Well, Nigel Farage has officially lost the plot. The Reform UK leader has just revealed that Jeremy Kyle – the poverty-porn mogul – has a secret role within the party. Hilariously, he’s media training Reform’s candidates.

Jeremy Kyle lol, one of the most hated TV presenters of all time.

Well, expect reform politicians to bully their opponents until they top themselves. pic.twitter.com/apaxqRVLzL

— Inevitable Pinky 🐡🏳️‍🌈🇬🇧🇬🇱🇪🇺 (@BpdLion) February 5, 2026

Jeremy Kyle: a legacy of exploitation

Jeremy Kyle spent a ridiculous 14 years shouting through our TV screens. He put vulnerable people on show for the world to see, and he laughed at them.

ITV finally took The Jeremy Kyle Show off air in 2019 when Steve Dymond took his own life after failing a lie detector test. Kyle’s legacy is one of cruelty and death.

Never forget: Jeremy Kyle built his career on screaming at vulnerable people, getting addicts drunk, parading them in front of a jeering audience, then hiding behind a lie detector. Some of those people took their own lives. To describe him as despicable doesn’t even cover it. pic.twitter.com/Rew922MCez

— Vit (@vitt2tsnoc) October 8, 2025

A full eighteen years ago, a judge described the show as ‘human bear-baiting’ after a violent incident unfolded on the show. Kyle built his empire by kicking down on people who are on a low income; people who are suffering with addiction, and people facing mental health crises.

Yep, sounds like the right man to help Reform reclaim the UK:

This footage of The Jeremy Kyle Show is a stark reminder of how he ruthlessly exploited vulnerable people for ratings. It highlights just how irresponsible and cruel his approach was. Good riddance to this kind of ‘poverty porn’pic.twitter.com/l9Jy4UWxCs

— Charlie Watts (@char1iewatts) September 5, 2024

Reform’s a magnet for scandal, just like his show

Jeremy Kyle seems to fit right in with a party surrounded by scandals. It seems like Reform UK have an issue with having to drop candidates for shitty behaviour:

Can you see a pattern here? Kyle fits right in, it seems:

🚨Jeremy Kyle is FURIOUS with how illegal immigrants are treated better than the British people 🇬🇧

“I don’t care if they get rid of me for saying this”

Everybody HAS HAD ENOUGH of free loading fake asylum seekers who are put before us at every turn ⚠️ pic.twitter.com/9Gee97h7hI

— BRITAIN IS BROKEN 🇬🇧 (@BROKENBRITAIN0) January 26, 2026

The perfect home for Kyle

The right-wing Talk TV helped Jeremy Kyle reboot his career. The channel performs a similar function to GB News, which Reform UK are intimately entwined with:

As usual with @Nigel_Farage when he’s told he must fall in line he falls in line.

On his GB News show two nights ago he continued to spread the unfounded and frankly ludicrous theory that Epstein was a Russian agent all along.

This is how controlled opposition operations work. pic.twitter.com/wg5bLdV5We

— Wolf 🐺 (@WorldByWolf) February 6, 2026

Ladies and gentlemen.
I present to you:
Mr Lee Anderson MP dressed up as a warlock, bleeding from his head, making serious political comment on GB News.
I feel as though I need say no more…
😬 pic.twitter.com/j50jH5ddmr

— Sir Michael Take CBE (@MichaelTakeMP) November 1, 2025

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Bringing Kyle into the fold is a transparent attempt to woo the demographic he spent over a decade mocking. They assume our memories are that short.

If Reform UK wants voters to take them seriously, hiring the king of poverty-porn is a fucking funny way to show it.

Do we really want the man who monetised human misery to be training what could be our future MPs?

Featured image via Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia)

The European Legal Support Center (ELSC) has posted a peer-reviewed study which shows a ‘dramatic escalation’ in the Jewish Chronicle (JC) crying antisemitism. The JC is a right-wing British newspaper with a history of having to make public retractions. Now, the ELSC have shown that the JC alleges antisemitism more often today than it did in 1938 (i.e. during the era of Nazi Germany).

These findings confirm widespread views that the JC uses the very real trauma of antisemitism to shield Israel. Furthermore, the findings provide evidence of how the hostile state and its Zionist supporters operate. They’re using false antisemitism accusations to shut down the global protests supporting Palestinian liberation.

This is hardly a surprise. Obviously the Zionists and their colonialist buddies would want to use the victim-card to deflect from Israel’s genocide. And the more war crimes Israel commits, the more they have to double down on the smears.

Our upcoming Britain Index of Repression documents the resulting patterns of repression across all sectors of society, revealing the institutionalised criminalisation of Palestine solidarity.

The consequences are real: careers derailed, students investigated, people referred to… pic.twitter.com/zoATHq5DqR

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— European Legal Support Center (ELSC) (@elsclegal) February 5, 2026

The ELSC will release the full report on 26 February.

Jewish Chronicle — ‘Zionist notion of antisemitism’

The ELSC’s analysis covered 100-years of the JC‘s output. The hate-rag is well known for churning out potentially career-ending allegations against activists, politicians, creatives, and other professionals. The ELSC concluded that the Jewish Chronicle deliberately uses a ‘Zionist notion of antisemitism’ to stir up a moral panic intent on diminishing solidarity with Palestinians. As a result, the ELSC have concluded that the pro-Israel paper plays an active role in the UK in working to repress support for Palestine liberation.

Below are just a couple of the pages showing findings of the peer-reviewed analysis by Professor Neve Gordon:

Michael Rosen, the beloved Jewish author and poet, has often spoken out against the alleged antisemitism crisis created by Zionists. Pointing to the Labour Party, Rosen recently stated:

At the height of the claim that the Labour Party was riven with antisemitism and/or institutionally antisemitic, I pursued a theory as follows: ‘If people are combatting antisemitism only in the Labour Party and not in the Tory Party, they’re not combatting antisemitism, they’re combatting the Labour Party’.

To expand that slightly, I was in effect saying that it’s hard to take such people’s definition of antisemitism seriously if it’s only directed at people in one organisation.

Rosen further added:

Could it be, I wonder, that my theory – as expressed above – could in any way be possibly slightly true? Could it be that some kind of double standard or two-tier policing of antisemitism had been and perhaps still is in place?

False victimisation: real abuse against Palestinians

The Zionist fury over the recent Fitton 6 acquittal underscores how Israel’s protection drives these allegations. The defendants faced trial for their anti-genocide efforts as part of now-proscribed Palestine Action, a non-violent direct-action group. Nevertheless, the trial and subsequent acquittal by jury has led to yet more allegations of antisemitism. Seemingly, the intent now is to label the UK’s criminal justice system as ‘antisemitic’. Our own Skwawkbox wrote:

Of course we must never forget that Israel and its lobby are always the victim. Even when they’re slaughtering innocent Palestinians and making up bollocks in court to imprison people trying to stop them.

We all know the story of the “boy who cried wolf”. It’s crucial that allegations of antisemitism come from genuine instances, or we risk exposing Jews to a backlash from people who equate Judaism with Zionism.

As we’ve reported, such a backlash is already happening within the American right. Over there, prominent figures like Nick Fuentes openly arguing that Israel has made a mockery of America, and that the correct response to this is antisemitism. We can’t let such bigotry fester over here.

It’s also crucial that Muslims and others are able to speak freely of their support for Palestine without fear of being harassed by the media.

Featured image via Facebook

Political prisoner Umer Khalid, one of 24 ‘Filton 24’ prisoners jailed for up to 19 months and counting for opposing genocide, ended his hunger strike last month. His decision came after prison authorities agreed to review the punitive conditions in which he is being held. These included banning his religious observance and restricting visits.

But his family say little or nothing has changed and they’re still being blocked from seeing him. In fact, it’s worse than before as he’s now deprived of meetings with his lawyer.

Umer Khalid: desperate situation

In a statement, they asked supporters not to call or visit the prison or risk anything outside “formal routes” that his family is pursuing. However, they say they can no longer remain silent over Umer Khalid’s situation as they are “terrified for [his] life”:

For now, we please request that nobody calls into the prison, tries to locate Umer, or escalates this beyond the formal routes being followed by Umer’s legal team. Updates with actions you can take will follow as they are received.

We’ve stayed silent long enough, but now I’m terrified for my son’s life. My son has been on remand for seven months. During this time, we have had daily contact. After a 17-day hunger strike and four days without water, he was hospitalised on Monday, 26 January.

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Since then, the prison has kept him incommunicado. We have had zero contact for over 10 days now. They are blocking him from his family and, alarmingly, from his solicitor.

A mother should not have to wonder whether her son is alive or dead while he is in state care. Access to his solicitor and contact with his family are basic human rights — especially during a medical crisis. We are demanding answers and the right to hear his voice. Please share this and amplify our voices. We cannot let him be forgotten in that hospital bed.

The Starmer regime’s political persecution of the Filton humanitarians has been further exposed and disgraced recently by the refusal of a jury to convict the first six to go on trial on any of the trumped-up charges against them. The trial exposed the lies of the state and of arms manufacturer Elbit to smear and criminalise them.

Yet despite this, the regime continues to hold the others – and even one of those acquitted – in prison without trial. This is as clear a case as could be of ‘making the process the punishment’ and Starmer wants to end jury trials to withhold justice. All of this is to protect Israel and its ethno-fascist genocide.

Enough is enough. It’s long past time for Starmer’s authoritarianism and collaboration in genocide to end. He and his cronies are the ones who should be behind bars.

Featured image via the Canary

Keen to divert attention away from the fact he’s a massive fucking pedo, Donald Trump announced a new drugs initiative yesterday. TrumpRx will apparently give users “the world’s lowest prices on prescription drugs”. However, as with most of the pervert in chief’s plans, this will benefit very few average Americans.

TrumpRx is too good to be true

TrumpRx is a direct-to-consumer marketplace that gives discounted drug prices direct from manufacturers. This is done using Most Favoured Nation pricing. This basically ensures a consumer gets the product at the lowest possible price in other countries. Customers get a coupon card which they can take to participating pharmacies.

The prices listed for drugs are, by all accounts, huge discounts, anything from 33-93% off. But as a British person, it also brings into stark focus just how much disabled Americans are expected to pay per month for vital medication. What do you fucking mean it’s five hundred dollars a month for an asthma inhaler?!

There is, however, of course, a catch. The discounted drugs can only be purchased in cash. This means only those who can afford to buy the medication in the first place can access it. Most sick and disabled citizens rely on health insurance or government schemes such as Medicaid to afford their sky-high medication.

It’s also not clear yet whether buying these drugs in cash will count towards health insurance deductibles in the way that traditional prescribing will. Which means patients could be shelling out what they think is a lower price every month, whilst facing higher-than-usual insurance bills.

This means that, once again, while Trump is appearing to help all Americans, he’s only serving the wealthy few.

Trump stretching the truth again

The TrumpRX site boasts

Thanks to President Trump, the days of Big Pharma price-gouging are over. Leveraging the full weight and power of the United States of America, the President has ensured every American gets the lowest prices on prescription medications in the developed world.

This is, however, not true. According to Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker analysis, four other countries sell Ozempic for less than the $100 TrumpRx is boasting. These are also the manufacturer prices – not what the consumer often actually ends up paying. TrumpRx also has to warn that those with insurance could actually end up paying more than usual.

CNN pointed out that some of the medications listed are already available at the discounted prices Trump is bragging about

For instance, GoodRx lists multiple pharmacies where consumers can pick up Pfizer’s Duavee, which is used to treat menopause symptoms, for $30.30 without insurance – the same price as on TrumpRx.

This isn’t even Trump’s idea, as many pharmacies and manufacturers already do this. As CNN also points out, Mark Cuban has been running Cost Plus Drug since 2022. Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk also has NovoCare, and Eli Lilly has Lilly Direct.

TrumpRx could drive up the drive of medication for those who need it most

There’s also the fact that you don’t require a prescription to purchase the drugs on TrumpRx. With a huge array of very popular and profitable drugs on offer, it could drive up the price for those who desperately need them. This could particularly be true in the case of Ozempic and other “weight loss” drugs, which are actually vital diabetes medications.

There are also fears that with these drugs being readily available at “knock-down” prices, greedy insurance companies might stop covering them. After all, if the government is claiming they’re cheap, you don’t need insurance for them, surely.

Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center told a briefing hosted by KFF [also in the CNN article linked]

Even when you have very large discounts provided for brand-name drugs, they still end up with prices that are not really that affordable to the average person. We know from research that once a price goes above about $100 a month, that a lot of people stop filling their drugs at that price point.

Let’s face it – Trump doesn’t serve the average American

The fact of the matter is, this won’t make much difference to those actually struggling with the costs of medications. It won’t do anything to ease the pressures of sick and disabled Americans who have to fight with insurance companies and their own government to get the medication they need to survive.

But it will once again benefit the rich, because let’s not forget who Trump really cares about.

Featured image via the Canary

Israel have been accused of spraying mysterious chemicals inside Lebanon.  Now the Lebanese PM and rights groups have called the attack a ‘crime’ after it emerged the chemicals were a potentially cancer-causing compound.

Prime minister Joseph Aoun called it an act of “aggression”:

This is an environmental and health crime against Lebanese citizens and their land.

These dangerous practices that target agricultural lands and the livelihoods of citizens and threaten their health and environment require the international community and relevant United Nations organisations to assume their responsibilities to stop these attacks.

Israel accused of yet another war crime

Unifil, the UN mission in Lebanon, said shortly after the attack that they’d been told about the airborne operation. They also said that it had stopped peacekeepers carrying out their duties:

Peacekeepers could not perform normal operations near the Blue Line along about a third of its length and were only able to resume normal activities after over nine hours.

The Blue Line is a 120km strip which marks the line of Israel withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000. The UN and Lebanese army tested the chemicals. Those tests now seem to have come to a conclusion.

The Guardian said:

Lebanese authorities said that laboratory analysis identified that the spray contained glyphosate, a potent herbicide that was in 2015 classified by the World Health Organization as “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

Lebanon’s ministries of agriculture and the environment said some samples showed glyphosate at:

20 and 30 times higher than normal [use].

They said such high concentrations would:

damage vegetation in the targeted areas, with direct repercussions on agricultural production, soil fertility and ecological balance.

Others said this was another example of Israel’s scorched earth policy.

War crime?

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said the “deeply alarming” attack may constitute a war crime:

The deliberate targeting of civilian farmland violates international humanitarian law, particularly the prohibition on attacking or destroying objects indispensable to civilian survival.

They added:

Large-scale destruction of private property without specific military necessity amounts to a war crime and undermines food security and basic livelihoods in the affected areas.

Euro-Med said they directly observed the spraying, which they considered part of

a systematic destruction of agricultural land.

The NGO warned:

This incident cannot be viewed in isolation from the scorched-earth policy pursued by the Israeli army.

Israel sprayed farmland with “pesticides of unknown composition in Syria in January 2026, causing:

widespread crop destruction, posing a serious threat to economic and food security and violating farmers’ rights to work and to an adequate standard of living by destroying their primary sources of income without military justification.

Strip aways Zionist claims about birthright and indigeneity and you’ll find nothing more mystical, historical or religiously motivated than an old-fashioned settler land grab. From Syria to Lebanon, Gaza to the West Back, the Israeli state will keep displacing locals and expanding its territory by whatever means it can, for as long as it can, until someone stops it.

Featured image via the Canary

The Israeli occupation sent a grisly delivery to what’s left of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza yesterday, 5 February. Bags were delivered containing dismembered bodies and body parts.

Speaking to al-Arabi, hospital director Dr Mohammed Abu Silmiya said that the occupation had delivered 66 bags of human body parts along with 55 Palestinian corpses to the hospital. On opening the bodies, shocked hospital staff found they contained skulls.

None of the bodies or body parts bore any identification. The bodies returned showed clear signs of severe mutilation consistent with systematic organ theft and medical experimentation. Many of the skulls also bore surgical incisions.

At least ten thousand Palestinians are detained indefinitely without charge in Israel, where many suffer starvation, rape and frequent torture. Thousands more are officially ‘missing’, many of them likely still buried under millions of tonnes of rubble. The occupation refuses to allow bulldozers and other clearance equipment into Gaza so that bodies can be recovered.

Abu Silmiya said that this latest horror is yet more evidence of Israel’s serious and systematic violations of human dignity and international humanitarian law during the Gaza genocide.

No western ‘mainstream’ media have bothered to report it.

This is not the first such incident. Israel has routinely dumped large piles of its Palestinian victims’ bodies on waste ground in Gaza. Many bear marks of torture, execution and organ theft.

Featured image via Aljazeera

Anti-genocide direct action activist Drew Robson has today, 6 February 2025, won his appeal to quash his conviction for criminal damage. Robson occupied the Manchester office of Fisher German, at the time property manager for Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems. The firm eventually cut all ties with Elbit after a sustained pressure campaign.

Drew Robson wins his appeal

Drew Robson’s appeal victory comes hot on the heels of a jury’s refusal to convict six members of the ‘Filton 24’ group of anti-genocide direct action activists. They were the first of their group to face trial and won despite the attempts of a judge to pressure the jury into convicting. If found guilty, all could have faced sentences of up to 20 years prison. The 24 have been jailed for up to 19 months without trial. Some face more than a year’s further wait as Starmer seeks to protect Israel by punishing protest and free speech against genocide.

 

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Spectators at an All Elite Wrestling (AEW( Dynamite wrestling match in Las Vegas had a message for Donald Trump. It was certainly not one that he will have enjoyed, particularly from a sport popular with what’s left of his base.

As the wrestlers posed and glared at each other before the start, a chant from the crowd quickly grew to a volume where the message couldn’t be missed – “Fuck ICE”.

The commentators were silenced. The wrestlers’ glares turned to raised eyebrows. But not in disapproval – at least in one corner of the ring. Challenger Brody King is a vocal opponent of Trump’s Gestapo thugs, organises anti-ICE fundraising and community organising and wore an “Abolish ICE” t-shirt before a recent match.

His opponent ‘MJF’ – real name Maxwell Friedman – might be more of a mixed bag. He has described Palestinian resistance as terrorism – but at the same time said that:

I don’t support terrorism, Zionism, genocide [or] genocidal governments, dead innocent Palestinians [and] dead innocent Israelis. I don’t support people — any people — dying because of hate.

However, he then repeated typical Israel lobby talking points, claiming that:

people are calling for the death of Jews over something that’s happening on the other side of the world.

Given ICE’s strong links to Israeli terrorist forces, who knows what he made of the chanting.

You’ll definitely enjoy it though:

Featured image via YouTube screenshot/All Elite Wrestling

Content warning: this article contains discussion of rape and sexual assault

After almost a year’s silence on the matter, author Neil Gaiman released a statement this week to once again deny the allegations of sexual assault against him.

The allegations against Gaiman date back to 2024. They were first reported on the Tortoise Media podcast Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman. The New York Vulture then published a more lengthy – and widely read – article in 2025 entitled:

There Is No Safe Word

How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.

Beginning with an initial two, eventually nine women would come forward with allegations including rape, other forms of sexual assault, and non-consensual and un-negotiated BDSM practices. Many of the descriptions are graphic in the extreme, and I try not to repeat them here without need.

‘I should have done so much better’

At the time, 14 January 2025, Gaiman put out a statement on his blog denying the accusations. He described re-reading messages from the accusers on the dates of the situations they described as assault – messages which displayed consent.

These messages are now a matter of public record. They do appear to display consent, although the Vulture article framed this as a product of being scared to upset Gaiman.

In his statement, Gaiman also wrote:

And I also realise, looking through them, years later, that I could have and should have done so much better. I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could or should have been.

However, he also stated unambiguously that all of his relationships were consensual, and that:

Some of the horrible stories now being told simply never happened, while others have been so distorted from what actually took place that they bear no relationship to reality. I am prepared to take responsibility for any missteps I made. I’m not willing to turn my back on the truth, and I can’t accept being described as someone I am not, and cannot and will not admit to doing things I didn’t do.

However, production companies moved quickly to cancel adaptations of Gaiman’s works across stage and screen. These projects included a musical version of Coraline, a Disney production of The Graveyard Book, and the Netflix adaptation of Dead Boy Detectives. 

‘Smear campaign’: Neil Gaiman

Gaiman then remained relatively removed from the public eye for over a year. However, on 2 February 2026, he posted a new statement. Again, he denied all of the allegations against himself:

I’ve learned firsthand how effective a smear campaign can be, so to be clear:

The allegations against me are completely and simply untrue. There are emails, text messages and video evidence that flatly contradict them.

In particular, Gaiman decried the “echo chamber” of journalism reporting on the allegations. He spoke about his conviction that the “truth would, eventually, come out”:

I expected that when the allegations were first made there would be journalism, and that the journalism would take the (mountains of) evidence into account, and was astonished to see how much of the reporting was simply an echo chamber, and how the actual evidence was dismissed or ignored.

Then, he went on to single out one blogger whom he believed exemplified the journalistic rigor he’d expected:

I was a journalist once, and I have enormous respect for journalists, so I’ve been hugely heartened by the meticulous fact and evidence-based investigative writing of one particular journalist, whom some of you recently brought to my attention, who writes under the name of TechnoPathology.

This investigator, Technopathology, produced pages and pages of reporting on Gaiman, under the umbrella title of “Neil Gaiman is Innocent”. Gaiman actually linked to the introductory page of the Substack blog in his statement.

Technopathology and ‘Neil Gaiman is innocent’

For full disclosure, in writing this article I read a lot of Technopathology’s blog, but not all of it. There is an awful lot to get through, and I have other articles to write. The author makes some valid points about the overall timbre of the reporting and its motivations, and some that I found reaching or off-mark. I’ll get to them later.

Technopathology’s introduction to their extensive project contained a complaint that there was “no room for nuance” in the reporting on Gaiman:

Even requiring evidence was deemed to be ‘‘victim blaming’’. No deviation from the party line, (that is to say – utter and complete condemnation) went unpunished.

This type of complaint will be familiar to anyone who observed public reactions to the MeToo movement. Technopathology talks about the importance of the MeToo movement, but couples that with their disbelief in the specific allegations against Gaiman.

In the introduction, the author mentioned something that made me sit up in my seat:

I wasn’t completely unprepared, I am after all a journalist and make all of my paltry income from writing. I have a steady beat with technology trade magazines, and used to pen a lot of political articles for The Canary. But I had no idea what form the investigation should take. It was new territory.

So, a fellow (ex-)Canary writer. One other mention of the Canary on the blog indicated that they were around for the inception of the site, long before my time or that of most of the current employees. After a bit of digging, we’re confident in our guess on who they are, but that’s not terribly important for this article.

Fact and speculation

Some of the points that Technopathology raises in their articles are valid. In particular, they highlight that the allegations against Gaiman were gleefully seized upon and amplified by elements of the far-right, including Nazi-types and transphobes, due to Gaiman’s Jewish heritage and outspoken support for LGBTQ+ causes.

However, other conclusions that they draw are much more of a stretch. This includes speculation that one accuser, Caroline Wallner, could in fact have known another, Scarlet Pavlovich, before they made their allegations, which could potentially cast doubt on the similarities in their accounts of Gaiman’s behavior.

The problem is that Technopathology’s speculation rests on the fact that Wallner is a friend of Michael Stipe, the lead singer of REM:

Interestingly, Michael Stipe is good friends with Tilda Swinton, who Scarlett Pavlovich says personally gave her a scholarship to her school in Scotland. I’m not altogether convinced that there was no prior contact between the accusers, so these degrees of separation are interesting.

This is quite an extraordinary reach, even if it is framed as a speculation.

Consent is consent

However, and most importantly, I feel that Technopathology elides some of the features of the cases that simply shouldn’t be ignored. For example, the blogger highlights one exchange between Pavlovich and Gaiman, and the way the Master podcast framed it. Pavlovich told Gaiman that:

I have told Amanda [Palmer, Gaiman’s then-wife] that even though it began questionably eventually it was undoubtedly consensual and I enjoyed it.

Technopathology then highlighted their problems with the the reporting of the exchange:

Master of course zooms in on ‘’questionably’’ rather than ‘‘undoubtedly consensual’’. Questionable does not mean non-consensual, and it’s not certain what element is questionable. There’s always ways to do better.

I would point out that if the very first sexual encounter between two people features ‘questionable’ consent, then that’s no consent at all. If consent isn’t firmly and unambiguously established beforehand, it can’t be gained retroactively when people are left to decide what happened. That’s not how this is meant to work.

Pavlovich’s relationship with Gaiman began the day she arrived at his house to work informally as a nanny. Gaiman ran her a bath in the middle of the garden. He then later climbed in with her. Technopathology quotes from Pavlovich’s interview on Master regarding the encounter:

“He ended up sort of asking me to put my legs down and I ignored him.”

We should note that he is ‘asking’, she is not compelled to put her legs down, thus revealing her body.

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But the next time he asks, she does. There is no force here. This is an action freely taken, at Gaiman’s request.

“He asked me again and sort of gestured, so I put them down.”

Again, the problem with Technopathology’s framing here is that when Gaiman made a sexual advance that Pavlovich didn’t take up, that should have been the end of it. Anything after that point carries an implicit threat, because it doesn’t take a lack of ‘yes’ as an answer in itself.

Neil Gaiman and Technopathology

Technopathology later writes that:

Reluctant consent vs enthusiastic consent is a big topic of discussion, but its a lot to go into here. Suffice to say, in legal terms, even reluctant consent is still consent – and it’s not clear if she was reluctant at the time or if this a later reframing. Certainly the WhatsApp messages affirm an enthusiastic consent, effusively and repeatedly.

Definitions of sexual assault and rape vary from country to country. As such, I’m not particularly concerned with guilt or innocence in the law, and I won’t make pronouncements on it.

However, what I will say with confidence is that anyone who was particularly concerned with consent probably wouldn’t show up naked to a bathtub someone else was in without asking first.

Even if they missed that detail, making requests that the other person doesn’t acquiesce to isn’t a prompt to ask again.

Technopathology, among their many articles on Gaiman’s purported innocence, analyses a lot of situations and exchanges around Gaiman in similar detail. You can go read them if you like.

However, I chose the bathtub scene as an illustrative example. The fact that Gaiman pointed specifically to Technopathology’s Substack as the kind of journalistic integrity he expects is a point that I find damning in itself.

Yes, Technopathology poured at length over the reporting and some of the dubious motivations behind it. They also took it upon themself to scour the accusers’ stories for inconsistencies. However, the blogger’s actual understanding of consent is very, very different to mine, and – I would hope – most everyone else’s, too.

If that’s what Gaiman thinks is proof of his innocence, I’d hate to see his definition of guilt.

Featured image via the Canary