you can read the article here; severe content warning for detailed descriptions of sexual and other abuse
there is a lot to talk about here, such as the correlation between organized religion (especially insulated groups like neil gaiman's scientology) and abuse, gaiman's (and his ex-wife amanda palmer's, who is described as complicit in some of his abuse) exploitation of his façade as a safe progressive feminist, the use of n.d.a.s to silence his victims, etc -- but here's two things i wanted to point out specifically:
Pavlovich was living in a sublet that was about to end. She was broke and hadn’t been able to find a new apartment. She’d been homeless at the start of the pandemic, when the perfumery closed, and had ended up crashing on the beach in a friend’s sleeping bag on and off for the first two weeks of lockdown. The thought of returning to the beach filled her with dread.
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.’”
economic abuse like this is extremely common and will only get more common as income inequality continues to increase. serial abusers are very good at identifying (or creating) power differentials that they can leverage against their victims, and this is a very easy power differential for abusers to take advantage of even when they are only moderately wealthier than their targets. how do we as a society start to counteract this?
Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do. “You’re not thinking in a linear or logical fashion,” Pavlovich says, “but the mind is trying to process it in the ways that it can.” Whatever had happened in the bath, she’d been through worse and survived, she thought. [...] After Palmer’s offer, 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.”
it's really really common for victims to say these kinds of things to their abusers for a ton of different reasons (not recognizing the abuse for what it is, trying to convince oneself, reflexive trauma response, etc); i myself was fawning over my abuser until the last few hours of the relationship. and yet, society routinely leverages these kinds of statements against the victims, casting them as proof they are making things up and/or actually wanted to get abused. i've already seen a scattering of social media sociopaths do this with neil gaiman's victims, and i hope it remains just a scattering, but it is depressing nonetheless. why do we refuse to learn?