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Even more horrific accusations against Neil Gaiman revealed

Asbo Zaprudder said:
Is Scientology somehow associated with Gaiman's alleged behaviour? It's possible, but it shouldn't be accepted as an excuse. I haven't delved into the allegations - frankly, I have no need to know and would rather leave that to the relevant legal authorities. The following video summary told me as much as I could stomach and I agree with the opinions expressed:

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I'm wondering whether I should now avoid anything with which he has been associated - even tangentially - not that I'm a big fan of his work or, indeed, the fantasy genre outside the works of JRR Tolkien. For example, does watching certain episodes of Babylon 5 or Doctor Who, for which he wrote episodes, or The Big-Bang Theory, in which he had a cameo, constitute implicitly supporting him? I'm not a big fan of cancel culture either, but I think you have to censor what you consume sometimes. But where should one draw the line? How much bad behaviour is acceptable by an artist in whatever medium? Is asking such questions even acceptable without turning the spotlight on oneself? Does the future consist of everyone living in fear of stepping outside the boundaries of what unaccountable groups on social media consider allowable?
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Yup, apparently his parents were high-ranking members of the cult in its early days. I had no idea about any of that until the allegations. We talked about this history in The Sandman thread, as well as how The Ocean at the End of the Lane reflects his childhood trauma of that upbringing.

But as you said, it shouldn't excuse his behavior at all. Just explains where it may have come from.
 
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Asbo Zaprudder said:
Yes, it was apparently well known in the SF writing community that Clarke didn't just go to Sri Lanka because of his interest in scuba diving.
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Really? Hmm. Okay.

Well quickly: in the early-90s he and his partner stayed with my mother's boss. At the time Mum was head chef at the top restaurant in Christchurch, NZ - owned by Michael-Lee Richards (RIP) and his partner Alan, who was the head waiter (Alan is a lovely man whom I still run into).

Michael put on what I would imagine was a gorgeous dinner for his guests in his home just out of Chch. The story went from Alan to my mother, to me. They were round the dinner table when Clarke described, well ... the nitty gritty. Did he assume because his hosts where homosexual they were au fait with it? He creeped them the fuck out.

Alan told Mum, who told me. I hadn't read a word of Clarke, but I knew the name. Then the Internet happened, found Trek, Sci-fi and I started seeing his name. I brought it up a few times before the allegations surfaced IIRC.

The top creep quote I remember ... "they're all lined up like a buffet." (words to that effect).
 
Starkers said:
Speaking strictly in terms of Dr Who, someone I follow on Bluesky pointed out that it was fine to still love The Doctor's Wife because it was a page one rewrite from Moffat.

And who wants to rewatch Nightmare in silver anyway?
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I have to admit, after I read the article, I remembered the part where it noted there seemed to be a bit of a turn in his personality, and all the really horrific stuff started when he in his 40s, or after the early 2000s, and mentally sorted out what felt a bit less tainted based on that.

I did the same thing with John Landis, where I'm okay with spending money on the movies he directed before the Twilight Zone deaths.
 
StarMan said:
Really? Hmm. Okay.

Well quickly: in the early-90s he and his partner stayed with my mother's boss. At the time Mum was head chef at the top restaurant in Christchurch, NZ - owned by Michael-Lee Richards (RIP) and his partner Alan, who was the head waiter (Alan is a lovely man whom I still run into).

Michael put on what I would imagine was a gorgeous dinner for his guests in his home just out of Chch. The story went from Alan to my mother, to me. They were round the dinner table when Clarke described, well ... the nitty gritty. Did he assume because his hosts where homosexual they were au fait with it? He creeped them the fuck out.

Alan told Mum, who told me. I hadn't read a word of Clarke, but I knew the name. Then the Internet happened, found Trek, Sci-fi and I started seeing his name. I brought it up a few times before the allegations surfaced IIRC.

The top creep quote I remember ... "they're all lined up like a buffet." (words to that effect).
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A reasonably successful SF writer of my acquaintance told me about Clarke's proclivities back in the mid 90s. I assumed it might just be salacious tittle-tattle and thought no more about it until now.
 
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Asbo Zaprudder said:
A reasonably successful SF writer of my acquaintance told me about Clarke's proclivities back in the mid 90s. I assumed it might just be salacious tittle-tattle and thought no more about it until now.
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It's a frustrating thing to rely on "trust me mate". I've been here for 25 years; this would be a really fucked up story to stick to between 18 and 42 and ... why? I don't profit defaming the man.
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
Your story rings true based on what I was told. Some very creative people do really horrible things, Hopefully, the two traits are not correlated.
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He had an enormous impact on science / sci fiction and rightly so - I've never once challenged that. I'm not sure what the takeaway is - realize that every voice in this world, however profound, insightful and influential, is just from another flawed human being that's a bag of great / good / bad / awful (of various ratios).
 
The way I justify continuing to watch movies or TV shows people like Gaiman were involved with is that there are a lot of other good people involved who I'm still willing to support. I will avoid at least spending money on things where a person like him is the sole credited creator, like their novels.
StarMan said:
Really? Hmm. Okay.

Well quickly: in the early-90s he and his partner stayed with my mother's boss. At the time Mum was head chef at the top restaurant in Christchurch, NZ - owned by Michael-Lee Richards (RIP) and his partner Alan, who was the head waiter (Alan is a lovely man whom I still run into).

Michael put on what I would imagine was a gorgeous dinner for his guests in his home just out of Chch. The story went from Alan to my mother, to me. They were round the dinner table when Clarke described, well ... the nitty gritty. Did he assume because his hosts where homosexual they were au fait with it? He creeped them the fuck out.

Alan told Mum, who told me. I hadn't read a word of Clarke, but I knew the name. Then the Internet happened, found Trek, Sci-fi and I started seeing his name. I brought it up a few times before the allegations surfaced IIRC.

The top creep quote I remember ... "they're all lined up like a buffet." (words to that effect).
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Wow, I'd never heard any of this about Clarke before, and I'm shocked to see there is nothing about it on his Wikipedia page. That kind of makes me wonder if people are purposefully not including it to protect his reputation, since they're using pretty good about adding these kind of things.
 
JD said:
The way I justify continuing to watch movies or TV shows people like Gaiman were involved with is that there are a lot of other good people involved who I'm still willing to support.
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Yep.

JD said:
Wow, I'd never heard any of this about Clarke before, and I'm shocked to see there is nothing about it on his Wikipedia page. That kind of makes me wonder if people are purposefully not including it to protect his reputation, since they're using pretty good about adding these kind of things.
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Well there is something there, in the section on his knighthood:

On 26 May 2000, he was made a Knight Bachelor "for services to literature" at a ceremony in Colombo.[14][...][50] The award of a knighthood had been announced in the 1998 New Year Honours list,[13][51] but investiture with the award had been delayed, at Clarke's request, because of an accusation by the tabloid the Sunday Mirror of paying boys for sex.[52][53] The charge was subsequently found to be baseless by the Sri Lankan police.[54][55] According to The Daily Telegraph, the Mirror subsequently published an apology, and Clarke chose not to sue for defamation.[56] The Independent reported that a similar story was not published, allegedly because Clarke was a friend of newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch.[57] Clarke himself said, "I take an extremely dim view of people mucking about with boys", and Rupert Murdoch promised him the reporters responsible would never work in Fleet Street again.[58] Clarke was then duly knighted.​

To believe the allegations against Clarke, you have to believe in conspiracy theories about it being covered up. Clarke was homosexual when it was criminal in the United Kingdom to come out, and so he was a target for ridicule. (Homosexuality was a criminal offense in the UK until 1967.) Does that explain the rumors of molestation? Were they true? I don't know. I've looked into it before, and I found nothing substantive, nothing conclusive. Does that mean there's no evidence out there? No, of course not. But AFAIK it has never been proven.
 
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Ah, I missed that part. It's always so hard to know what to believe when it's all these kind of second hand stories. Have there been any victims or first hand witnesses who have come forward?
 
JD said:
Ah, I missed that part. It's always so hard to know what to believe when it's all these kind of second hand stories. Have there been any victims or first hand witnesses who have come forward?
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Not as such, no.

There's one essay written by someone who claims that when he was a boy his family lived near a man who could be inferred to be Clarke, who recounts something uncomfortable involving nudity, but it doesn't involve any sex act or anything approaching one. Was the neighbor Clarke? The essay does not explicitly say. Did the events happen? There is no corroboration of any kind, despite the alleged presence of two other people who would not be predisposed to be biased against the boy.

There's a whole video that makes inferences about Clarke's personal life, which is partly based on fact and partly based on pure speculation on the part of the pundit.

You can easily Google this stuff; I won't dignify any of it with a link. You asked, I answered.

There's not evidence like apparently there is against Gaiman, or for that matter, say, that there was against Polanski. Perhaps it's because it was a different time, circumstances were different, culture was different. I can acknowledge that while also maintaining that (AFAIK) there isn't anything to see here in the instance of Clarke that can establish guilt by any reasonably sufficient standard. There's nothing more damning here, certainly not anymore, than just the conclusions of a slew of Internet armchair investigators who haven't much more than rumors that may never die to chew on, and I guess I'm just one of those too. If something more convincing emerges (one way or the other), I'll gladly change my tune.
 
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That does make it more plausible then. I'm the kind of person who likes to give people the benefit of the doubt when possible, but that gets harder to do the more evidence starts to add up, and it sounds like the Clarke accusations are little more in that direction than I thought.
 
JD said:
That does make it more plausible then. I'm the kind of person who likes to give people the benefit of the doubt when possible, but that gets harder to do the more evidence starts to add up, and it sounds like the Clarke accusations are little more in that direction.
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I wouldn't call essays posted on the Internet that don't name names and that lack any means of corroboration "evidence," but you do you.
 
JD said:
That does make it more plausible then. I'm the kind of person who likes to give people the benefit of the doubt when possible, but that gets harder to do the more evidence starts to add up, and it sounds like the Clarke accusations are little more in that direction than I thought.
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I remember hearing rumors about this a few decades ago now. I've never seen anything other than rumors. As someone said earlier, at the time being gay automatically made one a possible child molester in the eyes of many people.

As to the Tanith Lee stuff, I'm not sure if Gaiman really took from her in as much as they were both inspired by similar stories. I did find this from Sylvia Moreno Garcia who dismisses any inspiration Gaiman took from Lee as nothing that could be considered plagiarism:

Silvia Moreno-Garcia (@silviamg.bsky.social)

No, Gaiman didn't plagiarize Tanith Lee (I have a bunch of Lee first editions, I interviewed her once, I know her work). There are a bunch of writers who did gods stuff before him (Adams, Leiber) BUT it does show something I've noticed that a lot of writers from the 80s and 70s have been forgotten-
bsky.app bsky.app
 
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Unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, I don't believe that humans are either intrinsically good or intrinsically evil, whatever "good" and "evil" mean in a given context. However, judging by what I've witnessed, we might be intrinsically chaotic. Perhaps that's why the aliens never visit. Fermi paradox solved? LLMs exhibit similar behaviour and that isn't really surprising as they are trained on data provided and created by humans.
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
For example, does watching certain episodes of Babylon 5 or Doctor Who, for which he wrote episodes, or The Big-Bang Theory, in which he had a cameo, constitute implicitly supporting him?
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If you're a fan of those shows and regularly watch all the episodes anyway, you should be fine watching the episodes he wrote or appeared in without making it appear as though you're supporting him. Besides, as mentioned about his Doctor Who episodes, The Doctor's Wife was heavily rewritten by Moffat and Nightmare in Silver isn't really worth rewatching anyway. I never watched B5, but I wouldn't be shocked if the episode(s?) he wrote there were rewritten by JMS anyway. I also never watched Big Bang Theory, but since you said "cameo" I'm guessing he didn't have that big a role in it? In that case, is the episode otherwise good or worth watching? If so, I see no harm in continuing to watch that.

All that said, I don't blame anyone who feel they can't watch the content he was involved in on these shows either.
 
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