Before Richard Siken and his puzzling yet seemingly boundless availability to answer fans’ most banal queries on X, there was Neil Gaiman on Twitter. Goodreads. Tumblr. Reddit — though one only hoped so.
He engaged with the digital world like a man who had discovered an entirely new stage for his performance. He would speak of writing, of the sanctity of story, of the necessity of creativity, and always, with the ease of someone practised in the art of affirming others, he would assure you that your dreams were, indeed, valid.
Gaiman was not alone in offering this new kind of digital intimacy, of course, but he was certainly one of its most charming practitioners. Or at least, he was until New York Magazine published a damning exposé on Gaiman on January 13. For this cover story, journalist Lila Shapiro interviewed eight women, gathering testimonies from six who accuse Gaiman of rape, coercion, and degradation. Four of these women previously went public with their allegations in a podcast series by Tortoise Media last year.
Shortly after, the writer posted a statement on his website emphatically denying all accusations. He insists, with quiet confidence, that what transpired was not non-consensual, but rather an exploration of BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism), a negotiation of boundaries within a world of desire and dominance. In his retelling, he is the subject of misunderstanding, his actions framed as the fault of misinterpretation rather than intention.
This is, of course, the work of a man who has built a career out of recuperating myths.
In Norse Mythology, Gaiman introduces us to Yggdrasil, the sacred ash tree, and the mead of poetry, a magical concoction of blood, spit, and honey. In The Sandman, he reimagines John Milton’s Lucifer as a fallen angel turned extravagant philanderer.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a myth is both “an ancient story” and “a widely believed but false idea.” These definitions reflect the evolution of myth—an attempt to bridge the gap between what we see and what we understand. When the myth exceeds its reality, it becomes a false idea.
Neil, a lifelong believer in the power of myth, has resuscitated many. The myth he retells now is the myth of consent.
Yes means what
#MeToo has birthed a new lexicon replete with legal borrowings meant to bolster defence against and information around violation of a subject’s person and dignity. Consent sits at the heart of this new language.
But is it enough to say “yes,” or is that merely the beginning of a much larger negotiation? Reading through the testimonies of these women who claim that Gaiman manipulated both their yes and no is reckoning with a world where language is fundamentally flawed at capturing the complexities of human interaction, not just a context-starved legal vocabulary. Consent is used and abused with the same regularity as love or kindness, or indeed, power.
The news about Gaiman does not come as a surprise to me, nor, I suspect, to many others who have watched him — much like any well-constructed narrative — spend decades weaving his own mythology. Gaiman’s self-positioning as the mythic storyteller, with a public persona both enigmatic and playful, has long invited the question of his moral accountability. But it is not the what of the allegations that troubles me so much as it is the how — a larger, more unsettling question that has haunted our cultural conversations for years. That question is not “Was there consent?” but “What does consent mean when power is so pervasive, so insidious, so hard to pin down?”
Post-#MeToo, there is greater awareness around violations of consent: we know minors cannot consent, and intoxication can invalidate a “yes.” But things get murkier when a woman like Scarlett Pavlovich, a young lesbian from an abusive childhood, at the brink of homelessness, meets Gaiman through his ex-wife Amanda Palmer to babysit their child. Pavlovich alleges she repeatedly said no to Gaiman’s sexual advances, but he pressured her into sex. She recalls his words just before he assaulted her: “Don’t ruin the moment.”
This is not mere coercion with the threat of violence, but a demand that she enjoy it, or at least not protest in a way that could ruin his high. Soon after, Palmer asked if Pavlovich would move in to care for their child. Pavlovich didn’t just say yes.
“I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry. What a terrible creature you’ve turned me into,” she texted Gaiman. In his statement, the writer talks of revisiting old messages that “read now as they did when I received them — of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships.”
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