Mourning a Monster: Grief and Betrayal in Gaiman Fandom Following His Sexual Assault Allegations
Kaitlyn Hartings
At the end of a long day, there’s nothing like curling up with a favorite piece of media.
Whenever I’m stressed or tired, I know I can find comfort in one of my worn paperbacks or most-watched TV shows and movies. These stories lead me down well-tread paths into familiar worlds, but they never seem to get old or irrelevant. Through my childhood, adolescence, and young adult years, those stories have come from the works of Neil Gaiman. I’d return to the original stories from time to time, but I’d think about the worlds and characters daily, as they came up in discussions with family, friends, and Gaiman’s online fandom community. Until recently, Gaiman’s stories – and, by extension, Gaiman himself – represented safety, acceptance, and escapism.
I remember the day that I saw the first news of allegations against him: it was August of 2024 and I was deep in my obsession with his latest production, Dead Boy Detectives. I didn’t see much, but I knew it had to do with rape and sexual assault. As someone who grew up during the #MeToo movement and witnessed the harm that powerful celebrities could wreak on vulnerable women, I knew that allegations don’t emerge unless something had gone terribly wrong. “No smoke without fire,” is how media and popular culture professor Simone Driessen illustrates these initial doubts within fandom communities (Driessen 402). For months, I waited
for an exposé to reveal that “fire,” which would kill Gaiman fandom as I knew it. I dreaded that moment: how can you mourn a safe community if it was built on the back of a dangerous man?
Neil Gaiman began writing back in the 1980s as a biographer for Duran Duran before landing a deal with DC comics in 1989 and writing 76 issues of the immensely popular comic The Sandman (Dickinson). The Sandman was Gaiman’s breakout work, though just calling it popular would be a massive understatement (Shapiro). Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt waited for hours to get an issue of The Sandman signed by Gaiman while he was in college; in an interview, he claimed that “it contained universes. I had never seen that done in a comic so perfectly,” (Dickinson).
The Sandman concluded in 1996, just as my parents were graduating high school (Dickinson). Both of them are huge readers, though they very rarely read the same things: my mom is more into realistic fiction and horror while my dad is more of a sci-fi geek. Gaiman was one of the few authors that my parents agreed on. The Sandman had enough horror and fantasy for my mom and enough sci-fi for my dad. They, like many others around the world, followed Gaiman’s career as it moved beyond The Sandman. Since then, Gaiman has published almost 50 books and sold around 50 million copies worldwide (Shapiro). He wrote such acclaimed pieces as Coraline, The Graveyard Book, American Gods, Good Omens, and Anansi Boys.
Growing up, reading was super important to my parents. Up until I was 13, they read to me and my siblings every night. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gaiman featured quite prominently in our bedtime routine. When I was three, they would read us Wolves in the Walls, Gaiman’s picture book about an imaginative little girl who defeats the wolves living in the walls of her family home. As another little girl with an active imagination, I saw the heroine in Wolves in the Walls as something of a kindred spirit. When I turned seven, my parents got me Gaiman’s kid lit novel,
Fortunately the Milk. A play on the joke about dads going out to get milk and never coming back, the story was about a hapless father getting abducted by aliens from a grocery store and encountering space ships, hot air balloons, and dinosaur pirates on his journey to return home. By seven, I was fully able to read the book by myself (it was half pictures anyway), but nothing could compare to the voices my dad did for the dinosaur pirates. My sister and I would fall asleep in fits of giggles and demand the book be reread when my dad eventually finished it.
As I got older, my mom would check out his YA novels, such as Coraline and The Graveyard Book, from the library before picking me up from school. When I was twelve, my mom recommended Gaiman’s American Gods to me; it was the first truly adult book I’d ever read. In a book review from 2014, David Barnett illustrates the dichotomy American Gods presents: “[a] sense of being anchored to reality but at the same time being merely a bulwark against something massive and frightening and ultimately unknowable” (Barnett). Although Barnett is describing American Gods’ unsettling modern fantasy setting (Barnett), I think the same quote could be used to describe the experience of being twelve and reading it: stuck between a familiar author and an unfamiliar, racy subject. It felt like I was moving closer to “ultimately unknowable” adulthood with every page.
Despite my appreciation for Gaiman’s work at that point, I wouldn’t have considered myself a fan until after the pandemic hit and I turned 13. For the first time in my life, I had totally unrestricted access to the Internet. Unsurprisingly, the combined factors of puberty, self reflection, and the full strength of all the world’s accumulated knowledge created the perfect environment for my sexuality crisis. As a baby gay without access to my friends in the outside world, I turned to online fandom on Tumblr and AO3 to find a sense of community and solidarity through fanart and fanfiction. Dr. Lauren B. McInroy, an associate professor at Ohio
State University’s College of Social Work, and Dr. Shelley L. Craig, a research chair in Sexual and Gender Minority Youth at the University of Toronto, found that queer youth are often drawn towards online fandom because it allows them to find safety, acceptance, and the normalization of queer identities, things they may not have at home (McInroy and Craig). Through online fandom, I was able to see complex conversations about queer people and queer culture that I didn’t have access to at school or at home, conversations that widened my perspective and taught me more about myself. Even more importantly, in the face of national political bigotry, fanworks showed me that queer people could be appreciated and the testimonies of older queer fans taught me that it was possible to have a fulfilling life as an “out” adult.
Considering my newfound identity and love of fandom, it’s unsurprising that I found myself re-entering Gaiman’s fandom as Covid came to a close and I entered high school. As a kid, what really struck me about his work was that it placed kids, especially girls, in positions of power and leadership. While writing scholars like Helen S. Schwartz have found that girls are more likely to relate to people of different identities than boys because they are conditioned to be empathetic (Schwartz 48), there was a special satisfaction in seeing female leads in Wolves in the Walls and Coraline that I didn’t have when reading books with male leads like The Graveyard Book. One of the highlights of his work is his inclusion of diverse characters. It’s a sentiment that I think a lot of people relate to; in an interview for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts with Gaiman, Novella Brooks de Vita told him, “you’re one of the earlier people I could pick up a book of yours and feel included. I had a lot of my own personal experience of not seeing myself reflected in worlds” (de Vita 100). What really reeled me back in as a teenager was that Gaiman not only portrayed women, he included queer people.
Gaiman has been writing about queer people for a very long time, which is significant given his massive fanbase. His breakout work The Sandman presented unique feminist and queer-positive takes on mythology, aging, and the subconscious. In an award-winning paper for the Journal of Popular Culture, Ally Brisbin and Dr. Paul Booth argued that The Sandman could be used to teach Judith Butler’s theory of gender fluidity to a layman audience (Brisbin and Booth 34). The theory claims “deconstruction of gender is possible only when people perform outside of long-standing prescribed norms,” an idea that is difficult to perceive within the highly gendered context of Western society, especially when parsing the coexistence of personal gender identity and an ungendered view of the world (Brisbin and Booth 21). Brisbin and Booth found a multitude of useful examples to illustrate this point in The Sandman though. For example,
Barbie, a stereotypical female character, is able to remove herself from a highly gendered context by taking on positions of greater authority over the course of the comic, becoming more performatively male while maintaining her gender identity (Brisbin and Booth 24-5). In a more complex example, Destruction, a godly entity in the story, “abandons” his role as Destruction in favor of performing more creative endeavors, something he argues is part of the same role because destruction defines creation (Brisbin and Booth 30-1). Since he plays the role of both a creator and a destroyer, he confuses Western cultural binaries that are similarly applied to gender (Brisbin and Booth 30-1). This sense of play really spoke to me as a reader because it reminded me of my trans and non-binary friends, as they broke the barriers of what I understood to be acceptable gender roles and presentations. Gaiman claims that his inclusion of queer people, much like his inclusion of women and people of color, was because “my friends were gay, and my friends were trans…if I was writing a comic that felt true, I was just going to put them in,” (de Vita 101). I felt drawn to his work because it felt real, because it was based on real people.
When I re-entered Gaiman fandom as a lover of his queer characters in Good Omens and The Sandman, the community was going through something of a Renaissance. People had always appreciated his work, but the fandom was growing increasingly more active as he started to produce more movies and TV shows (Dickinson). The title of a 2022 Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson article on Gaiman proclaims “Neil Gaiman’s Books Have Enchanted Millions. Finally Hollywood is On Board,” (Dickinson). As someone in the community in 2022, that was definitely the resounding emotion. Good Omens was filming its second season for Prime Video, The Sandman had just released its first season on Netflix, Anansi Boys was being produced for Prime Video, and Dead Boy Detectives (a spin-off of The Sandman) was set to be released in 2024 (Dickinson). The storylines on these productions were consistently deep and thoughtful, in ways that many streaming released shows haven’t been. It seemed like everyone loved him then, with actors like Jon Hamm saying he “breaks life down to the fundamentals of what it is that makes us human,” authors like Stephen King referring to him as a “treasure-house of story,” and fans communicating with him (directly! Not through an aide!) over apps like Tumblr and Bluesky (Dickinson). I remember crocheting a doll of Aziraphale from Good Omens for a friend in 2023 and my dad liked it so much that he sent a picture of it to Gaiman through Bluesky, bragging, “the oldest crocheted this Aziraphale for her friend. (It’s so good that the family
protested that *we should be able to keep it 😭). Crowley is next on the docket,” (Hartings). I
wanted him to respond so badly! In that span of time from 2022 to early 2024, Gaiman was untouchable, the herald of minorities, celebrities’ favorite celebrity, the Internet’s cool uncle.
That dream had completely collapsed by early 2025, when Lila Shapiro published the long-expected exposée in the Vulture detailing the very specific crimes that Gaiman committed against a young gay woman named Scarlett Pavlovich (Shapiro). Pavlovich had met Gaiman’s
wife, Amanda Palmer, in 2020 at age 22; at the time she had been working odd jobs and struggling with housing insecurity (Shapiro). Palmer developed a friendship with Pavlovich and Pavlovich did several odd jobs for her before eventually babysitting for her and Gaiman’s 5-year-old son (Shapiro). That night, Gaiman convinced her to use the family’s outdoor tub, in which he subsequently raped her (Shapiro). The next few months were nightmarish for Pavlovich as she struggled to escape from the situation as the family withheld the funds she was promised and Gaiman continued to rape and assault her, behavior that only stopped after Pavlovich told Palmer that she intended to commit suicide (Shapiro). She has officially accused Gaiman of rape and Palmer of human trafficking, since she claims that Palmer knew Gaiman might rape her (Cain). Several other women have put forward similar allegations (Cain). As I sat there and read the article, I was enraged, frustrated, and disgusted, but also terrified. It seemed impossible. This was the person who had promoted feminism and LGBTQ+ rights to the point that his works were recommended to teach queer theory; how could this same man be so evil towards women? I could imagine myself in the place of these victims, as a young queer woman and a fan of Gaiman’s work. The only difference was that I had a safety net, something the victims and many other Gaiman fans did not.
It feels highly insensitive to call the time period that came after that article “mourning,” but I don’t know if I can necessarily find a better term. It seemed like people were encompassing every stage of grief: my dad was furious at Gaiman and wouldn’t talk about him, my friend removed her Good Omens keychains from her backpack, and my entire Tumblr feed was full of people cat-fighting. In the beginning, people would come out saying that there wasn’t a verdict out yet and nothing was proven, while others would say things like “I love how silent you all are about Neil Gaiman you were riding his dick like what, 6 months ago…I want to vomit on you”
(“Post by @postmariannizm · 1 Image”). There was a massive culture around who liked versus who didn’t like Gaiman’s work before the allegations (“Post by @postmariannizm · 1 Image”), which created a sense of moral hierarchy among various internet fandoms.
With any cancellation of a major fan icon, there are three main losses: the artist, the work, and the community. First, I lost any and all respect I had for Neil Gaiman. Second, the TV shows that I’d been following for four years were cancelled by the companies producing them. I lost any sense of closure that I may have once had, which is something I had to sit with alongside my conflicting feelings towards the works themselves (and by extension, myself, for liking them).
Third, I lost a lot of the fandom community that I had. Both people inside and outside the fandom would post arguments lampooning Gaiman fans for “[making] this about you and your blorbos,” or favorite characters (“Post by @divorce-Enjoyer”). It’s a sentiment I could understand, but it was also incredibly frustrating because it over-simplified the complex issue of fandom as an identity. As someone who had been connected to his works for years, whose works defined connections I made with my friends and family, it seemed unreasonable to be completely selfless when approaching his cancellation.
To date, no new scholarship has emerged on Gaiman’s fandom since his cancellation, but I think that Dr. Driessen’s work with participatory politics and cancellation within Marco Borsato’s music fandom works well as a case study. Both Borsato and Gaiman built up their fandoms in the 90s, both had fandoms that crossed family generations, both were accused of sexual assault, and both were accused in the post-pandemic era (Driessen 397-401). One of the people Driessen interviewed, Ellen, said “his music functioned as a soundtrack to their family life” (Driessen 401), much like how Gaiman’s books were my bedtime stories. Another thing that the two creators shared was that both of them hid their crimes in plain sight, Borsato with his
family friendly image and Gaiman with his feminist one (Driessen 401). Driessen’s study concluded that there were a wide variety of ways that people coped with Borsato’s cancellation, from staying loyal to giving up on his work altogether, though most fell somewhere in the middle (Driessen 406-7). The strategy used by Sascha, to stop funding Borsato or talking about him publicly (Driessen 404), was echoed across Gaiman fandom. Glen Weldon, a cultural critic and author for NPR, said, “[Gaiman’s books] will remain in my physical library because they remain in my memory…[but] my grappling with his past work, now and in the future, won’t put a single dime in Gaiman’s pocket,” (Weldon). In my own unique relationship with Gaiman’s work, I have adapted similar strategies to Sascha and Weldon.
However, it has been difficult to hold onto Gaiman’s books in the face of fandom attempts to read into works and to rewrite history. It is very easy to look at a horrible event and to try to find a reason why it happened. In the Vulture exposé, Gaiman is compared to his character, Richard Madoc, who kidnaps and rapes a Greek Muse to unlock the secrets of feminist writing (Shapiro). Comic book author and colleague of Gaiman, Marc Bernardin, compared the meek nature of one Anansi Boy to the hedonistic nature of the other, saying “I never gave too much thought about that. Until now. My heart breaks for the survivors…” (Bernardin). While I understand the reasoning behind these comparisons, they are beautifully poetic and justifiably scathing, I would caution against them as they over-emphasize the relationship of the artist to the art. They reinforce an understanding of Gaiman’s corpus based on hindsight bias, creating an unambiguous narrative that will only perpetuate the cycles of blame and self-hatred among fan bases (“Post by @thebibliosphere”). Already, Tumblr users have circulated statements like “‘Don’t trust charming people’” or “‘don’t trust people who declare themselves allies of this or that cause’” or “just stop idolising celebrities!!!!!!!” (“Post by @jdtrashman”; “Post by
@jinnybinghamsghost”). Forcing readers to police all the content they consume is just unrealistic; perpetual cynicism isn’t good for anyone’s health.
It is highly unlikely that these arguments will disappear; they are knee-jerk reactions that are programmed into the human brain. A 2023 study by Hannah Kaube and the Abdel Rahman Lab for Neurocognitive Psychology at Humboldt University found that individuals had faster brain response to art pieces if they were provided with negative rather than neutral biographical information, implying that people are less biologically inclined to separate the art from the artist (Kaube et al. 10-4). Even now, people inside and outside of Gaiman fandom have adapted this less nuanced understanding of Gaiman’s legacy, which Weldon condemned because, “It’s not remotely complicated for those who rush to social media to declare that they never truly liked the creator’s work in the first place, or that they always suspected them” (Weldon). With this in mind, I believe that any future discussion of Gaiman’s work will be severely tainted by his alleged crimes, especially because he is still alive to profit from interactions with his work.
I am not certain what the future contains for Gaiman fandom or my own role within it.
Like so many other Tumblr Gaiman fans, his work has played a huge role in shaping my teenage and adult life, but it was also monumental in shaping my childhood. I know that it will remain too sore a subject to ever bring up with my parents, which is terrible because it used to unite us. I know that I will never buy another one of his books, watch a legally obtained version of his movies or shows, or post online with reference to his name. But I think I’ll keep the books I have and continue to interact with my community online. I know that I will continue to idolize artists and participate in fandoms and I think that is something that people should be free to do, just so long as they accept the words of victims. That, if nothing else, should be the legacy of this era of fandom.
References
Barnett, David. “A Book for the Beach: American Gods by Neil Gaiman.” The Guardian, 29 July 2014. Books. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jul/29/book-beach-american-gods-n eil-gaiman.
Bernardin, Marc. “Last Wednesday, Issue 7 of Anansi Boys….’” Instagram, 18 Jan. 2025, https://www.instagram.com/marcbernardin/p/DE-uBp6yNp5/.
Brisbin, Ally, and Paul Booth. “The Sand/Wo/Man: The Unstable Worlds of Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Series.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 46, no. 1, Feb. 2013,
pp. 20-37. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12014.
Cain, Sian. “Neil Gaiman: Accuser Files Civil Lawsuit Alleging Rape, Sexual Assault and Human Trafficking.” The Guardian, 4 Feb. 2025. Books. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/04/neil-gaiman-accuser-files-civil-lawsuit-rape-sexual-assault-allegations-ntwnfb.
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Dickinson, Elizabeth Evitts. “Neil Gaiman’s Books Have Enchanted Millions. Finally, Hollywood Is on Board.” The Washington Post, 6 July 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/07/06/neil-gaiman-sandman-netflix-jon-hamm/.
Driessen, Simone. “The Participatory Politics and Play of Canceling an Idol: Exploring How Fans Negotiate Their Fandom of a Canceled ‘Fave.’” Convergence, vol. 30, no. 1, Feb. 2024, pp. 395–409. SAGE Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231199983.
Hartings, Matt. “Matt Hartings (@matthartings.Bsky.Social).” Bluesky Social, 22 Nov. 2024, https://bsky.app/profile/matthartings.bsky.social/post/3lbjzfr6jdk2t.
Kaube, Hannah, et al. “Separating Art from the Artist: The Effect of Negative Affective Knowledge on ERPs and Aesthetic Experience.” PLoS ONE, vol. 18, no. 1, Jan. 2023, 161598876, pp. 1–18. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281082.
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Schwartz, Helen S. “When Barbie Dated GI Joe: Analyzing the Toys of the Cold War Era.” Material History Review, vol. 45, Spring 1997, https://american.instructure.com/courses/69996/files/8160091?wrap=1.
Shapiro, Lila. “There Is No Safe Word: How the Best-Selling Fantasy Author Neil Gaiman Hid the Darkest Parts of Himself for Decades.” Vulture, 13 Jan. 2026, https://archive.is/2025.01.13-132911/https://www.vulture.com/article/neil-gaiman-allegat ions-controversy-amanda-palmer-sandman-madoc.html.
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