Neil Gaiman responds to sexual assault allegations: "I don't accept there was any abuse"

This week, a lengthy exposé was published in Vulture and New York Magazine detailing numerous allegations of sexual abuse against fantasy author Neil Gaiman. These allegations first came to light in July 2024 following a series of podcasts released by news start-up Tortoise Media. Titled "Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman," they featured interviews with five women who claim that Gaiman subjected them to various instances of sexual harassment and abuse.

But this week's piece in Vulture revealed far more details. Vulture spoke with four of the women featured in the Tortoise podcasts as well as four others who had similar experiences, and the resulting report was graphic, disturbing, and horrifying. All it takes is one Google search to see how much the story has been picked up by other large outlets since then, including People, USA Today, BBC, and Rolling Stone.

Now, Gaiman has taken to his blog to respond to the allegations. This is the first time he's spoken about them since Tortoise's podcasts dropped in the middle of 2024. "Over the past many months, I have watched the stories circulating the internet about me with horror and dismay," Gaiman wrote. "I’ve stayed quiet until now, both out of respect for the people who were sharing their stories and out of a desire not to draw even more attention to a lot of misinformation. I've always tried to be a private person, and felt increasingly that social media was the wrong place to talk about important personal matters. I've now reached the point where I feel that I should say something."

Gaiman claims that he has read through the accounts given by his alleged victims, and that "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."

In short: he denies the allegations in full, saying he reviewed messages he exchanged with the women in question, and that to him, they were "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."

"And I also realise, looking through them, years later, that I could have and should have done so much better," he added. "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."

"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."

Neil Gaiman

Despite coming close to some sort of apology in those paragraphs, Gaiman closes his blog post by once again firmly refuting the allegations made against him, writing, "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."

There's a little bit more in Gaiman's blog, but what's written above is the bulk of it. Now, I am obviously not positioned to weigh in too heavily on this, but I do want to point a few things out. One is that the timing of this post, which he titles "Breaking the Silence," feels a little transparent. These allegations were first made more than half a year ago, and Gaiman — who used to be notoriously chatty with fans on the internet — has gone radio silent. I suspect that the opening paragraph of his post, which mentions that he didn't want to "draw even more attention" to what he claims is misinformation, explains that.

According to The Bookseller, Gaiman hired crisis management firm Edendale Strategies and lawyer Andrew Brettler to handle his PR in relation to this story. If you're keeping track, that's the same firm hired by That '70s Show star Danny Masterson after he was accused (and later convicted) of rape, as well as Marilyn Manson following sexual misconduct allegations from multiple women. It seems to me that, obviously, Gaiman didn't want this sort of negative press, and was hoping it would go away. I don't think it's too surprising that he's only now responding once this news has reached huge outlets where it can't be swept under the rug as easily. This thing is going to be on news stands now:

Another thing I feel the need to point out is that Gaiman's response is pretty pale in comparison to the sheer breadth and depth of the allegations reported in Vulture, from multiple women with similar accounts, none of whom had ever met each other before their stories became headline news last year. A large news organization like Vulture/New York Magazine is also going to do a fair amount of legal vetting before running a story with such sensitive material, accusing one of the entertainment industry's most recognizable figures (with a lot of money for lawyers) of this sort of gross misconduct. I do not think they did so lightly, or without doing their due diligence.

I'll also add one last thing: reading the accounts of those women, perception and imbalanced power dynamics were a consistent theme that kept occurring in their stories. They often described Gaiman pushing boundaries, and themselves as going along with it for various reasons only to later have to grapple with the reality of their situations. So while I do not doubt that the text messages Gaiman has in his phone read a certain way to him, I also don't really get how that dismisses the first-hand accounts of these women and their lived experiences. Or the NDAs that he had several of them sign to keep their affairs quiet.

"I was caught up in my own story and I ignored other people's," Gaiman wrote in his response. And from the tenor of this post, and the way it centers him while spending very little time reflecting on the harm done to the women caught in his path, it sounds like that's still the case.

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