is Susan.
Gaiman himself has acknowledged that some of his work includes biographical connections. He has called his 2013 novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane his most personal book. Dedicated to Amanda Palmer, “who wanted to know,” the book is not strictly autobiographical, yet “that kid is me.” Set in Sussex, where Gaiman grew up, the book includes an episode of a seven-year-old boy who is punished by being plunged into a cold bath—reminiscent of a detail from Gaiman’s childhood reported by Shapiro in the New York magazine article. Gaiman has even spoken publicly about dreading writing this bathtub scene.
Besides consideration for true victims, the main issue surrounding author cancellation is ongoing financial support for the artist. There is an understandable desire to avoid contributing financially to a contemporary artist. Indeed, the corporate cancellation of Gaiman has been substantial. In the fall, Disney paused production on an adaptation of The Graveyard Book, and Amazon abbreviated Season 3 of Good Omens from an entire season to a 90-minute finale, with Gaiman removed from production. After Shapiro’s article in mid-January, Gaiman was dropped by his publisher Dark Horse Comics (cancelling the Anansi Boys comic adaptation) and by his agent; a U.K. stage production of Coraline was cancelled; and Netflix announced that Season 2 of The Sandman would be the last.
Similar to the writer’s tension between writing from experience and inventing narratives, readers experience a similar tension between eisegesis and absolute fictive separation from the author. It’s all too easy for readers to play Monday morning quarterback and suggest that the signs were there all along. Knee-jerk reactions to plot details—which at times can be appropriate—may cause readers to recoil, but do they necessarily tell a tales of secret sexual deviancy on the part of the author? In The Narnian, published in 2005 (a year after Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan”), Alan Jacobs writes, “It is in the end useless to point to fictional characters and declare that they prove something about the character of their creator” (261). It’s a fair warning. As Jacobs says, “[I]f every negative female character an author creates is evidence of that author’s misogyny, then few writers can escape censure.”
However, as we’ve seen above, sometimes the parallels are striking. In fact, Shapiro makes some of these very connections: “As allegations of Gaiman’s sexual misconduct emerged this past summer, some observers noticed Gaiman and Madoc [the rapist from “Calliope”] have certain things in common. Like Madoc, Gaiman has called himself a feminist. Like Madoc, Gaiman has racked up major awards…. And like Madoc, Gaiman has come to be seen as a figure who transcended, and transformed, the genres in which he wrote.”
These parallels and others lead to a question of moral complicity. To put the question bluntly: what degree of guilt, if any, do readers bear for failing to speak up? If such a question seems wildly unfair, we should consider certain details in the current lawsuit against Gaiman and Palmer, in which Pavlovich makes accusations of human trafficking, assault, battery, emotional distress, and negligence. In one of the suit’s causes of action against Palmer, Pavlovich specifically claims that “[a]t the time that Palmer suggested to Scarlett [Pavlovich] that Scarlett babysit at Gaiman’s home, Palmer knew that Gaiman was a sexual predator who enjoyed hurting women.” At least one critic has argued that Palmer basically played Ghislaine Maxwell to Gaiman’s Epstein.
Palmer publicly denied the allegations on February 7, and Pavlovich has not accused Palmer of direct sexual assault. Yet there Palmer appears in the lawsuit, accused of criminal negligence. A literary analogue appears at the end of Homer’s Odyssey as two suitors among others face judgment at the hands of Odysseus and Telemachus. Antinous had been an explicit predator while Amphinomus had been more muted in his Ithacan insurrection. One man pursued injustice recklessly while the other made only weak attempts to impede the injustice, acting more as an enabler. However, it’s not exactly a badge of honor to be the best-behaved of the xenia-violating suitors, and the dramatic effect of the epic is that we see that both kinds of people are punished.
It’s never fun to look in the mirror and see the specter of Amphinomus, but it seems reasonable to at least ask if silence is a tacit approval of the activities of someone’s books? Again, Gaiman’s fiction doesn’t dabble in sexual debauchery—it’s almost everywhere. His body of work is filled with cases of serial rape, BDSM activity, fantasies about pornographic models, sex with underage girls, addiction to masturbation, detailed descriptions of nude characters, sexualized characters from classical literature, and fan fiction in which characters from children’s novels engage in oral sex. So what kind of cultural pressure could and should Gaiman’s readers have exerted? What kind of people are okay with this kind of literature floating around in public libraries? Possibly not the kind of people who have much of a right to protest against actual sexual abuse.
Last month, one of my university colleagues expressed concern about continuing to include Gaiman’s work in an English course on children’s literature. The spring semester had started, and students had already purchased The Graveyard Book. What to do? I don’t have all the answers for the questions that arise from the Gaiman situation. But certain facts are unavoidable, such as the fact that clues and patterns do exist, biographical connections often are present in works of art, and audiences do participate in the morality of a work. Given these realities, when it comes to the question of whether authors are visible in their works or whether audiences can be complicit in destructive art, it’s difficult to conclude that the answer is no.
Jeremy Larson is Associate Professor English at Regent University. Follow him on X at @TheMundaneMuse.