Gaiman Mess Acquires New Details, Horrific New Angle

Neil Gaiman’s lawyers definitely want you to know he didn’t pull up a girl’s skirt and begin fucking her while he talked to his four-year-old boy, who allegedly sat facing the couple’s bed in a hotel room in Auckland. They also say that Gaiman didn’t say to the girl, “Before you leave, you have to finish your job,” that he didn’t summon her into the hotel bathroom and didn’t push her onto her knees with the bathroom still door open. But it’s unclear the denial applies to the time Gaiman allegedly reached around his little boy to slip his hand under the girl’s shirt and give her breasts a feel. (Everybody was watching Odd Squad.) Or the time Gaiman reached across his son to allegedly grab a woman’s hand and force his penis into her grip.

Having a kid on hand for these deeds sound like child abuse, though the term isn’t used in the article reporting the allegations, Lila Shapiro’s “There Is No Safe Word” in New York magazine. The 11,400-word article offers a new dimension to the material in “Call Me Master,” the Tortoise Media series that broke news of the Gaiman sex accusations last summer. Most notably, the article says Gaiman roped his little boy into watching some of the sex behavior that was described in the podcast. The news comes in the article’s second half, after a good deal about what he’s done with adults.

Scarlett Pavlovich, the girl in the bed, talks on the podcast about her hotel visit but doesn’t mention Gaiman’s son being there. Caroline Wallner, the woman whose hand Gaiman allegedly planted on his penis, does the same regarding her incident. Then, in the New York article, we get the boy. He’s there both times, and also in some new alleged incidents (the boy’s father “never shut a door,” Pavlovich says). My guess is that Tortoise, a British outfit operating under UK libel laws, felt constrained by some legal angle that New York could shrug off. Consider that the podcast had to adopt a tortured “It is our understanding that Neil Gaiman believes” formula to get across the writer’s defense. The New York article just goes ahead and gives us what his lawyers have to say. New York goes light on the accusers’ enthusiastic, or pseudo-enthusiastic, texts from the days when Gaiman had his way with them; Tortoise gave these a lot of attention.

Skeptics might wonder about collusion among Gaiman’s accusers, since the article says they’ve “formed a WhatsApp group and grown close.” The contact is since last summer, when they began stepping forward. The article says that more than two years before, back in March 2022, Gaiman’s ex-wife flew from New Zealand to Edinburgh to retrieve their son from him, doing so right after Scarlett revealed what Neil had been up to. If so, Scarlett made her accusation about the boy before contact with the others. Given that child-abuse charges are supposed to be dynamite, one wonders what effect the ex-wife’s alleged knowledge has had on custody proceedings.

Anglerfish. He’d smile until he pounced, the girls say. From the article: “Two of the women, who have never spoken to each other, compared him to an anglerfish, the deep-sea predator that uses a bulb of bioluminescence to lure prey into its jaws. ‘Instead of a light,’ one says, ‘he would dangle a floppy-haired, soft-spoken British guy.’” Broken into linear time, you get a process where first he’s really nice and then he’s suddenly nasty, like a transformation—Jekyll and Hyde, or a werewolf. A woman remembers how he doted on her, and finally they went to bed and… “It was like he’d gone into this ritual that had nothing to do with me.” All of a sudden he wanted to be called master. “He seemed to have a script.” How nasty that script could become is detailed by other accusers. They say he practiced a BDSM where it was all one person’s idea and no limits were in place.

The Gaiman of Tortoise and New York is out to devour women. When he takes them to bed, he breaks them up. His aim is more destruction. Now he’s got a child involved so reality’s last mooring point can be yanked free. He wants to collapse reality, bring the room down and warp it, twist it, crush everyone breath. He says Kathy Acker got him started this way maybe 40 years ago, something like that. I mean, this is all if you go by New York.

Dianetics trauma alleged. Tortoise made a foray into Gaiman’s upbringing as a Scientologist, but not to great effect. The New York article details the physical punishments inflicted on members, and it finds a source who says Mr. and Mrs. Gaiman gave their boy the same treatment: “According to someone who knew the Gaimans, David and Sheila did apply Scientology’s methods at home. When Neil was around the age of the child in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the person said, David took him up to the bathtub, ran a cold bath, and ‘drowned him to the point where Neil was screaming for air.’”

In Gaiman’s book, the boy also has his head plunged underwater by his father. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a horror novel about a boy who sees his family give their loyalty to a sinister outsider, is presented by the article as an account of what growing up felt like for Gaiman. Back when Gaiman and Palmer were married, we’re told, his ex-wife would ask him about “his childhood in Scientology… he would curl up on the bed into a fetal position and cry.” The result was a short story that became Ocean, with the dedication “to Amanda, who wanted to know.”

Stinky Palmer. Amanda is Gaiman’s ex, the TED talker and punk performance artist Amanda Palmer. The New York reporter says Palmer refused interviews, “but I spoke with people close to her.” Palmer and Gaiman, met in 2008, married in 2011, and are now “entering the fifth year of an ugly divorce and custody battle.” Gaiman has much more money and can keep the fight going, we’re told, so Palmer has had to move back in with her parents. No word on whether the reporter checked out if this was true. We’re told the reporter looked over “contemporaneous diary entries, texts and emails with friends, messages between Gaiman and the women, and police correspondence.” But nothing about checking items not contained in the back-and-forth, such as Scarlett’s entry into a “psychiatric unit” when she was 13, or the statement that Palmer flew from New Zealand to Edinburgh to get her little boy away from Gaiman.

We do have confirmation for Amanda Palmer telling her then-husband that Scarlett was off-limits, like Dracula pulling his brides back from Jonathan Harker. A friend says Palmer said it, Scarlett recalls Gaiman saying so (“Amanda told me I couldn’t have you,” so that meant he had to). A text from back at the time, to Palmer from an angry friend of Scarlett’s, refers to it: “And yes I know you asked him not to do that to her, but honestly, the fact you even felt that was something you should ask is fucked up in ways that defy comprehension.”

Timeline. Amanda Palmer invited Scarlett, then 22, into the couple’s two households after what seems like one disaster after another between Neil and dependent women. During the early years of the marriage, Palmer steered girls his way, the article says. (Katherine Kendall has described Palmer at work, though New York doesn’t use the material.) Then she became pregnant and they ended all that, there’d be nobody from outside. Then, when Palmer was eight-months pregnant, we’re told Neil gave his wife some news: “He had slept with a fan in her early 20s, taking her virginity. Now, Gaiman told her, the girl was ‘going crazy.’” In the months after, Caroline Wallner remembers Palmer saying, “You have no idea the twisted, dark things that go on in that man’s head.” Five years later Palmer divorced her husband because it turned out he was still fucking a girl Palmer had pushed his way about a decade before. (“According to her friends,” that was Palmer’s motive.) Around the same time, she heard that her friend Caroline had been used and disposed of by Gaiman. “I can’t believe he did it again,” she said, according to a named source (Lance Horne, “a musician and friend”). And a month or so after that, Palmer was asking Scarlett Pavlovich to babysit for the weekend. Go figure.

“Did you not see this coming a mile away?” Scarlett’s angry pal texted Palmer after the fallout. “By the time she asked Pavlovich to babysit, Palmer was fed up with Gaiman’s behavior, but ‘she still had some faith in his decency,’ a friend says.” Another recalls, “Her realism could blind her to reality.” The Gaiman camp think Palmer’s “a ‘major force’ driving this story in light of their contentious divorce,” the article says. If the Gaiman camp’s right, Palmer’s friends did a terrible job of making her look good. To take their account as given here, Palmer knew what her husband did and still placed the girl in harm’s way, alone with a sex fiend in a house that’s a long walk, and a bus ride, and a ferry ride from anywhere else but helipads and, one expects, the inaccessible homes of rich folk.

“Fourteen women have come to me about this,” she told Scarlett after Neil acted up. Anyway Scarlett says that’s what Palmer told her, and I haven’t heard the claim contradicted. That line is a beauty. She doesn’t realize she what she just said.

“Too awkward, too old.” The friends of Palmer get in some hits. “Gaiman was prone to panic attacks,” we’re told. A person who was “close to them” reveals, “Amanda was shocked at how traumatized Neil was, given his public persona and the guy she thought she’d married.” She’d had some doubts from the start, her being such a free spirit. “He was too rich,” the article says, “too famous, too British, too awkward, too old. And they didn’t have great sexual chemistry. But he appeared to be kind and stable, a family man…  She also felt a little sorry for him.” Just so that’s clear.