Neil Gaiman and the perils of BDSM Is it possible to consent to sexual torture?

In the literary world this week, a hackneyed writing genre got an unexpected revival: the stern-faced #MeToo callout. Fearlessly exposing a famous person’s sexual impropriety for the scandalised enjoyment of all, the long read in New York Magazine took as its subject the extremely successful “dark fantasy” writer Neil Gaiman. Sensible readers had already guessed the ending: that the overindulged manbaby in black, with his wild gothic imagination and propensity to hitch himself to splashy feminist causes, would turn out to be a priapic creep. Still, it was worth slogging through the piece for the inadvertent light it shed upon the strangeness of modern sexual mores.

Alongside Gaiman, the main protagonist — also in the Tortoise podcast series which preceded it, containing some of the same allegations — was New Zealander Scarlett Pavlovich, now a mature student in the UK. We first encounter her as someone with a major crush on the performance artist Amanda Palmer, who also happens to be Gaiman’s wife and the mother of his child. Pavlovich is 24 when she first meets Gaiman, having been hanging out with Palmer for two years following a chance encounter on an Auckland street. Hours after arriving at his house to babysit, he inveigles Pavlovich into taking what she wrongly presumes will be a solo bath in an outdoor tub. He then allegedly subjects her to unexpected acts of nudity, digital penetration and facial ejaculation, and tells her to call him “master”.

Next, Palmer invites Pavlovich to live with her at a nearby property, and she enters into a loose nannying arrangement with the couple, albeit unpaid. Over the next few months there are further allegations of traumatic encounters with the lecherous sexagenarian: episodes of unexpected and forceful sex, as well as beatings with a belt, and the unwilling ingestion of various disgusting bodily fluids.

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