Re Cosby
Cosby was on some board at Temple University. IIRC the trial happened in Montgomery county, which borders on Philadelphia county. It was local news and I suspect covered even more extensively in Philly than it was nationally. IIRC a former DA had all the evidence for a conviction. It was inadmissible due to a deal that DA had made with Cosby. A new DA used that evidence to get a conviction. That conviction was overturned. There is no factual question of Cosby’s guilt. But without that evidence, proving he was legally guilty is almost impossible.
Back To The OP
As you would expect, the story is all over social media. Singer Tori Amos was a close friend of Gaiman’s and Palmer’s. He admits she was the inspiration for the character Delirium. A billboard ad for Tori Amos appears in a panel in Death- The Time Of Your Life. I’ve heard, but have not confirmed, that Amos has cut both Gaiman and Palmer out of her life. This is extremely believable. Tori Amos was raped early in her performing career. She wrote a song about it- Me And A Gun And A Man On My Back. It seems very unlikely that a rape survivor who urges other rape survivors to come forward would support a rapist and a woman who knew but kept quiet.
Cosby was strongly associated with Temple - he was an alum and did TV ads for Temple throughout the 1980s (“Joe so-and-so: 12 million on his SATs and cured cancer: he could have gotten in anywhere - he chose Temple”)
I can understand your questions. This is a very, shall we say measured article about the allegations and his responses to them. After reading it as my first real source of information, I too had similar kinds of questions in my mind.
I don’t think it’s impossible for multiple independent allegations to be false, but you would have to assume that all of those people had really strong motives for potentially perjuring themselves (I realize that there has been no sworn testimony yet, due to no trials). Some of them might really hate him, some of them might be hoping for some kind of notoriety bump or a financial payout at some point, or other things like that, but that every one of them would have such motives for lying stretches credulity well past the snapping point.
By the way, I noticed in the article that the 3rd season of Good Omens has been reduced to a 90-minute movie, that his production company is no longer involved, but some of his writing is still in the script.
edited to add: I guess I messed up the copy mode, and I don’t know how to fix it.
If I had to bet, I wouldn’t rely on her either. But the ray of hope is that in 2023, none of this info was public, so Palmer had incentive to keep quiet to avoid looking bad herself. Now that this is all out there, she already looks pretty awful, so testifying might be a first step to rehabilitating her image.
But I don’t know if criminal charges are even a possibility, so maybe this is all moot.
Sidebar: this made me wonder if it was the same person as the author of The Art of Coarse Sport, a book I’ve enjoyed rereading many times - thankfully it seems not. Unsurprisingly, it’s a name shared by a lot of famous people.
We had a discussion about Neil Gaiman last night at dinner. We also brought up the case of Piers Anthony and Marion Zimmer Bradley. I also couldn’t help but think of Bill Cosby (whose records I’d listened to so often that I had his routines memorized) and cases like Randall Garrett.
Someone I worked with at a job a long time ago was arrested as a child molester. It came as a total surprise – you’d never guess it from seeing and talking with him at work. But one day he was there, and the next he was gone, and pretty much never spoken of again. There aren’t necessarily any indications. You can talk about red flags in the work of Cosby and Anthony, but I’ll point out that many authors of sexually adventurous works aren’t therefore themselves sex criminals. For all the outrageousnes of Anne Rice’s “A.N. Roquelaire” novels or of Jack Chalker’s body-switched and body-morphing fantasies, I never heard any claims about them being aberrant. Phil Foglio’s XXXenophile comics had highly imaginative sexual scenarios (which included sex with a horse, part of the solution of a logical puzzle) , but no one’s accused him of misconduct. And he maintained a list of topics he swore to keep away from.
As for Gaiman, I can’t see anything in his works that I know of that suggests that he would be a sexual abuser.
I don’t think that follows. Brains are weird and irrational, and people can justify all sorts of behaviors through mental gymnastics. Given his knowledge of monsters, and his creativity and intelligence, I have no problem believing that he’s dedicated tremendous mental energy to imagining a world in which his actions aren’t monstrous, in which certain cherry-picked facts are strung together into a narrative that means consent, in which his NDAs are there to “protect” women from their own delusions and help them out from his flaw of being emotionally unavailable.
People can justify damn near anything, and intelligence and creativity make that easier, not harder.
He wrote a post back in July when things were just starting to become widely known and just came out and said he had no insider information and was as angry and upset as everybody else was.
That tracks with other comments in this thread - you just aren’t going to keep such close tabs on a friend you may only see a few times a year and when you do, usually in a professional context.
His next novel is out in March and involves the moon turning into cheese.
From the John Scalzi article one item that does speak to how the public opinion street often works despicably:
I see some deeply shitty people hoping I’m “next,” which among other things means they are explicitly hoping that I’ve done things close to what Neil is credibly accused of, to actual other people, just so they can have the satisfaction of seeing me “owned.” And, well. Those people can go fuck themselves.
Or they are threatening that “someone may” fabricate an accusation against him, because they are so convinced that anyone can be arbitrarily picked for “cancelling” that way.
This goes to the unfortunate tendency in mass public opinion to either believe anyone can be “cancelled” on mere hearsay, or the even more pernicious belief that “they ALL do it, this one just got caught”.
This last contributes to the corollary that anyone who had any contact or adjacency to the troublesome person’s circle, even in other contexts or even if not themselves involved, HAD to have known, SHOULD have known, MUST have known. So everyone who ever met with Epstein, or Weinstein, or Diddy, or Gaiman, etc. more than once, must have been part of the misdeeds or been part of the cover up.
the absolute best case scenario is still terrifically bad
and yeah, I think he’s right about that.
I also think that @puzzlegal might be right: that Gaiman genuinely doesn’t see how bad it is; and that it’s even possible he doesn’t see how bad the worse scenarios are. He grew up with massive abuse of power, and may see it as normal. (Again: a reason is not an excuse. He should have known better, even if he didn’t understand better.)
Someone more familiar with his work, tell me if I’m remembering right, I don’t have the work here to check: did Gaiman write Dream, somewhere in the graphics, as having had their (also immortal) lover tortured for an extraordinary length of time – and then have them forgive it?
He’s a horror writer; I don’t remember being that shocked by his having written Dream as having done that. But I was disturbed, years ago, at having it presented as something forgivable, to the point of their getting back together. But again I’m not sure that I’m remembering it right.