Neil Gaiman responds to sexual assault allegations
Following yesterday's damning report from Vulture, Gaiman has publicly denied that any abuse took place.
Photo by Andrew Toth (WireImage)
Sandman writer Neil Gaiman has denied the sexual abuse allegations published by Vulture yesterday. The allegations first publicly circulated in the July 2024 podcast series Master, painting a damning picture of the once-heralded feminist author and accusing him of sexually assaulting numerous women, with whom he allegedly pushed engaged in BDSM practices without consent, negotiation, or communications. Gaiman claims he “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.” However, though he claims to “half-recognize” some of the scenarios in Vulture’s report, he believes others “emphatically did not happen.”
In the post, Gaiman says he “went back to read the messages” with his accusers and believes that his correspondence read “of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationship and wanting to see one another again.” This is something that came up in the Vulture report. Sexual abuse is not always as cut and dry as other forms of violence, with many victims not realizing they were violated until well after. “You’re not thinking in a linear or logical fashion,” Scarlett Pavlovich, one of Gaiman’s accusers, told Vulture, “but the mind is trying to process it in the ways that it can.” In the piece, a text from Pavlovich to Gaiman after the alleged assault would indicate that she was enthusiastic about a relationship with the writer. Nevertheless, Gaiman admits he “could have and should have done so much better.”