Neil Gaiman appears to have engaged a damage-control firm and begun an extensive social media campaign TWO MONTHS BEFORE the podcast that broke the news of the alleged sexual assaults, based on what the members of the Neil Gaiman Facebook group have observed.
In the past few weeks, there have been reports that a reputation management firm has been hired by Neil or on his behalf, and their activities may include astroturfing X with positive comments about his work. Messages take the form of paragraph of Chat-GPT-style text praising a Gaiman project, or describing it as if readers will never have heard of it before (which is not appropriate for the intended audience, who have already been discussing it for years). There is then a bunch of replies to the post expressing delight about the work. I assumed that couldn’t happen on Facebook.
A few days ago I was concerned by a post that was shared to this group from the Neil Gaiman group. Now, we’re all positive folks and we’re here because we like Neil’s stuff (or did until recently), so it’s not unusual for the mood to be on the enthusiastic side. It’s possible I’m seeing more than is there. But… You can check how long somebody has been a member of a group, so I had a quick look for each of the posters. Tortoise Media’s podcast was published on 3rd July so there would have been an awareness of their initial investigations in the months running up to then. A remarkable number of commenters only joined the Neil Gaiman group in May, June, and July.
A Reddit commenter points out that Gaiman’s claims to have been diagnosed with autism – at the age of 62 – appear to be rather dubious. He first made the claims on March 8, 2023. That would appear to have been before the podcast production was underway, but well after Gaiman was aware that he was going to be facing public accusations of sexual assault.
If I remember correctly, didn’t he also talk about having autism for the first time a few months before the podcast was released? I think he confirmed it for the first time on Tumblr earlier this year, (and surprise, that was one of the defenses used by a friend of his who talked to Tortoise). Seems like he and his team were already long prepared for the podcast episodes to drop and had a plan in place.
It’s certainly interesting that while Gaiman is more than willing to tell people that he’s autistic – which apparently has not impressed anyone as an even remotely legitimate diagnosis – while continuing to conceal what appears to be his continued involvement with Scientology. Personally, I think he should have gone with sociopathy, although perhaps that would have struck just a little bit too close to home.
I’ll be doing an AMA – with the exception of anything related to my family – in the r/gammasecretkings subreddit on Friday at 7 PM EST. Feel free to come and enjoy the repertoire, and if you’ve got a Reddit account, join in the fun.
Same as the Kurgan AMA, Marquess of Queensbury rules will apply. I expect a clean fight and for all parties to be good sports. I’m not saying anybody should pull any punches, just that none will be allowed to fight dirty. u/voxday, whether he intends it or not, is a man that can bring out the worst in both his supporters and detractors.
Of course, it being Thursday, that means tonight at 7 PM EST is Arkhaven Nights. Turn on the lights!
We all know better than to expect logic or consistency out of SJWs. But sometimes, their contorted reasoning is so incredible that simply it has to be appreciated for the gymnastic accomplishment that it is.
Now, keeping in mind that one of my great offenses in the minds of the r/nealgaimanuncovered crowd is that I don’t believe in the concept of “marital rape” – and to be clear, I am in absolute accord with the centuries-long history of legal jurisprudence in rejecting the concept as an intrinsic contradiction in terms – it is somewhat astonishing to see the same people who genuinely believe that a man can rape his legally-married, fully-consenting wife also believe that Neil Gaiman cannot have raped any of his various accusers because he was reportedly in some sort of sexual relationship with them after the fact.
I’m quite willing to listen to the arguments of those who insist that the act of signing a marital contract and undergoing a wedding ceremony is not tantamount to giving permanent and ongoing sexual consent. Those arguments are obviously wrong – try telling the US Army that even though you enlisted and signed the papers, you are refusing to provide active consent to deployment in the Middle East – but they’re not entirely self-contradictory.
But how you can argue that rape exists in marriage despite the obvious evidence of consent having been previously provided, but that having sex with a woman proves you didn’t previously rape her, is simply incoherent nonsense.
The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor called Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather.
Whatever could she be trying to tell us about Mr. Tubcuddle?
It’s not exactly a mystery why the radical feminists never get anywhere in their endless, and futile, campaign against sexual predators. They drive off everyone who isn’t one of them, then complain that no one supports even their most reasonable efforts. They now have a rule that nothing posted on r/neilgaimanmemes can be posted on r/neilgaimanuncovered, which is ironic because r/neilgaimanuncovered was set up in response to r/neilgaiman banning all discussion of Neil Gaiman or the growing number of allegations against him.
r/neilgaimanuncovered A sub for discussion of Neil Gaiman, post sexual misconduct allegations and for any other writers with similar allegations. Rules 1 Be nice. 2 No spam. 3 No racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism or TERFs. 4 If they say they’re traumatized, they are. 5 No “Bitches Be Crazy.” 6 No reposts from “Neil Gaiman Memes”
What’s particularly amusing is that the rule was just adopted today because a member of r/neilgaimanuncovered requested a meme that was subsequently produced on r/neilgaimanmemes.
What’s even funnier is that they sincerely believe their side is in sole possession of all human creativity and talent. To the contrary, some of the memes are excellent and are entertaining even if you have no idea who Neil Gaiman is.
On a tangentially-related note, it appears F&SF is already dead. There can be little doubt that this is a harbinger for the converged mainstream F&SF publishing industry.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, commonly referred to as F&SF, has long been revered as one of the last century’s most important genre fiction magazines. It’s the one cultural staple that held out the longest against wokeism, actually focusing on great storytelling for much of the 2010s, but it appears as if the magazine may be in trouble or even ceasing publication entirely... Since the Winter Issue, Fantasy & Science Fiction has not published any new content, its website has not been updated, and no commentary has been made on the magazine’s status.
UPDATE: Wow, Bing has declared “Neil Gaiman” to be unsafe content.
Prompt: Neil Gaiman signs a book
Result: Unsafe image content detected Your image generations are not displayed because we detected unsafe content in the images based on our content policy. Please try creating again with another prompt.
My wife and I visited a winery this week where the owner gave a tour—good looking young dude, charismatic, great speaker and storyteller. Everyone in the group seemed to be fawning over him. But something in his story, and something about him, felt very off to me.
Sure enough, when I got home some quick online searching (oddly, his last name is scrubbed from any mention on on winery website) and some texting with a few friends—we are usually only 2-3 degrees of separation, it’s a small world—turned up that a number of years ago he had cheated on his wife in a different state and been involved in a massive fraud scheme in education, misappropriating public funds (he was a ”public school teacher”, he told us). He had fled the state and turned up in a new one, now running a multi-million dollar winery and presenting himself as morally superior to every other wine maker in the region.
Did you notice the tell? Con men of every stripe always present themselves as nice people. This is why I roll my eyes when obvious creeps like Neil Gaiman are unmasked and everyone somehow manages to be surprised; of course he acted super nice to everyone in public, unless you’re a rock star, you don’t get young women fawning over you if you don’t present a warm and welcoming mask to everyone. But the comparison between the art and the artist was incongruous, ergo there was a problem lurking underneath.
But there are lots of nice people and sociopaths work very hard to imitate them. The dead giveaway is the posturing at being morally superior. Normal people don’t do that; if anything, they tend to exaggerate their flaws. Always be very leery of any man or woman who is conspicuously nice, and then tells you why they are better than the average individual. And definitely keep one hand on your wallet.
Even if Vox Day rather than Rachel Johnson had 1st reported the accusations against Neil Gaiman, I hope I would have believed K and Scarlett once I read/heard their testimony & the damning statements from whomever communicated Neil‘s response. I say that as someone who owes a lot to Neil.
You know it’s getting serious when SJWs are getting to the point that they would, even hypothetically, consider believing your favorite Dark Lord rather than the self-appointed social justice saint and LGBTQFP+ ally Neal Gaiman. The ironic thing is that I’m very far from the only one on the Right who knew that he was an overrrated creep all along. Consider what I wrote publicly back in 2018 when I first got into writing comics.
If you think Neil Gaiman is a great novelist, or even a great SF/F novelist, you are simply wrong. He is a successful, talented and much-loved SF/F author, and understandably so, but he is also little more than a very successful stunt writer with two or three tricks in his bag. There is a reason that all of his notable books involve mythology of one sort or another; his true gift is translating ancient myth into a form that pleases postmodern palates. He also has the ability to convey that sense of the numinous that I lack. But Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Alan Moore, John C. Wright, China Mieville, Nick Cole, and even George R.R. Martin are all better, more original SF/F writers with considerably more to say about the human condition than Gaiman. When I have thought about the writers whose work I would like to be able to emulate or surpass over the years, Neil Gaiman never once entered into the equation, not even for a moment. Consider that American Gods is described as “Neil Gaiman’s best and most ambitious novel yet.” I liked that story considerably better when it was called Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and On the Road.
It’s pretty simple. I am a better novelist than Neil Gaiman by almost every reasonable measure. Anyone who has read a sufficient variety of both our novels will recognize that pretty easily. Gaiman writes a variant of the same book with the same sort of characters almost every time. Even his Sandman is a Gary Stu of sorts. I have much wider literary range and can write everything from haunting shorts that could almost pass for modern Maupassant to murder mysteries to epic military fantasy. I don’t write myself into my books and I can even successfully pull off the “you genuinely think he’s dead but actually he isn’t” trick without cheating or magic or medical science or anything but pure literary sleight of hand. George Martin can’t do that despite repeated attempts. Gaiman can’t do it either. And as for Murakami, I have been writing a literary novel inspired by his style for years, although since I am not Japanese, it is more likely to feature a wedding than a suicide. I have no idea when it will be finished, if ever, but I think I might be able to pull it off. And if I can’t get even reasonably close, then I won’t publish it. I admire Tanith Lee. I admire JRR Tolkien. I admire John C. Wright. I admire China Mieville. I admire Alan Moore. I admire Umberto Eco. The only thing I admire about Gaiman’s writing is his ability to give everything the flavor of a fairy tale. That’s not nothing, it’s actually pretty cool, but it’s very far from the most significant thing. Sure, he sells a lot more books, but then, Dan Brown and Katie Price sell even more and I don’t have any respect for their literary abilities either.
The reason so many people on the Right knew Gaiman was a creep while no one on the Left did is very simple. We believe the art reflects the artist. They reject the connection between the art and the artist.
And, obviously, they are wrong.
It is, however, mildly amusing to observe that the way SJWs ritually disavow a formerly beloved author is to repeat “F— Neal Gaiman” as if it is a formal anathema.
It’s going to be a busy day on r/neilgaimanmemes today, in light of the news that two more women have come forward to accuse Neil Gaiman of sexual assault, one in 1986 and the other in 2017. That makes five alleged victims over a period of 35 years, so the chances that there will be dozens more is astronomical. It’s a good thing Gaiman is a prolific storyteller, because he’s almost certainly going to have to be coming up with an awful lot of stories explaining away his historical behavior over the next few months.
The two new accounts — published today in a new episode of ‘Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman’ — have been corroborated through documents, emails, and messages seen by Tortoise as well as through interviews with friends and family who the women confided in. Gaiman did not provide any on-the-record response to multiple detailed requests for comment on either set of allegations.
Caroline Wallner lived in a house on Gaiman’s property in Woodstock, New York between 2014 and 2021 with her three young daughters and, until 2017, her husband. Alongside her work as a ceramic artist in a studio in a barn on the property, Wallner and her husband worked for Gaiman and his then wife Amanda Palmer, including doing property maintenance, gardening, and grocery shopping. Gaiman had moved to the area to teach at Bard College.
Around the time Wallner’s marriage ended in 2017, which she said devastated her emotionally, Gaiman told her ex-husband that there was no more work for him on the property, which had provided the family’s main income. Wallner and her daughters were now dependent on Gaiman for work and housing. While she was in this situation, Wallner, then 55, said that Gaiman began pressuring her for sex.
Wallner said: “There were little hints of, ‘we’re going to need the house’. And I remember saying, let’s talk about it. Let’s figure it out. That’s when he would just come to my studio and make me give him a blowjob”. There is no suggestion of physical force, but rather of coercion in light of her housing and family situation. Wallner said: “And he can say it was consensual. But why would I do that? It was because I was scared of losing my place”, characterising Gaiman’s treatment of her as “sexual abuse.”
The UN defines sexual abuse as actual or threatened sexual contact by force or coercive conditions. The UN’s refugee agency, where Gaiman is a goodwill ambassador, has described the allegations against him published by Tortoise as “very serious”, adding that it is “assessing the detailed reporting”.
Gaiman settled with Wallner for $275,000 and a non-disclosure agreement less than two weeks later. The NDA “disputes and denies that Wallner has sustained any losses, damages, or injuries for which Gaiman is legally responsible.” Gaiman’s position is that he settled with her to avoid expensive and protracted litigation. The NDA prohibits Wallner from talking about Gaiman with “family members, friends, associates” and from filing, reporting, or prosecuting any action or proceeding in “any court, governmental agency, or before any tribunal whatsoever or wheresoever”. If Wallner is asked to make disclosures by a “valid legal process”, the NDA says she must give Gaiman 20 days notice and help him resist disclosure.
The 1986 woman is an OBE. It’s certainly going to be difficult for Gaiman to play his customary “who are you, you’re nobody” card.
“I’m a very wealthy man. You’re…”
“I’m an OBE. Her Majesty the Queen made me an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Who are you, Mr. Wealthy Man?”
One wonders what the Crown knew about Gaiman. Far less well-known, far less successful authors have been given honors by the Queen. I would think he must have come up at some point but then failed the vetting process.
In less than 24 hours, there are already 96 members of r/neilgaimanmemes and loads of memes with thousands of views. The media’s wall of silence will not stand!
The first lesson of fighting the patriarchy and exposing sex predators is don’t talk about Neil Gaiman! First Reddit:
r/neilgaimanuncoveredu/voxday is permanently banned from r/neilgaimanuncovered expand allcollapse all
[–]subreddit message via /r/neilgaimanuncovered[M] sent 14 hours ago Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/neilgaimanuncovered because your comment violates this community’s rules. You won’t be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.
If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team by replying to this message.
Reminder from the Reddit staff: If you use another account to circumvent this subreddit ban, that will be considered a violation of the Content Policy and can result in your account being suspended from the site as a whole.
The amusing thing, of course, is that there are more comments on a single post on that subject at Sigma Game than on any post at that subreddit. And then something called Bluesky, which is apparently where all the would-be literary SJWs ran after Elon Musk bought Twitter for reasons that are still unclear to me. I’m not sure I even got around to posting anything there yet; they REALLY don’t want you talking about Neil Gaiman AT ALL. Notice that to SJWs, the mere creation of an account is “harassment”.
Hi there,
A Bluesky account you control (@voxday.bsky.social) has been taken down for harassment.
This takedown is not a temporary suspension. Please do not create additional accounts on our service. We will take action against any additional accounts as we become aware of them.
If you have any additional questions or wish to appeal this decision please email moderation@blueskyweb.xyz.
Bluesky Moderation Team
Anyhow, if you wonder why JDA and I are still talking about this, this should explain why. The evil people in this publishing industry desperately want to maintain their wall of silence. Just because he’s always been irrelevant to our community – I don’t own a single Gaiman book or comic; if I want to read magical realism, I’ll read Murakami or Borges, not a mediocre wannabe – doesn’t mean he’s not extremely important to them, if only as a symbol of success. And it’s observably making a difference; I have now heard from several people who have been strangely silent up until now who are clearly in the process of formulating their first public statements about Gaiman. But they know how it goes.
Former BBC presenter Huw Edwards has been charged with child pornography offences after 37 indecent images were allegedly shared on a WhatsApp chat.
Scotland Yard confirmed the 62-year-old broadcaster was facing three charges of making indecent images of children between December 2020 and April 2022.
Police said Edwards was arrested on November 8 last year and charged just over a month ago on June 26 following authorisation from the Crown Prosecution Service.
Edwards – who helmed royal and political events at the BBC before resigning in April – has been bailed and will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this Wednesday.
According to the charge sheet, Edwards is accused of having six category A images, 12 category B pictures and 19 category C photographs on WhatsApp.
And yes, it’s pretty much all of them. The evil guys don’t want to talk about the wicked guys, they prefer to systematically target the kind of people who will call them out for what they are.
And they tell you what they are. You just have to believe what you read. Consider the following, written by the accused himself, Mr. Tubcuddle:
Today I had my photo taken, for an American Library Association Series of author photo posters. (The poster won’t be out for months. You’ll need to get something else in the meantime, like their Sherman Alexie poster. Or their Orlando Bloom READ poster. Or their P. Craig Russell Sandman poster.) The photographer explained that she was going to do a straightforward photo (which she took), and that later she wants take some more imaginative ones — me looming from the darkness, me with paint or ink dripping from my hand, that kind of thing. And then she mentioned that she wanted to also take a photo of me as the mythological or literary character of my choice, and wondered who I’d like to be.
“Red Riding Hood’s Wolf,” I said, because I went perfectly blank, and that was the first thing that popped into my completely blank head. So I’m going to be Red Riding Hood’s Wolf in a photo, although this may not be obvious to anyone except the photographer and me.
Afterwards, she asked why…
I honestly didn’t know, so I started writing, to try and figure it out.
I think part of the idea of Red Riding Hood’s Wolf (why her wolf? Possibly because I was given a Ladybird book containing the story of Little Red Riding Hood, when I was an infant, and that was the first time I’d encountered the image of a wolf standing on his hind legs. He wore a jacket, at least in memory he did, in the paintings, and was talking comfortably to Red Riding Hood, who was chubby and pretty, and much older than I was, and I could absolutely understand what he saw in her, and for me Sondheim’s song “Hello Little Girl” was already beginning to come into existence, as text not subtext: obviously, this meeting was to be the start of a beautiful friendship, one that would last — girl and wolf — forever). The wolf in the story represents an awful lot of stuff — the danger and truth of stories, for a start, and the way they change; he symbolises — not predation, for some reason — but transformation: the meeting in the wild wood that changes everything forever. Angela Carter’s statement that “some men are hairy on the inside” comes to mind: as an image, in my head, it’s the wolf’s shadow that has ears and a tail, while the man in wolf form stands in his forest (and cities are forests too) and waits for the girl in the red cloak , picking flowers, to come along, or, hungrily, watches her leave…
There’s a woodcutter, and an axe, but at the start of the story, the wolf is waiting again, and he’s just fine.
When I was a boy, when I grew up I wanted to be a wolf. I never wanted to be a wolfman. I didn’t really want to be a werewolf, except for a few years in my early teens. I wanted to be a wolf, in a forest or in the world.
Later, as an adult, I remember encountering the story of Red Riding Hood in its original form, a French version that predated the cleaned-up ways of telling the tale I’d already encountered, and the bleak sexuality of the story came through: when she encounters the wolf in her grandmother’s bed, he eats and drinks her grandmother with her, then tells her to take off all her clothes and throw them on the fire — she wouldn’t be needing them any more, — and, finally, she joins him in the bed naked. And then, with no more ado, he eats her. And there the story stops, sometimes with a direct moral — not to talk to strangers — and sometimes without it. The story disturbed me, and I put it into Sandman, in the Serial Killers’ Convention story, where it represents a number of things at once, and is also itself.
The wolf defines Red Riding Hood. He makes the story happen. Without him, she’d just be another girl on her way to her grandmother’s house. And she’d leave her goodies behind, and come home, and no-one would ever have heard of her. But he’s not just her wolf: he’s all the wolves on the edge of the world, all the wolves in all the stories, all the wolves in all the dreams of wolves; flashing green eyes in the darkness, dangerously honest about what he wants: food, company, an appetite.
And if I could be any literary figure, I think, today, I’d be strangely happy to be him.
TRANSLATION: if they get him for breaking the law, it’s going to because the girl was underage.
UPDATE: Oh, the irony. I was banned from commenting at /r neilgaimanuncovered because the moderator read my biography on Wikipedia. La, whatever shall I do? Anyhow, I’ll continue to mine the subreddit for information, but now they won’t get what we dig up without reading VP and Fandom Pulse.
Feminists are such retards.
FEMINIST: Why won’t men speak out against rich, famous men attacking young women?
EVERY FEMINIST ALLY:-total silence-
VD and JDA: Rape and sexual assault are bad. Neil Gaiman is also bad.
FEMINIST: Shut up shut up shut up! Not you, you’re too evil! Now, why won’t men speak out against rich, famous men attacking young women?
UPDATE: The poster and photo referenced in Gaiman’s blog post. He’s just one fedora short of euphoria. Now you know why only losers and overweight, insecure goth girls ever thought he was cool.
