Neil Gaiman: celebrity, sex, power
And the unspeakable contract
I am about as interested in celebrities as I am in golf. This isn’t a virtue, just a fact. So I was slightly discombobulated when Tortoise Media – a company I’ve worked with and rate very highly – announced a three part audio series entitled The Master dealing with accusations of sexual abuse and worse against the popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. Especially since, as Tortoise made clear from the beginning, these accusations were contested, no legal action was imminent, other media outlets had not reported them and the series promised to explore the sometimes grey area of what constitutes consent. I wondered whether if that was the case, it wouldn’t have been better to anonymise the content. Why would you need names at all?
I say “I wondered”. After six episodes – the series was originally released in four parts and then expanded first to five and then to six as subsequent accusations surfaced from other women - I didn’t wonder any more.
At first the story seemed to be one of terrible decisions and was told in such graphic detail that I felt like a voyeur. In episode one a young New Zealander called Scarlett – a fan of Neil Gaiman’s musician wife Amanda Palmer – is engaged by Palmer in February 2022 to look after the couple’s young son on the small New Zealand island where the Gaiman-Palmers were keeping separate homes. Scarlett is picked up from the ferry stop by Gaiman and driven back to his home.
Scarlett is 22 at this point, Gaiman is 61. Within a couple of hours Gaiman has persuaded Scarlett to step naked into a bath that is at the bottom of the garden. Gaiman joins her there. According to Gaiman Scarlett consented to cuddling and fondling in the bath. Her version is that it was a form of coercion, and that subsequently and over the next three weeks Gaiman and she had sex which included a “rough and degrading” element which she did not want. Despite this Scarlett initially sends a number of texts and messages to Gaiman and others which on the face of them seem strongly to corroborate his claims of consent. Even so in May 2022 Scarlett was asked to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) backdated to the day of the bath incident. That October she reported Gaiman to the police in New Zealand.
At this point as a listener I felt dismayed by what I was hearing. Everyone seemed to have made (to me) incomprehensible decisions. Why would a 22 year old voluntarily get naked into a bath in front of an old man she has just met? Why would a feminist icon like Palmer, apparently aware of her husband’s philandering tendencies, put a young woman – a fan - she barely knew into a situation like that? Why would Gaiman, a strong rhetorical supporter of the #MeToo movement, do and say things which (even had his intentions been innocently playful) would have been fraught with reputational risk?