Another day, another left-wing male feminist celebrity exposed as an (allegedly!) abusive, predatory, creep. Reset the clock.
This time, it’s perplexingly celebrated writer Neil Gaiman, former husband of the equally perplexingly celebrated musician, Amanda Palmer.
A friend remarked to me, “In a way, I’m relieved that my apparently irrational dislike of Neil Gaiman turned out to be not so irrational, after all.” I’ve never been a fan of either Gaiman or Palmer, but my deep dislike was far from irrational.
As a writer, Gaiman has never impressed me in the least. His writing is far too knowingly ‘clever’, as if he is spending the whole time chortling at his own wonderfulness, while looking over his shoulder to see if everyone else can see how clever he’s being. Which he isn’t, as it happens. Well, at least only enough to appeal to the midwits who flocked to his trash like squawking seagulls.
The same goes for Palmer’s music. The Dresden Dolls were a one-trick pony whose appeal was strictly limited to people who think that slavishly copying the aesthetic of Cabaret somehow passes for creativeness.
Personally, though, both always came across as deeply unpleasant and exploitative.
Palmer, already wealthy, has a penchant for demanding that others work for her for nothing. As if bathing in the reflected glory of her ego was payment enough. She infamously put out a social media begging-letter, imploring musicians to work as backing on a tour for no payment. Then she made a TED Talk about leveraging platforms like GoFundMe; that’s right: a wealthy musician, married to a wealthy writer, went around begging ordinary people to subsidise her ‘creative’ (allegedly) endeavours.
At the same time, I’ve long been aware of rumours swirling around the couple for years. Whispers, for example, of star-struck young fans (always girls) approaching them at conventions and being almost immediately pressured to go back to their hotel room.
During all this time, Gaiman was touting himself as the quintessential male feminist.
‘With art,’ he says?
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.”
Art imitating an extremely ugly and secret life?
This past July, a British podcast produced by Tortoise Media broke the news that two women had accused Gaiman of sexual assault. Since then, more women have shared allegations of assault, coercion, and abuse. The podcast, Master, reported by Paul Caruana Galizia and Rachel Johnson, tells the stories of five of them. (Gaiman’s perspective on these relationships, including with [Scarlett Pavlovich], is that they were entirely consensual.) I spoke with four of those women along with four others whose stories share elements with theirs. I also reviewed contemporaneous diary entries, texts and emails with friends, messages between Gaiman and the women, and police correspondence. Most of the women were in their 20s when they met Gaiman. The youngest was 18. Two of them worked for him. Five were his fans. With one exception, an allegation of forcible kissing from 1986, when Gaiman was in his mid-20s, the stories take place when Gaiman was in his 40s or older, a period in which he lived among the US, the UK, and New Zealand […]
Although his books abounded with stories of men torturing, raping, and murdering women, this was largely perceived as evidence of his empathy.
So, what, specifically, is he accused of? According to former nanny, New Zealander Pavlovich, as well as nearly a dozen other women, some very nasty stuff indeed.
The first alleged attack, according to Pavlovich, took place the first day she babysat […]
Soon after, according to texts reviewed by New York, Palmer asked Pavlovich not only if she would babysit again but if she would consider staying at the house for the foreseeable future. Pavlovich, who was broke and had struggled with homelessness in the past, accepted […]
But according to Pavlovich, Gaiman attacked her on multiple occasions. She claims Gaiman made her perform oral sex while his penis had urine on it, and once allegedly pushed his penis into her mouth with such force that Pavlovich vomited. Gaiman then allegedly told her to lick the vomit off his lap and the couch.
She also accused Gaiman of beating her with his belt, then anally raping her, first without lubricant, and then using butter as a lubricant. Afterward, Gaiman allegedly called Pavlovich a “slave” and told her to “clean him up.” Pavlovich refused at first, to which she claims Gaiman replied, “Are you defying your master?” Pavlovich said she “had to lick my own shit.”
Pavlovich accuses that Gaiman “did not seem to have boundaries around his son”. Her accusations include that Gaiman would grope and even have sex with her with his son in the same room, watching TV or playing with an iPad. Tellingly, the son also allegedly began asking to be addressed as “master”.
According to one of Palmer’s friends, the musician Lance Horne, Palmer called Gaiman that night and asked about the alleged hotel-room incident and if their son had been wearing headphones. Horne said Gaiman replied “no,” then hung up.
Gaiman denies any allegations of non-consensual happenings and claims that some of the alleged events simply never happened. Pavlovich admits that she did not see the relationship as abusive for some time. It wasn’t until she spoke to a friend, whose partner is a doctor of psychology who’d lectured on coercion, consent and rape, that she began to reassess the situation.
Pavlovich filed her own police report against Gaiman in New Zealand in January 2023, accusing him of sexual assault. A spokesperson said that the “matter has been closed”.
Still, Gaiman’s other accusers are less uncertain. They are adamant that he forced them into humiliating, abusive, non-consensual acts, using his celebrity status as leverage.
So, how did Gaiman get away for so long with what was an open secret in the literary/comic book scene? Much the same as SF writer Marion Zimmer Bradley (a lesbian paedophile), or Australian literary writer Dorothy Hewitt (who pimped her underage daughters to the cream of the left-literati): everyone knew, but conspired to protect the literary superstars.
As they did with Harvey Weinstein: the entertainment establishment tolerated and covered up for his abuses, for as long as it was convenient and expeditious for them to do so.
