Neil Gaiman, the writer of The Sandman, and the allegations he denies

Neil Gaiman

Photo: Kyle Cassidy / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 10, 1960 Portchester, Hampshire, England
Occupation	Writer
Known for	The Sparks Brothers, The People vs. George Lucas, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown
Awards	World Fantasy · Eisner · Bram Stoker · 5 Hugo · 2 Nebula · Locus · Newbery Medal · Carnegie Medal · British National Book Awards, Book of the Year

The angel and the demon of Good Omens got their goodbye this spring without the man who first put them on the page. The comic apocalypse Neil Gaiman wrote with Terry Pratchett, and later carried to television himself, ended on Prime Video as a single feature-length episode, cut down after several women accused him of sexual assault and he stepped away from the show. He denies every accusation. The Sandman remains in print, and the readers who grew up on it are left to work out what to do with a writer they trusted to tell them the truth about monsters.

He was a reader before he was anything else. His family was Polish-Jewish, and when he was small they moved to East Grinstead in West Sussex, where his parents studied Dianetics at the town’s Scientology centre, a family religion he says was never his. He could read at four and was given the Narnia books for his seventh birthday, which is how he learned that a prize called the Carnegie Medal existed: the last Narnia volume had won it.

Gaiman, who was born on 10 November 1960 in Portchester, Hampshire, went to Whitgift School in Croydon and by the early 1980s was a journalist. His first book, in 1984, was a biography of Duran Duran. That year, at Victoria Station, he read Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and gave in to comics. With the artist Dave McKean he made Violent Cases, and in 1987 DC Comics hired him, the year he quit journalism, saying British newspapers printed untruths as fact.

The editor Karen Berger gave him a forgotten character to rebuild. The Sandman, which ran from January 1989 to March 1996, follows Dream, also called Morpheus, lord of dreams and stories, across 75 issues of horror, myth and history. An issue built around Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction in 1991. Dream’s older sister Death, who first appears in the eighth issue, got her own miniseries, Death: The High Cost of Living, which launched DC’s Vertigo line in 1993. The series outsold Batman and Superman at DC, and the DC executive Paul Levitz said its paperbacks converted new readers to comics, “particularly young women on college campuses.”

The novels came alongside. Good Omens, his first, appeared in 1990; Pratchett later said he had done the larger share of the writing because Gaiman was busy with Dream. Neverwhere (1996) grew out of his BBC series about a London below London, and Stardust (1999) was a Victorian fairy tale. American Gods, in 2001, sent the old gods that immigrants carried to America on a road trip against the new ones, and won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Bram Stoker Award. Anansi Boys opened at number one on The New York Times list in 2005.

His sharpest books are about children. In Coraline (2002) a girl finds a second mother behind a door in her new home, one with buttons for eyes; the book won the Hugo and the Nebula for novella before Henry Selick turned it into a stop-motion film in 2009. The Graveyard Book moved Kipling’s jungle to a cemetery, where ghosts raise a boy whose family has been murdered. It became the first book to win both the Newbery Medal, in 2009, and the Carnegie Medal, in 2010. Accepting the Carnegie, he said that “if you can make yourself aged seven happy, you’re really doing well.” The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a man’s memory of something terrifying that happened when he was a boy, was named Book of the Year at the British National Book Awards in 2013 and later became a National Theatre play.

Television gave him a second career. After the film of Stardust in 2007, he wrote “The Doctor’s Wife” for Doctor Who and won a Hugo for it in 2012. After Pratchett died in 2015, a letter he had left for Gaiman urged him to finish adapting Good Omens; Gaiman wrote the 2019 series, ran it as showrunner and won another Hugo for the screenplay. Netflix‘s The Sandman, which he co-created, followed in 2022.

In July 2024 the Tortoise Media podcast Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman aired the accounts of women who said he had sexually assaulted or abused them, and a New York magazine cover story in January 2025 brought the number of women to eight. One of them, Scarlett Pavlovich, who had worked as a nanny for his son with the musician Amanda Palmer, sued both of them in US federal courts in February 2025, alleging sexual assault and human trafficking. Gaiman’s answer has not changed: “I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.” In the same blog post he allowed that he “could have and should have done so much better.” No court has ruled on the claims themselves. Her suits were dismissed because the events she described took place in New Zealand; on 29 June 2026 a US appeals court upheld that ruling, noting that Gaiman had agreed to be sued there.

The industry did not wait for a verdict. Disney halted its film of The Graveyard Book, Dark Horse ended its comic adaptation of Anansi Boys and stopped publishing his work, his literary agency dropped him, and HarperCollins and Norton said they had no new books by him planned. The final season of The Sandman arrived in July 2025, closing with a bonus episode built on Death: The High Cost of Living. Good Omens wrapped up on 13 May 2026 with Gaiman no longer part of it.

In February he broke a long silence on his blog, calling the allegations “completely and simply untrue”, praising a Substack writer who campaigns for his innocence and announcing a novel that, he wrote, could be “the biggest thing I’ve done since American Gods.” No publisher has been named. In 2015 he gave a lecture called How Stories Last, about why some tales survive the people who first told them. His own are now being tested on that point, by readers rather than courts.

Tags: writers, novelists, Good Omens, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, The Sandman

Neil Gaiman, the writer of The Sandman, and the allegations he denies

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