Do we like Dan Brown?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and there's one real act of generosity, but the public record on his views is thin.
Dan Brown is the American novelist behind The Da Vinci Code and the rest of the Robert Langdon thrillers. His latest, The Secret of Secrets, is a roughly 200,000-word novel about consciousness. He told The Globe and Mail he wrote about a million words to get there, and that about half of what he cut was science.
His biggest stoush was over the book that made him famous. The authors of an earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, took the case to court in London, claiming The Da Vinci Code copied it. The Court of Appeal ruled in March 2007 that no substantial part had been copied, and said the shared theories were too general for copyright to protect.
The messier chapter is personal. In 2021 his ex-wife sued in New Hampshire, alleging he led a secret life during the marriage, diverted funds to gifts for another person and hid future projects worth millions. Brown said he was “stunned”, called the complaint “written without regard for the truth”, and denied misleading her about their finances. Both sides then agreed to dismiss the lot, her lawyer called it an “amicable resolution”, and the terms were never made public.
On the harm test, we came up empty, which is a good result here. Our searches found no campaigning against LGBTQ+ or trans people, no slide into conspiracy theories and no dodgy co-producers. The flip side is that he's a private sort who talks about his books rather than politics, so we can't point to him standing up for anyone either.
Nothing new on him lately beyond the book tour for The Secret of Secrets in late 2025. In that interview he said his first job is to entertain and his second is to get readers curious enough to dig into the topic. He also said researching the book changed his mind on life after death, which is a fair bit more thoughtful than most thriller promo.
The real good stuff is quiet. In 2016 he gave €300,000 to help digitise the Bibliotheca Filosofica Hermetica in Amsterdam, a library of about 25,000 esoteric books, so the texts can be read online. That's the kind of nerdy generosity you'd expect from the bloke who made libraries and old manuscripts feel like crime scenes.