Neil Gaiman was a poster boy for progressive causes. Then came the sex abuse allegations

Neil Gaiman describes himself as a “free-speech absolutist”. So committed is the best-selling fantasy author to untrammelled expression that he likes to point out he was born on the same day, in November 1960, that the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial concluded. The ruling, in favour of DH Lawrence’s novel, was a transformative moment that liberalised publishing.

Gaiman, 64, may be regretting his strident support for outlets to publish whatever they like. The creator of The Sandman, Good Omens and American Gods has been accused of sexual assault by multiple younger women, and is the subject of a police complaint in New Zealand.

Last summer, a podcast hosted by Rachel Johnson, the sister of former Prime Minister Boris, heard testimony from the two women – a fan he met at a book signing and a former family nanny – that Gaiman had conducted non-consensual sadomasochistic sex with them and that he had told them to call him “master”. Gaiman says that he was in consensual relationships with both women, almost two decades apart, and denies all allegations of wrongdoing. Tortoise Media, which produced the series, reported that he was “disturbed” by the accusations.

Now, New York Magazine has published a lengthy exposé following up on the allegations of those two women – and adding the testimony of six more, three of whom have never spoken out before, who allege that Gaiman had assaulted, coerced and abused them. The claims include sexually assaulting his family’s new nanny in a bath within hours of their first meeting; further details included in the report are equally stomach-churning.

The allegations would be shocking if they were levelled at any public figure, but for Gaiman they are doubly damaging. The author has long been seen as a progressive champion who has inspired devoted gay and transgender fans for putting diverse characters in his novels and comics, as well as an outspoken advocate for people who have suffered sexual abuse. As Tara Prescott-Johnson wrote in the essay collection Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman, “Gaiman insists on telling the stories of people who are traditionally marginalised, missing, or silenced in literature.”

In The Sandman, the comics he started publishing about a family of cosmic beings in 1989, Gaiman had characters that were gay, trans, non-binary and otherwise unconventional in publishing at the time. Netflix adapted The Sandman into a series in 2022 and, among its casting choices, it gave the role of Desire to the non-binary actor Mason Alexander Park.

Before the series premiered, Gaiman reflected on his early progressive streak in a Guardian interview.

“The great thing about having done all that stuff back then is that there’s an awful lot less work to do now,” he said. “There are moments when people yell at me for being woke online, and I’m like: ‘Have you ever read the f—ing comic?’ People have criticised me for casting a gender-fluid, non-binary actor as Desire, but they were in the original. Desire was always non-binary; that was the whole point of the character.”

He added: “I wasn’t out there banging a drum. These were my friends and I wanted to put them into comics. I wanted to change hearts and minds. I had trans friends and still do, and it seemed to me that no one was putting trans characters in comics. And I had a comic. I would learn things from my friends: for instance, people being buried under dead names [the names they used before transitioning] by their families. That was shocking to me. And I thought, here was this opportunity to write a story in which everybody reading it is going to fall in love with my trans character who is going to be awesome.”

For his fans, many of whom are utterly devoted to Gaiman, the backlash from the allegations made against him have been devastating. Many refuse to believe that their hero, who has long made an explicit point of giving voice to the marginalised, could have behaved in such an unacceptable way.

“I hate the way people are reacting to this,” read a typical tweet when the news of the allegations first broke. “Good Omens has been one of the things helping me through this terrible year so I’m sorry if I don’t immediately want to hate its creator.” Others went further, suggesting that the Tortoise report was part of a politically motivated attempt to “smear” Gaiman for his pro-trans views.

Some of his fans seem to be taking the latest allegations especially hard. “[Gaiman’s] work has been a constant in my life, and I treasured everything the man had written,” wrote one commenter on Reddit. “Since the allegations of SA [sexual assault] surfaced last year, I have been quietly hoping against hope, that my impression of his decency would survive… Now, I feel more than a touch of shame for burying my head in the sand because I didn’t want to be disappointed in yet another person. I won’t be getting rid of my Gaiman books, but I don’t see how I can ever support his future endeavours either.”

Gaiman is one of the best-known, and most recognisable, fantasy writers in the world. He has sold more than 50 million books, won virtually every fantasy and children’s literature prizes and had his work translated onto both the big and small screens. The Ocean at the End of the Lane — which draws on his childhood in a fantastical, Alan Garner-esque way — inspired a stage adaptation at the National Theatre that became its biggest touring hit since War Horse. As if to underline how far he has entered the mainstream, in 2024 he was a featured guest on The Queen’s Reading Room podcast, an initiative driven by Camilla.

Gaiman has a signature look: always wearing all black, with a shock of messy black hair – though with some greys creeping in now that he is past 60. Once, when asked why he wears only one colour, he explained: “Everything matches and I never have to wonder what I’m going to wear that day.” So striking is he that he has played himself in The Simpsons (twice) and The Big Bang Theory.

His unconventional love life has also long been in the spotlight, especially his second marriage to the feminist rock star Amanda Palmer. One half of the punk-cabaret duo Dresden Dolls, Palmer married Gaiman in 2011 and they had a son together. The couple were not afraid of sharing their relationship online, such as inviting his millions of social media followers to listen to them singing lullabies to their young son, Ash.

They were also notable for having an open relationship that Palmer described in a 2019 interview. “There are lots of varieties of open relationships… we’re not interested in having big, multiple relationships; we’re just slutty, but compassionately so.” They announced their divorce in 2022.

Gaiman has been in the public eye since he was a small child. The eldest of three, he was born in Portchester, a small Hampshire village, into a Jewish family of Eastern European descent. When he was an infant, Gaiman’s parents settled the family in East Grinstead, West Sussex, where they became devotees of Scientology and studied at the quasi-religion’s global headquarters in the town. David Gaiman, Neil’s father, was Scientology’s British PR chief at the time and, in August 1968, he wheeled out his then seven-year-old son on BBC radio to do an interview in an attempt to counter accusations that it “indoctrinated” children.

Speaking to Keith Graves, the precocious youngster said that it “helps you to handle quite a lot of problems” and talked about the various exercises that Scientologists practise. He was later kicked out of the Anglican Fonthill School in East Grinstead because of his family’s Scientology links. The New York Magazine article suggests Gaiman suffered abuse during the Church’s indoctrination and punishment practices – events that later obliquely surfaced in his fiction. “When Neil was around the age of the child in The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” it runs, “David [his father] took him up to the bathtub, ran a cold bath, and ‘drowned him to the point where Neil was screaming for air.’”

Later, Gaiman embarked on a career in journalism before discovering comic books and achieving widespread fame with The Sandman in the late 1980s. His has been a career with precious few setbacks ever since, with other highlights including publishing the dark children’s novella Coraline and writing critically-acclaimed episodes of Doctor Who, another great fantasy franchise. So lucrative has his career been that the multi-millionaire has homes in Wisconsin, New Zealand and on the Isle of Skye.

How will these latest allegations affect Gaiman? After the story broke, JK Rowling compared him to Harvey Weinstein on X, “The literary crowd that had a hell of a lot to say about Harvey Weinstein before he was convicted has been strangely muted in its response to multiple accusations against Neil Gaiman from young women who’d never met, yet – as with Weinstein – tell remarkably similar stories.”

Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of Good Omens – which was due to conclude with its third and final season – has been cut down to a single feature-length episode and Gaiman is no longer involved. And no release date has been given for the streamer’s take on another Gaiman property, Anansi Boys, on which principal photography had completed. Meanwhile, the second season of Netflix’s The Sandman, which was due to come out this year, has also been delayed.

Gaiman has not commented on these most recent allegations, though he denied any wrongdoing when the first allegations were reported last year. What happens now? The consummate storyteller, who staked his identity on progressive causes, is caught in a situation that could be far more troubling than his own fiction.