I believe that so far we don't have enough evidence to believe nor to not believe the accusations against Neil Gaiman. I cannot pass any judgment on that and hope that serious press vehicles verify the facts.
What I do believe is that it's awfully convenient that radfems and JK Rowling supporters (seriously, look at the tags of the people spreading the story) are stirring it up just after both David Tennant and Michael Sheen criticized an alt-right politician in a moment where the alt-right is losing and desperate. And, unless they shun Neil Gaiman immediately, they will be accused of siding with a rapist.
It's possible that one or both things are true: the allegations against him and a targeted campaign by the alt-right. If both things are true, the stories of victims of sexual abuse are being exploited to discredit not only the perpetrator but also unrelated people who dared to protest for workers and trans people rights.
It will be a mess. And radfems will have a rude awakening when they are not useful to the alt-right anymore, specially the lesbian and bisexual ones, and their rights get erased. The victims, real or not, may also suffer further emotional damage in the turmoil.
I hope to be extremely wrong about everything.
Edited to add: when I say that I can't pass judgment, it's not about not knowing the women who came forward; it's about not knowing enough about the vehicle who published the story. A podcast is not accessible for me and I have never heard of the website and its reputation.
I will not be spending energy answering asks that are clearly in bad faith. I do not feel compelled to defend or attack Gaiman and will not be pushed to a stance that is not mine.
So, some quick additional notes about Tortoise Media, the company who makes the podcast and who has it paywalled.
- It's owned by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, member of the Conservative party - a party further to the right than the Torys, and the party that current prime minister Rishi Sunak (who called the current election thinking that this was a sure thing, and is at very real risk of entering the "And Find Out" phase after having "Fucked Around".
- It's paywalled - so if you try to listen to the podcast yourself to verify, you have to pay money to a very hateful bigot, which also disincentivizes people who are more inclined to be critical of the podcast and willing to pick it apart to not listen to it themselves.
- All the news coverage I've found so far traces their reporting back to that podcast - as the New Zealand Police don't comment on ongoing investigations, and the victims aren't making comments outside of the podcast (not saying that they should be hounded by the press, but when the only way to hear them out is to listen to a paywalled podcast by a hateful bigot, it makes it tricky to properly hear them out).
- Neil Gaiman, along with their artistic collaborators Michael Sheen and David Tennant, have just been ripping the UK Right Wing, including their TERF allies over the coals, and had been doing so for a long time before this election - giving them plenty of time to put this podcast together... and release it at a time where the UK media can't report in a non-neutral fashion about the election itself but can report on a very carefully timed attack on critics of the party that called this election in the first place.
- UK law limits the ability of the UK press to report on an upcoming election in a non-neutral manner within a certain window of the election - and we are in that window. Which means if Gaiman, Sheen, Tennant, or anyone else were to clap back on the podcast, the only way they could and have it be picked up in the media would be to attack the victims (which is a shitty thing to do, so certainly Tennant & Sheen are highly unlikely to do that - and Gaiman doing so wouldn't help his case in the court of public opinion). If they target Tortoise Media, their reporting, and their ownership, then they're targeting high-profile members of the UK Conservative Party and thus that couldn't be reported on.
Is it possible the accusations are true? Absolutely. However, in the scenario where it is true - this would then reek of the UK Conservative Party, through a directly held proxy, buying exclusivity over these women's story so they can sit on it and release it timed with an upcoming election to smear their critics in a way where they couldn't properly respond to the people who released the podcast, and the public can't directly evaluate the claims for themselves without providing some financing to the Conservative Party.
Oh, and if this doesn't stick - the Conservatives can trot this back out again when their allies get caught doing it, and it gets reported on in a more open and transparent manner.
In short, this is a textbook political dirty trick.
