SOME stories take time. It’s been over a year since author Neil Gaiman‘s babysitter, Scarlett, then 22, contacted me via Instagram.
Her breezy introduction – ‘Kia ora Rachel!’, the Maori greeting – set me off on a draining, disturbing eight-month investigation, during which I would hear not only Scarlett’s terrible story, but those of four other women who had, to say the least, complicated and – they claim – abusive relationships with one of the world’s most successful authors.
Scarlett accused horror and fantasy fiction writer Gaiman – who in public is a #MeToo advocate, feminist ‘ally’ and trans activist – of sexually assaulting her in a bath in the garden at his home in New Zealand within hours of meeting her, while the other women also alleged varying degrees of sexual assault.
The resulting podcast, Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman, which I co-presented with the investigative journalist Paul Caruana Galizia, came out in July last year as a six-part series by Tortoise Media.
In its wake, Gaiman’s film and TV projects were either paused or cancelled by Disney, Amazon and Netflix, and the story’s dark, upsetting details and implications were debated and pored over on fan and feminist forums online.
Yet Gaiman, who has sold more than 50 million books worldwide, appeared on Time Magazine’s list of the world’s most influential people in 2023, and was once called ‘the most loved living writer’, kept his silence. This is the man who used to invite fans to write to him on X or via his blog. Who frequently answered their letters, often leading to meetings at book signings.
Yet when we approached him, he went schtum, only communicating through his team of lawyers and crisis managers (which includes Andrew Brettler, the legal eagle hired by Prince Andrew and Johnny Depp) to deny all the allegations against him and insist that all sexual activity with the women was consensual.
Now, however, the story has re-emerged with allegations that are even more terrible detail. And at last Gaiman has given us a response.
This week, Lila Shapiro, a writer at New York Magazine, published a 13,000-word article titled There Is No Safe Word, reporting her further probing of The Sandman author’s world. The cover of the magazine is a brooding portrait of the dishevelled Gaiman, with the cover line Call Me Master – of which more later.
The magazine piece goes back to four of the five women we interviewed for Master, and Shapiro also speaks to four more, including one who calls herself ‘Brenda’.
This takes the current tally at my count to nine alleged victims, out of whom five have so far given their full names. Two were made to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) by the man who claims to be a free-speech absolutist. Three of the five we interviewed for Master received pay-offs from Gaiman, and two have filed police reports – one to Devon and Cornwall Police, and one to Auckland Police – alleging the author raped them.
One woman, a mother-of-three, claimed Gaiman pressured her into having sex with him in return for letting her live with her daughters at his property in upstate New York, and made her sign an NDA in return for a $275,000 (£225,327) payment to help her cope with post-traumatic stress and depression following their sexual relationship.
As we were forced to before each podcast episode, New York Magazine prefaced their article with a trigger warning: ‘This story contains content that readers may find disturbing, including graphic allegations of sexual assault.’
Indeed, it is the often disgusting level of detail in the New York Magazine piece that finally caused the dam to break around the world and the Gaiman allegations to at last go viral.
In response, JK Rowling tweeted about the ‘literary crowd who had a hell of a lot to say about [serial predator Harvey] Weinstein before he was convicted’ being ‘strangely muted’ when it came to denouncing one of their own. Elon Musk replied to the Harry Potter author: ‘Their silence is deafening.’
The article has now broken one man’s silence, however: Gaiman’s. Indeed, the blog entry he posted on Tuesday was titled Breaking The Silence. ‘There are moments I half recognise and moments I don’t,’ he writes of the women’s detailed accusations. He dwells on the messages he received from his accusers – just as we did in the podcast series. He calls them ‘positive and happy’ and says they reflect the women’s affection for him in their ‘entirely consensual sexual relationships’. He says he is working on himself to do better and wants to ‘continue to grow’.
He does not apologise to any of his accusers, saying: ‘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.’
So what is he accused of doing?
The date is Friday, February 4, 2022. Scarlett is en route to her babysitting job to care for the then six-year-old child of Amanda Palmer and her husband Gaiman who live on Waiheke Island – a short ferry hop from Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island. Scarlett knew musician Palmer a bit socially (Palmer is in punk band The Dresden Dolls), and ran occasional errands for her, but had never met Gaiman.
The couple were living in separate houses on the exclusive island full of beach cottages, with their manicured grounds sloping to the ocean. Scarlett made her way via ferry, bus and foot to Gaiman’s house.
When she got there, the child was due at a playdate – so there was no babysitting to be done.
Gaiman made some calls. He got pizza and a glass of wine for Scarlett (he stuck to water), and then, around 9pm, he asked if Scarlett wanted to take a bath in his outside tub. She said yes, assuming she would be alone.
In Scarlett’s telling, Gaiman ran her the bath and gave her a towel. He went back to the house. She undressed, got in, and went on her phone. Five minutes later she heard the slap of bare feet down the stone steps. It was Gaiman, naked. He set out some candles.
‘And then he got in the bath with me in the most un-f*****g unfazed way, like completely nonchalant. Like no issues, just in the least sexual way possible. I sat down at one end and immediately went like this with my legs,’ she told me, showing me her arms defensively encircled round her knees.
The man in the bath, who then allegedly asked her to sit on his lap, was old enough to be her father, even grandfather. She had never met him before. He was 61; she was 22 – and his child’s babysitter.
Despite her telling him she was gay and had been sexually abused by a 45-year-old when she was 15, she says he then started groping her. He inserted his fingers in her anus and insisted that she touch his penis. He told her not to ruin the moment.
New York Magazine also interviewed Scarlett about the bath. She revealed to them that he also tried to penetrate her anally. She told Shapiro: ‘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.’ ‘
The following day, a Saturday, Scarlett said she searched online: ‘Neil Gaiman sexual assault’ and ‘Neil Gaiman MeToo’. She sent texts to her friends about being ‘shocked’ and it having ‘crossed the boundaries’.
But Scarlett had a difficult relationship with her family and had been homeless at the start of the pandemic, crashing on the beach in a friend’s sleeping bag.
She felt desperate, dreading the thought of having to sleep rough again.
That night, she was back at Gaiman’s house, on duty, and she says, without asking, he penetrated her anally without a condom, using butter as lube: ‘I was in so much pain I had tears in my eyes.’
She then alleged many further episodes of rough penetrative sex, mostly anal, including once where she says she blacked out with pain. All the incidents took place over the course of three weeks while she was nannying and housekeeping. She also alleged he forced her to have sex with him in plain view of the child she was supposed to be taking care of.
Gaiman, who denies all of this, including that he had penetrative sex with Scarlett, grew up in East Grinstead, Sussex, where his family were high up in the Church of Scientology. He also has a house on the Isle of Skye, and left New Zealand for Scotland later that month.
Scarlett – who still hadn’t been paid for childcare or even shopping – confided everything to Palmer, his wife, in early March 2022.
Palmer’s representative told New York Magazine: ‘While Ms Palmer is profoundly disturbed by the allegations… she has no comment on these allegations.’
In April, without a job or a place to stay, Scarlett says she wanted to take her own life. She turned up at a hospital emergency room and her medical notes, which were shared with us, describe her as being at ‘high risk of suicide’.
In October 2023, she went to the police in New Zealand. They listened, but decided not to pursue Scarlett’s complaint because, they told her, it didn’t meet the evidential threshold, and also Gaiman was a big cheese and a jury would say she was ‘asking for it’.
Besides which, she was told, the WhatsApp messages she and Gaiman had exchanged, apparently showing mutual consent and enjoyment, undermined her claims of sexual assault.
For example, after she was allegedly raped in the bath, she sent him a text thanking him for a lovely evening, adding: ‘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 existence of these messages between Gaiman and Scarlett, and also with his other partners, is the crux around which Gaiman’s public defence revolves.
Indeed, New York Magazine and Tortoise’s investigations found that all of the accusers had at some point ‘played along’ with Gaiman’s desires, to some extent, by calling him ‘master’ and continuing to communicate with him.
His representatives told Tortoise last year: ‘Sexual degradation, bondage, domination, sadism and masochism (BDSM) may not be to everyone’s taste, but between consenting adults, BDSM is lawful.’
Yet we, and New York Magazine, also reported that the women claimed consent for sex had rarely been established and the boundaries for any specific BDSM activities had not been discussed between Gaiman and his accusers beforehand.
And, as we discovered, it is quite common for victims to send fawning messages like these. All Gaiman’s accusers did. One academic told us many victims don’t want to accept they’ve been abused.
After she reported Gaiman, Scarlett felt utterly abandoned. As well as the police and Gaiman’s wife, she also told neighbours, but nobody acted on her allegations.
So, in desperation, Scarlett sent that first message to me, hoping a journalist would listen to her story. As soon as I heard the bath incident, I thought there was more. This was not the behaviour of a first-time abuser. It felt premeditated to me – the move of a man who could easily source his perfect victim: young, impressionable, vulnerable. And there were plenty of those to be found among his young female fanbase; moths to the flame of his celebrity. And there were more allegations.
Kendra Stout, from Florida, was 18 when she first met Gaiman at a signing in the US in 2003. More than double her age, he sent her a webcam so they could chat, and then, when she was 21, they started dating. Kendra, who now lives in Georgia, alleges he hit her with a belt and his hand. He also asked her to call him ‘master’.
She says she was Gaiman’s girlfriend – or one of them – before he married Palmer. She alleges that while on holiday in Cornwall in April 2007, she developed a urinary tract infection. She asked Gaiman not to have penetrative sex with her, which she found painful. She says he did so anyway, causing her ‘screaming agony’. Last year, after Tortoise reported her case, Kendra filed a report with Devon and Cornwall Police.
Again, Gaiman’s position is that everything that happened between him and Kendra was consensual, and to suggest otherwise is highly defamatory.
Since Gaiman’s blogpost on his website, there has been further reaction, some sad, some furious. Palmer has spoken for the first time, saying again she is ‘profoundly disturbed’ by the allegations but, as a mother, her son is her primary concern and she will not be commenting further (she also says she and Gaiman are in the process of getting divorced).
The victims, however, are now bonded together in a WhatsApp support group – even though they had never met or spoken before our podcast. A few of them got together on New Year’s Eve, at REM lead singer Michael Stipe’s cabin in Georgia (he is a close friend of Caroline Wallner, who was once Gaiman’s tenant on his Woodstock property).
‘We welcomed in the new year, wrote our intentions on scraps of paper, and then burned the scraps – all our s*** – in a big bonfire,’ Scarlett told me. Scarlett’s intention was to ‘lose the yoke of victimhood’.
They responded to Gaiman’s blogpost denying any abuse in a joint statement: ‘We are disappointed to see the same non-apology that women in this situation have seen so many times before.’
What will survive, it appears, is the sisterhood of these women. The Sandman’s future is unwritten.
Rachel Johnson presents LBC on Fridays at 7pm and hosts the Difficult Women podcast.
To listen to Tortoise Media’s podcast Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman, visit https://lnk.to/ng-master
