Civil lawsuits filed against Neil Gaiman for sexual assault
By Rob Freeman, PA
A woman has lodged civil lawsuits against Neil Gaiman and his wife in the US, accusing the British author of sexually assaulting her.
The lawsuits against Gaiman and Amanda Palmer were filed in Wisconsin, Massachusetts and New York.
In January, the 64-year-old wrote a blog post in which he denied allegations of sexual assault made against him by eight women.
The lawsuits say the woman was befriended by Palmer when she was 22 and homeless in New Zealand and began working for the couple, which is when the assaults began.
According to the lawsuits, Palmer told the woman there had been previous complaints from more than a dozen different women.
The woman alleges the couple violated laws on federal human trafficking, with complaints of assault, battery and inflicting emotional distress against Gaiman and negligence against Palmer.
She is seeking at least seven million dollars (£5.6 million) in damages.
Five women, four of whom were among eight featured in a New York Magazine article in January, made allegations about the writer in a Tortoise Media podcast series published in summer 2024.
Since the magazine article, publisher Dark Horse Comics cancelled upcoming work by Gaiman and a UK stage adaptation of his book Coraline has been scrapped.
The British-born The Sandman author wrote in a blog post he had read the allegations with “horror and dismay”.
He wrote: “I’ve 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.
“I’ve always tried to be a private person, and felt increasingly that social media was the wrong place to talk about important personal matters. I’ve now reached the point where I feel that I should say something.
“As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen.
“I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.”
The author said he understood that “not everyone will believe me” and added he would be “doing my very best to deserve their trust, as well as the trust of my readers”.
He claimed some of the allegations “simply never happened” while others had been “distorted” to “bear no relationship to reality”, but said he would “take responsibility for any missteps I made”.