Partners in power games

There are even more sexual assault survivors out there, for certain, including many who will choose not to emerge publicly, as is their prerogative.
Image used for representational purposes only
Image used for representational purposes only
Updated on
2 min read

CHENNAI: In July last year, I wrote in this column — in response to news that author Neil Gaiman had been accused of sexual assault by two women — “I would bet my last rupee that there are more than two women out there whom he has harmed this way.” Tortoise Media broke the story; over the weeks that followed, they released a podcast mini-series interviewing a total of five survivors.

Now, Vulture has published a longform piece by journalist Lila Shapiro in which multiple women were interviewed about Gaiman’s violence against them, with a focus on a nanny and drama student named Scarlett Pavlovich. The publicly-known count of survivors grows.

There are even more survivors out there, for certain, including many who will choose not to emerge publicly, as is their prerogative. This is not just speculation. Gaiman’s ex-wife, the musician Amanda Palmer, is paraphrased in the article as having told Pavlovich, “Fourteen women have come to me about this”. Palmer was aware of, and actively enabled, Gaiman’s violence. The revelations in Shapiro’s piece are sordid, but it is written elegantly and with care.

Unlike, for instance, a recent essay by a male writer in another publication, about Cormac McCarthy’s decades-long relationship with a woman named Augusta Britt, whom he met when she was 16 and he was 42. That piece enthusiastically fanboyed over the author and glossed over the grooming and power dynamic abuse of McCarthy’s muse — and I do not use that term as a compliment at all.

The McCarthy piece passed muster somehow, but in the seven or so years since the #MeToo movement took off on social media, many people around the world have gained or reclaimed vocabulary, framing tools, ethical understandings and new healing possibilities around sexual violence. The spectrum of sexual trauma is not narrow, and consent is not always a clear-cut experience.

Some celebrities, including most notoriously the producer Harvey Weinstein, have fallen from grace. I still feel that most accused perpetrators, whether on high-profile fronts or in smaller circles, have managed to move on without significantly tarnished reputations. Gaiman may bounce back, too. But his survivors — known and unknown — may have begun to find vindication now.

Gaiman — like actor Justin Baldoni, currently believed to be behind a targeted smear campaign against his co-star Blake Lively, whom he allegedly sexually harassed — claimed to be a feminist and queer ally. He was not, in practice. But neither was Amanda Palmer.

There’s something a little boring to me at this point about powerful, charismatic men who come unmasked. What triggers, intrigues and provokes me here is Palmer’s role. Perhaps I speak largely empirically, but the buffer zone that surrounds predatorial men almost invariably contains enabling women who defend the man in question, bring him sacrificial lambs and have their own twisted power games in motion with other women.

In this case, Palmer herself has been noted by people who encountered her in queer and artistic circles as sexually predatorial towards young women herself, as well as financially and emotionally exploitative. Gaiman may be a garden variety monster, but Palmer is certainly not an anomaly either — and women like her are monstrous too.

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