I’ve been a fan of the works of Neil Gaiman since roughly 2003, when I read American Gods. During the 00s, I read most of his published works, including Neverwhere, Anansi Boys, The Sandman, and various short story collections. I even went to book readings by him, first in 2007 in Cologne (weirdly, it took place inside a car dealership), and then again in 2014, also in Cologne (but in some more author-appropriate location).

I always loved how dreamy and philosophical Gaiman’s works were, and how they weave something magical into something utterly ordinary. Especially their concepts of religion and gods1 has influenced my way of viewing the world. He’s without a doubt a very skilled writer.

Well. If you haven’t heard yet, I’m about to burst your bubble: Neil Gaiman has been revealed to be a despicable human being in a very, very unsettling, extremely long article on Vulture. I’ve read that whole article back when it was released in March 2025, and it’s absolutely revolting (trigger warning for SA). Tl:dr; Gaiman is a creep who has manipulative sexual relationships with young women with extremely questionable consent. Sometimes in front of his 6 year old son.

Gaiman, who was always very active on the internet, especially on his own blog, Tumblr and ex-Twitter, has since completely disappeared and the only comment he made on the whole situation was a flaky post on his blog in which he doesn’t really admit to anything, and claims whatever happened was consensual. Therein lies the problem: How can something be consensual between an old, rich man in a position of power, a masterful wordsmith manipulating a young adult woman in a position of need, who didn’t have a choice at that time?

While I’ve always been a fan of Gaiman’s works, I actually haven’t always been quite as much as a fan of the man himself. Already in 2003 when I first learned about him, I was never quite sure what to make of the fact that he comes from a family of Scientologists. He himself has never publicly said anything at all about his Scientology-family, and seems to have wanted to distance himself from it. But even back then it was well known that his entire family is very, very deep in that cult, with his father having been the head of the Church of Scientology in England for a long time.

Then in 2009, I learned that Neil Gaiman was divorcing his Scientology-wife for Amanda Palmer. Palmer was never really on my radar before that. I checked her music briefly and found it appalling, and the more I learned about the woman, the more appalling I found her as well. I could never understand how and why someone like Gaiman, who seemed like a rather quiet, introverted person, would want to be with someone so shrill and quite obviously narcissistic. This is a woman who faked her own suicide to film her then-boyfriends reaction, selling it as performance art. That then-boyfriend later committed suicide. Needless to say, once the Amanda Palmer phase began, my little respect for Neil Gaiman as a person, beyond being a writer, dwindled.

Nevertheless, I continued to read most stuff he published, which to be honest is not that much past the 00s. His biggest projects in the past 10 years or so where the TV adaptation of American Gods, which started great and went downhill extremely fast, the TV adaptation of Good Omens, which is great fun, and the TV adaptation of The Sandman, which so far is also quite good.

So where does that leave me as a fan? Should I get rid of all my Gaiman books now, even burn them ceremonially? Will I ever be able to consume his books or TV adaptations without feeling that disgust that I felt when reading the Vulture article? Should I even read them ever again, seeing that he’s such a horrible human being?

It’s complicated. I don’t think this is something that should be seen in terms of good and evil, or black and white. He’s a terrible person to be sure, but does that make everything he ever wrote terrible? Does it de-value his contributions to literature somehow? The Sandman has been one of the most praised and most influential graphic novels of the past 30 years. I don’t think that will ever change.

Perhaps it’s time to look beyond the author. Roland Barthes wrote in his 1967 essay La mort de l’auteur that one should never rely on the literary intentions, the biography or the identity of an author when reading their works. The only thing that matter is the reader’s interpretation of the work. And with that, I would like to declare: Neil Gaiman is dead. The Sandman, American Gods, Neverwhere, and all these other stories, live on in our collective (un)conscious. They have become something greater than their author. Or to use my favorite Westworld quote, “Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin never died. They simply became music.”

A perhaps even better example of what I’m trying to explain here is Harry Potter, which faces a similar issue. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has also been revealed to be a despicable human being, who actively makes life literally dangerous for transgender women in the UK these days. I’ve written about this at length a couple of years ago, and about the dilemma I faced regarding giving money to a product she would gain income from. Fans have since tried to disown Rowling from Harry Potter ever since she started her TERF war.

Gaiman and Rowling are by far not the only terrible humans who have produced great art. Author Marion Zimmer Bradley was a pedophile. Author Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. Actor Sean Connery has been accused of domestic violence. Jack Nicholson attacked a car with a golf club. Tom Cruise is… Tom Cruise. Kevin Spacey is so damn creepy he probably legit had people murdered (if he didn’t murder them himself). Lots and lots of actors and filmmakers were accused of sexual misconduct. Gary Gygax, the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, was a known misogynist who thought women can’t play roleplaying games.

Does that mean I should never enjoy playing DnD again, knowing that its creator was such a despicable human being? I don’t think so. I think applying “good” and “evil” labels to everything is an approach that will lead us to an ever-more polarized world, in which it will become increasingly impossible to find a middle ground – as seen in politics in a lot of nations these days. The best thing I can do it no longer financially contribute to those people. If I will ever feel the need to buy a Gaiman or Rowling or insert-scandalous-person’s book (which is rather unlikely), I will buy them second hand.

But if I now say “I’m never reading a Neil Gaiman book again!!!1!!!1!!”, I believe the only thing that would do is virtue signaling. I would do it to paint myself as a good person, who does not read works written by bad people. But that would be a lie, because how do I know that any of the authors whose books I read are actually good people? What about all the books I read by authors who have been dead for hundreds and hundreds of years, where we will never know what they were like? And why does it even matter so much?

What truly matters to me is the effect a story has on me. If it’s a good story, it will stay with me for a long time, just like American Gods has stayed with me for over 20 years and has shaped how I see the world. Who cares who wrote it.