A conversation with Rachel Johnson

About Neil Gaiman, and the differences in the storytelling between her podcast The Master and the subsequent viral New York article.

Last summer Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia made a brilliant podcast for Tortoise Media, The Master, revealing for the first time the allegations against Neil Gaiman. It was nuanced and thoughtful while also being completely damning.

Oddly, for such an important and well-made show about a topic with so much mainstream interest, the Master did not go viral. In fact almost no one talked about it. I recommended it, as did a few other people like David Aaronovitch – but the world was bizarrely quiet. (Although it was far from a disaster: It’s apparently heading for 1.5 million downloads.)

But this month, New York Magazine’s Lila Shapiro followed up on Rachel and Paul’s work. After doing six months more research, she published a devastating article, There Is No Safe Word, which this time went incredibly viral. It was extremely powerful, but there were occasions when I did miss the tone of The Master - which was, as I say, totally damning, but in a different way.

Given that this is a Substack about various ways of telling nonfiction stories, I messaged Rachel to ask if I could interview her about all those things.

But first, briefly, to give you a sense of the allegations (which Neil Gaiman denies) here’s one story from Rachel’s podcast.

In return for doing odd jobs, Caroline Wallner lived with her three daughters in a house on Gaiman’s land in Woodstock, NY (a 40 minute drive from where I live, as it happens). After her marriage broke down, she said, Gaiman began pressuring her for sex:

“There were little hints of, ‘We’re going to need the house’. And I remember saying, ‘Let’s talk about it. Let’s figure it out.’ That’s when he would just come to my studio and make me give him a blowjob …And he can say it was consensual. But why would I do that? It was because I was scared of losing my place.”

During Gaiman’s oral sex with Wallner, she said “he used to say to me ‘Call me your master. Tell me you want it. Tell me you want it.’ He would choke me sometimes.”

Wallner recalled one incident where she had fallen asleep reading in bed: “When I woke up, Neil was in the bed and he put my hand on his cock.”

Wallner said that whenever she resisted his sexual advances, Gaiman would say that [his then partner Amanda] Palmer wanted the house back, as well as the studio she worked in. Then he’d add, “But you take care of me and I’ll take care of you,” understanding it to be a reference to what she called the “sexual trade”.

During Covid, Gaiman began sending her sexually explicit videos of himself, asking her to send him ones of herself. After she stopped answering his sexual video calls, in June 2021, she said his business manager told her to vacate the property by December that year.

This was 2021 when our part of New York had been inundated by people from New York City, property prices were skyrocketing, and there were no rentals to be had. What a terrible thing to threaten someone with – a woman in her fifties with three children.

We spoke while Rachel was driving through Balham. This is an edited version of our conversation.

(By the way, a quick nerdy note: I used the new iPhone call-recording feature - that icon in the top left corner. It recorded the call beautifully, but the automatic transcription sucked, despite Rachel talking in a very clear voice. Rev.com’s AI transcription is much better.)

Rachel Johnson: Are you aware that Coraline has now been canceled as well?

Me: Yes, I read that this morning.

Rachel Johnson: I mean, it’s really snowballed, I'm afraid. I say I’m afraid because there is a part of me that thinks, ‘God, this has had consequences,’ You know?

Me: I do understand that feeling some journalists have of wanting to write exactly what we want but without there being consequences. Did it surprise you that your podcast didn’t go viral last year? Because it surprised me.

Rachel Johnson: It was very surprising. The big streamers - Netflix, Disney and Amazon - publicly distanced themselves from him, but the publishers still said nothing. I felt he was too big to fail, that you don't kill the golden goose.

Me: Can we talk about the differences between your podcast and the New York piece? There’s a tonal difference.

Rachel Johnson: But before we get to the tonal difference, the most important thing to say is we had our hands tied by UK libel laws. New York magazine was freed by first amendment liberalism and free speech absolutism. Lila could report things that we, wet drippy Brits, just… I wanted to. I was more gung ho. But I wasn’t paying the legal bills at Tortoise.

I do want to acknowledge Lila’s work. You should probably note that she's done a podcast interview where she says she used to have therapy four days a week but [due to writing the story] she upped it five days a week.

But what we reported and what Lila reported comes over very differently. We didn't include some details we knew, and Lila did. And what we included, which she didn't, was his side of the story, that we got from Neil Gaiman’s team. She said a couple of times, ‘He denies all the allegations.’ But I thought his side of the story was gold dust that really enriched our podcast. We really noodled away at what he said, and what she said, and I thought it added depth and complexity, which was intriguing for the listener because they really didn't know at any point who’s side they were on, or whether indeed they were on anyone's side.

Me: So including Neil Gaiman’s side made the whole thing more interestingly complicated?

Rachel Johnson: Well, what we have is a classic examples of intimate partner sexual violence. Where the person who’s involved with the alleged abuser sort of feels love, and they think they can somehow change the dynamic if they respond to the abuse in a different way. We reflected that even if the sex was horrific, they sent him tender messages because they were in a dysfunctional sexual relationship with him. What I wanted to do was explore this very grey area. We did not use the word rape. Lila does. She very much firmed up the allegations and made it more black-and-white in terms of his behavior. It was much more victim and perpetrator in New York magazine.

Me: Your podcast was still very damning, though. Do you think the reason why the New York piece went so insanely viral, while yours didn't, was because she made it much more black-and-white?

Rachel Johnson: Well, I think there's lots of reasons. There's the legacy media still having a huge impact - the cover story of New York magazine compared to a podcast start-up. And she worked on it for six months more. Also, we didn't get a huge amount of pick up because of me. People didn't want to think that I - the Zionist TERF sister of Boris - could be anything to do with this. I’m not even marmite. So they had a terrible kind of anguished reaction, which was: Tortoise is great, tick. But oh my God, Rachel Johnson. How do we process the fact that she's the one who got the story?

Me: It’s also been suggested that people didn’t want to see Neil Gaiman be brought down. But I don’t know about that.

Rachel Johnson: Oh my God yes, yes! He works for the refugee council. He's a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature or something. He sells millions of books. He provides work for thousands of people. Somebody came up to me at a screener and said, “Well thanks a bunch. My boyfriend is the director of Sandman or Good Omens or something and now he's out of a job.”

Me: Did that person mean it? They were angry?

Rachel Johnson: Yes, they were furious. I’m seeing them tonight, actually.

Me: So clearly not THAT furious if you’re seeing them again tonight. Anyway, you're right that the legacy media has a lot to do with it, and Tortoise is a start-up, and there’s prejudice about you, but to go back to that thing I asked you before: Yours was nuanced and complicated, and the New York piece was devastating, and I wonder whether that was another reason why the dam broke with her story.

Rachel Johnson: I don't want to criticize that piece and compare it to what we did, but she included details that you just couldn't get past. Scatological details that the reader couldn’t get past. And she reported and we took out, but knew all about, the presence of the child on a couple of occasions at least. We knew, but we didn't include it out of sensitivity. I think there was kind of an American version and a British version and the British version was much more reserved. And I was very concerned for the child. At one point I was arguing we should've kept the child in, but I was talked out of it.

It looks like he’s been canceled, and how do I not feel kind of responsible for that? I've got to say, I’m uncomfortable with #metooing people. Is that all right to say? I don't believe in cancel culture. We all do bad stuff and we all do good stuff and he's done good stuff and he's done bad stuff and he is now regarded as an evil monster. I think the women who accuse him would say he hurt them, but that’s a female-male dynamic that unfortunately happens to be incredibly common.

But I do think there was genuine public interest in reporting what we did. And the way he has responded since has made me double down. That non-apology that he blogged just put salt in the wounds. No acknowledgment that he had done anything wrong. He was a wrong’un sexually. He's got lots of other good things going for him, but he has got a very dark center. And that probably comes from his childhood, scientology, who knows? Or It could just be pure misogyny.

Me: And are you done with it now or will there be more episodes?

Rachel Johnson: I'm done, I'm done, I'm done.