The shocking podcast about Neil Gaiman, and our participation in it

You may have heard about the four-part podcast from Tortoise Media (a British news site created in 2019 by a former BBC news director) that premiered on Wednesday, about two women who say they were in consensual relationships with author Neil Gaiman, but who each allege that they experienced what they consider sexual assault to have occurred in those relationships. Gaiman denies that the two relationships were anything but consensual.

It’s not a simple story to tell, but one that is told with great sensitivity and consummate skill over four episodes by journalists Paul Caruana Galizia and Rachel Johnson (who happens to be the sister of Boris Johnson).

The two of them called in March to go over Neil’s Scientology upbringing, which we have written about at length at the Village Voice and here at the Underground Bunker. Some excerpts of our interview with them show up in episode three of the podcast.

For the call, they let us in on the shocking news that a couple of women were coming forward with sexual misconduct allegations about Gaiman. We said we had not heard about such allegations, but they were being very thorough looking into Neil’s past, and they had questions about what we’d written about how Neil’s Scientology childhood had informed his book The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was later turned into a hit play.

They even visited that “ocean at the end of the lane,” a pond in East Grinstead, England near Scientology’s UK headquarters, Saint Hill Manor, for the series. It was near that pond that Neil’s father, prominent Scientologist David Gaiman, had a boarding house, and where a lodger was found dead in a car one morning when Neil was about 6. Thinking back on that incident after his wife Amanda Palmer asked him about his Scientology background is what motivated him to write the short novel, Neil has said.

It was also around that time, when Neil was a young child going through Scientology processing, that his father hit upon the idea of having the BBC interview the young prodigy. Scientology then had a transcript of the interview sent to members of Parliament, who were considering banning Scientology at the time. So yes, David Gaiman had used young Neil in a public relations stunt, something we pieced together years ago, and that we were happy to recount for the podcast.

Neil was out of Scientology by the mid-1980s, but he’s refrained from criticizing it publicly because his family is still firmly entrenched in it. Although his father David Gaiman died in 2009, Neil’s mother Sheila and sisters Claire and Lizzy are still hardcore church members.

But we cautioned the podcasters that Neil’s Scientology past wasn’t necessarily to blame for allegations of misconduct today, and the show really didn’t go there.

Like we said, they handled with great sensitivity a very difficult subject, and they seemed to do their best to put in as much as they could about Neil’s responses to their questions and his denials about the allegations being made about him.

The result is a fascinating and detailed look at questions about consent and the law, about the power dynamics in a relationship with a celebrity, and about how difficult it can be to prosecute cases of sexual assault.

And it also has a little about Scientology. Which we were happy to supply.

We hope you give the podcast a listen, and let us know what you think about it.

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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea

Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology

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