"'I've had a thought,'" she recalls him saying. "'Why don't you have a
bath in the beautiful claw bathtub in the garden? It's absolutely enchanting.'" Pavlovich told Gaiman that she was fine as she was but ultimately agreed. He needed to make a work call, he said, and didn't want Pavlovich to be bored.
Gaiman led Pavlovich down a stone path into the garden to an old-fashioned tub with a roll top and walked away. She got undressed and sank into the bath, looking up at the furry magenta blossoms of the pohutukawa tree overhead. A few minutes later, she was surprised to hear Gaiman's
footsteps on the stones in the dark. She tried to cover her breasts with
her arms. When he arrived at the bath, she saw that he was naked. Gaiman
put out a couple of citronella candles, lit them, and got into the bath.
He stretched out, facing her, and, for a few minutes, made small talk. He bitched about Palmer's schedule. He talked about his kid's school. Then he told her to stretch her legs out and "get comfortable."
"I said 'no.' I said, 'I'm not confident with my body,'" Pavlovich
recalls. "He said, 'It's okay -- it's only me. Just relax. Just have a chat.'" She didn't move. He looked at her again and said, "Don't ruin the moment." She did as instructed, and he began to stroke her feet. At that point, she recalls, she felt "a subtle terror."
Gaiman asked her to sit on his lap. Pavlovich stammered out a few
sentences: She was gay, she'd never had sex, she had been sexually abused
by a 45-year-old man when she was 15. Gaiman continued to press. "The next part is really amorphous," Pavlovich tells me. "But I can tell you that he put his fingers straight into my ass and tried to put his penis in my ass. And I said, 'No, no.' Then he tried to rub his penis between my breasts,
and I said 'no' as well. Then 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.'"
Afterward, Pavlovich crouched down in the water and tried to clean herself off. Gaiman looked at her and smiled. "'Amanda told me I couldn't have you,'" Pavlovich recalls him saying. As soon as he'd heard this, he "knew
he had to have" her. "'God,'" he continued, "'I wish it were the good old days where we could both fuck you.'"
Pavlovich texted Gaiman: "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 following weekend, she packed up her sublet and boarded the
ferry to Waiheke.
Pavlovich was in the kitchen, tidying up, when he approached her from
behind and pulled her to the sofa. "It all happened again so quickly," Pavlovich says. Gaiman pushed down her pants and began to beat her with
his belt. He then attempted to initiate anal sex without lubrication. "I screamed 'no,'" Pavlovich says. Had Gaiman and Pavlovich been engaging in BDSM, this could conceivably have been part of a rape scene, a scenario sometimes described as consensual nonconsent. But that would have required careful negotiation in advance, which she says they had not done. After
she said "no," Gaiman backed off briefly and went into the kitchen. When
he returned, he brought butter to use as lubricant. She continued to
scream until Gaiman was finished. When it was over, he called her "slave" and ordered her to "clean him up." She protested that it wasn't hygienic. "He said, 'Are you defying your master?'" she recalls. "I had to lick my
own shit."
Afterward, she got into the shower and tried to wash her mouth out with a bar of lavender soap. It had a grainy texture and tasted of metal, acid,
and herbs. She noticed blood swirling down the drain. He hadn't used a condom, and she worried she might have gotten an infection. She had a migraine, and her whole body ached. But she didn't consider leaving. She'd hated herself her whole life, she tells me, "and when someone comes along and hates you as much as yourself, it is kind of a relief, without it
always being consent."
The nights with Gaiman blurred together. There was the time she passed out from pain while Gaiman was having anal sex with her. He made her perform oral sex while his penis had urine on it. He ordered her to suck him off while he watched screeners for the first season of The Sandman. In one instance, he thrust his penis into Pavlovich's mouth with such force that she vomited on him. Then he told her to eat the vomit off his lap and lick it up from the couch.
A week or so into Pavlovich's time with the family, their son began to address her as "slave" and ordered Pavlovich to call him "master." Gaiman seemed to find it amusing. Sometimes he'd say to his child, in an affable tone, "Now, now, Scarlett's not a slave. No, you mustn't." One day, Pavlovich came into the living room when Gaiman and the boy were on the couch watching the children's show Odd Squad. She joined them, sitting
down next to the child. Gaiman put his arm around them both, reached into Pavlovich's shirt, and fondled her breasts. She says he didn't make any effort to hide what he was doing from the boy. Another time, during the
day, he requested oral sex in the middle of the kitchen while the boy was awake and somewhere in the house. "He would never shut a door," she says.
On February 19, 2022, Gaiman and his son spent the night at a hotel in Auckland, which they sometimes did for fun. Gaiman asked Pavlovich if she could come by and watch the child for an hour so he could get a massage.
It was a small room -- one double bed, a television, and a bathroom. When
he returned, Gaiman and the boy ate dinner, takeout from a nearby delicatessen. Afterward, Gaiman wanted to watch a movie, but the child wanted to play with the iPad. The boy sat against the wall by the picture window overlooking the city, facing the bed. Pavlovich perched on the edge of the mattress; Gaiman got onto the bed and pulled her so she was on her back. He lifted the covers up over them. She tried to signal to him with
her eyes that he should stop. She mouthed, "What the fuck are you doing?" She didn't want the child to overhear what she was saying. Gaiman ignored her. He rolled her onto her side, took off his pants, pulled off her
skirt, and began to have sex with her from behind while continuing to
speak with his son. "'You should really get off the iPad,'" she recalls
him saying. Pavlovich, in a state of shock, buried her head in the pillow. After about five minutes, Gaiman got up and walked to the bathroom, half-naked. He urinated on his hand and then returned to Pavlovich, frozen on the bed, and told her to "lick it off." He went back to the bathroom, naked from the waist down. "Before you leave," he told Pavlovich, "you
have to finish your job." She went to the bathroom, and he pushed her to
her knees. The door was open. (Gaiman's representatives say these allegations are "false, not to mention, deplorable.")
Sitting in the kitchen, Pavlovich told Palmer that Gaiman had made a pass
at her. She told Palmer about the bath. "I didn't have any choice in the matter," she said. "He just did it." She said he had been having sex with her ever since. She withheld some of the most brutal details and did not describe her experience as sexual assault; she didn't yet see it that way.
So then this woman told some guy about the relationship and the guy said
it was rape and Gaiman found out he said that, then he messaged her to apologize and she told him it was all consensual and blamed the guy she
told it was rape for thinking it was rape.
Apologizing for "bringing any upset" into Pavlovich's life, he wrote, "I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed."
Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. "I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life," she tells me. She rushed to reassure him. "It was consensual (and wonderful)!" she wrote. Anaru had been "triggered by something I think," she added.
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."
Katherine Kendall was 22 when she met Gaiman in 2012. She was volunteering at one of his events in Asheville, North Carolina. He invited her to join him a few days later at an after-party for another event, where he kissed her. The two struck up a flirtatious correspondence, emailing and Skyping
in the middle of the night. Kendall didn't want to have sex with Gaiman,
and on one of their calls, she told him this. Afterward, she recorded his reply in her diary: "He had no designs on me beyond flirty friendship and
I believe him thoroughly." She'd grown up listening to his audiobooks, she later told Papillon DeBoer, the host of the podcast Am I Broken: "And then that same voice that told me those beautiful stories when I was a kid was telling me the story that I was safe, and that we were just friends, and that he wasn't a threat."
At a reading ten months later, Gaiman suggested that Kendall and two other girls wait for him on his tour bus so they could all hang out after he was done signing. When Gaiman showed up, he pulled Kendall into the back of
the bus and lay on top of her. He kept saying, "Kiss me like you mean it," Kendall remembers. She tried to get into it, but she was panicked. Eventually, Gaiman rolled off her. "'I'm a very wealthy man,'" she
remembers him saying, "'and I'm used to getting what I want.'" (Years
later, Gaiman gave Kendall $60,000 to pay for therapy in an attempt, as he put it in a recorded phone call, "to make up some of the damage.")
Kendra Stout was 18 when, in 2003, she drove four and a half hours to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to see Gaiman read from Endless Nights, a follow-up
to The Sandman. She met him in the signing line. Gaiman sent her long
emails and bought her a web camera so they could chat on video. Around
three years after they met, he flew to Orlando to take her on a date. He invited her back to his hotel room, put on a playlist of love songs, and held her down with one hand. Gaiman didn't believe in foreplay or lubrication, Stout tells me, which could make sex particularly painful.
When she said it hurt too much, he'd tell her the problem was she wasn't submissive enough. "He talked at length about the dominant and submissive relationship he wanted out of me," she tells me. Stout had no prior
interest in BDSM. She says Gaiman never asked what she liked in bed, and there was no discussion of "safe words" or "aftercare" or "limits." He'd
ask her to call him "master" and beat her with his belt. "These were not sexy little taps," she says. When she told him she didn't like it, she
says he replied, "It's the only way I can get off."
In 2007, Gaiman and Stout took a trip to the Cornish countryside. On their last night there, Stout developed a UTI that had gotten so bad she
couldn't sit down. She told Gaiman they could fool around but that any penetration would be too painful to bear. "It was a big hard 'no,'" she says. "I told him, 'You cannot put anything in my vagina or I will die.'" Gaiman flipped her over on the bed, she says, and attempted to penetrate
her with his fingers. She told him "no." He stopped for a moment and then
he penetrated her with his penis. At that point, she tells me, "I just
shut down." She lay on the bed until he was finished. (This past October, she filed a police report alleging he raped her.)
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."
Wallner, 54, spent her days in bed crying and drinking. She stopped eating and, for the most part, stopped working. It was then that Gaiman began paying attention to her. He would bring juices up to her cabin and fret
that she was losing too much weight. The first time he touched her, in December 2018, she was sitting on his couch next to him, crying from exhaustion. Gaiman told her, "You need a hug." She stood and he hugged
her, then slid his hands down her pants and into her underwear and
squeezed her butt. She does not recall saying or doing anything in
response. "I was stunned," she says.
Over the next two years, they had a series of sexual encounters, always
when Palmer was away. When Gaiman wasn't around, they occasionally engaged in phone sex. At first Wallner, who hadn't been with anyone since Phillip left, went along willingly. But at the end of their second encounter, she remembers asking Gaiman what Palmer would think about their romance: "He said, 'Caroline, there is no romance.'" After that, she tried to keep her distance from him, darting away when she saw him on the estate. He was difficult to avoid. He kept an egg incubator in Wallner's cabin and would come down and check on it, entering without texting first. On one of these visits, he found her crying by the fireplace. He walked over to her, stuck his thumb in her mouth, and twisted her nipples. She told Gaiman the arrangement was making her "feel bad." She recalls him replying, "I don't want you to feel bad." But nothing changed. Wallner had no income at the time and was borrowing money from her sister to get by. She worried that
if she didn't appease Gaiman, he'd kick her out of her house and then she and her three daughters would have nowhere to go. "'I like our trade,'"
she remembers him saying. "'You take care of me, and I'll take care of you.'"
Sometimes she would babysit. Once, Wallner and the boy, then 4, fell
asleep reading stories in Gaiman and Palmer's bed. Wallner woke up when Gaiman returned home. He got into bed with his son in the middle, then reached across the child to grab Wallner's hand and put it on his penis.
She says she jumped out of the bed. "He didn't have boundaries," Wallner says. "I remember thinking that there was something really wrong with
him."
(Gaiman's representatives say Wallner initiated the sexual encounters and deny that he engaged in any sexual activity with her in the presence of
his son.)
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.
Palmer emailed Gaiman and their couples counselor, a man named Wayne
Muller, a minister and "a sort of marital companion," as he put it to me. According to Muller, who relayed the contents of the email to me, Palmer wrote that Gaiman needed psychiatric treatment and had finally agreed to seek it. "Everyone was trying to make the best of what was clearly a difficult situation," Muller tells me.
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