It was very calculated, because even before the most horrific allegations broke and went very mainstream there had been a whisper network about NG generally being a creep for years and years as many women recall/had experienced something off about his behavior when meeting him in person. Especially women working in media industries who might run into him would have often heard or been warned he might be a little weird, or worse.
Which makes sense, one of the stories in the Vulture article happened back in 2012, another woman said she was raped back on 2007.
And even if those instances weren't part of the rumors, it was NOT a secret that he slept with many of his young fans and his students. (To my knowledge I think they were all legally adults, but like, he was definitely going after women who were much younger than him, and this wasn't a secret or a whisper. Hell, when he got married to Amanda Palmer they were very forthright about having an open marriage.) Even if the default assumption was that he was just having a lot of consensual sex with willing fans/students, it's still kinda like...well how did anyone know he wasn't leveraging his fame, money, and connections with people who wanted to get into the industry?
(I mean he met Amanda Palmer, age 23, the year he got a divorce from his first wife, when he was what, 39?)
The power imbalance existed and how could anyone know how he navigated that with the women he slept with? So a lot of people probably just either:
a) didn't know that he had been publicly very open about sleeping with a lot of people for a pretty long time, and had a bit of a cultivated pseudo-rockstar/groupies reputation [and his open relationship with palmer had been pretty publically allll over the internet since they confirmed it in 2013. Because some people probably don't know or weren't alive/old enough to remember, Palmer actually announced their engagement on livejournal's community OhNoTheyDidn't!)]
or b) didn't really stop to consider the implications or possibilities of "he frequently sleeps with his fans and students."
(Or c) They dismissed any criticism as prudishness or puritanism.)
So no, at no point was Neil Gaiman trying to avoid hero worship or even avoid flirtation. The rockstar type reputation always included the stereotype of going after fans
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