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20th December 2025: The Day Walliams Fell

I don't really know why I'm doing this; I do already have a blog I regularly fail to update, and that's on a website I pay like £30 a month for. But one of the things I really like about neocities is all the faintly unhinged blogs, so maybe this can be a place I keep some of my more 'not fit for general consumption' thoughts.

Like, for example, the fact that it's currently 03:16 and I'm not only still awake (I spent all night making that Felix graphic on Affinity), I'm thinking about the David Walliams thing. Which, if you don't know, is the fact that he's FINALLY been let go by Harper Collins, after LITERAL YEARS of it being basically an open secret in the publishing industry that he's a predator.

I'm absolutely confident something major's going to come out of the Telegraph investigation in the next few weeks and it will become woefully obvious the publishers were just trying to get out in front of it. It's depressing, knowing that EVERYONE KNEW for years and years but no one felt they could say anything, and all the while, young women were warned in whispers not to let themselves be alone with him.

It's too late at night for really deep, insightful thoughts about any of this, except that it's all so fucking obvious. I am in my mid-30s, and I can't even begin to count the number of times I've seen this happen in my life - famous men with some sort of power or cultural capital managing to blithely continue their evil ways while women desperately try to get someone to listen, until EVENTUALLY it happens, but usually so late in the game that a ton of other women (and men as well, in lots of cases) have also been harmed. When I was a teenager, the obvious big one in my sort of arena of knowledge was the Ian Watkins thing. I remember there were pages and pages of online forum posts of women explaining exactly what had been going on, how long for, and where the proof was - long before that sick creature got charged for any of it.

It makes me feel really gross, as well, that I'm even tangentially a part of the publishing industry. It makes me upset that I'm someone with no power - like, I'd love to say that if one of the young women of publishing had confided in me about Walliams or someone like him, I'd have stood up for them - but who the fuck would have listened to me?! And at the same time, I WISH I had a plan that meant I could tell the industry to do one, because I don't love that even after all this, if HC offered me a contract I would feel like a FOOL if I didn't take it. Because if I didn't, someone else would, and because they're still one of the biggest names in the game and if I ever want to be a name in the industry I have to be ambitious and yuck, yuck, yuck. Don't love it. Hate it, actually.