Neil Gaiman, Abuse, and Scientology

Published January 24, 2025 By admin with Comments 0

The “master” thing is particularly interesting, because this piece goes into a possible reason for Gaiman’s seeming fetish for violating and dominating young women: the fact that he grew up in a high ranking Scientology family. “The Master,” of course, is the title of the 2012 Paul Thomas Anderson film fictionalizing the story of the founding of the Church of Scientology.

If you’ve been watching me for a minute, you know how I feel about Scientology: they’re a dangerous cult who have been responsible for actual murders, and most recently they were in the news for harassing Danny Masterson’s rape victims in the hopes that they wouldn’t testify against him. For more on that fun story, see this video I made about the topic in 2023.

I’ve been on this beat longer than you might realize. More than a decade ago, I had the opportunity to accompany my pal, writer Jon Ronson, to Scientology’s annual gala at their British headquarters in West Sussex, where they presented an award to some quack who thought they had discovered the cure for autism or something. It was weird. I gave them a fake name, just in case.

I had no idea until now that I had been in the home county of Neil Gaiman, where he grew up with parents at the top of the Scientology hierarchy, his father acting as the official spokesperson of the cult’s UK wing.

The New Yorker points out that L. Ron Hubbard was very much into torture as a punishment for Scientologists who stepped out of line, and he also decreed that children were just adults in tiny bodies, so they should be subjected to the same forms of punishment as adults. They cite someone who knew Gaiman’s parents, who claims that at one point they punished a young Neil by nearly drowning him in a bathtub of cold water, a story that Gaiman would go on to include in his book, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane.” According to the New Yorker, that book was written after Gaiman’s wife, Amanda Palmer, pushed him to talk about his childhood in the cult.

Content retrieved from: https://skepchick.org/2025/01/neil-gaiman-abuse-and-scientology/.