Reading the news

I've encountered Neil Gaiman in person three times. The first time was at ReaderCon in 2010 when he collected a pair of awards. All he did was walk by me, but I remember how the room sort of fell into a hush when he strode in and self-deprecatingly collected both awards. The second time was when I was invited to a book release for The Ocean at the End of the Lane in 2013 in Saratoga Springs, when I saw him speak before a massive crowd of adoring fans. The third instance was during a press junket at New York Comic Con in 2018 for the then-upcoming series Good Omens, along with David Tennant, Jon Hamm, and Michael Sheen. I happened to sit next to Gaiman, asked him and the cast some questions about the series.

They were all were memorable experiences: I'd been a fan of Gaiman's books ever since I'd read his 2001 novel American Gods, a sprawling cross-country adventure that follows a felon and a god across America as they wage a battle for the heart of the country, and enjoyed some of the other books and shorter stories that I'd read by him.

If you were online at all, he maintained an affable presence on Twitter, where he'd provide updates about his projects or opine with some wisdom about the value of stories and imagination and the like. It got to be a bit overly twee for me, but he was the type of author whose book I'd still stick to the top of my reading list.

As a professor of mine noted, he's "Neil-fucking-Gaiman," the closest thing that the genre community had to a rock star and as a fan and journalist covering the field, I always saw Gaiman as a sort of ambassador for the cloistered world of genre fandom, helping to bring fantasy to a much wider audience at a time when such stories weren't exactly popular.

Gaiman has been in the news this week for other reasons: a devastating exposé in Vulture by Lila Shapiro titled "There Is No Safe Word," which details allegations of sexual misconduct against a number of women. It's a grim read, one that follows the allegations that came to light in July 2024 through a podcast from Tortoise Media by investigative journalist Paul Caruana Galizia called The Master, in which five women alleged that Gaiman sexually assaulted them, with some of the incidents going back to the 1980s.

I'm not using this newsletter issue to recap the allegations against him: that reporting's already been done, and I don't have anything to add to it. What I'm more interested in is how this is a good example of how investigative journalism works and why this story has taken a while to play out.

Given the subject matter and the potential for context collapse, I'm leaving this article locked for members: you can read it in your email, but if you want to read it on the site, you might need to log in.