Federal judges have dismissed three lawsuits accusing the bestselling fantasy author Neil Gaiman of sexually assaulting his children’s nanny in New Zealand four years ago.

Scarlett Pavlovich filed a lawsuit against Gaiman and his wife, Amanda Palmer, in Wisconsin in February 2025, accusing Gaiman of multiple sexual assaults while she worked as the family’s nanny in 2022. She filed lawsuits against Palmer in Massachusetts and in New York on the same day she filed the Wisconsin action.

Gaiman has a home in north-western Wisconsin, and Palmer lives in Massachusetts. Pavlovich moved to drop the New York lawsuit against Palmer in May, explaining in court documents that she filed an action in that state because Palmer had recently relocated from New York to Massachusetts and she was unsure which state had jurisdiction. US district judge Mary Kay Vyskocil in New York granted the request in June.

Pavlovich also dropped the portion of the Wisconsin lawsuit against Palmer in May, and US district judge James Peterson in Madison dismissed the rest of it in October, saying Pavlovich needed to pursue the case in New Zealand. US district judge Nathaniel Gorton in Boston threw out the Massachusetts filing on Friday on the same grounds.

Pavlovich’s attorneys did not respond to emails from the Associated Press seeking comment on Monday. Attorneys listed for Gaiman and Palmer did not respond to messages, either.

The AP does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they publicly identify themselves. Pavlovich identified herself in an interview with New York magazine, which published an article in January 2025 detailing allegations of assault, abuse and coercion leveled by eight women.

Pavlovich alleged in her lawsuits that she was 22 and homeless when she met Palmer in Auckland in 2020. Palmer invited Pavlovich to the couple’s Waiheke Island home, and she eventually became their son’s nanny, according to the filings.

Pavlovich alleged in the lawsuits that Gaiman sexually assaulted her on the night they met in February 2022. The assaults continued, according to the filings, but she kept working for the couple because she was broke and homeless, and Gaiman had told her that he would help her writing career.

When she told Palmer about the assaults, Palmer told her that more than a dozen women had told her in the past that Gaiman had sexually abused them, according to the lawsuits. The assaults finally stopped when Pavlovich told Palmer that she was going to kill herself, according to the filings.

Pavlovich went on to allege that Palmer knew of Gaiman’s sexual desires and presented her to him, knowing he would assault her. She argued that Gaiman and Palmer violated federal human trafficking prohibitions and demanded at least $7m in damages

Gaiman released a statement after the New York magazine article was published, denying he had ever sexually abused anyone.

Gaiman’s attorneys argued in a motion to dismiss the Wisconsin lawsuit that Gaiman and Pavlovich had a brief personal relationship that involved “consensual physical intimacy”.

Police in New Zealand investigated her assault allegations and found them meritless, the motion says. The attorneys went on to argue that Pavlovich’s lawsuits were the culmination of a plan to smear Gaiman and that any legal disputes should be resolved in New Zealand, not the US.

Gaiman has authored numerous science fiction and fantasy works, including the novels American Gods, The Graveyard Book, Anansi Boys and the children’s dark fairy tale, Coraline.

His 2013 novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, won the National Book award in Britain.

Neil Gaiman has said that multiple sexual assault allegations against him are “simply untrue” and claimed to be the victim of a “smear campaign”, in the first post addressing the accusations for almost a year.

Gaiman, 65, author of novels including American Gods and the Ocean at the End of the Lane, has faced allegations of sexual abuse and coercive behaviour, which were outlined in a podcast by the Tortoise Media team in July 2024.

When New York Magazine published its own investigation in January 2025, Gaiman made a statement insisting he had “never engaged in nonconsensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever”.

Nine women have come forward to accuse Gaiman of sexual misconduct, including Scarlett Pavlovich, the former nanny to Gaiman and his wife, Amanda Palmer. The couple, who have a son together, are going through a divorce.

On Monday evening Gaiman posted on his Facebook author page for the first time since the allegations broke, save for a book-related post in November, to say he had “learned first-hand how effective a smear campaign can be”.

“The allegations against me are completely and simply untrue. There are emails, text messages and video evidence that flatly contradict them,” he said.

“These allegations, especially the really salacious ones, have been spread and amplified by people who seemed a lot more interested in outrage and getting clicks on headlines rather than whether things had actually happened or not. (They didn’t.)”

Gaiman said he had hoped there would be journalistic investigations that “would take the (mountains of) evidence into account” but he had been “astonished to see how much of the reporting was simply an echo chamber, and how the actual evidence was dismissed or ignored”.

He added: “One thing that’s kept me going through all this madness is the conviction that the truth would, eventually, come out.”

Since the allegations were published, one of Gaiman’s comic publishers, Dark Horse, has dropped him, while DC Comics, publishers of the Sandman, pulled a planned reprint of his work from its schedule. A stage play of Gaiman’s children’s book Coraline was cancelled a year ago after the claims against him.

Gaiman also revealed that, despite the condemnation he has faced and many fans turning against him, he had begun writing again and was close to finishing a new novel.

“Thank you again to so many of you for your belief in my innocence and your support for my work. It has meant the world to me,” he said.

Andalucía is famous for its variety: high alpine mountains and snow-capped peaks, river plains and rolling olive groves, sun-baked coastlines and arid deserts. It is the perfect setting for Neil Rollinson’s debut novel, which is its own kind of spectacular mosaic. Built from short, seemingly discrete chapters that take us between Spain in 2003 and the coalfields of Northumberland in the 70s and 80s, The Dead Don’t Bleed coheres into an extraordinarily tense and tender portrait of two brothers trying to escape their father’s gangland past.

Until now, Rollinson has been known as a poet; his collection Talking Dead was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa poetry prize. Here he brings his talent for compressed evocation to an exploration of fraternal rivalry and the enduring impact of a violent patriarchy. If you took Frank and his brother Gordon apart on the autopsy table, he writes, “you’d find the same bones, the same blood. Almost everything interchangeable. The corkscrews of DNA, the cells, the posture, the downcast glance.” But from a young age, change is afoot within Frank. He knows his father has “high hopes for him” in the family business of petty crime: “Frank Bridge. King of Northumberland”. But Frank wants to be a different kind of king. He carries within himself a “yearning for something more expansive” – the kind of dream that could get him killed in his family’s closed world of criminal secrecy.

Like his author, Frank is drawn to poetry – particularly the work of Federico García Lorca. He is also dangerously drawn to his brother’s girlfriend, Carol, often glimpsed with a mop and bucket in hand at the local pub, cleaning up after the men. Frank “loves to watch her move: tough, big boned, elegant but strong. He’s seen her put men flat on their backs for touching her up. A single punch.” In north-east England, “no one messes with Carol” – and even fewer mess with poetry. The twin risks of Frank involving himself in forbidden lust and forbidden literature power the whole plot, giving the novel the through line of a quest narrative. When Gordon and Carol flee to Spain with the proceeds of a robbery that went disastrously wrong, Frank, in the wake of his father’s death, makes the irrevocable decision to track them down.

Rollinson is expert at capturing the long shadow cast by a complicated father. Laurence is a local gangster who, through his own perverse code of ethics and innate charisma, has established himself as “a man of stature. Respected. Everyone stopping to chat.” His “loud laugh echoes across the room. A man among men”. Frank is caught between wanting to please his parent and wanting to escape the family’s gaze entirely. His “father’s scrutiny is like a physical manifestation,” Rollinson writes. Frank “always feels it in his throat, as if he’s being throttled”. The novel captures the way close observation can be an expression of love, but also a kind of violence. In the Northumberland boozers where men “get mortal in the afternoon”, pints “glow in the river light, amber gold and black, like beakers in a chemistry lab”. Many of these men will drink themselves to death. What catches your eye can kill you.

One of this novel’s many successes is in capturing the terror of illicit attraction – of admitting to yourself that you secretly want something more. Readers of Karl Geary, Douglas Stuart or Ross Raisin will appreciate the way Rollinson blends social realism with a knack for capturing risky intimacies. The “creeping deprivation” of Northumberland in the Thatcher era – the closure of its core industries, “more and more lads on the dole” – is put in beautiful contrast with Frank’s longing for his brother’s girlfriend. In one lovely, expertly judged scene, Frank and Carol sit “on a wall by a waste ground” as the rain beats down around them. A “demolition squad takes down a terrace behind them. A whole street. Houses he’s known, and been in.” A fireplace “hangs, mid-air, levitating, its grate gaping. Improvements, they say. For whom?”

That question – “for whom?” – reverberates on every page. How much of our lives should be spent in service of the family that made us, as opposed to the family we hope to make? Spain seems to offer the relief of fresh contrasts: “the shadow and light, the scent of orange blossom, the endless, undulating fields and the high, unblemished sky”. But every landscape in this novel holds its ghosts. Lorca was murdered in Andalucía, and his exact resting place remains a mystery – one echoed in a final moment of violence that is all the more powerful for being played out largely off stage, in the space between sentences, the gap between chapters. Rollinson’s novel is heartbreaking, but he is no sentimentalist. Life and love spring up from the cracks, he seems to say, but damage continues to be done.

Amanda Palmer, the musician and former partner of Neil Gaiman, has denied allegations of human trafficking and negligence made in a civil lawsuit filed by a woman who previously worked for the couple in New Zealand.

“I will not respond to the specific allegations being made against me except to say that I deny the allegations and will respond in due course,” wrote Palmer in an Instagram post on Friday, adding that her “heart goes out to all survivors”.

On 3 February, Scarlett Pavlovich filed a lawsuit to district courts in Wisconsin, New York and Massachusetts accusing Gaiman of repeated rape and sexual assault, and Palmer of “procuring and presenting” her to Gaiman “for such abuse”.

Nine women have now accused Gaiman of sexual misconduct, eight of whom were interviewed for a New York Magazine piece published on 13 January.

The following day, Gaiman published a statement on his website stating that he had “never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.”

Palmer and Gaiman, who married in 2011 and had a child together in 2015, announced in 2022 that they had decided to divorce.

On 15 January, Palmer said in an initial Instagram statement that because of ongoing custody and divorce proceedings, she was unable to offer public comment on the allegations. A representative for Palmer told NME that she “is profoundly disturbed” by the allegations against Gaiman.

The lawsuit states that Pavlovich met Palmer in Auckland in 2020, when Pavlovich was 22, and the two became acquaintances. Pavlovich would sometimes run errands for Palmer, and eventually became the couple’s nanny.

The lawsuit alleges that Gaiman repeatedly sexually assaulted Pavlovich while she was working without pay during a “three-week indenture”. At the time, she was “broke and homeless”, and Gaiman and Palmer “intentionally withheld” pay to keep her “trapped, vulnerable, and penniless”, it claims.

Pavlovich said when she went to Palmer about the assaults, Palmer told her that other women had previously come to her about abusive sexual encounters with Gaiman.

The lawsuit states that Palmer “knowingly approached and procured the services of Scarlett with reckless disregard for the fact that Gaiman would force Scarlett to engage in commercial sex acts” with him.

“I thank you all deeply for continuing to respect my recent request for privacy as I navigate this extremely difficult moment”, Palmer wrote in her post on Friday. “I must protect my young child and his right to privacy.”

A US publisher of comics by Neil Gaiman has announced that it has cancelled plans to publish future works by the author who has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women.

Dark Horse Comics “takes seriously the allegations against Neil Gaiman and we are no longer publishing his works,” the company wrote in a statement on X.

“Confirming that the Anansi Boys comic series and collected volume have been cancelled,” it added. Dark Horse Comics began publishing the Anansi Boys series, an adaptation of Gaiman’s 2005 novel of the same name, in June last year. It was intended to be an eight-issue series, but has now been cancelled following the seventh issue, published 15 January.

Nine women have now accused Gaiman of sexual misconduct. On 14 January, the author published a statement on his website saying that he had “never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone”. Gaiman’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment on Dark Horse Comics’ statement.

HarperCollins, which publishes many of Gaiman’s books in the US including Coraline and American Gods, told Publishers Weekly that it does not have any new books by Gaiman scheduled. WW Norton, the US publisher of Gaiman’s book Norse Mythology, said that it will not have projects with the author going forward, though did not say whether this was connected to the allegations. Marvel Comics has no new works by Gaiman in progress, according to the New York Times.

Other publishers of Gaiman’s work – including Bloomsbury, Penguin, Hachette, DC Comics and Titan – have not yet made public statements about whether they will continue to publish the author, and did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

Last July, an investigation by Tortoise media reported sexual assault allegations against Gaiman by two women. By the end of August, three further women had come forward with allegations. On 13 January, Vulture published an investigation in which four further women accused Gaiman of assault, including nonconsensual BDSM.

The following day, Gaiman said in his statement that he had refrained from speaking publicly so far “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 don’t accept there was any abuse,” he said. “Some of the horrible stories now being told simply never happened, while others have been so distorted from what actually took place that they bear no relationship to reality.”

Several television adaptations of Gaiman’s works have been cancelled or had their production paused. Prime Video’s Good Omens, based on the novel by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, will now end with one 90-minute episode instead of a full third season. According to Deadline, Gaiman offered to step back from the show’s finale. A Disney film adaptation of Gaiman’s 2008 young adult novel The Graveyard Book, which was in development, was also put on hold. Neither streaming service confirmed that these decisions were taken because of the allegations.

Three screen adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s works have been cancelled or had their production paused amid reports accusing the author of Coraline and The Sandman of sexual misconduct.

Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives, based on characters created for DC Comics by Gaiman and Matt Wagner, has been cancelled after one season. Production of the third and final season of Amazon drama Good Omens, based on the 1990 novel by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, has been paused, according to US website Deadline.

Meanwhile, development of a Disney film adaptation of Gaiman’s 2008 young adult novel The Graveyard Book has been put on hold. None of the streaming services has confirmed that these decisions were taken because of the allegations, but Gaiman apparently offered to step back from his involvement in Good Omens, according to Deadline.

Gaiman’s representatives declined to comment on the decisions taken by the streaming services.

In July, an investigation by Tortoise media reported allegations by two women of sexual misconduct against Gaiman, including sexual abuse and coercive behaviour. Gaiman has strongly denied any unlawful conduct. One woman, whose first name is Scarlett, alleged that Gaiman performed sexual acts on her without her consent when she was working as a nanny for the author’s family in New Zealand. Gaiman said they only engaged in consensual acts. A second woman, identified only by the initial K, alleged that Gaiman penetrated her without consent; Gaiman denied any unlawful behaviour.

Further allegations have been made since Tortoise’s original report, including by Caroline Wallner, who alleged that Gaiman pressured her to have sex with him in return for letting her live at his property in upstate New York, and made her sign a non-disclosure agreement in return for a $275,000 payment. Gaiman has said that the relationship had been entirely consensual.

There is, it seems, an unwritten law in the world of artificial intelligence, which I will attempt to distil here: “Any discussion of AI must include an early and robust reference to the Terminator”. Though the 1984 James Cameron film and its 1991 sequel are quite good, here are two equally made-up but probably mostly true facts: no one under the age of 30 has seen either film and, in any case, neither film has anything particularly insightful to say about AI. But here we are, and the relentless analyses of the moment we are in – where we apparently stand on precipices of revolutions, ushering in utopia or the apocalypse – tend to be written by men who have seen Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator failing to assassinate Sarah Connor many times over. If you can also allude to biblical creation, then you’re winning at AI bingo.

AI expert Neil Lawrence springs both traps on page one of his new book, The Atomic Human, and fulfilling the promise of the Terminator’s most quoted line (“I’ll be back”), the film makes a further 15 appearances. Lawrence doesn’t reference the more recent Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 AI film (that I, full disclosure, had a minor role in creating) which explicitly mocks techbro Silicon Valley arrogance: a Mark Zuckerberg/Elon Musk-like CEO hubristically misquotes a comment made about the creation myth of his own artificially intelligent robot: “If I’ve invented a machine with consciousness, I’m not a man, I’m a God.”

I wonder if we are in a unique moment in history when the discourse is shaped so significantly by the fiction that the men who are in charge of these domains consumed as nerdy youths. Last month it was revealed that Sam Altman, the controversial figure behind OpenAI had asked the actor Scarlett Johansson to voice the latest incarnation of their ChatGPT interface, emulating her role as the AI personal assistant in the 2013 film Her. Johansson declined, but Altman allegedly used a soundalike actor or possibly an artificial Johansson voice anyway. In May, apparently too arrogant (or rich) to bother hiding his deed, Altman tweeted the single word, “her”. Hubris 1: Ethics nil.

We understand big ideas through storytelling. Much has been made of humans as storytelling machines, and Lawrence embraces this mode of science communication with gusto. He indulges us with the Bletchley Park saga, Alan Turing’s brilliance and details of the strategies and technologies of the second world war, in enjoyably exploring ideas of intelligence and how computers can or don’t emulate human cognition. In a chapter called Enlightenment, we veer from Great Man classic tales of Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill and Stephen Hawking, down a cul-de-sac visiting William Blake and Michelangelo, then to Lewis Carroll and Bertrand Russell, and all the way to Elon Musk, via many more.

It says on the press release for The Atomic Human that “the voices of women in AI get overshadowed”. I scanned the index and found that 15 women are named in this 448-page book (16 if you count the goddess Hera), as well as the mention of two groups of anonymous women (Royal Navy Wrens, and the women of Bletchley Park). Winnie-the-Pooh, a fictional bear who as far as I am aware, did not make any pronouncements on intelligence research, or the AI revolution, is mentioned 17 times. I highlight this not to signal my no-doubt jarring political correctness, nor to deny the possibility that, for reasons unexplored in this book, women have played a less significant direct role in the history of AI and big Silicon Valley tech. But if the voices of women are overshadowed in a book by a movie robot or a whimsical bear, then by god we need new stories.

Countless books and films cover the history of Bletchley, of codebreaking, of life in Facebook or Microsoft, about George Mallory and Edmund Hillary, about JFK and the Apollo moon landings. Page after page of the Atomic Human are war stories and rocket stories, jumping about in time and space, and muddling the premise. Maybe I am not manly enough to be excited by this paean to the well-documented but tangential achievements of men. Even if the intended narrative here is to synthesise a thesis about how these well-told tales contribute to our understanding of intelligence, I couldn’t quite pick out the relevance of so many of these boys’ own adventures to the expectation embedded in the subtitle: “Understanding ourselves in the age of AI”.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Lawrence is, however, refreshingly dismissive of the tiring amount of posturing and bullshit in the world of AI. I may be in a minority in thinking that the trademark “big concepts” are so often pseudo-philosophical grandstanding by men who like the sport and status but maybe should’ve read a bit more philosophy, and at least had a glance at some history: the singularity – the point when technology is irreversibly beyond our control; transhumanism – a waftily defined state where we are human but vastly enhanced via some unspecified tech; Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence – a hypothetical technology whose mind far exceeds that of our own crude meat-brains. I’ve never quite resolved whether these future demons are the hooks to get people interested in the real issues, or simply distractions, the magician’s flourish. Either way, I’ve always found them rather tiresome. Lawrence pleasingly labels them as “hooey”, because in all their grandeur, they seem to be terabytes away from the real world of AI that we already live in.

Instead, Lawrence offers novel insight into what intelligence is, how it evolved, and how it is distributed in different living and non-living systems. Comparisons to psychological processing, and the intricacies of the intelligent learning behaviour of our own nervous systems provide insight into the neural processes that do, might or don’t underlie complex artificial administration – for example, in the process of buying something off Amazon, where Lawrence worked for several years – and how much of what is described as AI is merely computation and statistics. This is a salient point that should be better known, that much of the so-called AI in action today is likely to be an Excel spreadsheet doing some numerical powerlifting. But these are points lost in muddled tales whose relevance is often hard to detect.

I would prefer this book half the length and stripped of “great men” of history, to showcase the things we don’t know about what really happens inside the private offices and labs of Amazon or Facebook, and to puncture the movie-baddie hubris. It has an admirable central humanist message: that we are irreplaceable despite the scary waffle of popular discourse. Overall, The Atomic Human is a sensible book, which is higher praise than it sounds, because it tries and to some extent succeeds in rising above the very shallow oceans of public debates about AI that are often shocking but ultimately dull. I just wish he hadn’t started with a tired Uzi-toting cyborg from the 1980s.