Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual assault by two women-- one woman who was a 22-year-old live-in nanny to his child at the time of her alleged assault, and another who met him at a book signing when she was 18 and got involved with him when she was twenty. (Now, I'm in no position to criticize age gaps for being age gaps, but coming onto an employee is sketchy however you look at it, and when you're a famous author and powerful Hollywood dude, you do have to exercise a lot more caution with sleeping with any much younger person.) Being research-oriented I'm going to offer up a breakdown of the coverage so we can see what's being said and by whom.


Tortoise Media broke the story in a four-part podcast. (Listen without having to create a Tortoise account here; be warned that it's very graphic-- I've skimmed a "non-certified transcript" of the first episode available here but I'm mostly going on other news outlets' summarization of the content.) They purport to be a "slow news" organization that's about a more honest form of news-- they don't cover breaking news; they do investigations of what's driving the news and try to do in-depth journalism in the full view of their paying subscribership. I'm not finding a ton of information about it online, but it's run by a former director of BBC News and according to Wikipedia it won the British Journalism Awards' "Innovation of the Year" award in 2019, so it does seem to be a real news organization, albeit one run by rich people. (Emily Bell writing for the Guardian in 2018 criticized the entire concept of Tortoise Media here, noting that some of the Kickstarter tiers were extremely high dollar, but even she acknowledges that it's probably going to do real journalism and the criticism was more on a "this is not going to be The Solution to journalism's current problems" angle.)

One of the journalists involved in this particular story is Rachel Johnson, about whom some hay is being made in circles that wish to deny this because she's Boris Johnson's sister, and she's extremely TERFy. (She doesn't seem to share her brother's particular brand of crazy, so I don't think it's fair to hold him against her, but the TERF stuff is all her own.) The logic behind this seems to be that the anti-trans crowd hates Gaiman, which is true, and Tortoise Media itself seems to be somewhat TERFy (while I haven't listened to that podcast episode itself, the "why this story" essay underneath has a very specific slant).

My observation is that people who are bringing up the "But TERFs!" aren't doing the kind of above analysis of "how reliable are these people" and are just jumping to "But TERFs" because they don't want to believe it. The attached logic to that reasoning seems to be "these people are suddenly coming out of the woodwork years later and making these accusations as an anti-trans plot to discredit a trans ally," which is... implausible. As far as I can tell it's an actual journalism organization. One with some terrible opinions, but it's not, like, Infowars or Breitbart. Does the chance to go after a trans ally probably appeal to them? Yes. Does that automatically mean they're wrong? Unfortunately not. Tortoise has a lot of records; there were Whatsapps and texts and contemporaneous timestamped notes, so unless you think Tortoise is outright lying about the existence of these records and faked a whole bunch of recorded interviews, to be entirely faked it would have to be an elaborate, years-long conspiracy among multiple people.

Do I have any non-TERF sources? Well... kinda. It got picked up by a bunch of other outlets but none of those outlets have done their own reporting--they're reporting Tortoise's investigation. But the tone of that isn't like when they report on Alex Jones; they seem to be respecting Tortoise as a real media outlet that's done a real investigation. (Gaiman has refused to offer comment to any of the non-Tortoise media outlets who've asked.) You can see Rolling Stone's coverage here, the AV Club here, and TheWrap here. KnowYourMeme is also covering it.

The thing that makes me believe it the most is actually Gaiman's own responses, given that his response to Tortoise was apparently to tell them it was consensual and he suggested one of the accusers is suffering from "false memories."

There's then a lot of discussion on the fannish internet. A number of people have made callbacks to the time he and Amanda Palmer separated in 2020 (resulting in Gaiman flying back to the UK from New Zealand during lockdown) and neither of them gave any details as to why despite being people who live their entire relationship very publicly. That's barest speculation and we have no indication of these two things being related, but people are mentioning it.

Some specific links to opinions. With one exception, everyone I am quoting either has relevant expertise or is active in fandom in such a way that it's reasonable to care about their opinion:

Ursula Vernon wants a site that's not run by TERFs to talk about it and implies she's not going to believe it until one does, although she does walk that back a little in later posts. She makes mention of age gap discourse as well.

Crystal Frasier buys into the "the only source is TERFs" thing and implies Tortoise may have lied about Gaiman's comments, using "I am a sexual assault survivor" as a shore to her own credibility.

Gretchen Felker-Martin reminds us to remember that it's awful being on the same side of something as the TERFs but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be there. She also reminds authors to consider what kind of publishing world they want to make with their public reactions.

Lawyer Mike Dunford gives us a thread about why Gaiman's failure to immediately file libel charges is not in and of itself proof of his guilt.

My one exception to the "no anonymous things" rule, mainly because of timing: someone on lol_meme made a post accusing Gaiman of rape well before this broke, all the way back in 2023. What little detail in it tracks with the current allegations.

(Conspicuously absent from any coverage of or opinions on this is File770.)

This is a developing story and I may or may not continue aggregating it as more people comment and more details come out (oddly enough, it's draining to spend an evening and morning sifting through a bunch of people talking about rape), but I wanted to get some sort of aggregation of the stuff out there.