Gaiman
By 
I suspect that Abigail will also comment, but the Vulture profile of Neil Gaiman is as gross as you’ve been led to believe:
In The Sandman, the DC comic-book series that ran from 1989 to 1996 and made Gaiman famous, he tells a story about a writer named Richard Madoc. After Madoc’s first book proves a success, he sits down to write his second and finds that he can’t come up with a single decent idea. This difficulty recedes after he accepts an unusual gift from an older author: a naked woman, of a kind, who has been kept locked in a room in his house for 60 years. She is Calliope, the youngest of the Nine Muses. Madoc rapes her, again and again, and his career blossoms in the most extraordinary way. A stylish young beauty tells him how much she loved his characterization of a strong female character, prompting him to remark, “Actually, I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer.” His downfall comes only when the titular hero, the Sandman, also known as the Prince of Stories, frees Calliope from bondage. A being of boundless charisma and creativity, the Sandman rules the Dreaming, the realm we visit in our sleep, where “stories are spun.” Older and more powerful than the most powerful gods, he can reward us with exquisite delights or punish us with unending nightmares, depending on what he feels we deserve. To punish the rapist, the Sandman floods Madoc’s mind with such a wild torrent of ideas that he’s powerless to write them down, let alone profit from them.
As allegations of Gaiman’s sexual misconduct emerged this past summer, some observers noticed Gaiman and Madoc have certain things in common. Like Madoc, Gaiman has called himself a feminist. Like Madoc, Gaiman has racked up major awards (for Gaiman, awards in science fiction and fantasy as well as dozens of prizes for contemporary novels, short stories, poetry, television, and film, helping make him, according to several sources, a millionaire many times over). And like Madoc, Gaiman has come to be seen as a figure who transcended, and transformed, the genres in which he wrote: first comics, then fantasy and children’s literature. But for most of his career, readers identified him not with the rapist, who shows up in a single issue, but with the Sandman, the inexhaustible fountain of story.
I’m a late-comer to Gaiman (I only read American Gods last year and never really had the opportunity to become a fanatic), so this isn’t psychologically catastrophic for me in the way it is for some of his more dedicated fans. I also know a few people who are personally acquainted with Gaiman and pretty much all of them have indicated that they only find the revelations surprising in degree rather than in kind.
Where are we with respect to the artist and the work at the dawn of this post-woke age? In the future I don’t plan to avoid any Gaiman-related project because of Gaiman, but at the same time I don’t think I’ll want to read or watch anything specifically because it’s Gaiman. I make no judgment of how anyone else approaches; if digesting the work of a creep is too creepy for you, I’m in no position to tell you that you’re wrong and that you need to read American Gods or watch Sandman.
Photo credit: By Kyle Cassidy – By email, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37378819