Beloved Author Neil Gaiman Accused Of Horrific Abuse, Assault, & Torture Of Young Women — Some In Front Of His Son!

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[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]

Fans of Sandman, Good Omens, Coraline, American Gods, and more are devastated this week. The beloved author responsible for those works and many more has been accused of truly horrific behavior towards women.

In a bombshell Vulture exposé, Neil Gaiman has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault, abuse, and torture. Not only that, his rock star wife Amanda Palmer allegedly helped acquire women for him, like some kind of punk Ghislaine Maxwell. And some of the abuse happened in the presence of his young son.

Brace yourselves for an awful story. If you are a fan of Gaiman’s work this will be especially heartbreaking. But anyone who’s been in an abusive relationship may recognize this behavior…

Scarlett’s Story

The following is the account of Scarlett Pavlovich, a 22-year-old aspiring actress who says she worked as Neil Gaiman’s nanny. Everything following is based on her recollection of events, as told to Vulture…

Scarlett met Neil’s wife in Auckland, New Zealand in June 2020. She was already a big fan of Palmer, who had gone from punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls to a solo career known for its cultish fandom. Notably, she was the first person ever to hit $1 million on Kickstarter thanks to her devoted fanbase. It didn’t even matter that Palmer was walking with Xena star Lucy Lawless, one of the most famous Kiwis of all time. The young woman only had eyes for Amanda.

The two became friends. Amanda gave her concert tickets and invited her to swanky parties. Scarlett would occasionally babysit Palmer’s then-5-year-old son. Scarlett developed a crush on Amanda.

She also needed money, so when her crush asked her to be the nanny to her and Neil’s son, Scarlett agreed. It started with a weekend test run. Neil and Amanda had split up a couple years previous… kind of. He was living in a house near hers on Waiheke Island, they were coparenting and still very close. Scarlett’s new job would mean going back and forth between both houses.

Related: Lily Allen In Trauma Clinic After Being ‘Triggered’ By David Harbour’s Cheating

The first day she met Neil Gaiman, he was alone working — the child was on a play date Palmer had arranged. So it was a one-on-one meeting. They had pizza, and he gave her wine — but didn’t drink himself. After brief conversation and a tour, the author said he had to make a business call but suggested:

“I’ve had a thought. Why don’t you have a bath in the beautiful claw bathtub in the garden? It’s absolutely enchanting.”

She didn’t feel comfortable but after some cajoling, she agreed.

The bath in the garden was indeed beautiful, with a pohutukawa tree above. But the paradise bubble was shattered by the sound of footsteps after a few minutes. Neil was coming to join her. And he was naked.

Scarlett was frozen in shock as the 62-year-old got into the large bath and stretched out. She tried to cover herself. He told her to stretch out and enjoy herself as he made small talk.

“I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘I’m not confident with my body.’ He said, ‘It’s okay — it’s only me. Just relax. Just have a chat.’”

She remembers him telling her:

“Don’t ruin the moment.”

She did as he told her, and he started giving her a foot rub — an act that created “a subtle terror” in her. She was right to be scared. He asked her to sit on his lap. She told him no. She explained she was a lesbian, that she hadn’t had sex with a man, that she had been sexually abused by a 45-year-old man when she was just 15. You’d think that would have been enough to dissuade someone. Scarlett recalled:

“The next part is really amorphous. 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.’”

JFC. This is… She told him no. She told him she had been abused. How could he do such a thing?! What he said next explained some of it. She remembers he said:

“Amanda told me I couldn’t have you.”

It was his ex telling him no, he said, that’s when “knew he had to have” her. Like it was some sick game between them. He added:

“God, I wish it were the good old days where we could both f**k you.”

Scarlett was shocked.

She says she fled to Palmer’s home and stood in the shower for an hour. She googled “Neil Gaiman” along with the words “Me Too” to see if anyone else had described a situation with him that was like what she had experienced.

At the end of the weekend, Palmer asked her to stay on as their nanny. Scarlett was obviously uncomfortable now — but she was also broke and about to lose the apartment she was subletting. She also still adored Palmer, whom she described as “an actual creature sent from a celestial realm.” Add into the mix she’d grown up in an abusive situation and run away from home at 15 — and you have someone who was willing to accept this situation, even to tell herself it’s fine.

That’s what she says happened, and how she entered into a relationship with Gaiman. She texted him after accepting the offer:

“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.”

Huh. Seems like she was accepting more than the nanny position. That’s all the green light Gaiman needed.

One day when she was looking after Gaiman’s son at his house, “it all happened again so quickly.” She says he came up behind her and pushed her to the sofa, pulled her pants down, and started whipping her with his belt. Then he tried to have anal sex with her — without any lube.

“I screamed ‘no.’”

She says he acquiesced… to the lube. He went to the kitchen and got butter. She remembers screaming the entire time.

But it went from sex back into BDSM stuff. She says he called her “slave” and told her to “clean him up.” He meant with her mouth. She refused:

“He said, ‘Are you defying your master?’”

So she did it. As she puts it:

“I had to lick my own s**t.”

She took a shower in which she cleaned her mouth out — and noticed blood pouring down the drain from her anus.

Scarlett said she didn’t consider leaving though. That was the arrangement she was basically agreeing to. She explained:

“…when someone comes along and hates you as much as yourself, it is kind of a relief, without it always being consent.”

And so it continued. She describes multiple the demeaning sex they had. More painful anal sex, once so rough she passed out. He “ordered” her to go down on him while he watched screeners of The Sandman Season 1 from Netflix. She had to put his penis in her mouth when it had urine on it. Once he jammed it in so hard, she vomited — then he ordered her to lick up the vomit.

In Front of his son?!

The most disturbing accusations involved Gaiman’s young son. She says like Neil, the boy began addressing her as “slave” — and even told the nanny to call him “master,” something his father found funny. She says he told the kid:

“Now, now, Scarlett’s not a slave. No, you mustn’t.”

She recalls Gaiman once groping her breasts under her shirt while they sat on the couch, the boy between them, watching TV. Once he had her give him oral sex while the child was awake, somewhere — and could walk in any minute.

It gets worse.

Once when they were in a hotel room together, the boy was playing with his iPad, just a few feet from the bed. But Gaiman pulled her under him anyway and pulled the covers over them. She says despite her quietly protesting he pulled down her skirt and took off his pants and started to have sex with her from behind. The whole time he continued speaking to his son, just being a dad, saying:

“You should really get off the iPad.”

After a few minutes, Gaiman got up and went to the bathroom. She says he peed on his hand and came back and presented it to her — to “lick it off.” Then he told her to come into the bathroom with him, saying:

“Before you leave, you have to finish your job.”

She went in and he pushed her to her knees to fellate him. With the door open to where the boy was sitting the entire time.

The Fallout

After a couple weeks Scarlett told Palmer about the sexual relationship — after getting assurances she wouldn’t be fired. She never described it as abuse or rape, but did say of the initial bath incident:

“I didn’t have any choice in the matter. He just did it.”

To her shock, Palmer wasn’t shocked. She told her:

“Fourteen women have come to me about this.”

Wow. 14 women just since she knew him?!

When Scarlett told her about the sex in front of her son, though, that changed things. Palmer called Gaiman, and they had a heated discussion. Palmer made him agree to therapy. (Apparently he agreed to enter a six-week inpatient evaluation process at the Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts but then changed his mind.) Gaiman wrote to Scarlett, apologetic:

“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?”

“What we did.” Hmm.

But a couple of Scarlett’s friends who she told saw the whole relationship differently. Though she’d never used the words, they viewed what Gaiman did to her as rape, that he’d been repeatedly sexually assaulting her. They also thought Palmer deserved part of the blame for putting Scarlett into such a precarious situation knowing what Neil was like… and what he had done, a baker’s dozen times beforehand, apparently. In an email, Scarlett’s friend Misma Anaru wrote to Palmer:

“Did you not see this coming a mile away? 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 f**ked up in ways that defy comprehension.”

Meanwhile Scarlett was still trying to make everything OK. She wrote to Neil:

“I had a very intense dream about you last night. Are you doing okay?”

He told her Palmer had told him in couples therapy that Scarlett was going around telling people he’d raped her, and that she was going to “Me Too” him. He was devastated by the whole thing, he wrote:

“I wanted to kill myself. 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 had been told about Anaru’s email, he said:

“I’m a monster in it, and Amanda seems to have bought it hook line and sinker.”

He apologized to Scarlett, telling her:

“I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed.”

She reassured him Anaru had just been “triggered by something” in her stories about him, and that everything was fine between them:

“It was consensual (and wonderful)!”

He responded:

“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.”

Scarlett says she became suicidal around this time. After getting some help, Palmer set her up with a temporary apartment. But when she asked to come back to work as the nanny, Palmer told her she needed to take care of herself and NOT a child.

So Scarlett messaged Neil instead, asking him for help. He said he’d be happy to help her out. He sent her an NDA. And after she signed it, he paid her $1,700 — back pay for her babysitting work over those weeks. Two months later another check. In all she received a total of $9,200.

Over the next year, away from Gaiman and Palmer, she began to view the relationship the way her friends had. She thought of the NDAs and reached out to a former assistant of Harvey Weinstein‘s who had become a women’s advocate. She was encouraged to go to the police, which she did. She filed a report of sexual assault. The cops told her they’d need Amanda Palmer’s help if they were going to have a case.

“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.’”

She didn’t speak. She refused to get involved.

Was Amanda Palmer Complicit??

Early on they had an open marriage, living separately much of the time and encouraging one another to sleep around. In 2012, Palmer had a brief sexual relationship with a woman named Rachel. She even sent a nude photo of the woman to Neil. After they stopped sleeping together, Palmer introduced her to Gaiman online. They hit it off, and he invited Rachel to his home in Wisconsin. She asked Palmer for tips in pleasing her own husband sexually, to which the singer responded:

“i think the fun is finding out on your own”

She tells Vulture that Gaiman constantly pressured her to do things she found scary and painful. Later she decided Palmer must have sent her to him “like a toy.”

When they got pregnant, he agreed to stop the open marriage, at her request. However, a few months later he admitted to her he’d slept with a fan in her early 20s. He’d even deflowered her. And now she was “going crazy.” He admitted he needed to change his ways, and they went to couples therapy together, the first time he’d ever done so. A friend says of the experience:

“Amanda was shocked at how traumatized Neil was, given his public persona and the guy she thought she’d married.”

She confided in a friend named Caroline, telling her:

“You have no idea the twisted, dark things that go on in that man’s head.”

Caroline lived in a cabin on Gaiman’s property, where she and her husband worked as caretakers. But when she and her husband split, suddenly the author got more friendly with her. She recalls him bringing her juice and checking on her. Then one day he hugged her — and reached into her pants and squeezed her butt.

They began sleeping together. But she says he didn’t respect her boundaries, coming into her cabin whenever he felt like it, without knocking. She told the outlet once he found her crying by her fireplace. His response? To grope her. She told him the arrangement was making her “feel bad.” He told her he didn’t want her to feel bad — but he didn’t change either. Since her husband left, she and her children didn’t have anywhere to go, and this man was letting her stay on his property. She says he made the quid pro quo feeling of it all more explicit one day, saying:

“I like our trade. You take care of me, and I’ll take care of you.”

Once, she remembers, she was babysitting for him. She was reading his son stories in his bed when they both fell asleep. Gaiman got into bed with them, with his son in the middle — and grabbed her hand and pulled it to his penis. With his kid right there?! Caroline says she shot out of the bed immediately:

“He didn’t have boundaries. I remember thinking that there was something really wrong with him.”

In 2021, Gaiman did start pressuring her to leave. She says his business manager got in touch with her, making an offer of $5,000 to leave — and to sign a 16-page NDA about anything that happened with him or Amanda Palmer. Caroline remembers telling him:

“What am I going to do with $5,000? I need therapy. This is maybe $300,000.”

She says she pulled the wild number out of nowhere. But shortly after, he agreed to pay it. Really makes you wonder how accustomed he was to paying hush money, right?

It didn’t keep his secrets safe from everyone. Amanda Palmer found out about Neil’s affair with Caroline AND that he was still sleeping with Rachel, despite promising to close off the marriage, leading to the couple getting divorced.

When they hired Scarlett, this was after those affairs. Palmer knew who he was, and that’s why she warned him not to touch her. A friend of Amanda’s told Vulture:

“I remember specifically her saying, ‘You could really hurt this person and break her; keep your hands off of her.’”

All this really doesn’t paint Palmer in the best light either…

When Did This Start?

The author points out Gaiman grew up in the Church of Scientology. His parents were some of the first leaders of the Church in the ’60s. No one knows if he suffered the tortures alleged to have been visited upon children of Scientology as he never talks about his childhood, even with friends. He’s said his book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which contains some awful things happening to a child, was his most personal — it was apparently his version of explaining what he went through.

But the abuse of women… Is this a more recent perversion? It’s unclear. It was an open secret Gaiman slept with a lot of women — for a fantasy author, he’s always been a real rockstar, with his long black hair and black leather jackets. He also was said to regularly cheat on his first wife. But most women who spoken to as part of this investigation said he was “always a gentleman.”

However, there were hints, perhaps, by the time he hit his 40s. One woman told Vulture she’d met Gaiman in the late ’90s and hooked up with him a couple years later, around 2001 or so. This was fully consensual, as she was enamored with the author — until they started having sex. Then it was as if a mask dropped:

“He seemed to have a script. He wanted me to call him ‘master’ immediately… It was like he’d gone into this ritual that had nothing to do with me.”

She even said he made her promise to sell him her soul. WTF.

The Others

In all, eight women, most in their 20s, have stories about Gaiman. The youngest was Kendra Stout. The following is her story, per her claims.

Kendra Stout met Gaiman when she was just 18 years old. A huge fan, she drove over 4 hours to see him do a reading in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 2003. She stood in line to get her book signed, and he took an interest in her. He got her information to email her. As they continued their email correspondence, he bought her a web cam so they could talk face to face. Gaiman would have been 43.

Three years after they met, when she was still just 21, he flew to Orlando to take her on a date. She went back to his hotel room, and he put on a love song mix — then held her down and had sex with her. No foreplay, no lube. He told her he didn’t believe in them, that it only hurt because she wasn’t submitting to him enough.

“He talked at length about the dominant and submissive relationship he wanted out of me.”

Kendra wasn’t into BDSM, which she told him — but he didn’t care. She said there were no “safe words” or “aftercare” or “limits.” There was just abuse, as he’d make her call him “master” and beat her with a belt, and “not sexy little taps” either. She told him she didn’t like it, and she recalls him responding:

“It’s the only way I can get off.”

He told her he’d met a woman when he was younger who’d asked him to “whip her p***y.” Like, with an actual whip. He told Kendra he’d been so naive at that time he thought she meant her cat. But he did it. And it changed him forever, he told her:

“This is what gets me off now.”

Innerestingly this lines up with a story Neil himself told in a biography of writer Kathy Acker. He even used the same language, that she’d asked him to “whip her p***y” and he’d done it — but “run away” after because he was “very vanilla.”

Kendra kept seeing Gaiman, despite their… at best, perhaps you’d call it sexual incompatibility. Until, she says, he raped her.

They were on a trip to the Cornish country. She had a urinary tract infection and told him so. She said they could to some sexual things but NOT penetration, as it would be far too painful:

“It was a big hard ‘no.’ I told him, ‘You cannot put anything in my vagina or I will die.’”

She says despite this warning AND despite her telling him NO, he flipped her over on the bed and first tried to penetrate her with his fingers. Then he put his penis in her. She says she “just shut down” and lay on the bed until he finished.

There were more, of course.

Katherine Kendall met Neil Gaiman when she was 22. Per her allegations, she was a big fan who’d grown up reading his books, so she volunteered at an event for him in Asheville, North Carolina in 2012. He invited her to an after-party, where he kissed her. He was about 51 at the time.

They became flirty pen pals, but she told him she didn’t want to have sex with him — something he swore to her he respected. She said on the Am I Broken podcast:

“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.”

10 months later, she went to another reading Gaiman did in the area. He invited her and two other girls to his tour bus to hang out. But Kendall says he immediately took her into the back and laid on top of her, kissing her. She remembers him saying:

“Kiss me like you mean it.”

But she couldn’t get into it. And he rolled off and complained:

“I’m a very wealthy man, and I’m used to getting what I want.”

She says he used that wealth to pay her off, giving her $60,000 to pay for therapy — he said in a recorded phone call that it was “to make up some of the damage.”

His Response

Gaiman’s reps responded to Vulture before the article came out, saying the allegations the author had BDSM sex in front of his young son are “false, not to mention, deplorable.”

But on Tuesday, as the story spread like wildfire, after he saw himself being condemned as a monster, he broke his silence personally, writing on his blog:

“Over the past many months, I have watched the stories circulating the internet about me with horror and dismay. I’ve stayed quiet until now, both out of respect for the people who were sharing their stories and out of a desire not to draw even more attention to a lot of misinformation. I’ve always tried to be a private person, and felt increasingly that social media was the wrong place to talk about important personal matters. I’ve now reached the point where I feel that I should say something. As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen.”

He then says unequivocally:

“I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.”

Gaiman maintains he doesn’t believe he’s done anything nonconsensual. He even says he double-checked himself:

“I went back to read the messages I exchanged with the women around and following the occasions that have subsequently been reported as being abusive. These messages read now as they did when I received them – of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships and wanting to see one another again. At the time I was in those relationships, they seemed positive and happy on both sides.”

However he admits to treating women carelessly:

“And I also realise, looking through them, years later, that I could have and should have done so much better. I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could or should have been. I was obviously careless with people’s hearts and feelings, and that’s something that I really, deeply regret. It was selfish of me. I was caught up in my own story and I ignored other people’s.”

For that, he says he’s trying to do better:

“I’ve spent some months now taking a long, hard look at who I have been and how I have made people feel. Like most of us, I’m learning, and I’m trying to do the work needed, and I know that that’s not an overnight process. I hope that with the help of good people, I’ll continue to grow. I understand that not everyone will believe me or even care what I say but I’ll be doing the work anyway, for myself, my family and the people I love. I will be doing my very best to deserve their trust, as well as the trust of my readers.”

But then he doubles down on what he’s NOT copping to:

“At the same time, as I reflect on my past – and as I re-review everything that actually happened as opposed to what is being alleged – I don’t accept there was any abuse. To repeat, I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Some of the horrible stories now being told simply never happened, while others have been so distorted from what actually took place that they bear no relationship to reality. I am prepared to take responsibility for any missteps I made. I’m not willing to turn my back on the truth, and I can’t accept being described as someone I am not, and cannot and will not admit to doing things I didn’t do.”

Well. That’s a doozy, huh?

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence and would like to learn more about resources, consider checking out https://www.rainn.org/resources. 

If you have sincere cause to suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. 

[Image via Netflix/Focus Features/Amazon/YouTube/MEGA/WENN.]

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