Cucks and Lovers: Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer

Quem Iuppiter vult perdere, dementat prius

The original Sandman with his red boxer briefs

Back in the 1980s, every goth girl was in love with Neil Gaiman. I was in love with Neil Gaiman. My best friend introduced me to his works via DC Comic’s redux of The Sandman, a character that started out as a low rent Batman in a red cape, boots, and matching underpants. Neil Gaiman plucked the character out of five cent bin, garage sale obscurity and eventually landed a Netflix hit. Gaiman hardly needed Netflix, because by then he had several hit movies under his belt and a stellar collection of successful novels. He gained the kind of clout most writers only dream of, and he was apparently very humble about his success.

I started writing Gaiman letters in the days before email. I believe I was about 16 or so when I wrote a letter to the publisher of the comic book he wrote. I was shocked when he actually wrote me back a couple of times. He was very sweet and when I sent him a grainy photo of myself, he said I looked like Louise Brooks. This made me incandescently happy. I was an insecure, self-hating, suicidal kid and here I was being compared to a 1920s hottie by a man whom I considered a great writer. By the time I was 19 or so, I met him in person when he was coming through Chicago. My boyfriend at the time and I met him at Woodfield Mall. He was extremely grumpy and the meeting was short and awkward.

A much cooler (and more profitable) Sandman by Neil Gaiman

I dimly remember one of the woman writers of Sassy Magazine, a now-defunct teen rag that appealed to edgy girls in the 80s and 90s, openly fantasizing about being Neil Gaiman’s kept woman in a house full of books. I had no idea Neil Gaiman was married to Mary McGrath the entire time I knew or cared enough to write him fan letters and when I met him. I did not know he had children. Frankly, I did not want to know and I never bothered to find out. Like the Sassy writer, I was too busy entertaining myself with Hot Writer in the Library fantasies that featured Gaiman as a central figure. I did not know Gaiman was Jewish or raised by Scientologists until a few days ago. Like many, I was far more interested in Gaiman as an idealized fantasy than the real man. Like many, I was a groupie.

I have procrastinated writing this article because it is going to force me to walk a thin line on the precipice of what is and is not defined as consent. There are going to be people who claim Neil Gaiman did nothing wrong. Gaiman himself claims to be innocent on all counts. He does not think he ever breached the boundaries of consent. The general consensus among former goth girl Gaiman fans and gay/metrosexual men is that he is GUILTY, no jury or trial required. To my mind, the truth as always is somewhere in the middle.

Oh for heaven’s sake… an ailing New York Magazine’s desperate bid for relevance

We can say one thing about Neil Gaiman that requires no legal formalities to prove its veracity: he mercilessly cuckolded both of his wives with a seemingly endless stream of pliant young women. For every one who is claiming he raped her, there are at least a hundred who took it up the butt or licked his urine-coated hand with no qualms at all. In this way, he is no different from his fellow Jewish lotharios Gene Simmons or Anton LaVey, and therein lies a tale if you’ll excuse the diversion.

Scientology is Satanism. L. Ron Hubbard, Michael Aquino, and Anton LaVey were buddies. Hubbard was an ardent devotee of Aleister Crowley and went as far to live with fellow Thelemite Jack Parsons in the 1940s. Hubbard’s eldest son, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard Junior a.k.a. Ronald DeWolf, gave this quote about his dad: “My father did not worship Satan. He thought he was Satan.” He claimed that black magic is the inner core of Scientology. LaVey and Aquino split in the Church of Satan years; Aquino formed the Temple of Set, which blends atheism and Satanism more directly than LaVey’s brand of devil worship. Meanwhile, Scientology, which unlike LaVey’s Church and Aquino’s Temple does not openly acknowledge Satan as its deity, went on to become the most successful of the three by far.

Is Neil Gaiman with his exploits any different than his fellow Englishmen David Bowie or Sting? I think the key difference, besides Gaiman being a literary star instead of a music star, is that Bowie and Sting mostly escaped scrutiny. Bowie found himself facing allegations during the MeToo era when an ex-superfan named Lori Maddox claimed he raped her when she was underage, among others. Bowie responded by saying he was high as balls during that time of his life and he did not remember it. Sting was on Epstein’s flight logs, so you do the math on that.

OK Groomer: The Rape of Persephone

The dark truth that none of the MeToo women want to admit is that they have fantasized about being raped by older, powerful men, and that many literally FAFOed and are now angry and bitter about it. I am 51, born in 1973. Thank you for saying I look young for my age, I will never tire of hearing it. My era was the Era of the Groupie. In my mother’s generation, entire small nations of young girls would have traded their virginities in a heartbeat to Elvis Presley if given the chance, and it is alleged that many succeeded in this task. In the 1980s, a teenage slut’s badge of honor was to have slept with a rock star. I had several friends who went to concerts, backstage passes in hand, hoping to become Tommy Lee’s or Bret Michael’s next conquest.

I never thought of myself as a groupie when Neil Gaiman and I were trading the occasional letter, but if I had the opportunity to sleep with him at age 16 instead of the teenage boyfriend who offered himself, I probably would have taken it despite the potential of becoming a teenage homewrecker. Like most depressed suburban girls, I was an ingrate who hated my life and the choices I perceived as on the table. I saw my boyfriends as losers: somewhere between boyhood and a manhood they would never rise to claim. The pickings were slim and I knew I couldn’t do any better than a teenage scrub working at Burger King. Girls sleep with rock stars because why not… as long as we are giving away the fetishized prize of our maidenhood, it might as well be with a “real” man. The “real” man might find us so special that he makes us into his very own Priscilla Presley.

Like 50 Shades of Grey all over again

The dying legacy media has had an absolute field day trashing Neil Gaiman. I am reminded of when Random House (Neil Gaiman’s publisher, BTW) saved itself from bankruptcy with the publication of 50 Shades of Grey, a BDSM-lite series of novels that started as Twilight fanfiction. In 2012, during the height of 50 Shades mania, Random House’s executive staff received $5000 Christmas bonuses because it had been their first profitable year in decades.

I am not saying Gaiman does not deserve to be trashed: he does. He is a sleaze bag. I’m glad I did not end up having the opportunity to bed him in my teens: I feel like I dodged a bullet. Nevertheless, something about these women suddenly emerging with their “believe me because I have XX chromosomes” smells fishy. Oh how the liberated feminist writers are enjoying this quick return to quasi-relevancy publishing salacious accounts of Gaiman raping the nanny! I wonder how long they can ride the wave of sensational rape allegations before their ratings start dropping like a rock again?

He got lucky in more ways than one

To the outsider, Neil Gaiman lived a charmed life. He had a meteoric rise to success, millions from his creative works, and lived the life of an international jet setter. After I met him in the 90s, I put him out of my mind. I halfheartedly read his 2001 novel, American Gods. Despite being atheist at the time, I found its portrayal of the gods hackneyed and offensive. The premise of American Gods is that their power is dependent upon how many humans believe in them at any given time. In the novel, the gods met in conventions in futile efforts to usurp humankind’s new gods: computers, transportation, industrialization, and progress. Spoiler alert: the new gods win. Though American Gods was laden with awards seconds after it was on bookshelves, I thought it sucked. It was the author ego-tripping on his own innerworld fantasy of god complexes. If anything, it spoiled the Sandman and its spinoffs because it became clear that Gaiman believed god was whatever he imagined it to be, and typically that god was himself. To my mind, Gaiman’s talent fluttered for a brief second with Stardust (1999) and died. His subsequent works bored me. I have never seen or read Anansi Boys or Coraline, nor do I have any plans to consume anything else he puts out. Like Stephen King, he seems to have lost the ability to put out a good story. Calliope has escaped the building.

Neil Gaiman divorced Mary McGrath, his Scientologist wife with whom he had three children, in 2007. They had been married 22 years. In 2011, he married Amanda Palmer, a musician known for her lengthy stream of consciousness blog diatribes about being sexually abused and having multiple abortions. Her rabid fan base is mostly comprised of feminist-leaning women and girls. Amanda Palmer became notorious for raising over a million dollars on Kickstarter to fund an album project. During her subsequent tour, she claimed to have so little money that she had no choice but to scam musicians into playing her shows for free. She tried to pay musicians and roadies on her tour in “beer and hugs” and finally caught enough flak for it to cough up some of those crowdfunding dollars. Palmer is a consummate cheapskate hippie. If you’ve ever known the type, Palmer embodies the poor little rich girl trope. Her parents are loaded but she doesn’t have 45 cents for a bag of pretzels in the train station, so her lower middle class friend ends up paying for it. Rumor has it that she would pay random people off the street to watch her only child — her first and only son with Neil Gaiman. She is now enmeshed in a bitter divorce battle for that poor kid. Ex-nanny Scarlett Pavlovich had an informal agreement with Palmer. Palmer’s “system”, if you can call it that, was to confuse fans with domestic workers, presuming that any arrangement to watch her son was an unspoken barter. To be fair, Pavlovich was young and had no place to go and seems to have received free room and board during her multi-year stint watching and raising Gaiman’s and Palmer’s child. Another unspoken barter seems to have been the handover of sweet young things over to Gaiman for his sexual consumption. Though Gaiman denies it was rape, Pavlovich described a scene where she was tricked into taking a bath. Gaiman cornered her by joining her in the tub, and then coerced her (a lesbian who doesn’t have much of a bi leaning) into a finger bang. He came on her face, according to Pavlovich. This incident reportedly happened on the very day she met Neil Gaiman.

Pavlovich’s continuing story alleges that Gaiman got off on calling her “Slave” and forcing her to call him “Master” in non-consensual, non-orthodox kinky BDSM. He often did this right in front of his son, who is now 9 years old but was between the ages of 5 and 7 when Pavlovich was hanging around and babysitting for mostly-free. When Pavlovich spilled the beans, many other women rushed to join her. Gaiman paid one victim $60 grand off the books for traumatizing her, but it is not clear if they slept together. Another victim alleges he beat her with a belt, again demanding to be called “Master”. She later alleged that he raped her when she said no to sex because of a UTI (ostensibly caused by prior vigorous consensual sex) and he forced himself on her. Other victims describe being threatened and having their livelihoods and reputations dangled in front of them as a condition of not giving Gaiman the kinky sex he wanted on demand.

Ain’t no party like a Diddy party

Knowing what I do about Sean Combs, comparing his behavior to Gaiman’s isn’t just apples to oranges, it’s not even in the same ballpark. Sean Combs/P. Diddy is a monster. Gaiman is not. Diddy is accused of drugging and participating in the gang rape of a 10 year old boy in a recent lawsuit. In another suit, he allegedly drugged and tag-teamed a 13 year old while Jennifer Lopez watched. As if these rapes weren’t bad enough, hundreds of victims of various ages claim that Diddy had a serial tendency of doing the same sorts of things to anyone he met who spurred his morbid interest. There are lurid tales of foster children and babies being offered up as party favors fresh out of DCFS, delivered by that shady organization to various Diddy parties. Said children were said to have been occasionally killed and eaten afterwards after blood-soaked debacles of forced sodomy, vomit and poop eating. Yeah, I don’t see Gaiman’s behavior as the same species, despite it being extremely gross.

He should have kept it in his pants

The people I feel the most sorrow for in all this are Gaiman’s children. They are the ones who have been getting the metaphorical shaft this whole time, especially Amanda Palmer’s son who will likely grow up warped and damaged by his parents’ refusal to grow up. The reason I didn’t become a parent in this incarnation is because I always knew it is a job that you have to give yourself wholeheartedly. That means giving up polygamy or polyamory or whatever the hell they are calling it these days. When you cheat on your spouse, you are also cheating on your kids, primarily because of the etheric bonds between parents and children. Gaiman and Palmer are both now approaching the age of a second Saturn return, when all the work they did not put into self-development and realization comes back to bite them in the ass. When you are driven by lust for most of your adult life, and I would argue this is true of Gaiman if not Palmer, the price comes in middle age. When good looks and wanting to be wanted wanes with age, the Faustian arrangement sucks the hubristic would-be American god into a cauldron of reckoning.