Since you wanted me to do a podcast, congratulations! You got your wish! And you're in it at 1:52:00! Enjoy immortality! https://t.co/8lBhlw6DlK
— Jason Louv (@jasonlouv) January 15, 2025
Clicking on that link should let you see the whole thread if you'd like to. For anyone who doesn't like to click Twitter links, here is a direct link to the video I am responding to.
Before I get going, I'd like to show the specific tweet/post he made that offended me enough that I felt it was worth challenging him.
Rapist and child abuser Neil Gaiman's rape and child abuse-enabling ex-wife Amanda Palmer, who was once mildly noticed by people as awful as her for telling them that it's ok to rip off their fans and staff, looks very normal and not at all evil in this publicity photo. Hopefully… pic.twitter.com/1Mj1jN8wJt
— Jason Louv (@jasonlouv) January 14, 2025
This is the post I responded to originally.
And Jason, I am now going to address you directly.
First of all, you do not know for a fact that Neil Gaiman is a rapist or a child abuser, either one. Those are very serious charges, and I don't like the way it has become fashionable to throw them at people (especially famous people) so flippantly. I have (unfortunately) had to deal with some people who really were rapists over the years, and I had a Baptist preacher in my family tree who truly did include at least one child I know of among his rape victims. That guy died from an aneurysm when I was still in elementary school, and I will agree with one point you brought up in your three-hour video: The world is better off without people like that.
What Neil Gaiman has been accused of is very different from the behavior of the people I'm thinking about, people I've had to deal with in the real world, not the virtual world. I'm only mentioning details about the one who is dead. Conversations about the ones still living must stay confined to people I know well and trust, and you are plenty smart enough to understand why. Dealing with the real thing is a lot tougher than speculating about celebrities.
But you've got a right to your opinion. If you really think Neil is a rapist and/or child abuser, you've got a right to say so, as long as you don't cross the line into actual defamation. And social media is a cesspool of people constantly accusing each other of awful things. I'm used to seeing that.
The problem is, you dragged his ex-wife into this. You not only accused her of enabling rape and child abuse, but you attacked her personal appearance. You used your perception of her looking not-normal, or evil, as some weird sort of evidence that she would be into such things.
And that's why I challenged you.
Even Myra Hindley didn't look that evil pic.twitter.com/xQAht69w2T
— Jason Louv (@jasonlouv) January 16, 2025
A few days later, I noticed that you attacked Amanda Palmer's physical appearance again. As if she were a comic book villain rather than a real person.
I found it particularly reprehensible that you took this approach since you have been friends with and defended Damien Echols, probably the most notorious victim of the paranoid cultural climate of the 1980's and early 1990's.
You told me to keep Damien's name out of my damn mouth, and you said that he was a saint.
While I do respect the man, I do not know him personally. So I'm not going to agree that he is a saint. He's a survivor, and I read his book (Life After Death) when it first came out. I have listened to some of your interviews with him. I see him as a human being who's trying to find his way, the same as anyone else who cares enough to try for a noble path in life. I respect him a lot because for about half his life, he was not treated as a real human being, as you referenced in your video. And he seems to have let it make him into a better person. That's not easy to do. Sometimes even people who have been in war zones, or prisoners of war, things like that, don't cope so well when they are able to return to what we call normal civilization. Even if Mr. Echols was in total shellshock mode, staying drunk all the time like some war veterans, I would respect his ability to survive what he did. He has a lot better attitude than I imagine I would have if I'd been on death row for about half my life, for gruesome crimes I didn't commit.
I'm not sure whether your theory about what happened with the West Memphis Three is correct. At one time, I read and listened to just about every theory out there. Including the people who still thought the WM3 were guilty. I never felt confident in what really happened there, who committed those murders, but I do believe that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley were falsely convicted because they were easy targets in a paranoid era . . . somewhat similar to the era of paranoia we're going back into now. I'm sure you've heard of Pizzagate and similar things.
The reason I mentioned Damien is that while a lot of people consider him saintly now, that certainly was not the popular view for a long time. I seem to remember one woman being interviewed at the time of the case and asked how she knew those three young men were guilty of those murders, and her response was: "Well . . . just LOOK at them!"
You can't tell whether someone is guilty of serious crimes or not based only on how they look.
So if you think I should keep Damien Echols's name outta' my damn mouth, then you need to keep Amanda Palmer's name outta' yours.
You are subjecting someone, whose personal life you don't really know jack shit about, to the same sort of petty, stupid snap judgements that people in Arkansas made about Damien Echols in the 1990's. That's what I got out of your posts. And that's why I challenged you.
Maybe he was poor, and she's rich. But that doesn't really matter these days. Slinging mud is still slinging mud, and rich/famous people are not immune to its harm, not at all. I don't remember all three hours of your video verbatim, but I think you actually suggested that you wouldn't mind if Neil and Amanda went to prison and were murdered in there. If that's what you really said, then that is definitely going too far. It is the kind of talk that might actually put someone in danger.
You kept saying in your video, "Don't fuck with me."
That would be fair enough if I had, in fact, "fucked with" you. But that's not what I did, Jason. I challenged you, and I kept my tone fairly respectful, even though I strongly disagreed with you. There's a big difference. If you can't handle being challenged, you've got no business posting nasty things about people on the internet in the first place.
And by the way, you didn't make me famous, as you put it. I have not heard from a single person who watched your video and wanted to pick a fight with me. If I need publicity, I'll find it on my own . . . and in better ways. I did not challenge you to get attention. I was trying to provoke you to think about how stupid and pointlessly mean-spirited you were acting. I have read one of your books (John Dee and the Empire of Angels) and several of your essays. And I've listened to some of your more interesting podcast episodes. I felt that this was beneath your dignity and your level of intelligence. Perhaps I overestimated you. But I was trying to knock some sense back into you with some simple, logical challenges to what you were saying.
When it comes to logic, you really struck out in this discussion. You told me you knew Neil and Amanda were guilty "because it was in the fucking New York Times." And it was not in the New York Times. As you admitted in your video, it was in New York magazine, which I believe published it in a section called The Vulture - kind of ironic.
That's why I said the whole thing was confusing. You made it confusing when it didn't have to be. You gave me crap information to support your point of view. And then complained that I must not have read it, if I didn't agree with you that it proved Neil Gaiman to be guilty of all charges.
The crap information continued when you said, "They literally published the calls and messages." By that time, I'd already begun to suspect that you were talking about a different article than the one you actually told me, probably the Vulture one that I found in my own searches. But in the video, you clarified that these calls and messages were published in a podcast last year (which I vaguely heard about at the time but did not listen to). Since you provided no context in our conversation, I could only scan all the articles I could find about the Neil Gaiman allegations and wonder what the hell you were talking about.
I also had no way of knowing what the hell you meant when you said that some men would still defend a male celebrity if he raped a woman in public and admitted it. In your video podcast, you finally clarified that you were talking about a case completely unrelated to Neil Gaiman. If you want to believe that I would defend a man who publicly admitted to rape, you are welcome to that belief, just as you are welcome to believe that the moon is made out of green cheese, or that if you light your farts just the right way, maybe you can take off and fly . . . without even needing a broomstick.
But the truth is, the only men I am willing to defend against #metoo allegations are the ones who appear to be innocent, or where I see a lot of reasonable doubt. Just off the top of my head, I can rattle off several other famous men whose #metoo allegations turned out to be a lot of hot air or highly dubious: Neil Tyson, David Copperfield, David Blaine, Marilyn Manson, Johnny Depp, Chris Hardwick, Kevin Spacey, and even Garth Brooks. Granted, it's a little early to speculate too much about the Garth Brooks case; it's just that I read over his lawsuit and his one accuser's lawsuit and had a hard time imagining the scenario actually happening. That's my personal opinion, and hey, I've been wrong before. Some of these men may have done some of what they were accused of. It's possible. But these are the ones I remember looking at the evidence and just thinking: No. This smells like horse shit.
I'm not going to pretend I immediately gave all these people the benefit of the doubt. I say with some regret that I assumed the charges against Marilyn Manson and Kevin Spacey to be true at first. And I really should know better than to judge someone based on the character they play on a stage or on a screen. It took me a while to slow down and look at the actual evidence. I wish I could say that was my attitude to begin with, but I freely admit that I let my emotions win out over my logical side at first, with those two guys. Even though I was a fan of both.
I have never defended men like Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, or Alabama's own Roy Moore. To my eye, the evidence against them looked compelling. Even there, though, I didn't feel it was my place to be their judge, jury, and executioner. They did a pretty good job of burying their own reputations with the ways they responded to things. And the law finally caught up with at least a couple of them.
You seem to like to make snap judgements about people you don't know, so if you want to decide I'm some kind of rape apologist, go right ahead.
But here's the thing: I did not attack you publicly. I challenged you respectfully on a public platform.
You did attack me publicly as your response to my (reasonable) challenges.
And now I'm answering by attacking your deeply flawed arguments and reminding you that you have been a better man than this in the past.
The way you portrayed me in your video was almost completely inaccurate, and I think the reason I haven't gotten any backlash from your viewers is that they could probably tell you were blowing my words out of proportion instead of slowing down to actually read and consider them.
I will give you credit for making the video to begin with. Based on your petulant behavior on social media, I didn't think you had anything worth saying on the subject.
I will agree with you when you say that a man is only as good as he treats women and children, and that the same goes for a culture.
After our argument and your video, Neil Gaiman spoke for himself. What he said was about what I suspected, one of these murky cases where the lines of consent were not clearly established and communicated. I am inclined to believe him, but I do not share your level of certainty. I don't know that he is innocent of the serious wrongs he's been accused of. What I do know is that he deserves due process just like anyone else does.
And I strongly believe that the things you posted about his case were way out of line. To go so far as to attack someone's ex-wife and post the most unflattering pictures you can find of her, to "prove" that she's "evil", is just plain wrong. I don't blame the woman for blocking you on her social media. I don't think you'd appreciate being treated that way either, by another writer or podcaster, if the virtual lynch mob ever came knocking on your door.
You can advocate for the respectful treatment of women without assuming you know about people's private lives and attacking them for things they may or may not have actually done.
And I'd like to point out that you are not practicing what you preach, as far as treating women well. A woman just had to block you on Twitter/X because you were basically harassing her with accusations that may have no validity at all. And insulting her looks to boot.
I may look further into the details of this case as I have the time and energy. But I wasted a lot of time and energy over the past few years getting upset about other people I admired who were accused of similar things. Most of the time, the accusations fell apart under scrutiny. And I already see a lot of things that make me inclined to give Neil the benefit of the doubt. These days, I see celebrities as real people who deserve the same basic respect I would give anyone I interact with in everyday life. Which means I am not going to assume the worst about them just because it has become fashionable to do so, before I've seen all the evidence and heard both sides of the argument. If you want to take pot-shots at them, have at it, but I will not be joining you. You did not do a damned thing to convince me that Neil Gaiman was guilty or that his ex-wife was some kind of subhuman, horrible excuse for a person. What you convinced me of is that you have devolved into an aimlessly cruel, blowhard bastard who has given up writing thoughtful words and decided instead to devote most of his time to talking out of his ass.
I used to have a lot of respect for you. I cannot honestly say that I've lost all respect for you; that would be hyperbole. At the moment, it would be fair to say that my respect for you is greatly diminished.
Especially since when I told you that your jumbled information was confusing, your response was, "What, do ya' want it spelled out with five fingers to your face, motherfucker?!"
I can assure you, motherfucker, that all five of my own knuckles are in excellent working order - on both hands. So you would be well-advised to hold your tongue when it comes to any threats, even if they are somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I don't take shit like this from you or anyone else.
If you would like to have a discourse that is actually civil, you still have that choice.
And if you'd like to contact me privately, please, be my guest.
Otherwise, to quote your own words back at you:
GO FUCK YOURSELF.
AND DON'T FUCK WITH ME.
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