Rest In Infamy, You Haunted Castle

Why I believe the Neil Gaiman accusations

I only met Neil Gaiman once, at an upscale dinner party where Derren Brown had been hired to do magic tricks like in the old-timey days. Between astonishments, Gaiman and I withdrew to a quiet corner where I pretended to be pleased that he was giving me a signed copy of ‘Sandman’. One of the unexpected advantages of being cancelled is telling people who took part in my harassment what I really think about their work, but this was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, so I said the right things and we went back to being bamboozled by Brown’s invisible craft.

To give credit where it’s due, I later read Gaiman’s ‘Coraline’ to my kids which had them simultaneously terrified and hooked, and thanked him for it. Whatever my feelings about his earlier work, he was a real writer, practising his own invisible craft. From the evidence of that book, I thought he was probably a decent person too, an impression that continued until 2022, when we started to get into it over The Issue.

I may have asked why he wasn’t speaking out on behalf of JK Rowling, who was undergoing one of her regular cancellations for refusing to pander to the spoilt brats who loved her books but missed their meaning. A big name like his might have shifted the conversation and given her some much-needed support. He might perhaps have persuaded some of his fans to give the matter another look. This was when I assumed people like him acknowledged biological reality but worried about ‘coming out of the closet’, as it were. It took me years to realise that almost every celebrity mate of mine believed, or was pretending to believe, in the fashionable, American mind-cancer of ’gender’.

But back then, I was still astonished to find that he was a carrier of the virus, the mass delusion that by sheer coincidence, turned up after the arrival of the Internet. Whether it was Bill Bailey or Neil Hannon, Robin Ince or Matt Lucas, Arthur Mathews or Jimmy Mulville, it was always the same story. A sudden cloud of amnesia would form around my celebrity mates, a real peasouper, from which they suddenly could not see why we need female-only spaces, or why unhappy teenage girls will not find a miraculous cure for their woes in a double mastectomy. Far from sharing any of my urgency in the need to stop children from being irreversibly harmed in gender clinics, they instead downplayed, deflected and dismissed. “I never ask you to join in with my animal activism” grumbled Neil Hannon on one of the occasions I begged for his support.

“Couldn’t you pretend women and children are animals?” I thought.

My usual trajectory during these conversations saw me shifting from gobsmacked disbelief to fury and despair. The disloyalty made me angry, but knowing my friends did not care about their own daughters, wives, sisters and mothers was, and continues to be, destabilising in the extreme.

Gaiman went one step further. I can’t find the tweet, so I may be paraphrasing, but he said

"I hope you're kinder if your daughter ever hopes to transition."

I can think of no uglier thing to say to a parent. For girls, ‘transition’ means double mastectomies in their teens, hysterectomies in their mid-twenties, early menopause and a four times greater chance of having a heart attack than males of the same age. To have this decaying goth wish that horror on my daughter was more than I could bear. I wanted to rip his throat out.

Like a pair of grappling cowboys falling off a rooftop, our fight spilled into email. I sent Gaiman this article about the Tavistock. It was clear when he wrote back that he hadn’t absorbed it Like most celebrities in this fight, he appeared to have lost the ability to read.

“As I said before Graham, I hope that you'd be kinder if it was one of your kids who wanted to transition. “

He actually said it again. The piece was right there, detailing exactly what was happening to the children unlucky enough to wander through the Tavistock’s doors, and he chose to repeat that disgusting thing. Why?

That same year, just months before Gaiman was advising me on the value of kindness, a 22-year-old woman (‘Scarlett’ in the podcast) arrived at his Waiheke Island home in New Zealand for a babysitting job. Upon her arrival, she discovered that Gaiman’s wife of the time, Amanda Palmer, had suddenly remembered a sleepover, an appointment the child was apparently eager to attend.

So she and junior drove out of view, leaving the 23 -year-old Scarlett alone with Gaiman for the night. Within a few hours the 61-year-old man, without warning or invitation, appeared fully naked and slipped into the other end of her bath. Scarlett alleges that over the next three weeks, they embarked on a semi-consensual relationship, where Gaiman routinely ignored the boundaries she set. She alleges that he became angry when she would refuse these demands, used a belt to beat her, insisted she call him ‘Master’ and once sexually assaulted her so violently that she lost consciousness.

“… (the sex) was so painful and so violent that I fainted. I passed out, lost consciousness, ringing in the ears, black vision, the pain was celestial, you know, which is a strange word to use, but I couldn't even describe it in language. And when I regained consciousness and I was on the ground, I looked up and he was watching the rehearsals from Scotland of whatever they were filming, I don't fucking know. And he didn't even notice that I was passed out. And you know…there was blood. It was so so, so traumatic, and I asked him to stop. I said it was too much.”

Scarlett is a compelling witness despite, or because of, her contradictions. Certain things paint a picture of consent—she sexted Gaiman, to which he would send careful replies—and she laughs nervously when she talks about the alleged abuse. But when Gaiman’s side of the story is put to her, she turns cold as a knife and shows flashes of fury that she—in her telling—young, inexperienced and dazzled by Palmer and Gaiman’s fame and lifestyle, was used so casually and so brutally.

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A few years back, I wrote about becoming a sort of Jessica Fletcher figure on Twitter. ‘Murder, She Wrote” but with paedophiles and predators. “Just as murderers seemed drawn to any location Jessica presented herself, “ I said. “My opining about women's rights and safety on Twitter appeared to attract the kind of men who can't sit still during a spelling bee.”

Among my adversaries was Peter Bright, the Ars Technica writer now doing twelve years for trying to buy two children to abuse. Luckily the children didn’t exist and the parents were actually FBI agents. Our exchange was brief and concerned safeguarding. I’m sure you’re all astonished to discover that he was against it.

Then there was ex-Labour MP Eric Joyce, who argued with me about the safety of mixed-sex loos in schools and was done for possessing the worst kind of child abuse images. More recently, I tangled with ‘Lexi’, who is now serving time for rape.

They all had one thing in common. They couldn’t leave alone those of us who were actively opposing the trans movement's assault on safeguarding, an assault that chimed nicely with their plans for the future. Each was returning to the scene of a crime not yet committed, each picking at a scab on their own character.

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In 2018, at the height of #MeToo, Gaiman tweeted “On a day like today it’s worth saying, I believe survivors. Men must not close their eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to be believed, at the ballot box, and with art, and by listening, and change this world for the better.”

Well said. I certainly believe the women in ‘Master’. During my Jessica Fletcher period (a period which continues) no-one except Gaiman ever mentioned my kids. I think he knew it would cause me distress, and the second time he said it was just a twisting of the knife. Many of my colleagues in the media joined in with the trashing of my reputation, but Gaiman went that extra mile. I believe this is because he is a sadist. I think he is a man who finds pleasure in the suffering of others, and a man who does not see women and girls as fully human.

This was my final letter to him.

Dear Neil

I notice you’re still pretending you can’t read the Tavistock story. If you ever try and lay that curse on my kids again I will certainly share our exchange. Your privileged beliefs are harming children so to paraphrase Will Smith, keep their names out of your fucking mouth.

Thank you for giving me one last chance to say that JK Rowling will be remembered as a hero and you as a traitor to the kids who loved your books.

Rest in infamy, you haunted castle.

All the best,

Graham.

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