There Is No Safe Word

Lila Shapiro Jan. 13, 2025

How the best-selling fantasy author Neil

Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for
decades.
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 Photo: Guerin Blask/August

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

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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 prem...

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

February 2022: The bathtub in Gaiman’s garden where Scarlett

Pavlovich alleges he raped her, which Gaiman denies. February 5,
2022: Pavlovich the morn...

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.

Throughout his career, Gaiman has written about terror from the point
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 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.

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
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 a chubby little boy.”

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.”

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.’”

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...

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
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 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.

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 Pa...

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.)
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journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to
read in print, you can also find this article in the January 13, 2025,
issue of New York Magazine.
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