Yesterday, Jourdain Searles responded to a Twitter user expressing shock that there was a podcast about the Gaiman allegations six months ago, which they hadn't heard about, by saying "it's because the original investigation against him was headed by TERFs who were going after him for supporting trans people. there was a lot of skepticism regarding who the messengers were." This post got a lot of pushback because it is almost entirely lies.
- Tortoise Media's reporting was done by a TERF, Rachel Johnson, and Paul Caruana Galizia, an award-winning journalist. The investigation was led by Galizia, who is credited as both editor and reporter.
- Tortoise Media had the story because Gaiman's victims, per their own attestations, were repeatedly rebuffed by mainstream news outlets. No one else wanted to take this story.
- Within days of the allegations breaking, transcripts were available from a volunteer, and extensive summaries of the allegations were available not just on Tortoise's website but on social media, from feminists who are not trans-excluding. The podcast contains the victims speaking with their own voices; within weeks, the victims themselves confirmed that the podcast was a fair representation of their allegations. In other words, within a very short period of time, there was copious information to support the conclusion that the allegations of serial rape were in fact credible.
- There was never any evidence that Gaiman was targeted for supporting trans people. This implies the opposite of what the victims described: reaching out to many, many journalists while desperate to share their stories and being rebuffed or ignored.
- The silence in question was not exclusive to people who care about trans rights. The Guardian did not report on the allegations. Tor's industry publication Reactor didn't report on them. Many, many highly visible SFF industry publications and individuals stayed completely silent. Gaiman, meanwhile, had retained a PR firm whose stated strategy is stonewalling accusers.
So, Searles' claim is essentially that this silence was perpetuated out of well-meaning respect for trans people. This is blatantly false, and accordingly, many people (self included) said as much:
As you can see from my clumsy reconstructions, Searles did not like receiving pushback, despite the fact that the pushback was grounded in fact: she was disseminating inaccurate information in service of justifying an entire industry's silence in the face of credible allegations of violent serial rape.
(It's worth noting that I can personally attest to this exact set of justifications - claims the podcast was paywalled and the involvement of British TERFs makes the allegations de facto suspicious - being extremely popular within fannish spaces. I believe Searles that she isn't in those spaces, but she either got her information from someone who is, or managed to arrive at the exact same set of erroneous, minimizing conclusions that those people did. Neither reflects well on her ability to authoritatively characterize the nature of the stonewalling.
It's also worth nothing Searles blocked me. Not important, just don't want to be accused of hiding it.)
But wait, there's more! Searles kept posting, both quotes and self-replying into the void, and the tweets share a specific theme:
Searles attempts to reframe "that's not true and it is wrong to spread this information" as a personal attack on her identity, her status as a survivor, her like or dislike of Gaiman's work, and her perceived ideological alignment (in her words, her "team"). Several of her friends piled onto some of the users screencapped here to chide them for disagreeing with what Searles chose to post. Even the most mild, factually-grounded corrections - the podcast was not paywalled, that is simply provably false - were ignored or turned into grist for the "me me me" mill.
So, someone on the internet got suckered by crisis PR and is refusing to admit it to themselves or their 50,000 followers, why does that matter? A few reasons.
Firstly, on a very basic, human level: Neil Gaiman's victims are real people. They can see what you post, including the lies and insinuations you make about them by claiming their proactive choice to go public with allegations that a white cis male millionaire brutally raped them was actually a TERF op. If you know anyone in New Zealand who also uses social media there is a decent chance you're a few degrees removed from one of Gaiman's accusers, because NZ is small and that is how social networks work. This shouldn't need to be said, but you absolutely should never discuss these women, or any rape victims, as hypotheticals. They aren't proxies or avatars for how you feel about rape culture, Gaiman, Good Omens, TERFs, or literally any other topic. They are people. You fail them on a basic humanist level when you perpetuate lies about the circumstances and nature of their allegations.
Secondly, it should be very obvious that perpetuating these lies is both complicity with and continuance of rape culture. When you choose to stay silent about credible allegations because you don't like the source that published them, you are helping men like Gaiman get away with rape. Public interest and pressure in a case increases the chance that the rapist will experience some form of consequences for his behavior. No one is required to read or listen to graphic accounts of rape, but in this case no one had to: as previously mentioned, there were summaries of the allegations available very early on. Being triggered by rape allegations is not justification for refusing to think critically about, or engage with summaries of, those allegations. It's even less of a justification given that the news broke seven months ago.
Thirdly, Searles' justification for participating in this harmful stonewalling is victim-blaming. Her rhetoric lays responsibility for choosing the "right" outlet and reporters at the victims' feet, and withholds support until they find another outlet for their story. This is a really awful thing to do. Searles and others have attempted to justify it by pointing out that they're happy to circulate Vulture's article, but this is ex post facto reasoning intended to absolve oneself of moral culpability for previous inaction. Vulture's article being published was not a guarantee. Articles about powerful men who stand accused of rape go through exhaustive legal review, and the end result of that process is often that the article is killed. You are not justified in your previous silence because you got lucky and another outlet really did pick up the story, and perpetuating a narrative that this series of events was inevitable is to deny how rape culture works. Either you agree that there are absolutely massive barriers to victims of rich white serial rapists getting their stories out there, or you don't; and if you demonstrate with the words you say and the rhetoric you support that you think this task is simple or preordained to succeed, you are participating in denial and minimization of rape culture.
Fourthly, Searles' justification for participating in this harmful stonewalling is transphobic. She claims that both her individual silence about Tortoise's story and the general, ambient silence (which led to the person she quoted not knowing about the story) was because the story was reported by TERFs. This argues that major news outlets ignore stories about wealthy white cis men being violent serial rapists because of solidarity with trans people. That posits a world that does not exist and betrays a shocking willingness to lie about how TERFs are actually treated in the media (extremely favorably, that's why Rachel Johnson continues to have a career). But worse, it also argues that solidarity with trans people requires ignoring credible accusations of rape if they come from a transphobic source. I think this is a truly awful thing to say or imply, and it's one that many people have outright said since Tortoise broke this story. It is a basic moral obligation to condemn transphobia and make it clear that Johnson's beliefs are unacceptable. But that does not require silencing rape victims or believing them to be liars. This is unthinking replication of a core TERF talking point: that women's liberation and trans liberation are incompatible causes, and that fighting for one requires abandoning the other.
Finally, Searles' conduct is itself a form of minimization. She repeatedly reframes criticism of culture (fan culture minimizing the allegations the exact same way she did) or her behavior (spreading misinformation about the nature of Tortoise's reporting to justify her silence on said reporting) to be about her: her beliefs, her triggers, her status as a survivor who is not a Neil Gaiman fan. But rape culture does not persist because any individual has a specific set of experiences or opinions, it persists because of what we do. To repeatedly pull focus away from criticism of your actions and to insist that this criticism is actually a personal attack is to deny that these actions matter. Yes, it matters when you spread misinformation and help minimize or stonewall serious and credible allegations of violent serial rape. No, saying as much is not an attack on you.
None of this is new or unique to Searles. She is my example because she provided strikingly clear and high-profile examples of how rape apologism works in left-leaning spaces. She minimized, denied, self-justified, and pivoted to attacking others when people pointed out that her lies were lies. While attacking others, she focused the attention on herself: her identity, her status as a survivor, her reading habits, her energy, her mood. But the truth is, this was never about Jourdain Searles. This was about the human beings Neil Gaiman chose to rape and abuse. This was about the misogynistic rape culture that allows for every single major outlet in the Anglosphere to pass on such a story, and it was about the resultant silence from those same outlets, culture writers like Searles very much included.
I don't really have a conclusion to this post except to say: this behavior sucks, knock it off.
