Neil Gaiman controversy and the case of power differentials

Pavlovich alleged that she was assaulted by Gaiman when she went to babysit his seven-year-old son in February 2022, as well as over the course of several weeks. She points to Gaiman’s shock when she reached out to his then wife, the feminist singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, to tell her of a particular incident when Gaiman allegedly forced Pavlovich to have intercourse while his child was in the room. The article states that Gaiman’s representatives called these allegations “false, and not to mention, deplorable”. Drawing attention to the way Pavlovich could help him, he also wrote to her: “Knowing that you would be prepared to say, ‘It’s not true, it was consensual, he’s not a monster,’ makes me a lot more grounded,” the New York Magazine article reported.

Pavlovich’s attitude towards Gaiman also underwent a change over time: From thinking of the intercourse as consensual, she eventually filed a police complaint against him in January 2023. For many, this shift is enough to discredit her. But it is precisely this disjunction — between Gaiman’s and Pavlovich’s accounts, between Gaiman’s behaviour towards Pavlovich in a sexual context and in a non-sexual context, and even in Pavlovich’s own understanding of what happened to her — that must bear our scrutiny, as it is here that most of us live our quotidian lives.

It will always help men in power to have a public and a private persona: The public one is cultivated to maintain their status quo, and the private is kept well outside the scrutiny of the public. For too long, this dichotomy has been considered normal, based on the notion that the right to privacy is, after all, a given. Through our cultural obsession to heroise men in power — a trope Gaiman actively critiqued in his comics and fantasy novels, championing instead the underdog which made him, ironically, heroic to his fanbase — we allow such dichotomies to persist. This is why we are left shocked and often disbelieving when we hear accounts of violence by powerful men in their personal lives. By allowing this dichotomy to persist, we signal our willingness to sacrifice the safety of those who populate the private lives of powerful men.

In Gaiman’s case, the private was populated by a host of adoring fans of his comics and readers of his fantasy novels, some of whom he slept with. According to the allegations reported by the New York Magazine, he participated in acts of sexual domination, commonly understood within the BDSM community as part of role-playing based on one’s preferences. Within such dominant-submissive encounters, the differential in power is role-played. One of the foundational aspects of the practice of BDSM is to equalise power through consent before acting on desire.

Gaiman, however, wasn’t role-playing. He possessed more social, political, and cultural capital than the younger women he said he slept with consensually. Yet all the accounts of the accusers show him placing his needs first and not hearing a clearly stated no.

In a statement released after the publication of the article, he wrote: “As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen. I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.”

The disjunction between his account and theirs is what a power differential looks like.

Power plays out in these quotidian ways. We too experience it in the unwillingness to believe women’s accusations, in the entitlement of people of dominant and upper castes, in the ableist infrastructure we see around us, and in the heterosexual social norms we live within. Unlike the rest of us, Gaiman certainly understood that such a power differential existed in the circles he moved in. But was it to his advantage to question it? His explanatory statement doesn’t say.

The views expressed are personal