Neil Gaiman’s Phone Call With Claire
What’s the sound of Neil Gaiman tap dancing? It’s like this: “Because normally I keep all [inarticulate sounds] … I keep fans… at arm’s length.” And: “I mean, I would never have made the first move on anybody! I would be terrified of that.” On chasing young women: “The me of 10 years might have done—the me of these days has learned a lot.” Finally: “A few years ago I was informed I was high-functioning autistic, which is a… interesting thing to learn about yourself, when you’re old. Um, that did mean I sort of went, ‘Okay, this is why… I sort of… sometimes find myself tiptoeing through human… relations and sometimes getting them very wrong.’”
As to the last point: yeah, and Michael Jordan never had the hands. Those who know the career of the beloved fantasy author recognize Gaiman as a champion networker; in happier times he’s remarked that all his big breaks came from being recommended by one person or another. The business about keeping off fans also invites skepticism, since Gaiman has since admitted to an affair with a young admirer he met at a book signing in the Bush years. The other points remind us how interesting chronology can be. The quotes given above all come from a phone conversation held in July 2022. Seven months before that, in December 2021, Gaiman paid $270,000 to a woman and had her sign a nondisclosure agreement. Then, in February 2022, the bashful fellow found himself making a first move by stripping off and getting into a bathtub with a young New Zealander; she hadn’t invited him, nor did she invite his fingers up her rectum.
Gaiman denies sticking his fingers inside her, at least at that point. But he doesn’t deny the rest, including that the girl was 22 and he was 61. Whatever the “me of these days” had learned in July, he didn’t know it a few months before. But he did know about NDAs, since in May 2022 he had the young woman sign one after he offered to pay her $13,000 in New Zealand dollars (not quite $8000 in US dollars). That price clocks in low next to the December payout, but the girl had undergone only three weeks of the Gaiman sexual magic. The other woman says she spent two years providing the author with blowjobs on demand; she says that otherwise she feared being kicked into the street with her three children; Gaiman’s side is that she was never coerced.
Both women’s stories were reported by Tortoise Media’s Slow Newscast, so far the only news operation to break word of Gaiman’s marauding (and alleged marauding). The revelations began at the start of July and by now involve seven accusers: three using pseudonyms, two using their names, and two speaking on background (meaning they talked with reporters but didn’t want their stories shared.) The New Zealand woman was the first, with the other NDA signer speaking out a month later.
The phone call from July 2022 was taped by another accuser. She chooses to be known as Claire and she first told her story on a therapy podcast called Am I Broken?: Survivor Stories, doing so a few weeks after news of the first revelations. Having taken the plunge, she contacted the Slow Newscast and retold her story, this time complete with phone excerpts; the episode was released at the end of August.
Disputes involving he-said versus she-said are easy for third parties to dismiss; that’s so even when, like now, the situation’s really more of a he-said versus she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, and so on. But indifference becomes a lot more difficult when one side is repeatedly caught off base regarding the truth. Claire, who spent years in therapy post-Gaiman, says she taped the call to keep from detaching herself from the experience midconversation. But, for our purposes, the call matters because we hear Gaiman denying a list of things his camp later confirmed to reporters for the Slow Newscast. The reporters have already revealed that the Gaiman camp presented an accuser’s email as evidence that she lied about not liking sex with him; the accuser showed reporters the whole thread and it turned out the email was about someone else, not Gaiman. They have also revealed the Gaiman camp’s claim that another accuser had a medical condition causing false memories, a condition the reporters said isn’t included in her medical records. Now they have Gaiman on tape making claims—fans at arm’s length, never making the first move, no more age gaps—that he abandoned after the reporters began their investigations. In short he appears to have been lying his ass off and doing so with an offensive degree of sleeve-borne anguish and tortured stammering.
Unexplained. Neither podcast comes out and says Claire didn’t tell Gaiman she was recording the call. And, blatant as Gaiman’s contradictions are, Claire’s interview on the Slow Newscast presents some mysteries that go unaddressed. These don’t blow her account out of the water, but they do call for further explanation.
First, listening to Claire’s Slow Newscast account it sounds like Gaiman’s wife, Amanda Palmer, set the girl up so Gaiman could knock her over. This would give Palmer an integral part in the resulting mess; even so, Claire didn’t mention her when speaking on Am I Broken (Palmer hasn’t answered requests for comment). Second, Claire emphasizes that she always told Gaiman there’d be no sex, but the Slow Newscast describes what sounds like a definite offer on her part: “She suggested, in an email in October 2013, that they could spend one of the nights on his tour together.” Third, Claire says she thought she was Gaiman’s only fan dalliance until she learned otherwise this summer. But she also says Gaiman told her of his open marriage with Palmer and how “it was an arrangement that he was able to take advantage of more than she was, because of how tired she got after concerts. And book tours were not nearly as tiring.”
Leaving out Palmer the first time isn’t so much suspicious as puzzling; it’s hard to think what Claire could’ve been trying to hide. And the October 2013 email could well have been a desperate, last-ditch effort at salvaging her connection with Gaiman, an effort that was out of keeping with the rest of their time together. Finally, Claire’s claim that she thought she was the only one has the support of an email Gaiman sent her early in the relationship (“Because you are probably wondering, no, I’ve really not done this before, although Amanda has wanted me to for ages”) and of what he said in their postmortem phone conversation a decade later (his stammered “Because normally I keep all … I keep fans … at arm’s length”). The mystery’s why he also told her something so different and why she appears to have remembered this remark just once, the time she told the Slow Newscast about it, and then forgot it again. For that matter, it’s a mystery how Gaiman responded to her October 2013 offer and whether he brought up the offer during their phone call; if he didn’t, it’s a mystery why not, given that she was reproaching him for pressuring her to have sex.
The events. Claire’s story dates to 2012 and 2013, when she was 22 and 23. As Claire tells it, she’d spent half her life reading Gaiman and listening to audiobooks of him. Once they met, she recalls being repelled by the physical side of his attentions but thrilled at the fuss her hero was making over her (“the possibility of losing that felt devastating. So even when I was uncomfortable, I was—I was willing to be uncomfortable”). The Slow Newscast is conscientious about relaying messages she sent him that celebrate the very things she now complains about: “I was also a fan of the kissing. If you don’t mind, I’d very much like to kiss you again” and “Your lap is extremely comfortable, especially when your hands are involved. I seriously regret my wardrobe choice, and that I didn’t just wrap my arms around you and start making out with you shamelessly in the back of the car.”
Claire was also a fan of Amanda Palmer, the relentlessly self-assertive punk star who married Gaiman in 2011 and separated from him a couple of years ago. (The Slow Newscast says they’re still married despite reports of divorce.) Claire says that in September 2012 she attended a Palmer club date in North Carolina and told her that in a couple of days she’d be a volunteer at an appearance by Gaiman, also in North Carolina. To continue Claire’s narrative: Palmer (then 36) wrapped her arms around the girl’s neck, “whispered ‘Hello, Neil’ into my ear,” and told her she could nibble her husband’s ear (Gaiman then 51); when the day of the reading and book signing arrived, the girl didn’t do that but she did surprise herself by telling the author to stand up and then hugging him; Gaiman kissed her on the cheek and soon after invited her to the back of the theater where the book signing and reading was being held. There he told her a story about the ceremony he and Palmer had used for their wedding; demonstrating the ceremony’s climax, he kissed her on the cheek again. He invited her to another appearance, this one two days later. She says this second evening included him trying to grope her under her dress and ended with him pushing against the wall of his hotel room while he kissed her.
Claire says she and Gaiman then launched an extended alliance via email and Skype. She says her boyfriend, now her husband, knew about this, and that about a month into the back-and-forth she told Gaiman about him. Texts she supplied show her telling her boyfriend she wouldn’t have sex with Gaiman, and she says she told the writer the same thing. As she remembers it, Gaiman didn’t disagree openly but did set about testing her resistance and preparing the ground. His position, as paraphrased by the Slow Newscast, is that “he was corresponding with someone he’d kissed and had every reason to believe enjoyed it, and wished to do it again.”
In June 2013 the two met at a signing in Georgia, apparently without incident. About a week there arrived what the podcast describes as a shift in tone. Having told Gaiman she couldn’t sleep, she received an emailed invitation to phone sex, apparently a departure for them: “You have fingers, an imagination and my phone number…” The resulting encounter, as she describes it, involved her silence and a good deal from him about his penis and its impressive size. The Slow Newscast: “Neil Gaiman’s position doesn’t accept Claire’s description of this phone sex, saying the tone of their correspondence isn’t congruent with it. Claire’s description of this phone sex is similar to three other women’s accounts of their phone sex with Neil Gaiman.”
Claire was due to see him again in a few days, this time in Nashville. She recalls telling him once again there’d be no sex, and being assured he wouldn’t push for any. Even so, she says, she arrived in a highly alarmed state of mind for an evening that ended with her struggling beneath him while he groped her; this was on a bed at the back of his tour bus, with both of them clothed. She recalls him saying, “I’m a very wealthy man and I’m used to getting what I want” (a phrase denied by Gaiman’s side), and then, after he gave up, “I’m sad because I’m going to have to let you go.” This was in July 2013, after which she dropped out of contact with him (except, apparently, for her October 2013 email offering to spend the night). An unspecified number of months went by, after which he messaged to see if they were still friends. She remembers being fed a line: “he told me that he regretted us making things sexual, and all of this had been nothing more than, he called it, ‘an apotheosis of miscommunication.’ He said that my indecision had caused everyone stress that night. And I believed him.”
Years went by as she came to terms with her experience. She left her friends because they were Gaiman fans. “I was having panic attacks whenever I heard a British accent,” she says. “Or when I saw one of his books at a bookstore. And… I was depressed and having nightmares, and…” She had trouble reading, among other things: “I got off Tumblr, I stopped going to conventions, and… I stopped going into bookstores.” In 2022, when she was pregnant, she says she had nightmares about him again and decided to confront the writer about his behavior. She sent Gaiman a letter laying out her feelings and he agreed to talk by phone.
Two calls followed, both in July 2022. The first is the one quoted at the start of this article. In it Gaiman claimed to be autistic and said he’d misread her signals; she says she shot that idea down. He then stammered out apologies (“I’ve obviously fucked up on all this. And, and I’m trying to make up some of the damage” and “You know, I did something so much shittier than I ever dreamed, that I, I didn’t even realize I was doing something shitty. I did something really shitty”). In the second call he offered to make a “hefty donation” to a rape crisis center where she used to volunteer and to cover her years of therapy by paying her $60,000 (the payment arrived a few weeks later). She says she was satisfied that he had messed up once and learned from his mistake.
This year she discovered she was just one of a train of women reporting nightmarish experiences with the writer. She also learned, when the Slow Newscast reported her story, that the rape crisis center says it never received a donation from Neil Gaiman. The Gaiman camp says he thought he sent it.