# The Dark Secrets Behind the Neil Gaiman Abuse Accusations  ## Metadata - Author: [[Lila Shapiro]] - Full Title: The Dark Secrets Behind the Neil Gaiman Abuse Accusations - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The article discusses serious abuse accusations against Neil Gaiman from a former nanny, Caroline Pavlovich. She describes distressing encounters with Gaiman, including unwanted sexual advances and a lack of consent. The situation is complicated by Gaiman's relationship with his partner, Amanda Palmer, who was also aware of his troubling behavior. - URL: https://archive.is/2n1F6 ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > This past July, a British podcast produced by [Tortoise Media broke the news](https://archive.is/o/2n1F6/https://www.vulture.com/article/biggest-podcast-moments-2024.html%23neil-gaiman) that two women had accused Gaiman of sexual assault. S​ince then, more women have shared allegations of assault, coercion, and abuse. The podcast, [*Master*](https://archive.is/o/2n1F6/https://www.tortoisemedia.com/listen/master-the-allegations-against-neil-gaiman)*,* 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jhgbk1cmjb15498h72x4n31v)) > 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.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jhgbvyvbb5k6bg5kcfd0wzca))