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No is not a Safe Word - the Neil Gaiman debacle
I stumbled upon this around 8:45 pm and spent the last hour or so engrossed in it.
Finally, as we'd hoped, someone with a bit of cred and journalistic integrity - took up the story, and in a respectable and far more widely read publication, well more so than Tortoise Media at any rate.
There Is No Safe Word How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades by Lila Shapiro, A Features Writer for New York Magazine
It is a fascinating read, and explains a lot of things. I'd summarize it - but it's late and I have to get to bed. Also, I'd advise reading it for yourself. It's a compelling and gripping read - but alas still falls a little within the he said/she said category - and neither Palmer nor Gaiman deign to be interviewed. Although they do speak through others - friends, therapists, and legal counsel.
People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community,” one of Gaiman’s former friends, a fantasy writer, tells me. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works. “And if you have morality around it, you say ‘no.’” It was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers that Gaiman cheated on his first wife, Mary McGrath, a private midwestern Scientologist he’d married in his early 20s. But in my conversations with Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but enthusiastically consensual. As one prominent editor in the field puts it, “The one thing I hear again and again, largely from women, is ‘He was always nice to me. He was always a gentleman.’” The writer Kelly Link, who met Gaiman at a reading in 1997, recalls finding him charmingly goofy. “He was hapless in a way that was kind of exasperating,” she says, “but also made him seem very harmless.” Someone who had a sexual relationship with Gaiman in the aughts recalls him flipping through questions fans wrote on cards at a Q&A session. Once, a fan asked if she could be his “sex slave”: “He read it aloud and said, ‘Well, no.’ He’d be very demure.”
But there were some who saw another side of the author. One woman, Brenda (a pseudonym), met Gaiman in the ’90s at a signing for The Sandman where she was working. On signing lines, Gaiman had a knack for connecting with each individual. He would ask questions, laugh, and assure them that their inability to form sentences was fine. After the Sandman signing, at a dinner attended by those who had worked the event, Gaiman sat next to Brenda. “Everyone wanted to be near him, but he was laser focused on me,” she says. A few years later, Brenda traveled to Chicago to attend the World Horror Convention, where Gaiman received the top prize for American Gods, the book that cemented him as a best-selling novelist. The night after the awards ceremony, she and Gaiman ended up in bed together. As soon as they began to hook up, the feeling that had drawn her to him — the magical spell of his interest in her individuality — vanished. “He seemed to have a script,” she tells me. “He wanted me to call him ‘master’ immediately.” He demanded that she promise him her soul. “It was like he’d gone into this ritual that had nothing to do with me.”
And...about BDSM..
According to the podcast, which quoted Gaiman through his representatives, his position was that “sexual degradation, bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism may not be to everyone’s taste, but between consenting adults, BDSM is lawful.” (Gaiman declined to speak with me despite multiple requests, but through a legal representative, he responded to some claims.) If you know nothing about BDSM, Gaiman’s claim that he was engaging in it with these women may sound plausible, at least in some cases. The kind of domineering violence he inflicted on them is common among people who practice BDSM, and all of the women, at some point, played along, calling him their master, texting him afterward that they needed him, even writing that they loved and missed him. But there is a crucial difference between BDSM and what Gaiman was doing. An acronym for “bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism,” BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms, the most important of which is that all parties must eagerly and clearly consent to the overall dynamic as well as to each act before they engage in it. This, as many practitioners, including sex educators like Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy who wrote some of the defining texts of the subculture, have stressed over decades, is the defining line that separates BDSM from abuse. And it was a line that Gaiman, according to the women, did not respect. Two of the women, who have never spoken to each other, compared him to an anglerfish, the deep-sea predator that uses a bulb of bioluminescence to lure prey into its jaws. “Instead of a light,” one says, “he would dangle a floppy-haired, soft-spoken British guy.”
About sexual abuse and how it plays with the mind..
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.”
Gaiman's childhood and upbringing in The Church of Scientology and how it influenced him, and most likely is the backdrop for Ocean at the End of the Lane
Throughout his career, Gaiman has written about terror from the point 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.
In various interviews over the years, Gaiman has called The Ocean at the End of the Lane his most personal book. While much of it is fantastical, Gaiman has said “that kid is me.” The book is set in Sussex, where Gaiman grew up. In the story, the narrator survives otherworldly evil with the help of a family of magical women. As a child, Gaiman had no such friends to call on. “I was going back to the 7-year-old me and giving myself a peculiar kind of love that I didn’t have,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “I never feel the past is dead or young Neil isn’t around anymore. He’s still there, hiding in a library somewhere, looking for a doorway that will lead him to somewhere safe where everything works.”
While Gaiman has identified the boy in the book as himself, he has also claimed that none of the things that happen to the boy happened to him. Yet there is reason to believe that some of the most horrifying events of the novel did occur. Gaiman has rarely spoken about a core fact of his childhood. In 1965, when Neil was 5 years old, his parents, David and Sheila, left their jobs as a business executive and a pharmacist and bought a house in East Grinstead, a mile away from what was at that time the worldwide headquarters for the Church of Scientology. Its founder, the former science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, lived down the road from them from 1965 until 1967, when he fled the country and began directing the church from international waters, pursued by the CIA, FBI, and a handful of foreign governments and maritime agencies.
David and Sheila were among England’s earliest adherents to Scientology. They began studying Dianetics in 1956 and eventually took positions in the Guardian’s Office, a special department of the organization dedicated to handling the church’s growing number of legal cases, public communications, and intelligence operations. The mission of this office, as Hubbard wrote, was its “covert use in destroying the repute of individuals and groups.” On the side, the Gaimans ran the church’s canteen, lodged foreign Scientologists in their home, and opened a vitamin company in town, where they supplied courses of supplements for Scientology’s “detoxification” programs, a business that grew exponentially alongside the expansion of the church. By the late ’60s, David was the church’s public face and chief spokesperson in the U.K.
It was a challenging job, to say the least. The U.K., following the example of a handful of other governments, had issued a report declaring Scientology’s methods “a serious danger to the health of those who submit to them.” Hubbard would routinely punish members of the organization who committed minor infractions by binding them, blindfolding them, and throwing them overboard into icy waters. Back in England, David gave interviews to the press to smooth over such troubling accounts. The church was under particular pressure to assure the public it was not harming children. In his bulletins to members, Hubbard had made it clear that children were not to be exempt from the punishments to which adults were subjected. If a child laughed inappropriately or failed to remember a Scientology term, they could be sent to the ship’s hold and made to chip rust for days or confined in a chain locker for weeks at a time without blankets or a bathroom. In his book Going Clear, Lawrence Wright recounts the story of a 4-year-old boy named Derek Greene, an adopted Black child who stole a Rolex and dropped it overboard. He was confined to the locker for two days and nights. When his mother pleaded with Hubbard to let him out, he “reminded her of the Scientology axiom that children are actually adults in small bodies, and equally responsible for their behavior.” (A representative for the Church of Scientology said it does not speak about members past or present but denies that this event occurred.)
David used Neil as an exhibit in his case to the public. In 1968, he arranged for Neil to give an interview to the BBC. When the reporter asked the child if Scientology made him “a better boy,” Neil replied, “Not exactly that, but when you make a release, you feel absolutely great.” (A release, in Scientology lingo, is what happens when you complete one of the lower levels of coursework.) What was happening away from the cameras is difficult to know, in part because Gaiman has avoided talking about it, changing the subject whenever an interviewer, or a friend, brings it up. But it seems unlikely that he would have been spared the disciplinary measures inflicted on adults and children as a standard practice at that time. According to someone who knew the Gaimans, David and Sheila did apply Scientology’s methods at home. When Neil was around the age of the child in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the person said, David took him up to the bathtub, ran a cold bath, and “drowned him to the point where Neil was screaming for air.”
As a teenager, Neil worked for the Church of Scientology for three years as an auditor, a minister of the church who conducts a process some have likened to hypnosis. One former member of the church who worked with Gaiman’s parents and was audited by Gaiman recalls him as precocious and ambitious. It was unusual for a teenager to have completed such a high level of training, he tells me. But the Gaimans were like “royalty,” he says. In 1981, David was promoted to lead the Guardian’s Office, making him one of the most powerful people in the church. But the same year, he fell from grace. A new generation of Scientologists, led by David Miscavige, who eventually succeeded Hubbard as the church’s leader, had Hubbard’s ear, and David was “caught in that grinder,” as his former colleague puts it. A document declaring David a “Suppressive person” was released a few years later. It accused him of a range of offenses, including sexual misconduct. David, the document claims, put on a “front” of being “mild mannered and quite sociable,” adding that his actions “belie this.” His greatest offense, it seemed, was hubris. “Gaiman required others to look up to him instead of to Source,” it reads, referring to Hubbard.
In the ’80s, David was sent off to a sort of rehabilitation camp. It was around this time that Gaiman set out to make a living as a writer. Charming and strategic, he used the contacts he developed as a journalist to break into the business of genre writing, endearing himself to the giants of that world at the time: Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke, Clive Barker, Terry Pratchett, Alan Moore. “When I was young, I had unbelievable chutzpah,” Gaiman says in the documentary Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously. “The kind of monstrous self-certainty that you only get normally in people who then go on to conquer half the civilized world.”
Gaiman and Palmer
In 2012, Palmer met a 20-year-old fan, who has asked to be referred to as Rachel, at a Dresden Dolls concert. After one of Palmer’s next shows, the women had sex. The morning after, Palmer snapped a few semi-naked pictures of Rachel and asked if she could send one to Gaiman. She and Palmer slept together a few more times, but then Palmer seemed to lose interest in sex with her. Some six months after they met, Palmer introduced Rachel to Gaiman online, telling Rachel, “He’ll love you.” The two struck up a correspondence that quickly turned sexual, and Gaiman invited her to his house in Wisconsin. As she packed for the trip, she asked Palmer over email if she had any advice for pleasing Gaiman in bed. Palmer joked in response, “i think the fun is finding out on your own.” With Gaiman, Rachel says there was never a “blatant rupture of consent” but that he was always pressing her to do things that hurt and scared her. Looking back, she feels Palmer gave her to him “like a toy.”
For Gaiman and Palmer, these were happy years. With his editing help, she wrote The Art of Asking. They toured together. And when Palmer was offered a residency at Bard College, Gaiman tagged along to give some talks, then ended up receiving an offer to join the faculty as a professor of the arts. After they’d been together for a few years, Palmer began asking Gaiman to tell her more about his childhood in Scientology. But he seemed unable to string more than a few sentences together. When she encouraged him to continue, he would curl up on the bed into a fetal position and cry. He refused to see a therapist. Instead, he sat down to write a short story that kept getting longer until it had turned into a novel. Although the child at the center of the story in many ways remains opaque, Palmer felt he had never been so open. He dedicated the book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, “to Amanda, who wanted to know.”
And not so much...
In her response to them [the New Zealand Police Department], ‘She’s a public feminist, and she knows what happened. She’ll want to protect me. I’m sure she’ll speak.’” [ETA: What the nanny didn't appear to know was that Palmer was involved in a bitter and contentious custody/divorce dispute with Gaiman over the custody of their seven year old son, and barred from talking with police. Apparently, this had been going on for some time. Also the one with the money/power in the Gaiman/Palmer marriage was Gaiman. The writer of the New York Magazine article states the divorce/custody dispute had been going on for five years by 2025 - so it began in 2021 or thereabouts. This occurred in 2022.]
When the police contacted Palmer later that year, she declined to talk with them. [ETA: She'd been to a degree barred by the custody/divorce lawsuit.] Gaiman never spoke with the police either, though he did provide a written statement. Whatever feelings Palmer might have had about the situation went into a song she performed on tour in 2024, one she wrote shortly after Pavlovich’s confession. It was called “Whakanewha,” named after a park near their homes on Waiheke. “Another suicidal mass landing on my doorstep — thanks a ton / A few more corpses in the sack / You’ll get away with it; it’s just the same old script / This world is shaped to have your back / You said, ‘I’m sorry,’ then you ran / And went and did it all again.” [ Not covered by a legal gag order - it's vague enough not to fit under that legally. ]
...
"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.)[Palmer is 48 and her son is 9, Gaiman is 64.]
Oh dear god. That's a horribly twisted and sad story. Reminds me once again of how poorly our society deals with mental illness. And how incredibly toxic fame, fortune and power truly are to the human condition. And how isolating.
I feel deeply sorry for everyone in the story. Even Gaiman. Although it does explain his art...and Palmer's for that matter. It also explains what I've been seeing in Palmer's Patreon posts.
Finally, as we'd hoped, someone with a bit of cred and journalistic integrity - took up the story, and in a respectable and far more widely read publication, well more so than Tortoise Media at any rate.
There Is No Safe Word How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades by Lila Shapiro, A Features Writer for New York Magazine
It is a fascinating read, and explains a lot of things. I'd summarize it - but it's late and I have to get to bed. Also, I'd advise reading it for yourself. It's a compelling and gripping read - but alas still falls a little within the he said/she said category - and neither Palmer nor Gaiman deign to be interviewed. Although they do speak through others - friends, therapists, and legal counsel.
People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community,” one of Gaiman’s former friends, a fantasy writer, tells me. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works. “And if you have morality around it, you say ‘no.’” It was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers that Gaiman cheated on his first wife, Mary McGrath, a private midwestern Scientologist he’d married in his early 20s. But in my conversations with Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but enthusiastically consensual. As one prominent editor in the field puts it, “The one thing I hear again and again, largely from women, is ‘He was always nice to me. He was always a gentleman.’” The writer Kelly Link, who met Gaiman at a reading in 1997, recalls finding him charmingly goofy. “He was hapless in a way that was kind of exasperating,” she says, “but also made him seem very harmless.” Someone who had a sexual relationship with Gaiman in the aughts recalls him flipping through questions fans wrote on cards at a Q&A session. Once, a fan asked if she could be his “sex slave”: “He read it aloud and said, ‘Well, no.’ He’d be very demure.”
But there were some who saw another side of the author. One woman, Brenda (a pseudonym), met Gaiman in the ’90s at a signing for The Sandman where she was working. On signing lines, Gaiman had a knack for connecting with each individual. He would ask questions, laugh, and assure them that their inability to form sentences was fine. After the Sandman signing, at a dinner attended by those who had worked the event, Gaiman sat next to Brenda. “Everyone wanted to be near him, but he was laser focused on me,” she says. A few years later, Brenda traveled to Chicago to attend the World Horror Convention, where Gaiman received the top prize for American Gods, the book that cemented him as a best-selling novelist. The night after the awards ceremony, she and Gaiman ended up in bed together. As soon as they began to hook up, the feeling that had drawn her to him — the magical spell of his interest in her individuality — vanished. “He seemed to have a script,” she tells me. “He wanted me to call him ‘master’ immediately.” He demanded that she promise him her soul. “It was like he’d gone into this ritual that had nothing to do with me.”
And...about BDSM..
According to the podcast, which quoted Gaiman through his representatives, his position was that “sexual degradation, bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism may not be to everyone’s taste, but between consenting adults, BDSM is lawful.” (Gaiman declined to speak with me despite multiple requests, but through a legal representative, he responded to some claims.) If you know nothing about BDSM, Gaiman’s claim that he was engaging in it with these women may sound plausible, at least in some cases. The kind of domineering violence he inflicted on them is common among people who practice BDSM, and all of the women, at some point, played along, calling him their master, texting him afterward that they needed him, even writing that they loved and missed him. But there is a crucial difference between BDSM and what Gaiman was doing. An acronym for “bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism,” BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms, the most important of which is that all parties must eagerly and clearly consent to the overall dynamic as well as to each act before they engage in it. This, as many practitioners, including sex educators like Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy who wrote some of the defining texts of the subculture, have stressed over decades, is the defining line that separates BDSM from abuse. And it was a line that Gaiman, according to the women, did not respect. Two of the women, who have never spoken to each other, compared him to an anglerfish, the deep-sea predator that uses a bulb of bioluminescence to lure prey into its jaws. “Instead of a light,” one says, “he would dangle a floppy-haired, soft-spoken British guy.”
About sexual abuse and how it plays with the mind..
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.”
Gaiman's childhood and upbringing in The Church of Scientology and how it influenced him, and most likely is the backdrop for Ocean at the End of the Lane
Throughout his career, Gaiman has written about terror from the point 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.
In various interviews over the years, Gaiman has called The Ocean at the End of the Lane his most personal book. While much of it is fantastical, Gaiman has said “that kid is me.” The book is set in Sussex, where Gaiman grew up. In the story, the narrator survives otherworldly evil with the help of a family of magical women. As a child, Gaiman had no such friends to call on. “I was going back to the 7-year-old me and giving myself a peculiar kind of love that I didn’t have,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “I never feel the past is dead or young Neil isn’t around anymore. He’s still there, hiding in a library somewhere, looking for a doorway that will lead him to somewhere safe where everything works.”
While Gaiman has identified the boy in the book as himself, he has also claimed that none of the things that happen to the boy happened to him. Yet there is reason to believe that some of the most horrifying events of the novel did occur. Gaiman has rarely spoken about a core fact of his childhood. In 1965, when Neil was 5 years old, his parents, David and Sheila, left their jobs as a business executive and a pharmacist and bought a house in East Grinstead, a mile away from what was at that time the worldwide headquarters for the Church of Scientology. Its founder, the former science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, lived down the road from them from 1965 until 1967, when he fled the country and began directing the church from international waters, pursued by the CIA, FBI, and a handful of foreign governments and maritime agencies.
David and Sheila were among England’s earliest adherents to Scientology. They began studying Dianetics in 1956 and eventually took positions in the Guardian’s Office, a special department of the organization dedicated to handling the church’s growing number of legal cases, public communications, and intelligence operations. The mission of this office, as Hubbard wrote, was its “covert use in destroying the repute of individuals and groups.” On the side, the Gaimans ran the church’s canteen, lodged foreign Scientologists in their home, and opened a vitamin company in town, where they supplied courses of supplements for Scientology’s “detoxification” programs, a business that grew exponentially alongside the expansion of the church. By the late ’60s, David was the church’s public face and chief spokesperson in the U.K.
It was a challenging job, to say the least. The U.K., following the example of a handful of other governments, had issued a report declaring Scientology’s methods “a serious danger to the health of those who submit to them.” Hubbard would routinely punish members of the organization who committed minor infractions by binding them, blindfolding them, and throwing them overboard into icy waters. Back in England, David gave interviews to the press to smooth over such troubling accounts. The church was under particular pressure to assure the public it was not harming children. In his bulletins to members, Hubbard had made it clear that children were not to be exempt from the punishments to which adults were subjected. If a child laughed inappropriately or failed to remember a Scientology term, they could be sent to the ship’s hold and made to chip rust for days or confined in a chain locker for weeks at a time without blankets or a bathroom. In his book Going Clear, Lawrence Wright recounts the story of a 4-year-old boy named Derek Greene, an adopted Black child who stole a Rolex and dropped it overboard. He was confined to the locker for two days and nights. When his mother pleaded with Hubbard to let him out, he “reminded her of the Scientology axiom that children are actually adults in small bodies, and equally responsible for their behavior.” (A representative for the Church of Scientology said it does not speak about members past or present but denies that this event occurred.)
David used Neil as an exhibit in his case to the public. In 1968, he arranged for Neil to give an interview to the BBC. When the reporter asked the child if Scientology made him “a better boy,” Neil replied, “Not exactly that, but when you make a release, you feel absolutely great.” (A release, in Scientology lingo, is what happens when you complete one of the lower levels of coursework.) What was happening away from the cameras is difficult to know, in part because Gaiman has avoided talking about it, changing the subject whenever an interviewer, or a friend, brings it up. But it seems unlikely that he would have been spared the disciplinary measures inflicted on adults and children as a standard practice at that time. According to someone who knew the Gaimans, David and Sheila did apply Scientology’s methods at home. When Neil was around the age of the child in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the person said, David took him up to the bathtub, ran a cold bath, and “drowned him to the point where Neil was screaming for air.”
As a teenager, Neil worked for the Church of Scientology for three years as an auditor, a minister of the church who conducts a process some have likened to hypnosis. One former member of the church who worked with Gaiman’s parents and was audited by Gaiman recalls him as precocious and ambitious. It was unusual for a teenager to have completed such a high level of training, he tells me. But the Gaimans were like “royalty,” he says. In 1981, David was promoted to lead the Guardian’s Office, making him one of the most powerful people in the church. But the same year, he fell from grace. A new generation of Scientologists, led by David Miscavige, who eventually succeeded Hubbard as the church’s leader, had Hubbard’s ear, and David was “caught in that grinder,” as his former colleague puts it. A document declaring David a “Suppressive person” was released a few years later. It accused him of a range of offenses, including sexual misconduct. David, the document claims, put on a “front” of being “mild mannered and quite sociable,” adding that his actions “belie this.” His greatest offense, it seemed, was hubris. “Gaiman required others to look up to him instead of to Source,” it reads, referring to Hubbard.
In the ’80s, David was sent off to a sort of rehabilitation camp. It was around this time that Gaiman set out to make a living as a writer. Charming and strategic, he used the contacts he developed as a journalist to break into the business of genre writing, endearing himself to the giants of that world at the time: Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke, Clive Barker, Terry Pratchett, Alan Moore. “When I was young, I had unbelievable chutzpah,” Gaiman says in the documentary Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously. “The kind of monstrous self-certainty that you only get normally in people who then go on to conquer half the civilized world.”
Gaiman and Palmer
In 2012, Palmer met a 20-year-old fan, who has asked to be referred to as Rachel, at a Dresden Dolls concert. After one of Palmer’s next shows, the women had sex. The morning after, Palmer snapped a few semi-naked pictures of Rachel and asked if she could send one to Gaiman. She and Palmer slept together a few more times, but then Palmer seemed to lose interest in sex with her. Some six months after they met, Palmer introduced Rachel to Gaiman online, telling Rachel, “He’ll love you.” The two struck up a correspondence that quickly turned sexual, and Gaiman invited her to his house in Wisconsin. As she packed for the trip, she asked Palmer over email if she had any advice for pleasing Gaiman in bed. Palmer joked in response, “i think the fun is finding out on your own.” With Gaiman, Rachel says there was never a “blatant rupture of consent” but that he was always pressing her to do things that hurt and scared her. Looking back, she feels Palmer gave her to him “like a toy.”
For Gaiman and Palmer, these were happy years. With his editing help, she wrote The Art of Asking. They toured together. And when Palmer was offered a residency at Bard College, Gaiman tagged along to give some talks, then ended up receiving an offer to join the faculty as a professor of the arts. After they’d been together for a few years, Palmer began asking Gaiman to tell her more about his childhood in Scientology. But he seemed unable to string more than a few sentences together. When she encouraged him to continue, he would curl up on the bed into a fetal position and cry. He refused to see a therapist. Instead, he sat down to write a short story that kept getting longer until it had turned into a novel. Although the child at the center of the story in many ways remains opaque, Palmer felt he had never been so open. He dedicated the book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, “to Amanda, who wanted to know.”
And not so much...
In her response to them [the New Zealand Police Department], ‘She’s a public feminist, and she knows what happened. She’ll want to protect me. I’m sure she’ll speak.’” [ETA: What the nanny didn't appear to know was that Palmer was involved in a bitter and contentious custody/divorce dispute with Gaiman over the custody of their seven year old son, and barred from talking with police. Apparently, this had been going on for some time. Also the one with the money/power in the Gaiman/Palmer marriage was Gaiman. The writer of the New York Magazine article states the divorce/custody dispute had been going on for five years by 2025 - so it began in 2021 or thereabouts. This occurred in 2022.]
When the police contacted Palmer later that year, she declined to talk with them. [ETA: She'd been to a degree barred by the custody/divorce lawsuit.] Gaiman never spoke with the police either, though he did provide a written statement. Whatever feelings Palmer might have had about the situation went into a song she performed on tour in 2024, one she wrote shortly after Pavlovich’s confession. It was called “Whakanewha,” named after a park near their homes on Waiheke. “Another suicidal mass landing on my doorstep — thanks a ton / A few more corpses in the sack / You’ll get away with it; it’s just the same old script / This world is shaped to have your back / You said, ‘I’m sorry,’ then you ran / And went and did it all again.” [ Not covered by a legal gag order - it's vague enough not to fit under that legally. ]
...
"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.)[Palmer is 48 and her son is 9, Gaiman is 64.]
Oh dear god. That's a horribly twisted and sad story. Reminds me once again of how poorly our society deals with mental illness. And how incredibly toxic fame, fortune and power truly are to the human condition. And how isolating.
I feel deeply sorry for everyone in the story. Even Gaiman. Although it does explain his art...and Palmer's for that matter. It also explains what I've been seeing in Palmer's Patreon posts.
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It's so depressing how abuse manifests abuse. :( I wish someone had managed to get him to therapy, rather than him apparently suppressing it all and it coming out in the way it has.
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I agree. Palmer tried to get him into therapy (she tried to save him), and did succeed on two occasions. She yanked him into couples therapy, and he was seeing a therapist - Mueller. But unfortunately, it's a bit late? Scientology and then the power, prestige, and financial success kind of broke him? He's excellent at lying apparently. And elocution lessons - hence the charming voice.
Btw - Palmer's album New Zealand Survival Songs - addresses some of what happened. There's three haunting songs in that collection, which I'll post in another post: The Man who Eats Too Much, Whatehka (sp?), and Ballad of the New York Times.
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Apparently I had already hit my number of free articles. And yes, the story has suddenly gotten legs, it's front page of the BBC.
But unfortunately, it's a bit late?
Yeah. :(
There's three haunting songs in that collection, which I'll post in another post
I saw that post. I guess they both tried to work through things using art, but not enough in Gaiman's case. As in - if he had simply used his art, everything would be well...
Sidebar:
yeet = to throw something with a lot of force (x)
And here is a funny and unusual way of remembering this term.
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Sigh, this reminds me of the whole Whedon debacle but so much worse.
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Whedon was almost the other way around? Because the s8 comics came out, and they were just awful, so the whole house of cards of his so-called brilliance collapsed - and then all the other stuff came out, and it was like 'Yeah, that makes sense of all the weirdly icky stuff in his shows.
Gaiman is clearly a better artist and also a bigger monster. :(
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Oh totally. The Harry Potter fandom has struggled with this for years now, although in a different way.
But I didn't see the Gaiman or Palmer stuff at all.
I was only ever tangentially aware of Palmer, but I know that she was always a very divisive figure. There are people who stopped following her years ago because of stuff she has said or done (nothing like what she is now accused of doing), but this just adds a whole other layer.
About Gaiman, then it's so sad because he genuinely seemed so... genuine. I followed his Tumblr, and he was very engaged with his fans. Very friendly, very fair, sort of what you wished every creator was. I have also listened to several of his interviews/talks, and he was smart and insightful etc. It's such a shame. And I am sorry that it took so long for any of the badness to come out.
Maybe all writers should just be hermits and never engage with the fans. :(