That’s not the main thing. MZB was a sexual abuser all on her own as well, Breen aside.
Or, at least, that’s the accusation. Never convicted. But you’re not defending her. Why the difference?
No, but…
It’s also worth noting that one of the Xanth books is titled The Color of Her Panties. No points for guessing the age of the female whose panties are referred to.
Precisely, because you said it seems consensual and you were talking about it merely pushing beyond the boundaries of good taste.
The article describes one of the women as emphatically and repeatedly saying ‘no’.
If you had said this seems false or seems confabulated or seems embellished, that would be a different matter, and a different discussion (the discussion you are now trying to have, in fact), but the article does not describe something that seems consensual.
Consent terminates when someone says no, and especially if they have to say it over and over again.
I read the first four Xanth novels in my teens and bogged down on the fifth, never finishing it. Even by number four the color of the panties of a pretty teenage girl was a minor plot obsession. The actual book The Color of Her Panties was number fifteen. I just checked and God help me but he is apparently still pumping them out at age 90. Number forty-eight is ‘forthcoming’ 
.
I remember reading Mists of Avalon in high school, and thinking that some of the sex stuff was kind of skeevy and off-putting. But then I told myself, look, you’re just a teenager who’s never had sex, so what the hell do you know? Besides, it was set in the past, so maybe the writer’s just trying to be, I don’t know, authentic.
Looking back, though, it turns out I was right - the sex stuff in the book was skeevy and off-putting, and should have been a big red flag.
No question that if there was as in Baldwin’s case a criminal charge in play I’d hold to very high standard of proof and be reluctant to judge based on “as reported in The Vulture.”
The burden of proof however for me to say, “yeah, I believe it, and it makes me less likely to consume more of his work”? Much lower. And note that many here (maybe including me as well) would still watch the next season of Good Omens anyway.
We are not a mob with pitchforks. We are just saying that we are sad that someone whose work we enjoyed seems very likely to be a rapist. And that it makes feel a bit fooled and bad for thinking he was something much better.
So he is consciously and deliberately writing over-the-top gross-out stuff. (This is the author of Nobel-prize material like Pornucopia.) Not sure what that says about him (maybe he is not that great a writer? Nicholson Baker got a Guggenheim Fellowship), but what can you infer about Gaiman if the latter is not pushing hard-core BDSM themes in his writing? It seems that people who actually hang out with Gaiman, Anthony, Asimov, et c. may have a whiff of what they are personally into, but not [necessarily] at all their readers.
On another note, Gaiman was interviewed by the BBC about Scientology when he was seven years old. It’s…actually, it’s about what you’d expect from a bright seven-year-old fully indoctrinated into Scientology.
This makes me very sad. I was really looking forward to the third Good Omens series, and now i don’t know if i feel okay about watching it. And i was looking forward to the second Sandman series, too. And damn, the man had access to tons of consensual sex. But somehow, he had to choose rape, too. 
This is like Crosby, really upsetting, in part because I’m one of the people he fooled.
In contrast, I’m not terribly upset to learn Asimov was a serial sexual abuser. First, he’s dead, so i don’t have to worry about whether I’m supporting him. And second, even as a pre-sexual child, i recognized that his writing about sex, relationships, and women all sucked. I read him for other things. So he didn’t fool me.
And he was a product of his times, and mostly unusual for quantity, not quality of his abuse. I’ve interacted with a bunch of men of his age who behaved similarly, if at a smaller scale. I avoided them, but interacting with them was, in my experience, unpleasant, not really damaging.
Whereas these accusations are striking for their quality of awfulness. And i would have thought Gaiman understood relationships. That makes him a lot more guilty, both to the women he abused and also to his readers.
Between this and the Gisele Pelicot trial, I am thinking more and more about the Germaine Greer quote:
“Women don’t understand how much men hate them.”
I think it’s also true that men (collectively) don’t understand how much they hate women.
Yes, that is the bit I am dwelling on. How much and how many.
As a kid hitting mysterious puberty in the early 80s and my only guide to the female form being the JC Penny catalog, a lot of it was pretty relatable. Young protagonist sees a girl’s underwear and, yes, I too would like to see a girl in my age in her underwear. Protagonist accidentally grabs a centaur boob and, yes, I too would like to touch a woman’s boob. The same themes would probably be fine in a coming of age story for an age-appropriate audience. I’m pretty confident that some of the stories we were assigned in junior high or got out of the book fair flier included mild sexual content like heavy petting and seeing undies.
But the Xanth series was… a series. You’re expected to keep reading it over the years. And it never grew past that, adding new young protagonists so you would be 16 or 18 or 20 and still reading about some kid getting titillated by a twelve year old girl in a skirt climbing a ladder and realizing how skeevy this was getting. And wondering why this was a recurring theme.
But, for all that, and other works like Firefly that put me off him completely, I never heard anything about him abusing anyone. His Wiki is clean of accusations anyway.
I was going to put forward Samuel R. Delaney as an example of an SF writer who writes weird, off-putting sex stuff without being weird and off-putting himself, but then I found out he was a NAMBLA supporter, so never mind.
At least Tolkien is still clean (and likely to remain so). If he ever turned out a creep, it’d be all over, time to pack it in.
That was an interesting read. Kid struggling to believe what he was told he believed.
Oh dear, did someone call him a bad name? That’s unfortunate for him, but is, as noted above multiple times, not the same thing as convicting him of a crime. We put big hurdles over convictions because they result in people being locked up for months/years/lifetimes.
Calling someone a rapist isn’t the same thing. Neither is deciding to skip Good Omens 3, or Sandman 2, or whatever literary/visual/audible work he is trying to sell to us next. He wants me to buy? The burden of proof is on him.
Then again there’s “creep”, or maybe, “creepy by our standards”, and then there’s predatory. I can grant a certain degree of sociocultural-conditioning leeway to people in the past though even then there are lines that there’s no excuse to cross.
Especially in the case of celebrity culture there is an increase in the opportunity for acting up and getting away with it. Enough lifetime having elapsed, I realize that if we look at 20th century showbiz/literary fandom environments with the benefit of hindsight, we were around a whole assload of People Getting Away With Stuff™ that happened under the pretext of “liberation” and “not being squares” or of “oh but s/he’s SO special!”. Some took that all the way to the extreme taking advantage of having clout in their particular environment. And we were right there at the convention or concert or premiere or charity gala or political fundraiser, or maybe just buying the books & records, doing our thing and not really noticing or else just telling ourselves everyone in “that world” was cool.
So did Diddy. Hell, so did Ron f’in’ Jeremy. And yet where are they now.
It’s not about the sex per se. It’s about not just “playing” at dominance/submission but actually exerting it because you do feel you are entitled to overpowering (physically or emotionally or financially or legally) the other, who has to just take it and do nothing about it because you are more powerful and worth more than them.
Yeah, that was a dumb thing for me to say.