Neil Gaiman Is Innocent: Introduction
How this all began.
In July 2024 the author Neil Gaiman was accused of sexual assault by two women. This was publicised in the podcast Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman by Tortoise Media and by August that number had increased to 5 - later to be augmented by the novella-sized New York Magazine article, There Is No Safe Word.
It was not until the Summer of 2025 that I heard of the case. And despite my best efforts to ignore it and concentrate on the book I was writing, I could not help but be irked, disgusted, and also fairly intrigued by what I saw online.
There was something about the over-the-top and zealous attitudes of a small group of chronic users of social media sites such as Reddit. Something about their bad faith attacks on fans came across as artificial.
There was no room for nuance. Even requiring evidence was deemed to be ‘‘victim blaming’’. No deviation from the party line, (that is to say - utter and complete condemnation) went unpunished.
They seemed more than a little cruel towards Gaiman’s shellshocked fans, who overall are a sensitive bunch. So, I narrowed my eyes at this overall scene of bullying and self-righteous sadism and felt like something underhand might be at play.
And as I almost involuntarily picked up bits and pieces of information, I found it extremely hard to get a straight answer on what exactly this Neil Gaiman had done.
Terms like sexual assault, grooming, rape, predatory behaviour and so on were thrown about with impunity. But the actual acts which would make him guilty of these crimes appeared buried within the five hours of meandering podcast or Shapiro’s 11,000 word epic.
I had only barely heard of Neil Gaiman. I’d never read a book of his. Once I had pirated the complete MasterClass courses - instructional videos for writers, each by a different author. One of them was his. I thought he gave fairly useful advice. And that was it.
I was more familiar with the work of his friend and mentor Alan Moore, whose V for Vendetta had been a source of inspiration in the days of Occupy back in 2011. But for the most part the authors of my beloved tomes tended to be long dead.
So that Summer, almost a year after these initial allegations, I decided that I wouldn’t be satisfied until I got some answers. I delved into the podcasts. I read the articles. This was to say the least… frustrating.
I remember sitting on the sofa at a friend’s house, and bringing up Master on Youtube on his television screen, pausing every few seconds to tell him everything that was wrong with it from a journalistic point of view. But it was also just the many ways it flew in the face of common sense.
To listen to what was actually being said, rather than just passively consuming it in the background as I suspect many had done, it turned out to be an almost willfully confusing piece of media.
A quote would play, and then the reporter Paul Curuana Galizia would interject something that was the complete opposite of what had just been said. Rachel Johnson would cut off an interviewee, and fail to ask obvious and important follow-up questions. They would follow unnecessary tangents, bring up general talking points that did not relate to the events, but seemed merely there to distract when any question of the accusation’s validity might emerge.
The background music played sombre and tragic strings, ever suggestive that something serious and disturbing lay around the corner. But somehow the actual moment of revelation always evaporated into vague innuendo, faux-deep rhetorical questions and pop psychology talking points. When the claimants did get around to talking about the actual evil acts themselves, it often seemed well… consensual. The hosts even admitted this in many cases - yet pushed onwards.
I couldn’t believe that anyone would take something like this seriously, and then I found out who Rachel Johnson was. Not even really a reporter, more like a pundit, and a right-wing transphobic one at that. A kind of female Tucker Carson. Well known for dim out of touch attitudes. The establishment, the sister of the former British PM Boris Johnson. What was she doing on an investigation like this? She was no supporter of #MeToo.
And so I looked further than the media. I found out that private messages between Neil Gaiman and the initial accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich were publicly available. I read through all 46 pages. I was waiting for the penny to drop.
There must be something, I thought. After all, Rachel Johnson had read these same messages. Nobody would go ahead and publish the allegations if 46 pages of correspondence detailing the entire relationship turned up nothing.
But there was nothing.
There were rumours, there was confusion, but all laid to rest.
Worse than nothing, there was extensive, effusive, obvious, clear-as-day assertions of consent. There was no ambiguity. No hint of abuse. Nothing even mean. Nothing even unkind on Gaiman’s part.
He was affectionate. He was civil. He was vulnerable. He was appreciative. He was supportive.
While I researched, I also found out more about Neil Gaiman as an individual. From this window in on his life I saw someone who seemed to make a real attempt to connect to others in an open, conscious way.
It was in many ways the exact opposite of someone who used their fame just to take what they want from people. I also discovered more about his politics. He always stuck up for the marginalised, and often long before the issue came to public prominence.
The timing of this takedown seemed suspicious. A time of setbacks for the transgender community and ever-bolder attacks from the far-right. During this time he would normally be speaking. What would happen to society if all the advocates for the marginalised were ‘‘cancelled’’ I wondered?
So being a lazy old activist, who’d now much rather write articles than go on marches, I considered that time spent putting Neil Gaiman back in action was time well spent. If he got back in the game, and went back to being a public advocate, I’d be helping those marginalised people too.
So I realised I had to put something out there. In July 2025 I assembled a few initial articles. They were rough and disorganised. I felt if I waited until they were perfect I’d talk myself out of it. So, feeling completely unready I hit publish.
I wasn’t completely unprepared, I am after all a journalist and make all of my paltry income from writing. I have a steady beat with technology trade magazines, and used to pen a lot of political articles for The Canary. But I had no idea what form the investigation should take. It was new territory.
And I was scared to hit the publish button. I’d seen the treatment that others got, and there was a general air of intimidation. A Lord Of The Flies vibe in the subreddits. Why, if I was just putting out fact and opinion as my profession demands?
My conscience was clean. But I knew that I would need to have a thick skin, because every sort of personal attack that internet trolldom can muster was going to come my way. I accepted that and clicked submit.
The censorship was almost immediate. Within a few hours I’d been banned from almost every social media group I posted in, with hissing half-explanations from moderators.
Multiple DMCA takedown requests through EU ‘right to be forgotten’ laws meant it was delisted from google search rankings. It was even absent from the Substack internal search engine.
Days later, things started to come online again. But I’d missed the chance for virality. Views had shot up exponentially in the first few hours, only to crash to nothing in a brutal cliff-edge as the censorship hit.
But it had been noticed. Over the next few weeks, friends of Neil Gaiman contacted me. They’d been sitting on their hands for over a year going mad with frustration, watching his life torn apart.
Some of them knew the accusers personally, or otherwise had information about them through people they were in contact with. They told a very different story of what was going on behind the scenes.
It was a story of people taking advantage of his generosity over many years, of demanding more and more. Of entitlement, self-regard, and narcissism, set against the backdrop of a brutal salt-the-earth divorce.
One of his friends said they were waiting for the moment Neil could speak again, and that he’d been tied up in the legal process, told it was better not to say anything. That’s why he disappeared from social media.
Both discouraged and encouraged in equal measure I continued with the investigation. The gap between what was presented to the public and what I found ever-widened.
The claimants were not who they said they were. A ‘‘homeless, broke drifter’’ turned out to be the daughter of a CEO, not estranged but living it up on her father’s yacht.
A penniless mother of three turned out to be a celebrity’s ceramicist who hung out with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Stipe.
Even more concerning, one of the accusers was best friends with the lead reporter Rachel Johnson. A serious conflict of interest that was never disclosed in Master.
And all this was just the tip of the iceberg. Just what I could glean from conversations and the available articles and podcasts, social media accounts and long archived documents. I suspected there was even more going on that I was not aware of.
I began to see this as an orchestrated takedown with a political agenda behind it, and people who had known Neil Gaiman for decades appeared to echo that assessment. Some of the accusers had backing from someone extremely wealthy, but we could only guess at who.
In this series you will find evidence that the public has been lied to. You will see a lot that is overall suggestive of ideological motives. It contains argument, occasional speculation. It also contains my thought and opinion.
Before the Neil Gaiman Is Innocent project, this Substack was intended as an analysis of the ways that technology can bamboozle us, frighten us, make us hate people who shouldn’t be hated, and believe people who shouldn’t be believed.
I write about the state of the world, the internet and its broken dreams, our spiraling capacity to communicate and organise, our need for political change. I write about both the importance of #MeToo, and just how apparent it has become to even its most ardent supporters that ‘bandits of the occasion’ now act with impunity.
By sheer serendipity I stumbled across the perfect living example by which to make these points. The takedown of Neil Gaiman has been driven by our use of digital technology, in equal parts weapon of liberation and corrosive poison.
We have so often discussed the question of Neil in a way that we wouldn’t when face to face with others. In digital forums we have treated people in ways we wouldn’t in the pub or the town square.
It’s easier to ban a Redditor with an unpopular opinion, or delist a webpage, than it is to ban a book from schools or shut down a flesh-and-blood protest.
Technology is far from neutral.
What was once a digital frontier, for a brief period became a commons - but now it is fast becoming an enclosure, and we too are in danger of our minds becoming fenced off.
Today, the touch of a button can turn us all into psychopaths. Technopaths. And this Substack is the study of that sinister and fascinating side of human nature that is only just now emerging - our TechnoPathology.
I welcome constructive feedback to strengthen this work:
Please keep comments under 200 words so I can feature as many as possible.
If wording is unclear or could be misinterpreted, I’ll revise for clarity.
If you spot a factual or logical inconsistency, I’ll gladly correct or refine it.
Abuse or bad-faith commentary will not be tolerated.
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