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BOOKS 5:00 A.M.

There Is No Safe Word How the best-selling fantasy

author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself
for decades.
By Lila Shapiro, a features writer for New York
Magazine.

Photo: Guerin Blask/August

Editor’s note: This story contains content that readers may find disturbing, including
graphic allegations of sexual assault.

Scarlett Pavlovich was a 22-year-old drama student when she met the
performer Amanda Palmer by chance on the streets of Auckland. It was a
gray, drizzly afternoon in June 2020, and Palmer, then 44, was walking
down the street with the actress Lucy Lawless, one of the most famous
people in New Zealand owing to her six-season stint portraying Xena the
warrior princess. But Pavlovich noticed only Palmer. She’d watched her TED
talk, “The Art of Asking,” and was fascinated by the cult-famous feminist
writer and musician — by her unabashed self-assurance.

On the surface, Pavlovich appeared to be self-assured as well. A local girl,

she had dropped out of high school at 15 to travel to Europe, Morocco, and
the Middle East on the cheap, pausing in Scotland — where Tilda Swinton
gave her a scholarship to attend her Steiner school, Drumduan — and
London to work in the cabaret scene. Eventually, her visa expired and she
ran out of money and so, in 2019, she returned to Auckland, where she
enrolled in an acting school and took a job at a perfumery. Pale and dark-
haired and waifish, she favored bold colors and outrageous outfits. On the
day she met Palmer — on most days then — she’d painted a triangle of
translucent silver beneath her lower lashes so it looked as though she’d been
crying tears of glitter. It was Pavlovich who approached Palmer on the
sidewalk outside the perfumery. She was surprised when Palmer texted her a
few days later. “It’s amanda d palmer,” she wrote. “Your new friend.”

Palmer, an obsessive chronicler of

IN THIS ISSUE
her own life in songs, poems, blog
posts, and a memoir, got her start as
half of the punk cabaret band the
Dresden Dolls, but she is perhaps
more famous for her ability to
 attract a tight-knit and devoted
following wherever she goes. In
2012, she became the first musician
to raise more than $1 million on
Kickstarter and later became one of
Patreon’s most successful artists. As
Palmer explained in her book The
Art of Asking — part memoir, part
manifesto on the virtues of asking
for assistance of various kinds —
she had built her entire career on
“messy exchanges of goodwill and
SEE ALL the swapping of favors.” Out of this
mess, she argues, a utopian sort of
community formed: “There was no
distinction between fans and
friends.”

Over the following year and a half, Palmer and Pavlovich occasionally met
for a drink or a meal. Palmer offered Pavlovich tickets to her shows and
invited her to parties for the Patreon community at her house on nearby
Waiheke Island, a lush bohemian retreat with vineyards, golden beaches,
and more than 60 helipads to accommodate the billionaires who vacationed
there. Sometimes Palmer asked Pavlovich for favors — help running errands
or organizing files or looking after her child. Pavlovich was happy to assist.
She had a crush on Palmer. She didn’t mind that Palmer only occasionally
discussed paying her, even though Pavlovich was always strapped for cash.
For Pavlovich, who was estranged from her family and without a safety net,
Palmer filled a deeper need. In November 2020, Palmer invited her to hang
out at her place for a weekend with a group of local artists. At the gathering,
Palmer asked Pavlovich to babysit while she got a massage. Early the next
morning, Pavlovich wrote a diary entry about the easy intimacy she’d felt in
Palmer’s sun-drenched home, where she’d read to Palmer’s son, who was 5 at
the time, their limbs entwined. “The years absent of touch build up like a
gray inheritance,” she wrote. “I’m hungry. I am so fucking famished.”

On February 1, 2022, Palmer texted Pavlovich and asked if she wanted to

spend the weekend babysitting, which would mean bouncing back and forth
between her house and her husband’s. Pavlovich had never met Palmer’s
husband, from whom she was separated, though of course she knew who he
was: Neil Gaiman, the acclaimed British fantasist and author of nearly 50
books, including American Gods and Coraline, and the comic-book series
The Sandman, whose work has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide.
Gaiman and Palmer had arrived in New Zealand in March 2020, but just
weeks later, their nine-year marriage collapsed and Gaiman skipped town,
breaking COVID protocols to fly to his home on the Isle of Skye. Now, he’d
returned and was living in a house near Palmer’s on Waiheke. Their previous
nanny had recently left, and they needed help. Pavlovich agreed and was
pleased when Palmer offered to pay her for the weekend’s work.

Around four in the afternoon on February 4, Pavlovich took the ferry from
Auckland to Waiheke, then sat on a bus and walked through the woods until
she arrived at Gaiman’s house, an asymmetrical A-frame of dark burnished
wood with picture windows overlooking the sea. Palmer had arranged a
playdate for the child, so not long after Pavlovich arrived, she found herself
alone in the house with the author. For a little while, Gaiman worked in his
office while she read on the couch. Then he emerged and offered her a tour
of the grounds. A striking figure at 61, his wild black curls threaded with
strands of silver, the author picked a fig — her favorite fruit — and handed it
to her. Around 8 p.m., they sat down for pizza. Gaiman poured Pavlovich a
glass of rosé and then another. He drank only water. They made awkward
conversation about New Zealand, about COVID. Pavlovich had never read
any of his work, but she was anxious to make a good impression. After she’d
cleaned up their plates, Gaiman noted that there was still time before they
would have to pick up his son from the playdate. “‘I’ve had a thought,’” she
recalls him saying. “‘Why don’t you have a bath in the beautiful claw bathtub
in the garden? It’s absolutely enchanting.’” Pavlovich told Gaiman that she
was fine as she was but ultimately agreed. He needed to make a work call, he
said, and didn’t want Pavlovich to be bored.

Gaiman led Pavlovich down a stone path into the garden to an old-fashioned
tub with a roll top and walked away. She got undressed and sank into the
bath, looking up at the furry magenta blossoms of the pohutukawa tree
overhead. A few minutes later, she was surprised to hear Gaiman’s footsteps
on the stones in the dark. She tried to cover her breasts with her arms.
When he arrived at the bath, she saw that he was naked. Gaiman put out a
couple of citronella candles, lit them, and got into the bath. He stretched
out, facing her, and, for a few minutes, made small talk. He bitched about
Palmer’s schedule. He talked about his kid’s school. Then he told her to
stretch her legs out and “get comfortable.”

“I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘I’m not confident with my body,’” Pavlovich recalls. “He
said, ‘It’s okay — it’s only me. Just relax. Just have a chat.’” She didn’t move.
He looked at her again and said, “Don’t ruin the moment.” She did as
instructed, and he began to stroke her feet. At that point, she recalls, she felt
“a subtle terror.”

Gaiman asked her to sit on his lap. Pavlovich stammered out a few
sentences: She was gay, she’d never had sex, she had been sexually abused by
a 45-year-old man when she was 15. Gaiman continued to press. “The next
part is really amorphous,” Pavlovich tells me. “But I can tell you that he put
his fingers straight into my ass and tried to put his penis in my ass. And I
said, ‘No, no.’ Then he tried to rub his penis between my breasts, and I said
‘no’ as well. Then he asked if he could come on my face, and I said ‘no’ but he
did anyway. He said, ‘Call me ‘master,’ and I’ll come.’ He said, ‘Be a good girl.
 You’re a good little girl.’”

Afterward, Pavlovich crouched down in the water and tried to clean herself
off. Gaiman looked at her and smiled. “‘Amanda told me I couldn’t have
you,’” Pavlovich recalls him saying. As soon as he’d heard this, he “knew he
had to have” her. “‘God,’” he continued, “‘I wish it were the good old days
where we could both fuck you.’”

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Clockwise from top left: Neil Gaiman in 2002, with estranged wife Amanda Palmer in 2010, and with Henry Selick and
Dakota Fanning at the Coraline premiere. Photo: Getty.

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.” His downfall comes only when the titular
hero, the Sandman, also known as the Prince of Stories, frees Calliope from
bondage. A being of boundless charisma and creativity, the Sandman rules
the Dreaming, the realm we visit in our sleep, where “stories are spun.”
Older and more powerful than the most powerful gods, he can reward us
with exquisite delights or punish us with unending nightmares, depending
on what he feels we deserve. To punish the rapist, the Sandman floods
Madoc’s mind with such a wild torrent of ideas that he’s powerless to write
them down, let alone profit from them.

As allegations of Gaiman’s sexual misconduct emerged this past summer,

some observers noticed Gaiman and Madoc have certain things in common.
Like Madoc, Gaiman has called himself a feminist. Like Madoc, Gaiman has
racked up major awards (for Gaiman, awards in science fiction and fantasy
as well as dozens of prizes for contemporary novels, short stories, poetry,
television, and film, helping make him, according to several sources, a
millionaire many times over). And like Madoc, Gaiman has come to be seen
as a figure who transcended, and transformed, the genres in which he wrote:
first comics, then fantasy and children’s literature. But for most of his career,
readers identified him not with the rapist, who shows up in a single issue,
but with the Sandman, the inexhaustible fountain of story.

One of Gaiman’s greatest gifts as a story-teller was his voice, a warm and
gentle instrument that he’d tuned through elocution lessons as a boy in East
Grinstead, 30 miles south of London. In America, people mistakenly
assumed he was an English gentleman. “He spoke very slowly, in a hypnotic
way,” says one of his former students at the fantasy-writing workshop
Clarion. He wrote that way, too, with rhythm and restraint, lulling you into a
trance in the way that a bard might have done with a lyre. Another gift was
his memory. He has “libraries full of books memorized,” one of his old
friends tells me, noting that he could recall the page numbers of his favorite
passages and recite them verbatim. His vast collection was eclectic enough
to encompass both a box of comics (Spider-Man, Silver Surfer) from his
boyhood and the works of Oscar Wilde he received as a gift for his bar
mitzvah. For The Sandman, a forgotten DC property he had been hired to
dust off and polish up, Gaiman gave the hero a makeover, replacing his
green suit, fedora, and gas mask with the leather armor of an angsty goth,
and surrounded him with characters drawn from the books he could pull off
the shelves in his head, from timeless icons like Shakespeare and Lucifer to
the obscure San Francisco eccentric Joshua Abraham Norton. Norman
Mailer called it “a comic strip for intellectuals.”

Gaiman and the Sandman shared a penchant for dressing in black, a shock
of unruly black hair, and an erotic power seldom possessed by authors of
comic books and fantasy novels. A descendant of Polish Jewish immigrants,
Gaiman had gotten his start in the ’80s as a journalist for hire in London
covering Duran Duran, Lou Reed, and other brooding lords of rock, and in
the world of comic conventions, he was the closest thing there was to that
archetype. Women would turn up to his signings dressed in the elaborate
Victorian-goth attire of his characters and beg him to sign their breasts or
slip him key cards to their hotel rooms. One writer recounts running into
Gaiman at a World Fantasy Convention in 2011. His assistant wasn’t around,
and he was late to a reading. “I can’t get to it if I walk by myself,” he told her.
As they made their way through the convention side by side, “the whole floor
full of people tilted and slid toward him,” she says. “They wanted to be
entwined with him in ways I was not prepared to defend him against.” A
woman fell to her knees and wept.

People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an

“inherently vulnerable community,” one of Gaiman’s former friends, a
fantasy writer, tells me. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it
becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share their souls with the
creators of these works. “And if you have morality around it, you say ‘no.’” It
was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers
that Gaiman cheated on his first wife, Mary McGrath, a private midwestern
Scientologist he’d married in his early 20s. But in my conversations with
Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me
that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but
enthusiastically consensual. As one prominent editor in the field puts it,
“The one thing I hear again and again, largely from women, is ‘He was
always nice to me. He was always a gentleman.’” The writer Kelly Link, who
met Gaiman at a reading in 1997, recalls finding him charmingly goofy. “He
was hapless in a way that was kind of exasperating,” she says, “but also made
him seem very harmless.” Someone who had a sexual relationship with
Gaiman in the aughts recalls him flipping through questions fans wrote on
cards at a Q&A session. Once, a fan asked if she could be his “sex slave”: “He
read it aloud and said, ‘Well, no.’ He’d be very demure.”

But there were some who saw another side of the author. One woman,
Brenda (a pseudonym), met Gaiman in the ’90s at a signing for The
Sandman where she was working. On signing lines, Gaiman had a knack for
connecting with each individual. He would ask questions, laugh, and assure
them that their inability to form sentences was fine. After the Sandman
signing, at a dinner attended by those who had worked the event, Gaiman
sat next to Brenda. “Everyone wanted to be near him, but he was laser
focused on me,” she says. A few years later, Brenda traveled to Chicago to
attend the World Horror Convention, where Gaiman received the top prize
for American Gods, the book that cemented him as a best-selling novelist.
The night after the awards ceremony, she and Gaiman ended up in bed
together. As soon as they began to hook up, the feeling that had drawn her
to him — the magical spell of his interest in her individuality — vanished.
“He seemed to have a script,” she tells me. “He wanted me to call him
‘master’ immediately.” He demanded that she promise him her soul. “It was
like he’d gone into this ritual that had nothing to do with me.”
On Late Night With Seth Meyers in 2016 and accepting the Visionary Award in 2024. Photo: Getty.

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 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 U.S., the U.K., and New
Zealand. By then, he had a reputation as an outspoken champion of women.
“Gaiman insists on telling the stories of people who are traditionally
marginalized, missing, or silenced in literature,” wrote Tara Prescott-
Johnson in the essay collection Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman.
Although his books abounded with stories of men torturing, raping, and
murdering women, this was largely perceived as evidence of his empathy.

Katherine Kendall was 22 when she met Gaiman in 2012. She was
volunteering at one of his events in Asheville, North Carolina. He invited her
to join him a few days later at an after-party for another event, where he
kissed her. The two struck up a flirtatious correspondence, emailing and
Skyping in the middle of the night. Kendall didn’t want to have sex with
Gaiman, and on one of their calls, she told him this. Afterward, she recorded
his reply in her diary: “He had no designs on me beyond flirty friendship
and I believe him thoroughly.” She’d grown up listening to his audiobooks,
she later told Papillon DeBoer, the host of the podcast Am I Broken: “And
then that same voice that told me those beautiful stories when I was a kid
was telling me the story that I was safe, and that we were just friends, and
that he wasn’t a threat.”

At a reading ten months later, Gaiman suggested that Kendall and two other
girls wait for him on his tour bus so they could all hang out after he was
done signing. When Gaiman showed up, he pulled Kendall into the back of
the bus and lay on top of her. He kept saying, “Kiss me like you mean it,”
Kendall remembers. She tried to get into it, but she was panicked.
Eventually, Gaiman rolled off her. “‘I’m a very wealthy man,’” she remembers
him saying, “‘and I’m used to getting what I want.’” (Years later, Gaiman gave
Kendall $60,000 to pay for therapy in an attempt, as he put it in a recorded
phone call, “to make up some of the damage.”)

With Kendra Stout in April 2007. Photo: Courtesy of Kendra

Gaiman had been having sexual encounters with younger fans for a long
time. Kendra Stout was 18 when, in 2003, she drove four and a half hours to
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to see Gaiman read from Endless Nights, a follow-
up to The Sandman. She met him in the signing line. Gaiman sent her long
emails and bought her a web camera so they could chat on video. Around
three years after they met, he flew to Orlando to take her on a date. He
invited her back to his hotel room, put on a playlist of love songs, and held
her down with one hand. Gaiman didn’t believe in foreplay or lubrication,
Stout tells me, which could make sex particularly painful. When she said it
hurt too much, he’d tell her the problem was she wasn’t submissive enough.
“He talked at length about the dominant and submissive relationship he
wanted out of me,” she tells me. Stout had no prior interest in BDSM. She
says Gaiman never asked what she liked in bed, and there was no discussion
of “safe words” or “aftercare” or “limits.” He’d ask her to call him “master”
and beat her with his belt. “These were not sexy little taps,” she says. When
she told him she didn’t like it, she says he replied, “It’s the only way I can get
off.”

Gaiman told Stout he had been introduced to these practices by a woman

he’d met in his early 20s who had asked him to “whip her pussy.” At the time,
he claimed to Stout, he was such a naïve Englishman that he thought she
meant her cat. Then she handed him a flogger and told him to use it on her
vagina. “‘This is what gets me off now,’” Stout recalls him saying. A similar
anecdote shows up in an interview Gaiman gave for a 2022 biography of
Kathy Acker, the late experimental punk writer Gaiman befriended in his
20s, but he offers a different account of how it affected him. When Acker
asked him to “whip her pussy,” he found it “profoundly unsexual,” he told the
interviewer. “I did it and ran away.” He identified himself as “very vanilla.”

In 2007, Gaiman and Stout took a trip to the Cornish countryside. On their
last night there, Stout developed a UTI that had gotten so bad she couldn’t
sit down. She told Gaiman they could fool around but that any penetration
would be too painful to bear. “It was a big hard ‘no,’” she says. “I told him,
‘You cannot put anything in my vagina or I will die.’” Gaiman flipped her
over on the bed, she says, and attempted to penetrate her with his fingers.
She told him “no.” He stopped for a moment and then he penetrated her
with his penis. At that point, she tells me, “I just shut down.” She lay on the
bed until he was finished. (This past October, she filed a police report
alleging he raped her.)

According to the podcast, which quoted Gaiman through his

representatives, his position was that “sexual degradation, bondage,
domination, sadism, and masochism may not be to everyone’s taste, but
between consenting adults, BDSM is lawful.” (Gaiman declined to speak
with me despite multiple requests, but through a legal representative, he
responded to some claims.) If you know nothing about BDSM, Gaiman’s
claim that he was engaging in it with these women may sound plausible, at
least in some cases. The kind of domineering violence he inflicted on them is
common among people who practice BDSM, and all of the women, at some
point, played along, calling him their master, texting him afterward that
they needed him, even writing that they loved and missed him. But there is a
crucial difference between BDSM and what Gaiman was doing. An acronym
for “bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and
masochism,” BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms, the most
important of which is that all parties must eagerly and clearly consent to the
overall dynamic as well as to each act before they engage in it. This, as many
practitioners, including sex educators like Dossie Easton and Janet W.
Hardy who wrote some of the defining texts of the subculture, have stressed
over decades, is the defining line that separates BDSM from abuse. And it
was a line that Gaiman, according to the women, did not respect. 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.”
February 2022: The bathtub in Gaiman’s garden where Scarlett Pavlovich alleges he raped her, which Gaiman denies.
February 5, 2022: Pavlovich the morning after the bathtub incident. Photo: Courtesy of Scarlett Pavlovich.

After Gaiman got into the bathtub with Pavlovich, she retreated to Palmer’s
house, which was vacant at the time. She sat in the shower for an hour,
crying, then got into Palmer’s bed and began to search the internet for clues
that might explain what had happened to her. She Googled “Me Too” and
“Neil Gaiman.” Nothing. The only negative stories she found were about how
he’d broken COVID lockdown rules in 2020 and had been forced to
apologize to the people of the Isle of Skye for endangering their lives.

At the end of the weekend, Palmer texted Pavlovich to say how pleased she
was to see Pavlovich and her child get along. “The universe is a karmic
mystery,” Palmer wrote. “We nourish each other in the most random and
unpredictable ways.” Palmer asked if she could babysit again. She needed so
much help. Would Pavlovich consider staying with them for the foreseeable
future?

Pavlovich was living in a sublet that was about to end. She was broke and
hadn’t been able to find a new apartment. She’d been homeless at the start
of the pandemic, when the perfumery closed, and had ended up crashing on
the beach in a friend’s sleeping bag on and off for the first two weeks of
lockdown. The thought of returning to the beach filled her with dread.

She didn’t consider reaching out to her own family. Her parents had
divorced when she was 3, and Pavlovich had grown up splitting time
between their households. Violence, Pavlovich tells me, “was normalized in
the household.” One close family member beat her with a belt. Another
would strangle Pavlovich when she got upset and slap her across the face
until her cheeks were raw. She began to regularly cut her arms and wrists
with a knife when she was 11. She became bulimic, then anorexic. By 13,
Pavlovich had grown so thin that she ended up in a psychiatric unit at
Auckland Children’s Hospital and spent weeks on a feeding tube. When she
was 15, she left home and never went back.

In the years since, she had been looking for a new family, but many of the
people she’d encountered in that search turned out to be abusive as well.
“After all of this, Amanda Palmer was an actual creature sent from a celestial
realm. It was like, Hallelujah,” Pavlovich tells me. Palmer was famous for
speaking out about sexual abuse and encouraging others to do the same. In
songs and essays, she had written of having been sexually assaulted and
raped on multiple occasions as a teenager and young woman. Pavlovich
didn’t think someone like that could be married to someone who would
assault women.

Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person
can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not
immediately recognize it as such; some never do. “You’re not thinking in a
linear or logical fashion,” Pavlovich says, “but the mind is trying to process it
in the ways that it can.” Whatever had happened in the bath, she’d been
through worse and survived, she thought. And Gaiman and Palmer were
offering her the possibility of a shared future. Palmer’s vision of herself as
the central figure of a utopian community could, according to some of her
friends, make her careless with the young, impressionable women she
invited into her and her husband’s lives. “Her idealism could blind her to
reality,” one friend says. (Palmer declined to be interviewed, but I spoke with
people close to her.) Palmer told Pavlovich they might travel to London
together, and to Scotland, where Gaiman was shooting the second season of
Good Omens. Pavlovich had wanted to leave New Zealand — her “epicenter
of trauma” — for as long as she could remember. These conversations filled
her head with fantasies “of finally being on solid ground in the world.”

After Palmer’s offer, Pavlovich texted Gaiman: “I am consumed by thoughts

of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry. What a terrible creature
you’ve turned me into.” The following weekend, she packed up her sublet
and boarded the ferry to Waiheke.

Throughout his career, Gaiman has written about terror from the point of
view of a child. His most recent novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, tells
the story of a quiet and bookish 7-year-old boy. Through various unfortunate
events, he ends up with a hole in his heart that can never be healed, a
doorway through which nightmares from distant realms enter our world.
Over the course of the tale, the boy suffers terribly, sometimes at the hands
of his own family. At dinner one night, the boy refuses to eat the food his
nanny has prepared. The nanny, the boy knows, isn’t really a human but a
nightmare creature from another world. When his father demands to know
why he won’t eat, the boy explains, “She’s a monster.” His father becomes
enraged. To punish him, he fills the tub, then picks up the child, plunges him
into the bath, and pushes his shoulders and head beneath the chilly water. “I
had read many books in that bath,” the boy says. “It was one of my safe
places. And now, I had no doubt, I was going to die there.” Later that night,
the boy runs away from home; on his way out, he glimpses his father having
sex with the monstrous nanny through the drawing-room window.

In various interviews over the years, Gaiman has called The Ocean at the
End of the Lane his most personal book. While much of it is fantastical,
Gaiman has said “that kid is me.” The book is set in Sussex, where Gaiman
grew up. In the story, the narrator survives otherworldly evil with the help of
a family of magical women. As a child, Gaiman had no such friends to call
on. “I was going back to the 7-year-old me and giving myself a peculiar kind
of love that I didn’t have,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “I never feel the
past is dead or young Neil isn’t around anymore. He’s still there, hiding in a
library somewhere, looking for a doorway that will lead him to somewhere
safe where everything works.”

While Gaiman has identified the boy in the book as himself, he has also
claimed that none of the things that happen to the boy happened to him. Yet
there is reason to believe that some of the most horrifying events of the
novel did occur. Gaiman has rarely spoken about a core fact of his
childhood. In 1965, when Neil was 5 years old, his parents, David and Sheila,
left their jobs as a business executive and a pharmacist and bought a house
in East Grinstead, a mile away from what was at that time the worldwide
headquarters for the Church of Scientology. Its founder, the former science-
fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, lived down the road from them from 1965
until 1967, when he fled the country and began directing the church from
international waters, pursued by the CIA, FBI, and a handful of foreign
governments and maritime agencies.

David and Sheila were among England’s earliest adherents to Scientology.

They began studying Dianetics in 1956 and eventually took positions in the
Guardian’s Office, a special department of the organization dedicated to
handling the church’s growing number of legal cases, public
communications, and intelligence operations. The mission of this office, as
Hubbard wrote, was its “covert use in destroying the repute of individuals
and groups.” On the side, the Gaimans ran the church’s canteen, lodged
foreign Scientologists in their home, and opened a vitamin company in
town, where they supplied courses of supplements for Scientology’s
“detoxification” programs, a business that grew exponentially alongside the
expansion of the church. By the late ’60s, David was the church’s public face
and chief spokesperson in the U.K.

It was a challenging job, to say the least. The U.K., following the example of
a handful of other governments, had issued a report declaring Scientology’s
methods “a serious danger to the health of those who submit to them.”
Hubbard would routinely punish members of the organization who
committed minor infractions by binding them, blindfolding them, and
throwing them overboard into icy waters. Back in England, David gave
interviews to the press to smooth over such troubling accounts. The church
was under particular pressure to assure the public it was not harming
children. In his bulletins to members, Hubbard had made it clear that
children were not to be exempt from the punishments to which adults were
subjected. If a child laughed inappropriately or failed to remember a
Scientology term, they could be sent to the ship’s hold and made to chip rust
for days or confined in a chain locker for weeks at a time without blankets or
a bathroom. In his book Going Clear, Lawrence Wright recounts the story of
a 4-year-old boy named Derek Greene, an adopted Black child who stole a
Rolex and dropped it overboard. He was confined to the locker for two days
and nights. When his mother pleaded with Hubbard to let him out, he
“reminded her of the Scientology axiom that children are actually adults in
small bodies, and equally responsible for their behavior.” (A representative
for the Church of Scientology said it does not speak about members past or
present but denies that this event occurred.)

David used Neil as an exhibit in his case to the public. In 1968, he arranged
for Neil to give an interview to the BBC. When the reporter asked the child if
Scientology made him “a better boy,” Neil replied, “Not exactly that, but
when you make a release, you feel absolutely great.” (A release, in
Scientology lingo, is what happens when you complete one of the lower
levels of coursework.) What was happening away from the cameras is
difficult to know, in part because Gaiman has avoided talking about it,
changing the subject whenever an interviewer, or a friend, brings it up. But
it seems unlikely that he would have been spared the disciplinary measures
inflicted on adults and children as a standard practice at that time.
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.”

As a teenager, Neil worked for the Church of Scientology for three years as
an auditor, a minister of the church who conducts a process some have
likened to hypnosis. One former member of the church who worked with
Gaiman’s parents and was audited by Gaiman recalls him as precocious and
ambitious. It was unusual for a teenager to have completed such a high level
of training, he tells me. But the Gaimans were like “royalty,” he says. In 1981,
David was promoted to lead the Guardian’s Office, making him one of the
most powerful people in the church. But the same year, he fell from grace. A
new generation of Scientologists, led by David Miscavige, who eventually
succeeded Hubbard as the church’s leader, had Hubbard’s ear, and David
was “caught in that grinder,” as his former colleague puts it. A document
declaring David a “Suppressive person” was released a few years later. It
accused him of a range of offenses, including sexual misconduct. David, the
document claims, put on a “front” of being “mild mannered and quite
sociable,” adding that his actions “belie this.” His greatest offense, it seemed,
was hubris. “Gaiman required others to look up to him instead of to Source,”
it reads, referring to Hubbard.

In the ’80s, David was sent off to a sort of rehabilitation camp. It was around
this time that Gaiman set out to make a living as a writer. Charming and
strategic, he used the contacts he developed as a journalist to break into the
business of genre writing, endearing himself to the giants of that world at
the time: Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke, Clive Barker, Terry Pratchett,
Alan Moore. “When I was young, I had unbelievable chutzpah,” Gaiman says
in the documentary Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously. “The kind of
monstrous self-certainty that you only get normally in people who then go
on to conquer half the civilized world.”

Gaiman and Palmer met in 2008, when she was 32 and he was 47. Both
were at a turning point in their lives and careers. Gaiman was in the midst
of finalizing a divorce from his first wife, with whom he had three children,
and on the verge of breaking into Hollywood (nine of his works have been
turned into movies or TV shows); Palmer was in a fight with her record label
that would culminate in a split. Palmer had a collection of photos of herself
posing as a murdered corpse and wanted Gaiman to write captions to go
along with the pictures. Gaiman liked the idea, and the two met to work on
the project, a book tied to her first solo album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer.
As Palmer described in The Art of Asking, they were not attracted to each
other at first. “I thought he looked like a baggy-eyed, grumpy old man, and
he thought I looked like a chubby little boy.”

Gaiman was the first to propose a romantic relationship. In an interview, he

later said, “I got together with her because I couldn’t ever imagine being
bored.” Palmer could. Ever since she’d gotten her start as a street busker,
painting her face white and standing on a crate in Harvard Square dressed
as a silent eight-foot-tall bride, she prided herself on a low-rent, bohemian
lifestyle, couch-surfing when she toured, playing random shows in the living
rooms of her fans. She had no savings and didn’t own a car, real estate, or
kitchen appliances. Gaiman owned multiple houses. He was too rich, 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, and they
shared a dark, fantastical aesthetic. She also felt a little sorry for him. He
seemed lonely, in spite of his fame, and Palmer found herself hoping that she
could help him. “He’d believed for a long time, deep down, that people didn’t
actually fall in love,” she wrote in her book. “‘But that’s impossible,’” she told
him. He’d written stories and scenes of people in love. “‘That’s the whole
point, darling,’ he said. ‘Writers make things up.’”

They wed in 2011 in the Berkeley home of their friends Michael Chabon and
Ayelet Waldman, the novelists. Their union had a multiplying effect on their
fame and stature, drawing each out of their respective domains of cult
stardom and into the airy realm of tech-funded virality. They became
darlings of the TED talk circuit and regulars at Jeff Bezos’s ultrasecret
Campfire retreat. Gaiman introduced Palmer to Twitter, which he had used
to become fantasy’s most beloved author of 140-character bons mots.
Palmer, in turn, leaned into her growing reputation as a crowdfunding
genius. Online, they flirted, went after each other’s critics, and praised each
other’s progressive politics. In an interview with Out magazine in 2012,
Palmer said that the main “other” relationship in both of their lives was with
their fans: “Sometimes when I’m with Neil, and go to the other room to
Twitter with my followers, it feels like sneaking off for a quick shag.”

This wasn’t strictly a metaphor. During the early years of their marriage,
they lived apart for months at a time and encouraged each other to have
affairs. According to conversations with five of Palmer’s closest friends, the
most important rule governing their open relationship was honesty. They
found that sharing the details of their extramarital dalliances — and
sometimes sharing the same partners — brought them closer together.

In 2012, Palmer met a 20-year-old fan, who has asked to be referred to as

Rachel, at a Dresden Dolls concert. After one of Palmer’s next shows, the
women had sex. The morning after, Palmer snapped a few semi-naked
pictures of Rachel and asked if she could send one to Gaiman. She and
Palmer slept together a few more times, but then Palmer seemed to lose
interest in sex with her. Some six months after they met, Palmer introduced
Rachel to Gaiman online, telling Rachel, “He’ll love you.” The two struck up
a correspondence that quickly turned sexual, and Gaiman invited her to his
house in Wisconsin. As she packed for the trip, she asked Palmer over email
if she had any advice for pleasing Gaiman in bed. Palmer joked in response,
“i think the fun is finding out on your own.” With Gaiman, Rachel says there
was never a “blatant rupture of consent” but that he was always pressing her
to do things that hurt and scared her. Looking back, she feels Palmer gave
her to him “like a toy.”

For Gaiman and Palmer, these were happy years. With his editing help, she
wrote The Art of Asking. They toured together. And when Palmer was
offered a residency at Bard College, Gaiman tagged along to give some talks,
then ended up receiving an offer to join the faculty as a professor of the arts.
After they’d been together for a few years, Palmer began asking Gaiman to
tell her more about his childhood in Scientology. But he seemed unable to
string more than a few sentences together. When she encouraged him to
continue, he would curl up on the bed into a fetal position and cry. He
refused to see a therapist. Instead, he sat down to write a short story that
kept getting longer until it had turned into a novel. Although the child at the
center of the story in many ways remains opaque, Palmer felt he had never
been so open. He dedicated the book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, “to
Amanda, who wanted to know.”
In 2014, the cracks in Gaiman and Palmer’s marriage began to show to those
around them. While they were at Bard, they decided to buy a house upstate.
Palmer would have preferred to live in New York City, but Gaiman liked the
woods. Eventually, he picked a sprawling estate set on 80 acres in
Woodstock. It was Gaiman’s money, a friend who accompanied them on the
house hunt says, “and he was going to have the say.”

Later that year, Palmer got pregnant. She and Gaiman were spending more
time at home together and talked about slowing down and devoting their
attention to their marriage. She wanted to close the relationship, and he
agreed. But when she was eight months pregnant, Gaiman came to her with
a problem: He had slept with a fan in her early 20s, taking her virginity.
Now, Gaiman told her, the girl was “going crazy.” He promised to change,
and they met with a couples counselor. Gaiman was prone to panic attacks
and had never been in treatment. “Amanda was shocked at how traumatized
Neil was, given his public persona and the guy she thought she’d married,” a
person close to them says.

One of the people in whom Palmer confided about her marital issues at the
time was Caroline, a potter who, along with her builder husband, Phillip,
had been living on the Woodstock property and working as a caretaker.
Gaiman had made them an offer that seemed too good to be true. They
would build an addition on one of the cabins on the land at Gaiman’s
expense, and in exchange, Gaiman would sell them a five-acre parcel,
allowing them to put up a barn-style home to share with their three
daughters. They tended to the garden, ran errands for guests, and
rehabilitated the buildings, which needed plumbing and electrical work.

At lunch one day, Palmer told Caroline she hated living in the woods and
was disturbed by what she was learning about her husband. “‘You have no
idea the twisted, dark things that go on in that man’s head,’” Caroline recalls
Palmer saying. Palmer said she wished her marriage were more like Caroline
and Phillip’s, but their marriage of 11 years was falling apart, too. In 2017,
Phillip moved out of their house. Caroline, 54, spent her days in bed crying
and drinking. She stopped eating and, for the most part, stopped working. It
was then that Gaiman began paying attention to her. He would bring juices
up to her cabin and fret that she was losing too much weight. The first time
he touched her, in December 2018, she was sitting on his couch next to him,
crying from exhaustion. Gaiman told her, “You need a hug.” She stood and
he hugged her, then slid his hands down her pants and into her underwear
and squeezed her butt. She does not recall saying or doing anything in
response. “I was stunned,” she says.

Over the next two years, they had a series of sexual encounters, always when
Palmer was away. When Gaiman wasn’t around, they occasionally engaged
in phone sex. At first Caroline, who hadn’t been with anyone since Phillip
left, went along willingly. But at the end of their second encounter, she
remembers asking Gaiman what Palmer would think about their romance:
“He said, ‘Caroline, there is no romance.’” After that, she tried to keep her
distance from him, darting away when she saw him on the estate. He was
difficult to avoid. He kept an egg incubator in Caroline’s cabin and would
come down and check on it, entering without texting first. On one of these
visits, he found her crying by the fireplace. He walked over to her, stuck his
thumb in her mouth, and twisted her nipples. She told Gaiman the
arrangement was making her “feel bad.” She recalls him replying, “I don’t
want you to feel bad.” But nothing changed. Caroline had no income at the
time and was borrowing money from her sister to get by. She worried that if
she didn’t appease Gaiman, he’d kick her out of her house and then she and
her three daughters would have nowhere to go. “‘I like our trade,’” she
remembers him saying. “‘You take care of me, and I’ll take care of you.’”

Sometimes she would babysit. Once, Caroline and the boy, then 4, fell asleep
reading stories in Gaiman and Palmer’s bed. Caroline woke up when
Gaiman returned home. He got into bed with his son in the middle, then
reached across the child to grab Caroline’s hand and put it on his penis. She
says she jumped out of the bed. “He didn’t have boundaries,” Caroline says.
“I remember thinking that there was something really wrong with him.”

In April 2021, Gaiman informed Caroline that the land he’d promised her
was no longer available. That summer, she stopped responding to his
attempts to engage in phone sex and Gaiman increased the pressure on her
to leave his property. One night in December 2021, Gaiman’s business
manager, Terry Bird, called Caroline and offered her $5,000 to move
immediately if she’d sign a 16-page NDA agreeing to never discuss anything
about her experience with Gaiman or Palmer or to take legal action against
Gaiman. Caroline recalls saying to Bird, “What am I going to do with
$5,000? I need therapy. This is maybe $300,000.” Looking back, she says
she didn’t know how she came up with that number, but Gaiman agreed to
it, and she signed. (Gaiman’s representatives say Caroline initiated the
sexual encounters and deny that he engaged in any sexual activity with her
in the presence of his son.)

Two months later, Pavlovich arrived on Waiheke. By then, Palmer and

Gaiman were divorcing. According to Palmer’s friends, she asked for a
divorce after Rachel called to tell her that she and Gaiman were still having
sexual contact, long past the point when Palmer thought their relationship
had ended. She was hurt but unsurprised. “I find it all very boring,” she later
wrote to Rachel, who recalls the exchange. “Just the lack of self-knowledge
and the lack of interest in self-knowledge.” In late 2021, Palmer found out
about Caroline, too. “I remember her saying, ‘That poor woman,’” recalls
Lance Horne, a musician and friend of Palmer’s in whom she confided at the
time. “‘I can’t believe he did it again.’”
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. Still, she
knew enough to warn Gaiman to stay away from their new babysitter. “I
remember specifically her saying, ‘You could really hurt this person and
break her; keep your hands off of her,’” the friend says. And Palmer still
hoped, according to those close to her, that she and Gaiman would be able to
negotiate a peaceful co-parenting arrangement. She found a school for their
child and the two houses on Waiheke. “She was going to do her best to keep
Neil as a presence for her son,” one friend says.

One evening, Palmer dropped Pavlovich and the child off with Gaiman and
retreated back to her own place. Pavlovich was in the kitchen, tidying up,
when he approached her from behind and pulled her to the sofa. “It all
happened again so quickly,” Pavlovich says. Gaiman pushed down her pants
and began to beat her with his belt. He then attempted to initiate anal sex
without lubrication. “I screamed ‘no,’” Pavlovich says. Had Gaiman and
Pavlovich been engaging in BDSM, this could conceivably have been part of
a rape scene, a scenario sometimes described as consensual nonconsent. But
that would have required careful negotiation in advance, which she says they
had not done. After she said “no,” Gaiman backed off briefly and went into
the kitchen. When he returned, he brought butter to use as lubricant. She
continued to scream until Gaiman was finished. When it was over, he called
her “slave” and ordered her to “clean him up.” She protested that it wasn’t
hygienic. “He said, ‘Are you defying your master?’” she recalls. “I had to lick
my own shit.”

Afterward, she got into the shower and tried to wash her mouth out with a
bar of lavender soap. It had a grainy texture and tasted of metal, acid, and
herbs. She noticed blood swirling down the drain. He hadn’t used a condom,
and she worried she might have gotten an infection. She had a migraine, and
her whole body ached. But she didn’t consider leaving. She’d hated herself
her whole life, she tells me, “and when someone comes along and hates you
as much as yourself, it is kind of a relief, without it always being consent.”
She says she understands how Scientologists might have felt when they were
sent to the Hole, a detention center where they were forced to lick the floor
as punishment. She’d heard of how some would stay in the room even after
they were allowed to leave. “People keep licking the floor in that horrible
room,” she says.

The nights with Gaiman blurred together. There was the time she passed out
from pain while Gaiman was having anal sex with her. He made her perform
oral sex while his penis had urine on it. He ordered her to suck him off while
he watched screeners for the first season of The Sandman. In one instance,
he thrust his penis into Pavlovich’s mouth with such force that she vomited
on him. Then he told her to eat the vomit off his lap and lick it up from the
couch.

A week or so into Pavlovich’s time with the family, their son began to address
her as “slave” and ordered Pavlovich to call him “master.” Gaiman seemed to
find it amusing. Sometimes he’d say to his child, in an affable tone, “Now,
now, Scarlett’s not a slave. No, you mustn’t.” One day, Pavlovich came into
the living room when Gaiman and the boy were on the couch watching the
children’s show Odd Squad. She joined them, sitting down next to the child.
Gaiman put his arm around them both, reached into Pavlovich’s shirt, and
fondled her breasts. She says he didn’t make any effort to hide what he was
doing from the boy. Another time, during the day, he requested oral sex in
the middle of the kitchen while the boy was awake and somewhere in the
house. “He would never shut a door,” she says.

On February 19, 2022, Gaiman and his son spent the night at a hotel in
Auckland, which they sometimes did for fun. Gaiman asked Pavlovich if she
could come by and watch the child for an hour so he could get a massage. It
was a small room — one double bed, a television, and a bathroom. When he
returned, Gaiman and the boy ate dinner, takeout from a nearby
delicatessen. Afterward, Gaiman wanted to watch a movie, but the child
wanted to play with the iPad. The boy sat against the wall by the picture
window overlooking the city, facing the bed. Pavlovich perched on the edge
of the mattress; Gaiman got onto the bed and pulled her so she was on her
back. He lifted the covers up over them. She tried to signal to him with her
eyes that he should stop. She mouthed, “What the fuck are you doing?” She
didn’t want the child to overhear what she was saying. Gaiman ignored her.
He rolled her onto her side, took off his pants, pulled off her skirt, and began
to have sex with her from behind while continuing to speak with his son.
“‘You should really get off the iPad,’” she recalls him saying. Pavlovich, in a
state of shock, buried her head in the pillow. After about five minutes,
Gaiman got up and walked to the bathroom, half-naked. He urinated on his
hand and then returned to Pavlovich, frozen on the bed, and told her to “lick
it off.” He went back to the bathroom, naked from the waist down. “Before
you leave,” he told Pavlovich, “you have to finish your job.” She went to the
bathroom, and he pushed her to her knees. The door was open. (Gaiman’s
representatives say these allegations are “false, not to mention, deplorable.”)

Three weeks after Pavlovich arrived on Waiheke, Palmer told her that the
child would be traveling with Gaiman to Edinburgh in a few days to visit the
Amazon production of his series Anansi Boys. They wouldn’t need her for a
couple of weeks. That morning, Pavlovich came down with COVID. Palmer
and Gaiman agreed that she could isolate in Gaiman’s empty home. They
still hadn’t paid her for a single hour she’d worked for them.
February 26, 2022: In Gaiman’s bed after he left for Edinburgh. March 8, 2022: After telling Palmer about her -
experience with Gaiman. Photo: Courtesy of Scarlett Pavlovich.

Ten days after Gaiman left New Zealand, Pavlovich went to Palmer’s house
for dinner. She asked Palmer if she could tell her something in confidence
and made her promise not to tell Gaiman. She begged for reassurance that
she would still keep her job as the child’s nanny. Palmer assured Pavlovich
her employment was not in danger. Sitting in the kitchen, Pavlovich told
Palmer that Gaiman had made a pass at her. She told Palmer about the bath.
“I didn’t have any choice in the matter,” she said. “He just did it.” She said he
had been having sex with her ever since. She withheld some of the most
brutal details and did not describe her experience as sexual assault; she
didn’t yet see it that way.

Palmer did not appear to be surprised. “Fourteen women have come to me

about this,” she said. She mentioned that Gaiman had slept with another
babysitter during his first marriage, and that she’d heard from other women
who were disturbed by their experiences with him. Pavlovich waited until
the end to tell Palmer about the child being present in Auckland. Afterward,
she recalled, Palmer was silent. She appeared shocked. Palmer insisted that
Pavlovich spend the night in her guest room. She told her, “I’ve had to do
this before, and I can do this again. I will take care of you.” Pavlovich lay
down in the bed and heard Palmer pacing back and forth in her room
upstairs until 3 a.m.

Palmer called Gaiman that night. According to Horne, the musician, she
asked Gaiman whether their son had been wearing headphones while he
and Pavlovich were in the hotel room. He replied “no,” then hung up. The
following day, Palmer emailed Gaiman and their couples counselor, a man
named Wayne Muller, a minister and “a sort of marital companion,” as he
put it to me. According to Muller, who relayed the contents of the email to
me, Palmer wrote that Gaiman needed psychiatric treatment and had finally
agreed to seek it. “Everyone was trying to make the best of what was clearly
a difficult situation,” Muller tells me. Palmer then flew to Edinburgh, where
Gaiman was staying with their son, whom she collected. Meanwhile,
Pavlovich received a text from Gaiman: “Amanda tells me that you are
having a rough time and you are really upset with me about what we did. I
feel awful about this. Would you like to talk about it? Is there anything I can
do to make anything better?” Pavlovich didn’t respond immediately. “My
reflex was to fix the situation,” she tells me. The next day, she wrote, “Hey.
We’ll speak soon … hope you are doing good.”

In the days and weeks after Pavlovich’s revelation, Palmer was solicitous,
checking in frequently over text and sending warm notes: “From the minute
you entwined your fate with mine on ponsonby road i’ve been glad i met
you. That is tenfold so now.” She helped Pavlovich find a temporary
apartment and invited her over for meals. In late March, Palmer sent a
message to a friend of Pavlovich’s, a 41-year-old ceramicist named Misma
Anaru, in whom Pavlovich had confided about Gaiman. “I’m glad she had
you to take care of her,” she wrote. “It’s been a rough month for everyone.”
Anaru’s partner, Kris Taylor, was a doctor of psychology who had lectured at
the University of Auckland on coercion, consent, and rape. Although
Pavlovich had never used the words rape or sexual assault to describe what
had happened to her, both Anaru and Taylor believed Gaiman had raped her
repeatedly. Anaru felt Palmer bore a share of the blame. Replying to Palmer,
she wrote that “the majority of my rage is directed at Neil.” But she couldn’t
understand why, with all Palmer knew about Gaiman, she had sent Scarlett
into that situation. “Did you not see this coming a mile away?” She added,
“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.”

Around the same time, Pavlovich followed up with Gaiman. “I had a very
intense dream about you last night,” she wrote. “Are you doing okay?” In his
reply, he made a reference to something that had happened two weeks
earlier. In a session with Muller, Palmer had said that Pavlovich was telling
people he had raped her and was planning to “Me Too” him. “I wanted to kill
myself,” he wrote. “But I’m getting through it a day at a time, and it’s been
two weeks now and I’m still here. Fragile but not great.” He expressed
dismay at Anaru’s message, which Palmer had told him about. “I’m a
monster in it,” he wrote, “and Amanda seems to have bought it hook line and
sinker.” Apologizing for “bringing any upset” into Pavlovich’s life, he wrote, “I
thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed.”

Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was
terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at
that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him. “It was
consensual (and wonderful)!” she wrote. Anaru had been “triggered by
something I think,” she added.

“I am so glad that you messaged me,” Gaiman wrote. “I thought you were a
monster.”
Gaiman asked Pavlovich to speak with Muller. “Knowing that you would be
prepared to say, ‘It’s not true, it was consensual, he’s not a monster,’ makes
me a lot more grounded,” he wrote. Muller reached out to Pavlovich to offer
a “safe harbor.” When they spoke on the phone, Pavlovich told Muller what
Gaiman, who was paying for the session, had asked her to say. After
listening to Muller’s “esoteric, spiritual claptrap,” she felt worse. “I really felt
it was all my fault.” Muller, for his part, tells me that ethical boundaries
prevent him from sharing anything about his sessions with Gaiman, but he
apparently felt comfortable sharing details of his conversation with
Pavlovich. “What she called to speak with me about was feeling pressured —
from very diverse, mostly older women in her community — to take action
that she wasn’t sure she felt comfortable taking. I accompanied her on a
journey to help her figure out the answers for herself to that issue.”

In the weeks that followed, Muller connected Gaiman with the Austen Riggs
Center, a psychiatric facility in Massachusetts. According to Muller, Gaiman
had several preliminary phone calls with the facility and was considering
entering a six-week inpatient evaluation process. But Gaiman never
followed through. “I don’t remember why not,” Muller says.

Pavlovich grew suicidal. She hoarded zopiclone and aspirin and walked
around the city surveying bridges. She decided she’d take the pills and told
Palmer about her plan. At Palmer’s urging, she checked into an emergency
room. “You are loved,” Palmer texted. After a few days in a respite center,
feeling slightly better, Pavlovich reached out to Palmer to ask if she could
resume working as the child’s nanny. The apartment Palmer had set her up
with was temporary, and she needed a place to stay. “It would be really good
for me I think to have something to do and people to be around,” she wrote.
Palmer argued that it was not the time for her to take on the responsibility
of caring for a child. “Your job is to care for you,” she replied. She proposed
they get together when Pavlovich got out, promising to help her get back on
her feet, and suggested in the meantime she go home to her parents. This
infuriated Pavlovich. “There is a reason I have divorced my parents,” she
wrote. “I’m starting to feel very much on my own and like I hate everyone.”

“I can’t offer you exactly what you want from me,” Palmer wrote, “but i can
still be here. remember this.”

“Babe I am more alone than I’ve ever been in my life,” Pavlovich replied. She
wished she’d never agreed to be their nanny: “If I hadn’t gotten on that first
ferry I wouldn’t be where I am now.”

That night, Pavlovich texted Gaiman. “Amanda keeps saying she will help
but it seems more philosophical rather than actually like she will help.” Two
minutes later, she added, “I’ve been thinking of you so much.” Gaiman
replied that he’d be happy to help in a tangible way. Pavlovich then received
an NDA dated to the first night of her employment, when he had suggested
she take a bath. She signed it. A month later, she received a bank transfer
from Gaiman: $1,700 for her babysitting work. Two months after that, she
received the first of nine payments totaling about $9,200.

Over the course of the year, Pavlovich’s perspective changed. “As he faded
away, I began to let other voices in,” she says. Friends connected her with
women who were experienced in dealing with sexual assault and abuse,
including Zelda Perkins, a former assistant of Harvey Weinstein’s and an
advocate for ending the “misuse of NDAs to buy women’s silence.” (Caroline
and Pavlovich broke their NDAs when they spoke out about Gaiman.) These
women encouraged her to go to the police.

In January 2023, Pavlovich filed a police report accusing Gaiman of sexual

assault. At the station, she gave a formal interview about the case. After she
told the officers her story, one of them told her that Palmer’s cooperation
would be essential for the case to move forward. Pavlovich assured them
Palmer would participate. “I said to them, ‘She’s a public feminist, and she
knows what happened. She’ll want to protect me. I’m sure she’ll speak.’”

When the police contacted Palmer later that year, she declined to talk with
them. Gaiman never spoke with the police either, though he did provide a
written statement. Whatever feelings Palmer might have had about the
situation went into a song she performed on tour in 2024, one she wrote
shortly after Pavlovich’s confession. It was called “Whakanewha,” named
after a park near their homes on Waiheke. “Another suicidal mass landing
on my doorstep — thanks a ton / A few more corpses in the sack / You’ll get
away with it; it’s just the same old script / This world is shaped to have your
back / You said, ‘I’m sorry,’ then you ran / And went and did it all again.”
May 16, 2022: From a video message to Pavlovich. January 20, 2023: A text to Pavlovich after she filed a police report.
Photo: Courtesy of Scarlett Pavlovich.

This past fall, Pavlovich began studying for a degree in English literature at
the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. As it happens, the university had
awarded Gaiman an honorary degree in 2016. In December, Pavlovich
approached the head of the university, Dame Sally Mapstone, to share her
experience and ask the university to review the decision to honor Gaiman.
Mapstone was sympathetic but indecisive; some on the board, she told
Pavlovich, would likely want evidence of prosecution to rescind his degree.
As far as the police report goes, the “matter has been closed,” a spokesperson
says. Gaiman’s career, meanwhile, has been marginally affected. A few
pending adaptations of his novels and comics have been put on hold or
canceled. But the second season of The Sandman is set to premiere on
Netflix this year, as is Anansi Boys on Amazon Prime. (Amazon did not
return a request for comment.) He and Palmer are entering the fifth year of
an ugly divorce and custody battle. Gaiman has “bled her dry” in the divorce
proceedings, according to someone close to her. She’s moved back in with
her parents in Massachusetts. (Gaiman’s representatives alleged that Palmer
was a “major force” driving this story in light of their contentious divorce.)

In December, Pavlovich flew to Atlanta to meet some of the other women

who had made accusations against Gaiman. They had been unaware of one
another’s existence until they’d heard the podcast. Since then, they had
formed a WhatsApp group and grown close. “It’s been like meeting survivors
of the same cult,” Stout tells me. “It’s impossible to understand unless you
were there.” On New Year’s Eve, Pavlovich, Stout, and Caroline gathered
around a bonfire at the Athens home of the musician Michael Stipe, an old
friend of Caroline’s. Kendall joined them on FaceTime. With their dark hair
and delicate features, they looked like they could be sisters. Around 11 p.m.,
they wrote down their intentions for the year and cast the scraps of paper
into the fire. Pavlovich had written that she wanted to “release the yoke of
victimhood” and “invite in self-acceptance.” The next morning, she woke
before the others, made coffee, cleaned the kitchen, and sat on the porch in
the winter sun. “Am I happy?” she wrote in her journal. “No.” But she also
noted that she wasn’t alone. “There is no need to feel abandoned anymore.”

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article in the January 13, 2025, issue of New York Magazine.

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