What We Owe Our Friends: More on Neil Gaiman

More on Neil Gaiman that doesn’t involve comparing myself to him!

Many erstwhile friends and colleagues of the famed writer have turned on him since Monday’s grueling New York Magazine story. John Scalzi, a well-regarded science fiction writer and longtime buddy of Gaiman, issued a long statement today. An excerpt:

Neil’s been a friend, he’s someone whose work I’ve admired immensely, and it’s not entirely inaccurate to say that I owe a fair amount of the trajectory of my career to him.

He’s been kind to me and to my family and I’ve been happy to know him, and I think he was happy to know me.

Nothing about him having been my friend or boosting my career excuses or mitigates his actions, both alleged and admitted. This is not a defense of him. He’s done what he’s done and as noted above, the absolute best case scenario is still terrifically bad.

The friendship has been drawn down and done, and at this point, I don’t think he’ll complain much about that.

That third paragraph deserves a bit of unpacking. Scalzi is right that friendship does not excuse harm. Where Scalzi is wrong is in assuming that harm to a third party cancels any debt that friendship creates. The people who were kind to us, who helped us and guided us and were there for us? We owe them. We owe them a certain reciprocity regardless of what they did to others.

That debt we owe isn’t absolute. We are not required to lie on their behalf, to offer a false alibi or invent an affirmative defense. We are not required to join them in the compounding of whatever harm they’ve done. In other words, if your friend commits a murder, you should probably not help him bury the body. You might, however, show up every day for his trial, and send him gift packages while he’s in prison. It is possible to avoid defending a friend’s misconduct while also resisting the temptation to give the angry mob what it wants: an anguished denunciation.

In 2013, I lost a lot of friends. One friend I didn’t lose was someone who called again and again to check on me. She visited me in the hospital. She talked me off the proverbial ledge again and again. This friend also was a high-ranking figure in what the media has often described as a sex cult. Last year, this friend and another leader of the “cult” were arrested and charged with a variety of very serious federal crimes.

I immediately texted this friend, pledging my support. I sent her notes of encouragement. And at her attorney’s request, I wrote a letter detailing my experience with and admiration for my friend. I told no lies. I did not address the accusations, as I do not know if they are true or not. It is not irrelevant to me whether my friend is guilty of these charges. I will be sad if they turn out to be true. But even if they are true, and she behaved badly, her conduct towards others does not erase what I owe her. It does not cancel out her kindnesses. She helped save my life. Her generosity and friendship created a debt that I must repay to the best of my ability.

The law does not permit us to lie on behalf of our friends. But there’s a lot of emotional and relational real estate between lying to protect a friend and publicly denouncing them. There’s plenty of opportunity to support someone while they go through whatever process they have brought on themselves. To say, “Their sins are so vile that I simply cannot bear to continue our relationship?” Then you didn’t have a friendship. You had a temporary transactional association. It’s the platonic equivalent of a situationship: it’s a fleeting connection based on fantasy and a healthy dose of self-deception, and when it stops working, you ghost the other person and move along. You don’t call that sort of thing “true love,” and you don’t get to call a connection easily discarded in the face of disappointment a “friendship.”

I’ll say it again: when people do kind things for us, they create a debt. That debt is not discharged by a friend’s moral shortcomings. If they were nice to us but mean to others, we can grieve the latter – but we cannot decide that the former was all an act, or meaningless. Yes, the press will come clamoring for a statement. Yes, the mob will demand that you issue a fulsome denunciation, wring your hands, express your shock and betrayal, and declare that you will have nothing more to do with he who is now deplorable and damned. They will look for any sign of enduring affection for the cancelled fellow, and warn you if you do not fully repudiate him, you will be the next.

Nothing a mob does is clean, and it is at its foulest when it compels us to damn and decry those we once loved and admired. The mob doesn’t think it’s a mob. The mob thinks it is standing up for victims; the mob imagines it is only calling for long-delayed accountability; the mob flatters itself that it is merely delivering overdue comeuppances to those who richly deserve them. That’s what the Khmer Rouge told itself too. If you are the sort who wants to sublimate your sadism and call it consequences, I can’t stop you. The Internet will support you. The Internet is wrong.

As for me, I’m with E.M. Forster:

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome.

Hold up, you say. Neil Gaiman didn’t betray Rome, or Britain, or the United States. He betrayed women who trusted him. Women aren’t a country. You’re right, of course. What Neil did, if he did it, was a great wickedness. It deserves condemnation. But the fact that his acts deserve condemnation does not license a former friend to be the one to condemn. Your shock at your friend’s conduct does not constitute grounds to declare yourself released from your contractual obligations, whether he sold out his nation or abused an innocent human being. Again, there is no need to lie on their behalf, or even publicly defend them. But unless you admire Brutus, Cassius, and the other residents of the lowest circle, you will not surrender to the pressure of a salivating mob, drunk on its own self-righteousness.

In 2019, the #MeToo movement came for rock star Ryan Adams. With multiple accusations of inappropriate conduct, the record label dropped him. Many friends publicly cut ties --most notably, the renowned Americana singer Jason Isbell. A few years earlier, Adams had helped Isbell get sober, but Jason did not rest on old affections. He publicly repudiated his old friend, perhaps bolstering his own male feminist credentials. Another country singer took a different tack. The legendary Lucinda Williams – who had briefly dated Adams years earlier – released a song for him, addressing the allegations, but also – crucially – declaring she’d be at his side as he dealt with the wreckage.


And now the press
Has found you out
One can only guess
What this is about
And your so-called friends
They're out to surround you
And all these loose ends
Are wrapping around you


These are the dark, blue days
That much is true
And there's so many ways
To crush you
And you got your shadows
And you got your doubts
And you got your battles
But we’ll fight your way out

Lucinda’s own father was the poet Miller Williams. One of his most famous poems goes like this:

Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don't want it. What seems conceit,

bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign

of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.

When you find out that your friend did not tell you of the wars that went on where the spirit meets the bone? When you find out the secret they could not tell you? That revelation does not constitute your license to bail. It is your reminder to “have compassion” – and to honor a bond that even a terrible lie cannot break.