In July of 2024, start-up news outlet Tortoise Media published a series of podcasts which shocked the genre fiction world. Titled "Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman," this series contained the accounts of two women who accused the famed fantasy author and public figure of sexual assault. A few weeks later, two more women came forward with stories of gross misconduct from Gaiman. A fifth spoke out on the podcast Am I Broken?
Since then, the allegations against Gaiman have continued to snowball. Several TV adaptations of the author's work, including The Graveyard Book, The Sandman and the third and final season of Good Omens, have already been canceled or cut short. The most damning blow of all fell today: an extensive examination of the allegations published by Vulture, complete with new interviews with several of the women involved, author friends of Gaiman, musician friends of his ex-wife Amanda Palmer, quotes from their marriage counselor, and more.
I've been following this Gaiman story closely since it first broke last July, so I can say this without hyperbole: the revelations that Vulture writer Lisa Shapiro dug up are shocking, disturbing, and much, much worse than anything that has yet been reported. I gasped out loud at least a dozen times reading this very lengthy piece.
We're going to go over some of the most horrific new information from the Vulture article, because it's important that we acknowledge these allegations in genre spaces and have our reckonings with them. But I would highly recommend reading the full article yourself as well. Part of what makes it so soberingly painful is the extensive detail that Shapiro — and Gaiman's victims — go into about the terrible debasement, manipulation, and sexual assault that he subjected these women to. It is a difficult article to read, but an important one. To even discuss it in broad strokes, we need to give a firm trigger warning for graphic descriptions of sexual assault.
The allegations against Neil Gaiman are even more horrific than we thought
When Tortoise Media initially broke the story about the Gaiman allegations, they spoke to a young woman by the name of Scarlett, a 22-year-old nanny working in Australia who was hired to watch Gaiman's son in 2022. During her first meeting with Gaiman alone at his house, the 61-year-old author invited her into a pool, then got in with her and initiated an unwanted sexual advance. Scarlett filed a police report, but the case was dismissed. Gaiman's written account given to the police department by his representatives alleges that their encounters were consensual.
Vulture spoke with Scarlett, along with seven other women who had similar encounters with Gaiman. This young woman, Scarlett Pavlovich, was a fan of Gaiman's wife Amanda Palmer; Palmer hired her after a chance meeting on the street in 2020, and asked her to watch her and Gaiman's son over a weekend a couple of years later, which marked the beginning of her interactions with Gaiman. At the time, Gaiman and Palmer were already living in separate homes in the beginning stages of a messy divorce and custody battle.
Pavlovich's story functions almost as a framing device for the Vulture article, which returns to it again and again, each time revealing a horrifying new layer to Gaiman's treatment of her. In their initial encounter, Gaiman plied Scarlett with multiple glasses of wine while he drank water, before encouraging her to use an outdoor bath at his premises to relax while they waited for his son to return from a playdate. He claimed to have a business call he had to make in the meantime, giving her privacy...only to then show up naked to the bath once Pavlovich was already in it. After getting in and ignoring multliple refusals of his advances, Gaiman initiated unwanted sexual acts.
“The next part is really amorphous,” Pavlovich told Vulture. “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.’”
There are similar stories throughout the article, and each is more horrific than the last. I won't repost them all here — again, go read Vulture's article — but it suffices to say that if there was any clarity lacking on the exact nature of the allegations against Neil Gaiman from earlier reporting, that is no longer the case.
A common thread is that Gaiman initiated rough sexual acts, using lingo and ideas from BDSM without the consent which is so crucial to that particular kink community. Pavlovich recalls how on one occasion she passed out from the pain during anal sex, how he "ordered her to suck him off while he watched screeners for the first season of The Sandman," made her lick up her own vomit after she threw up from forceful oral sex, how he pulled down her pants and beat her with a belt without permission, and how he had sex with her in a hotel room while his 4-year-old son was on an iPad mere feet away.
Other women had similar accounts. One woman, Kendra Stout, says Gaiman penetrated her when she had an infection despite her repeated protests until she "just shut down.” Multiple women said that he exposed his son to some of this behavior. Pavlovich says that at one point, Gaiman's son called her "slave" and told her to call him "master," which Gaiman seemed to find "amusing." Another woman recalled a time when Gaiman groped her while they were lying in bed with his sleeping son between them. “He would never shut a door,” Pavlovich said, recounting how Gaiman had requested oral sex in the middle of his kitchen while his son was awake in another part of the house.
Power imbalances and the manipulation of fame
Another common thread throughout these allegations is that of emotional manipulation, supported by the fact that Gaiman is a massively famous figure while every single one of the women he abused who spoke out in this article was a fan of his. Many described feeling as though they were lulled into a sense of false security by him, only to later reflect back on how abusive their situations were.
A woman named Katherine Kendall, who recounted her encounters with Gaiman on the Am I Broken? podcast, said she grew up listening to Gaiman's self-narrated audiobooks. “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.”
Ten months later, Gaiman invited Kendall and two of her friends to one of his readings, then asked them to wait for him on his tour bus. When he joined them, he "pulled Kendall into the back of the bus and lay on top of her," telling her to "kiss me like you mean it." Kendall panicked, Gaiman eventually lost interest, and told her "I'm a very wealthy man, and I'm used to getting what I want."
Vulture notes that years later, Gaiman gave Kendall $60,000 to pay for therapy and to "make up for some of the damage" he'd done. Those sort of payments were another common thread. Both Pavlovich and another woman who gave only the name Caroline and was living as a caretaker on a property of Gaiman's in upstate New York in the mid-2010s were offered NDAs and payments in order to keep their encounters with Gaiman quiet. They broke those NDAs in order to come forward with these stories.
When Pavlovich eventually told Amanda Palmer about her encounters with Gaiman, she said that Gaiman's wife was unsurprised. "Fourteen women have come to me about this,” she said, saying she'd heard from other women who were "disturbed" by their experiences with him. "I’ve had to do this before, and I can do this again. I will take care of you."
Will Neil Gaiman be held accountable for his actions?
As I said at the top, these brief summaries of a few small aspects of these latest account do not even remotely scratch the surface of what's covered in the Vulture piece. This is a damning article which covers multiple first-hand encounters in detail, the psychological impact of Gaiman's history growing up in the Church of Scientology (where his parents were high-ranking members), the fallout of his divorce with Palmer, and more. It's by far the most expansive piece of reporting I've seen on the allegations against Neil Gaiman since Tortoise Media broke this story in mid-2024.
So what happens next? That is a massive question mark. While Pavlovich's case in Australia was dismissed, others are cropping up. Vulture notes that Kendall Stout, the woman who Gaiman penetrated while she tried to refuse him because she was suffering from a painful infection, filed a police report last year alleging he raped her. It's possible that some sort of legal accountability may come from all this...but given Gaiman's massive wealth and influence, the cynic in me is doubtful.
As for what we in genre spaces can do in regarding this, it's certainly an instance of seeing a literary hero living long enough to become a villain — or to realize that he'd been a villain in disguise all along, given that these horrors have spanned decades. In her article, Shapiro describes a famous storyline from The Sandman, where the muse Calliope is kept captive and repeatedly raped by a writer, Richard Madoc, giving him the inspiration to elevate his career to new heights. Eventually, Dream, the Gaiman-look-a-like hero of the saga, comes and saves Calliope, giving Madoc such an infusion of stories into his brain that he can't make any sense of it any more and is doomed to be driven mad, never able to get another one out. Shapiro posits that in light of all we know now, Gaiman is the Richard Madoc of this story, not the Dream.
At a certain point, it becomes hard to separate the art from the artist; and at a certain other point, the acts of the individual are so reprehensible that we degrade our own moral fiber by even trying. I think Neil Gaiman has pretty firmly crossed over into that second category. I know I'll never be able to look at the author's works without being reminded of all the real-world damage Gaiman has done to the women who have come forward with their stories.
As of right now, Gaiman's representatives are still saying he denies all these allegations, insisting these were consensual encounters. They've even gone as far as to state that Gaiman's wife Amanda Palmer is a "major force" driving this story because of their tumultuous divorce. But given the extensive, explicit detail of the accounts in Vulture's piece, I find that hard to believe. We'll be watching closely to see where the story goes from here — and hope for some form of closure for the women who were affected by it.
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