The Four Color Media Monitor

While much of the mainstream comics specialty press continues to maintain radio silence on the sexual assault accusations against Neil Gaiman, Fandom Pulse has reported there's more insiders and writing workshops that are distancing themselves from him, or already have:

To add more bubbles to the bath, a publishing industry insider has spoken out about Neil Gaiman on X. Michael Matheson posted, "The pattern talked about in recent allegations is decades-long. Power imbalance frequently at the heart of what Neil does. At Clarion, there's the Gaiman Rule for instructors, named after Neil: 'Don't sleep with the students.'"

He continued noting something potentially worse for the author about his being kept away from young writing students at another course, "Neil is (I think unofficially?) barred from teaching at a particular workshop for young writers that caps out attendant age at 19. Not naming that one because I was told it in confidence nearly a decade ago when I was reprinting a story of Neil's in an anthology."

Matheson also points out how the industry protects Neil Gaiman, saying, "It's not a question of 'if,' the silence surrounding Gaiman for years is about who wants to lose their career by tilting a lance at one of genre publishing's sacred (cash) cows. That Gaiman cloaked himself in feminist/ally rhetoric for ages also made it harder to air things."

Having an unspoken rule about not sleeping with students named after Neil Gaiman at Clarion is a huge red flag. Clarion is where writers go to live for six weeks to workshop and learn from teachers like Neil Gaiman. The workshop produces a lot of writers in traditional publishing and is seen as a rite of passage for a fast track to get into places like Clarke's World or Tor Books.

With a second writer's workshop allegedly banning Neil Gaiman because it's geared toward young students, it appears the industry knows the 62-year-old author's proclivities are much worse than they seem on the surface.

Even with this information coming to light, no one in mainstream entertainment media reports what's occurring with Neil Gaiman, leaving the public unaware of his alleged wrongdoings. One wonders how much bathwater needs to be put into the tub for this situation to boil over.

There's an important point to be made that, even if insiders have been keeping Gaiman away from their students, the silence of the press, mainstream, specialty or otherwise, only makes it worse, though it does make clear they realize the allegations have considerable validity, hence, their silence on what one of their fellow leftists has done. Of course, even Harvey Weinstein got away with his offensive antics for a long time, and it was only years later in his career that he finally met justice for his crimes, though he's come close to getting away with it recently after a mistrial was declared in the case filed against him in New York. It'll remain to be seen if the prosecution does a better job this time.

Now, since we're on the subject, I also took a look at what a leftist writer named Monica Byrne, somebody who's familiar with Gaiman, had to say about this scandal:

A fun thing is that, by staying silent about the women who’ve gone on record about Neil Gaiman, SFF authors/outlets are ceding the discourse to transphobes. Which further hurts the women who were brave enough to speak up & the women who’re thinking about speaking up.

Fuck you.

— Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) July 22, 2024

I’m still reconciling the fact that someone I knew as a kindly, bumbling, absent-minded older author friend is actually a sadistic serial rapist of young women. It is honestly very hard to reconcile.

But I don’t use that as an excuse to not believe them.

— Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) July 22, 2024

She may be willing to speak out, but it's regrettable she's siding with transsexual ideology, because there've been practitioners of that lifestyle who have committed sexual abuse, with prisons being where women are most vulnerable to these atrocities. If that form of abuse doesn't concern these leftists, then their current condemnations of Gaiman aren't altruistic so much as they're opportunistic. If he decided overnight to take up that kind of identity politic, would they suddenly fall radio silent, allowing that to serve as a shield for his evil deeds?

For now, here's more important signs that Gaiman's career is washing up on a rocky shore, and in the past few weeks since the allegations against Gaiman first went public, he's vanished from social media, and it's bound to be a while before he returns to writing there. Hopefully, DC and Marvel will stop paying him residuals for reprints of his work, and his book publishers will drop him from their partnerships.

Labels: misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, violence