#Tortoise Media

[angie-words]

So, regarding the latest Tortoise Media podcast episode about the allegations about Neil Gaiman, I was considering doing another write up. The podcast contains audio recorded from a phone call between Claire and Gaiman.

However, I do not have the mental capacity for that right now. Also, the episode focuses upon Claire's story as first discussed on the Am I Broken podcast, which I've already written up.

Thankfully, Paul Caruana Galizia (the journalist involved with the podcast) wrote a thread containing most of the main additional details.

CW: gaslighting, victim blaming, mentions of SA, using autism as an excuse for abusive behaviour

I'm adding screenshots here too. One thing addressed in the podcast is Gaiman trying to explain away his behaviour as due to being autistic.

I'm autistic and was actually quite pleased with how they handled this element - that they swiftly dismissed it being used as an excuse. They emphasised how autistic people are statistically far more likely to be the victims of assault and abuse than perpetrators in any sense. The hosts also highlighted how, due to the barriers autistic people face with social interactions, we are often much more cautious about initiating anything, treading carefully in new situations because of previous bad experiences.

Not, for example, trying to snog a person you've just met.

There's also a mention near the beginning of Claire's story about how she first met Amanda Palmer. Claire mentioned she was seeing Gaiman soon at a signing and did Palmer want her to pass a message on. According to Claire, Palmer put her arms around Claire's neck and whispered something about nibbling on his ear.

Boundaries seem to be things that Palmer and Gaiman are aware of, yet keep stepping over...

Anyway, screenshots of the twitter thread beneath the cut:

[originalleftist]

Over half of anti-Heard tweets were bots or paid trolls, many linked to Saudi government bots.

"According to an investigation by Tortoise Media, which examined more than one million tweets, more than 50 per cent of anti-Heard messages in the run-up to the 2022 defamation case were "inauthentic' - either from automated "bot" accounts or people hired to attack the actress."

"Bradley Hope, author of a book on Bin Salman, told the podcast that the pro-Depp tweets emanating from Saudi Arabia appear to be produced by "flies", a name for Saudi bot accounts."

"An intelligence professional who tracks online disinformation campaigns, said there was only a "0.1 per cent chance" that the hate directed at Heard was from genuine Depp fans.

The investigation also claims that bot networks in Thailand and Spain tweeted large numbers of pro-Depp messages."

"...more than 100 Twitter accounts sent 1,000 identical messages at exactly the same time to any company that had worked with Heard, reading: "This brand supports domestic violence against men."'

"The makers of the podcast argue that the criticism of Heard could have affected the jury in the 2022 US defamation trial which found in favour of Depp."

"So, if you couldn't tell the difference between a real-life Johnny Depp fan and a bot in 2022, then you probably won't be able to tell a Russian troll from a US election official in 2024. And that represents a serious problem for the security of our democracies."-Alexi Mostrous, presenter of the podcast.

"Johnny Depp and the Saudi Embassy did not respond to Tortoise's request for comment."

[thegaygrimreaper]

y’all, I’ve been sitting on the news abt Neil Gaiman for a few days and I wanted to vent to the void.

I believe the victims. That is a hard rule, I don’t want to say anything that comes off as these women are lying. But all the news has been copy pasted from one article written by a vocal transphobe, poorly summarizing a four episode podcast, on a media site I have never heard of before in my life and was founded by a former BBC head to make ‘slow, fully researched news’ which is not evident in this article. It repeats descriptive phrases, it does not give the full story, and I feel that if it was meant as a summary of a more indepth podcast, it should at least be a full summary. I watched a brief trailer for the podcast (which, in my opinion, is a really weird thing for a media site to push. These are not movies, it is news. Why are we publishing trailers with sensational words and phrases), and that still did not provide what sources they used for research, there are no sources other than a victims name, an extremely general term of ‘New Zealand Police’ what station? What officers? What town? The whole country? And any quote from Gaiman is not “stated” by Gaiman, the writers simply “understand” what his stance is. Did you interview him?

Until someone with actual new information comes in, rather than every news station rephrasing one article over and over again, I am not going to jump on the train of Neil Gaiman being a horrible person. We do not know that. We have gotten no information other than one article from a bigot. I believe the victims, not the news. No one close to Gaiman has even spoken on this, it is simply news repeating each other.

I understand other people are hurt by this, and I get that. But please, do not jump to conclusions when all we have to go on is unsourced research from a Rowling apologist.

Anyway. Please don’t be angry with me, I’m trying to process all of this too. I just want to enjoy my books without feeling like I’ve killed someone.

Feeling crazy, thanks for reading (or not, idk, this was a self soothing method, if anything)

[theremina]

Sup, TERFs?

Sorry not sorry to burst your lil consensus bubble, but right now there are trans folk all over the Internet crying out "not in our name", heartbroken beyond words over what these young women allegedly went through, and calling for justice.

Let's give other reputable investigative journalists a chance to do their work before dismissing "that crowd" as a bunch of unfeeling, subhuman ghouls, shall we?

Personally I'm certain there are more people out there who are still too afraid (understandably) to speak out publicly against one of the most powerful, wealthy, well-loved living authors of the past century.

How is your own behavior helping these survivors to feel safer about disclosing? You really think your bottomless irrational revulsion towards transgender people, not to mention Johnson's, should be centered ahead of them?

[wild-at-mind]

Just listened to the new episode of Tortoise’s Slow Newscast about Gender GP and it’s sooooo bad. Maybe I should have known better than to bother with it, but I’ve enjoyed their non-gender related stuff. I also know at least one person who uses Gender GP, and I separately have been hearing from an FTM support group I’m in that a lot of NHS trusts are no longer willing to do shared care with Gender GP while still doing it with other similar services. I had hoped maybe it would shed some light on why that might be, because even though trans healthcare is vital it’s still important that it be done ethically and held to the same standards as other healthcare. But no, instead it was basically a referendum on whether medical transition is good/bad. Again. Fucks sake.

(For non-UK people, Gender GP are a private service for transition related healthcare but they can, or have in the past, worked with the NHS to provide shared care e.g. blood tests for HRT monitoring. It is needed because it’s a very, very, very long drawn out and difficult process to access NHS transition care.) The podcast’s thesis was that the founder of Gender GP (a cis GP named Helen Webberley) is not practicing ethical healthcare because there isn’t enough assessment before providing HRT. They do treat children but the majority of their customers are adults. However you can guess which demographic was focused on. No children or adults who had undergone treatment with Gender GP were interviewed. There was a suggestion from the interviewer that maybe Helen Webberley is y’know a little bit ditzy, naive as hell of course, but also isn’t she bad for making money out of this? In this way she is juxtaposed against the NHS, which is the Good and Right way to transition, because they don’t profit off trans kids I guess. This argument stops working in any country that doesn’t have free at point of use healthcare of any kind, but never mind that. Also the podcast to its credit acknowledges several times that there are no currently practicing NHS gender clinics in the UK, and that this is a problem. But that’s about all we get in that department. There’s a waiting list, but no clinics. That list gets longer and longer. It’s so fucked up.

I would argue that the podcast is sceptical about the entire concept of being transgender, and I wonder if they even realise this about themselves. Two mothers of trans sons are interviewed, one who used Gender GP and one who accessed black market hormones. The first mother says that Gender GP ruined her child. But she was still referring to her child as her daughter and using she/her. You would think that if medical transition was the only concern, the mother would have been fine with the social and 100% reversable changes in pronouns and name. I know it’s hard for someone who has known you their whole life as one name and set of pronouns to remember at first, but this was different, she just hadn’t done anything. Without saying it out loud she was clearly waiting for it all to blow over, and not even considering that it might not. Meanwhile the child’s father (they were divorced) is helping the child access Gender GP, which can’t have helped matters. The mother sadly laments how Gender GP tore her family apart. The 2nd mother was worried about her child accessing black market hormones and using home syringes. This is a valid worry. However she also referred to her child purely as daughter, she/her and actively aschewed his new name. I don’t even know why she was interviewed as her son wasn’t using Gender GP, and this wasn’t a perspective about what Gender GP was clearly designed to be- a safer option in between black market hormones and the endless wait for the NHS. It was very clear she was even more ‘wait for it to blow over’ than the first interviewee. She spoke with apparent disgust (though to be fair was voiced by an actor who may have been hamming it up a bit) that since socially transitioning at school her child was suddenly really popular and was liked by many people he wasn’t before, and they all loved using his new name....that part felt especially weird, like she was angry that her child was being called a name he preferred by his friends. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of parents alluding to children coming out as trans at school to become popular. I read an article where a parent was relaying what their child had said, where apparently their classmate came out as trans in assembly and everybody clapped. The idea that there might be other factors involved, such as novelty that will wear off for the classmates, the classroom social standing of the child in question, or even in the case of the 2nd podcast interviewee’s son, increased confidence post coming out making him more sociable, was ignored. I do understand that this is a relatively new area of medicine without much long term data to draw on. However all types of healthcare has to start somewhere, and I wouldn’t have thought that the fear of an army of angry and betrayed detransitioners one day (which the interviewer was clearly disappointed that Webberley had never seen) should hold back progress. There are older adults who transitioned as children out in the world. On tumblr almost a decade ago I remember young trans guys in parts of the US accessing hormones through informed consent clinics, to much hand wringing from certain reactionary internet circles-see if you can contact those people. How are they doing?

There is so much more I could talk about but I have to stop there or I’ll go on all night. Edited to add: this should not be interpreted as a defence of Helen Webberley, only as a condemnation of the podcast episode’s framing of the concept of gender services that don’t require stringent assessment as very dangerous and scary and automatically malpractice. There’s a reason why I listened in the first place- because I had heard not great things about Gender GP. Sadly I didn’t get a look at its problems and its founder’s problems, I got yet another highly biased condemnation of the entire concept of transness with way too much airtime for parents who don’t believe their teenage children have their own internal selves.

Edit again: I understand now what the podcast was saying about clinics- there are currently no gender clinics in England that treat children. There are a few in the country that treat adults over 18, and the waiting lists are really long but at least you can refer to one in any region. My referral was for Nottingham even though I’m in the south as it currently has the shortest waiting list on the tracker.

[stillunusual]

Sweet Bobby is a live, multi-part investigation in search of one of the world’s most sophisticated catfishers. It’s a story about who we are online, and how social media can be weaponised as a tool of abuse and coercion.

[themarketplaceworld]

[helmstone]

BBC Sounds acquires three Tortoise Media titles

BBC Sounds acquires three Tortoise Media titles

BBC Sounds has today launched Tortoise Investigates, a new feed which will become the home of three gripping new investigative podcast series from Tortoise Media. The boxsets will be released consecutively on BBC Sounds this autumn, with the first series due to land on 25 August 2024. Each boxset series offers a captivating, complex story which will keep listeners guessing, including a Satanic…

[kittenwriter]

It's not the silence from individual writers I judge. It is the silence from SFF news outlets. Where is the File 770 article? Bleeding Cool? Camestros Felapton? I'll forgive Jason Sanford-- he's got COVID; he's excused from public speaking-- but he's the only one. (And Ursula Vernon went the other way and attacked the outlet that did the reporting, and Diane Duane defended her doing so, and then both posts were deleted.)

What about EVERYONE who was very willing to speak about the Alice Munro stuff but has not said a word about Gaiman?

THEY'RE NOT GOING TO WEIGH IN. They're going to use that excuse of "we need to process" until it's far enough in the rearview mirror that they can comfortably make excuses for why it wasn't that bad and everyone will go on with their lives, only now with proof for the whisper networks that coming forward with an allegation about Gaiman will get you nothing.

It is an excuse. SFF will quietly cover it up because the movers and shakers only care about this stuff when it's not someone they like doing it.

Everyone waiting for members of the SF/F community to weigh in about Neil Gaiman, please remember that a lot of people in light of recent revelations are having to recontextualize relationships and events going back decades.

Not just fans. Peers, friends, and family need space and time to process.

You may know someone your entire adult life, who has treated you with kindness, patience, affection, and support who is also capable of doing others harm. Cognitive dissonance is human. Grieving relationships that may have only existed as equal in your own mind is still grieving.

I genuinely hope that everyone who has been harmed finds healing, comfort, and peace, and that reparations are made and lives can go on without further suffering.

Believe the abused when they come forward. Hold abusers accountable for their actions regardless of intent.

Mourn, and go on.

But most of all take whatever steps you can to prevent further harm, and send a clear message to your community that deliberately doing others harm will not be tolerated, and those who choose to prey on others shall be held accountable.

[originalleftist]

Musk hired spies to surveil his critics and girlfriend.

Highlights:

"One of those critics is Vernon Unsworth, who sued Musk in 2018 for calling him a "pedo guy" on Twitter. A new Tortoise investigation reveals that the scale of surveillance used against Unsworth was greater than previously known: Musk used at least two sets of private investigators, both of which used deception to try to gather information."

"Musk deployed private investigators to follow a Tesla employee "24 hours a day". A former security operative at Tesla alleges the company also hacked into the employee's phone. Other whistleblowers also allege that they were followed."

"Unbeknownst to Unsworth, Musk's tam then paid about $50,000 to a private investigator called James Howard-Higgins to dig up dirt on Unsworth. Howard-Higgins promised that he would go through Unsworth's bins, pose as a charity worker to get information, and infiltrate his partner's Facebook page.

No due diligence. A Google search would have revealed that Howard-Higgins was a fraudster, jailed in 2016 for stealing from his own company. As the US trial, which Musk won by portraying his Twitter comments as a joke, his team portrayed Howard-Higgins as a one-off. In fact another investigation firm called Orion was also tasked with getting information on Unsworth. Emails show how Orion emailed one of Unsworth's friends, telling him, incorrectly, that they were "working on behalf of Vernon"."

"Musk allegedly placed his former partner Amber Heard under surveillance in Australia having become suspicious that she was cheating on him.

Around the same time a local newspaper received an anonymous tip that an Aussie Rules footballer was "spending many nights at Amber Heard's house" and "leaving early in the morning looking like the cat that swallowed the canary".

The paper traced the message to SpaceX, one of Musk's companies.

When one of its reporters spoke to Musk, he accepted that someone close to him had sent the tip but claimed it was done without his knowledge.

"My personal belief is that [Musk] definitely sent it," says the reporter, Sally Coates."

I've seen other outlets claim that Musk used infrared technology to spy on Heard's home and detect any movement inside, but can't confirm this from a source I consider credible.

Anyway, reminder that Muskrat is a serial domestic abuser and sexual predator as well as a fascist, that his supposed support for "free speech" (as always with the Right) just means "freedom for me to say whatever I want with no consequences, and no one else has freedom to disagree with or criticize me", and that how he conducts himself in his private life and in his businesses is mirrored in his goals for society as a whole.

Also, that this "genius" is so incompetent that he couldn't even use Google for two minutes before hiring a convicted con man.

(Addendum: I know a lot of people have accused Tortoise Media of being part of some grand Right-wing/transphobic conspiracy, but so far as I've found that's mostly desperate Neil Gaiman fans trying to make out that the accusations against him by multiple unconnected women, that he partly admitted to and others in the industry corroborated, are a vast Conservative conspiracy to frame him for being pro-trans. In other words- ridiculous and misogynist. Tortoise has some credibility issues of being fairly new, without much of an established track record and, like many major media outlets, having big business money behind it. But also, far Right psy-op outlets probably aren't inclined to write detailed exposes on Elon Musk and the Saudi Royals.)

[heycrymeariver]

five and many more: a timeline summary

(For legal reasons, all of this is alleged.)

Ref. links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

1984, is the first time Neil Gaiman released a book. 

In 1985, he got married and started his career as a comic book writer and in 1986, he assaulted Julia Hobsbawm.

This took place in Chalk Farm, London, where he forcibly kissed her and shoved her down on the sofa at her own studio flat before she escaped. According to The Crown Prosecution Service, “sexual assault is where one person intentionally touches another person sexually without their consent. The touching can be done with any part of the body or with an object.” In her own words, she described it as “an aggressive, unwanted pass” and that she still remembers it even now. 

Through 1987 and 2002 he progressed his career and published the famous book Coraline. A new year happens and he is in his early-forties and is thriving off of the success of his several money-making works, at a book signing event in Sarasota, Florida. There he hits it off with a young 18 year old (K) and they start dating. Two years later, in 2005, with two more awards under his belt, he forcibly penetrated that young twenty year old who told him not to because of a painful infection.

After another two years, he and his first wife divorced.

It's 2012, five years later and one year into a new marriage and at another book signing, Neil, age 52, immediately assaulted Claire (pseudonym) with a non-consensual kiss. Throughout keeping contact Neil had escalated this with video and phone calls that had a heavy sexual connotation where he appeared to either be naked or tried to instigate something. All of this accumulated into sexually assaulting her on a tour bus. Neil’s contact with her lasted until 2014 where he had promptly accused her in a text message that she had used him for sex.

Within the same year, Neil had enough money to buy a property, and met Caroline Wallner, 55, and her at-the time current husband. With a deal to do odd jobs for Neil and his wife to live there until she could own a five-acre plot, it wasn’t long before things turned sour. A divorce in 2017 sent everything spiraling, with her former husband fired, she in a once financially stable position, was now completely dependent on Neil Gaiman who used that to his advantage. Using her lack of financial stability to get himself sexual favors, he coerced her into a sexual-only, notably uninformed BDSM-entering territory while she was emotionally vulnerable, not accepting denials. This lasted until the summer of 2021, and in December of that year she and him went to court, what awaited her was $275k of compensation and a non-disclosure agreement (nda).

It wouldn’t take long for another woman to experience Neil Gaiman’s repeated offenses as well because in February of 2022, Scarlett (a pseudonym), age 23, a newly hired nanny, was sexually assaulted in the bathtub at his house. Neil, age 61, climbed into the bathtub with her and coerced her into having sexual relations. He too, in his coercion of her, made her financially dependent on him and brought BDSM elements to an inexperienced young woman who could not say no.

Since July 3rd of this year, 2024, five women have come out with sexual assault allegations aimed at Neil Gaiman. They all have several things in common with each other: either being young and naive, a fan of his, or put in a vulnerable spot financially or emotionally. Throughout the years and according to the stories, Neil progressively gets more bold and aggressive in his attempts for sexual gain. There are many more stories out there and whispers on the internet of how predatory Neil Gaiman has been in the industry. However, focusing on the five women who came out to speak and pushing their voice is an important part of the discussion.

Staying silent will only protect his peace.

(If you want to help keep this topic alive, please check out this post by @taraljc to see what steps you can take.)

[furubatsu]

After everything that happened. Everything the show and its fandom put is through. And it'll be gone, just like that.

[inthedarktrees]

“Tortoise Wins by a Hare” | 1943  

[beagleamarelo-moved]

Meet Little Tortoise...

[ellenjewettsculpture]

the art of ritual - 2024