How the Shadow Army Mobilizes to Protect the Powerful

An early incident involving Neil Gaiman illustrates the almost unconscious way a group will come together to protect an icon from his own actions.

There are enough unhappy things going on in the world this week, this month, this century, that I wouldn’t blame you for skipping this post. It doesn’t offer any solutions or solace, but only makes some depressing and uncomfortable observations. Caveat lector.

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781

As reported last week in New York Magazine, the story of the sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman only gets darker and more stomach-turning¹. I've been following the saga since it broke last summer with an increasingly sinking feeling, not because I've ever been much of a fan, but because I wish somehow he could have been called out—if not stopped—sooner.

When a person starts to acquire power and wealth in any field, a shadow army accrues around them, not just insulating him from the consequences of his actions but also reflecting a distorted reality back to the world outside and isolating anyone who would do him harm. This army grows larger and more complex as its focal point amasses more power. It includes both the insiders who depend on him for a living and the adorers whose faith in his benevolence isn’t easily be shaken.

The allegations against Gaiman seem detailed, consistent, and credible. I would take them seriously on that basis alone, even if I didn’t already have an inkling of how he operates. I’m pretty sure I saw an early version of his shadow army in action back in 1998. The story itself is fairly innocuous, at least in comparison with sexual assault, but I think it helps demonstrate how he’s been able to get away with what he does for so long.

This was back at time when it still felt almost possible as a young, up-and-coming SF writer to spend time at conventions and on the electronic bulletin boards and believe you knew, or at least knew of, most of the players in the field. At worst, you were only a degree or two of connection away from anyone you might care to meet.

I only met Neil Gaiman one time that I can recall, but at least two of my good friends were close with him. One, whom I will call O., was someone I’d known for well over a decade, since my late teens, and who lived in a distant city. The other, whom I will call T., was someone I’d known since arriving in New York City a couple of years early. Both were women involved in the SF field, and both had romantic histories with Gaiman.

I didn’t know much about what went on between him and O., other than the fact that it had happened and they remained friends. I knew a lot about what went on between him and T., because they were still deep in a tumultuous, years-long affair that often seemed like her favorite topic of conversation. And I knew that Gaiman was married, and that his wife rarely left their home in Minnesota.

The only reason I went to his book signing in Manhattan was because my significant other, whom I will call R., dragged me there. I had read and enjoyed much of the Sandman series by that point, at her urging, but I was a little put off by the worshipful way she talked about him. R. was a new writer in her late twenties starting to get some notice, and she had spent time a few years earlier as the tag-along to a group that included Gaiman and probably T. and another mutual friend, C., at a large regional science fiction convention². In any case, now that she was being published she was eager to reintroduce herself and reestablish that connection.

R. and I approached his table toward the end of the signing. He did indeed remember her and seemed quite pleased to see her. I was less pleased to see how pleased he was, but because R. and I were in an open relationship—nominally, for my part, since I never took advantage of the fact—all I could do was feel bad about feeling badly about it.

Our relationship was, actually, on its last legs, though I’m not sure R. realized it yet. O. was the one who first connected us, and we had lived together in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment through more than two years of miscommunication and misery. She hated the city, and I think by this time she was already planning to move away. It would be a while longer before it sank in that I’d be staying behind.

In any case, I wandered away to browse while R. and Gaiman caught up. When she and I left the bookstore a bit later, she was giddy. “Neil wants me to come to his hotel in the morning for elevenses,” she told me.

I was convinced she was the only late-morning snack on the menu, but it would have sounded jealous of me to say so, and jealousy was the primary thing R. could not abide. If I had known then what I know now—both about Neil Gaiman and about the world in general—I like to think I would have argued against her going to that hotel room. As it was, all I could do was try and fail to sleep that night, and try and fail to get some writing done the next morning while I waited for her to return from what she seemed certain would be a grand adventure.

She was not disappointed. When she got back from Manhattan in the early afternoon, R. was floating on air. She and Neil had talked, she told me. He listened to her. Every iota of his floppy-haired attention, focused on her. They shared a deep, soul-to-soul connection. And before she left his room, he had taken her face in his long, poet’s hands and kissed her, so sweetly, so tenderly.

I didn’t want to hear about it, but R. was certain that other people did. Even at that early date, she ran an email subscriber list where people could sign up to, essentially, read her diary³. She detailed the whole chaste encounter for her list the next morning and blasted it out⁴.

Maybe a day or two later, O. emailed me, which was not unusual. She and I were in frequent contact. She was several years older, and in a lot of ways was the big sister I never had growing up. Among her news items that morning was the fact that her longtime platonic partner, a subscriber to R.’s list, had some deep concerns about the latest update. It seemed, O. wrote, that

[R.] has been going on about the glory of Neil Gaiman and how he kissed her and she doesn’t think he thinks of her as a kid sister anymore and he’s promising [to spend] any time she asks [for with her] at [the next convention] and he mirrors her body language and he looks soulfully into her eyes and…

After consulting with O., she told me, her partner forwarded R.’s update to Gaiman. She went on:

I think I can trust you with the information⁵ that Neil’s response is that he was happy to see [R.] after three years, but it looks like now he will be very sweet whenever he sees her but somehow not have any time to spare. He’s an extremely private person and never signed up for people’s hormonal tea-leaf readings about him to be e-mailed to anyone who asks.

Whatever reply I made to O. is lost, but I took the hint that R. was intended to learn nothing of this. O.’s next email says:

Neil is going to make sure he doesn’t get into a position where any responsibility for her wafts his way, either. Maybe her public diary is a blessing here: it got the info out exactly where a person stands in her life when he smiles at her and gives her a European kiss.

Over the next few days, I discussed this all with C., who was not only friends with everyone involved but was a former partner of T. and R. both⁶. Of my responsibility toward R., he said the following:

[S]he knows full well the [T.] story, and probably a lot of [O.]’s Neil situation as well; if her eyes aren’t open, no one can open them for her.

I quote from these emails at length to make clear what was happening. Even at this relatively early date, an autonomic immune system was at work, detecting threats, closing ranks, expelling invaders. The group is already rewriting R.’s eyewitness account, discounting her experience, trying to turn a kiss into little more than a misconstrued social nicety.

Some may read all this and believe, as C. did, that R. was hopelessly naive, that she should have known better. That may be true, but it’s missing the point. In the New York Magazine article, Lila Shapiro writes, “It was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers that Gaiman cheated on his first wife.” Yes, and the members of the little circle I’m describing knew that better than most.

Despite this, the group’s reflex response was to protect the serial adulterer from the naive young woman, and not the other way around.

Looking back, it’s ridiculously obvious what happened. The tall, exotic, accomplished, powerful rock star of the SF and comics worlds turned his charm on an attractive and receptive young writer and summoned her to his hotel room. He made her promises. He planted seeds of expectation and sent her off again to let them germinate and bloom. He groomed her.

It was undoubtedly a stroke of luck for R. that the shadow army moved so quickly against her—who knows what might have happened if the dalliance had played all the way out—but make no mistake. The group was not looking out for her. They were looking out for the man who had already proven himself, beyond doubt, to be a bad actor.

I’m not pardoning myself here, either. I didn’t even have strong feelings about Neil Gaiman, but I joined the silent conspiracy anyway because I wanted to see R. fail at getting something she craved so hungrily. I was as culpable as anyone involved.

It’s all so twisted, looking back at it. Viewed one way, this is a very minor incident that fortuitously turned out much better than it might have. Viewed another, it’s emblematic of the way groups work almost unconsciously to protect and apologize for powerful predators. Everyone knew about Gaiman’s philandering, but instead of calling him out about it publicly, there were sympathetic murmurs about his unhappy home life. Excuses were made. Shoulders were shrugged.

Over time, I did develop a strong distaste for Neil Gaiman. I had read and enjoyed the original run of The Sandman, but his novels never did anything for me. More relevantly, listening to T.’s endless laments about his treatment of her as that affair dragged on eventually sank in with me. It got to the point that anytime I heard his voice on the radio, my skin would crawl. I occasionally ventured to express an ungenerous opinion of him in small gatherings of other writers, but quickly learned that This Was Just Not Done. (As recently as 2019, I ventured a word against him in what I thought would be a sympathetic group, only to have one person snap, “Why would you say that? That’s one of my dearest friends in the world.”)

Still, once in a while I would stumble across someone who felt the way I did. We would quietly exchange notes about what we knew—it was 2009, for instance, when I learned how frequently Gaiman entertained young fans alone in private—and hope that, somehow, word was getting around. This whisper network may have accomplished something, but it obviously wasn’t enough. And I don’t think anyone I ever spoke with suspected how awful his behavior really was.

We all know that power protects itself. What I think we don’t realize often enough is how the rest of us, consciously or not, pitch in to assist. ∅

Update: April 16, 2025. For a detailed account of what it was like for a young woman to find herself in Gaiman’s sights back in the ’90s, I highly recommend this post by my friend Maria Alexander.

Neil Gaiman: The Wolf in the Walls

1. If you can’t access the article itself, The New York Times addresses the story in this gift article.

2. O. might have been part of that group too, I’m not sure. I’m piecing some things together from a rather spotty email record.

3. Yes, she was Substack long before Substack was a gleam in the Internet’s eye, and before blogging itself was even much of a thing.

4. I did not myself subscribe to R.’s newsletter. She sometimes wrote uncomplimentary things about me, which was nothing I needed to expose myself to.

5. Obviously not in the long run.

6. I really should diagram the spaghetti tangle of relationships here, but such a dense web of connections is as typical of the SF world as it would be of any other tight-knit subculture.