Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Everyone involved is gross. These women all agreed to consensual sex with this man until at some point it went bad. What the heck did they expect, having sex with a married man while working as his babysitter? I’m not blaming them for instances of sexual assault but let’s not pretend these are upstanding young women. This man is disgusting. If he, as my boss invited me to take a bath in his garden, that would be a hard no. Where is common sense?

(I have only read the Variety article and excerpts of the Vulture on Reddit and elsewhere as it's paywalled on my phone)

The power dynamics are really significant here. Most of these women were very young. Several were employees of Gaiman or his wife. One was a neighbor who'd just divorced. Several agreed to NDAs for shockingly low sums, indicating that even when they knew what had happened was wrong, they struggled to really believe it. He clearly preyed on women who were especially vulnerable or compromised. So that's where the "common sense" was. Many of these women were likely abused or neglected as children or in prior relationships. It's very common. And then abusers like Gaiman are good at spotting the qualities of someone with that background -- eager to please, low self esteem but responds very well to attention and flattery, willing to override their internal resistance to things to please him (until, for most of them, there came a line where their internal resistance kicked in and they said no -- I am betting Gaiman got off and trying to find where that line was and then trying to push past it).

Also Gaiman and Amanda Palmer were very vocal advocates of polyamory. I think they used this essentially as cover for Gaiman to be a straight up predator. They could draw people in under the guise of "it's okay, it's an open relationship, we're affectionate people, love is love, the human body is beautiful in all its forms so nudity isn't shameful" and so on -- it normalizes a whole range of behaviors that would not be considered okay in a more traditional community where most people are monogamous and you don't take baths at your boss's house or discuss sex with your employer. They sold this "alternative lifestyle" as better than other kinds of relationships and people really idolized them for having figured out polyamory and viewed them as more evolved or something.

Turns out they are just extremely terrible people and there were a million signs along the way that people ignored because they seemed so "cool." Never been a better example of why "coolness" is absolutely worthless. Cool is deeply deceptive.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Everyone involved is gross. These women all agreed to consensual sex with this man until at some point it went bad. What the heck did they expect, having sex with a married man while working as his babysitter? I’m not blaming them for instances of sexual assault but let’s not pretend these are upstanding young women. This man is disgusting. If he, as my boss invited me to take a bath in his garden, that would be a hard no. Where is common sense?

+100. These women are fully complicit in their own treatment. They agreed to participate.

I don’t think the evidence is there that they fully agreed to participate in everything that happened.

There's no "evidence" but circumstantial evidence shows it. Maybe they were overborne by his charisma - that means that it was consensual.

Some of these women were 18 or 22 at the time. One was his child's nanny. Another was a tenant on his property whose husband had recently left her and she was worried she and her children would be evicted if she didn't comply.

Also so many of these incidents took place in remote homes in the middle of nowhere. That really struck me, especially because the article talks about how Gaiman preferred being in more remote places. It's always some remote house on farm upstate or an island off the coast of New Zealand. He owns a house on the Isle of Skye. All of the worst stuff in these stories take place in locations where it would be hard for the women to flee. In some cases they didn't have cars and were driven to his location or he was their ride. That plus the age difference and the employment relationship with the nanny or the landlord-tenant relationship with the neighbor -- it's all very coercive. He clearly seems to have selected women who he thought would be more compliant because they have few other choices.

It's like how serial killers often target prostitutes because they tend to be easier marks plus everyone is happy to blame a prostitute for her own murderer. And yes that comparison is horrifying and I mean it to be. I don't think Gaiman's psychology is a whole lot different than a serial killer except he stopped short of murder -- perhaps too much to lose with his fame and fortune.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Everyone involved is gross. These women all agreed to consensual sex with this man until at some point it went bad. What the heck did they expect, having sex with a married man while working as his babysitter? I’m not blaming them for instances of sexual assault but let’s not pretend these are upstanding young women. This man is disgusting. If he, as my boss invited me to take a bath in his garden, that would be a hard no. Where is common sense?

+100. These women are fully complicit in their own treatment. They agreed to participate.

I don’t think the evidence is there that they fully agreed to participate in everything that happened.

There's no "evidence" but circumstantial evidence shows it. Maybe they were overborne by his charisma - that means that it was consensual.

Anonymous wrote:Gaiman hired a crisis management firm - same one Prince Andrew retained.

Anonymous wrote:I get serious Ghislaine Maxwell vibes from Amanda Palmer. Amanda said she and Neil weren’t attracted to each other, so why were they together? For Amanda, it was access to his fame and money. For Neil, it was access to vulnerable young women who were impressed by Amanda’s coolness.

Amanda sent a fan girl-who she called fragile- to Neil’s house to “babysit” for hours when Amanda had sent the child out on a playdate. She knew what Neil would do. The fact that she told him to leave that woman alone shows she knew he’d try something. And yes, that 22 year old woman was clearly mentally unstable. That’s why they picked her. A young woman with a supportive family and healthy self-esteem would be harder to abuse.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Everyone involved is gross. These women all agreed to consensual sex with this man until at some point it went bad. What the heck did they expect, having sex with a married man while working as his babysitter? I’m not blaming them for instances of sexual assault but let’s not pretend these are upstanding young women. This man is disgusting. If he, as my boss invited me to take a bath in his garden, that would be a hard no. Where is common sense?

+100. These women are fully complicit in their own treatment. They agreed to participate.

I don’t think the evidence is there that they fully agreed to participate in everything that happened.

There's no "evidence" but circumstantial evidence shows it. Maybe they were overborne by his charisma - that means that it was consensual.

Anonymous wrote: let’s not pretend these are upstanding young women.