By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | January 20, 2025 |
Not a single person alive has ever had an ambivalent opinion of Amanda Palmer. The singer has long prided herself on her provocations and carefully manicured image as a shambolic cabaret princess who took no prisoners and kept no secrets. You either thought she was an incredible and honest artist or an aggravating phony. Starting any kind of conversation about her inevitably leads to heated rhetoric and discourse that would encourage Palmer to write more songs inspired by her notoriety. Her brand now lies in ruins, the eviscerated remnants of her former self now in the dirt as the world learned all about her ex-husband and the cruelties she may have been complicit in.
I won’t relitigate the excellent Vulture investigation into the allegations against Neil Gaiman here. The article, written by Lila Shapiro, is an excellent and detailed breakdown of years’ worth of horrific and violent accusations of rape, assault, and emotional terrorism. Expanding upon the Tortoise Media podcast that began the reports into these allegations, the profile is unflinching in its recollections. It’s one of the toughest reads you’ll ever have. Gaiman has denied all accusations in a DARVO-heavy statement. Palmer, now divorced from Gaiman and engaged in a contentious custody battle for their young son, released a brief and vague statement asking for privacy. It might be the only time in her public life where she has not demanded the microphone. It’s understandable, of course. Reading the Vulture piece, it’s tough to ignore the strong possibility that Palmer was, at the very least, aware of and somewhat culpable in Gaiman’s alleged crimes.
The article notes how Palmer hired women to be her child’s nanny, fans of hers who she had often had sex with and who were financially and emotionally vulnerable. She promised work and stability that they desperately needed and then passed these women on to Gaiman. To rub salt onto the open wound, she then didn’t pay these women in her employment. In one chilling moment, one woman alleges that Gaiman told her that Palmer had said he couldn’t have her. In another, a woman tells Palmer about what has happened to her and she responds that 14 other women had approached her with similar accusations. When one woman went to the police, she was sure that Palmer, an avowed public feminist who had said she would help her, would offer a statement in support. She didn’t.
Palmer is not to blame for Gaiman’s crimes. He’s the accused rapist here, not her. When men are faced with abhorrent accusations of sex crimes, it’s all too common to see women be treated as somehow ‘worse’ than the offenders. We’re never 100% sure of the circumstances of an abuser’s spouse. Who knows what they’ve witnessed or what they’ve been subjected to. This is a tough needle to thread. With Palmer, the Vulture piece is not unsympathetic to her, but it’s certainly not an apologia for her either.
At the very least, it paints her as someone all too willing to take advantage of her own fans, spinning exploitation as an act of community. Palmer received a major boost to her career when she embraced crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Patreon to bolster her creative platform. She raised over $1.19 million for her 2012 project Theatre is Evil and was, at one point in around 2016, making around $34,400 per ‘thing’ she released on Patreon. A TED Talk on how she embraced ‘The Art of Asking’ became a New York Times bestselling book. But she was also trying to get professional musicians to work with her for ‘exposure, fun, beer and hugs’ instead of money, a decision she eventually backtracked on after public outcry.
Palmer’s list of errors, cruelties, and outright nastiness was the stuff of Tumblr nightmares. She created a conjoined twins persona for one album and openly mocked disabled activists who took issue with it. During one performance, she and Margaret Cho pretended to rape a Katy Perry impersonator. She harassed two journalists because she claimed she wasn’t receiving enough coverage. She wrote a fawning poem about the Boston Marathon bomber. She loves to use the N-word. Palmer loves being a sh*t-stirrer, all in the name of her strain of bombastic feminism where she is sat at the top of the pile looking downward at her adoring followers. It’s all for attention, and for a long time, she was extremely good at getting it, and spinning negative versions of it into some sort of symbol of her genius.
She can’t do that now.
Whether or not you believe that Palmer is Manic Pixie Dream Ghislaine is a tough matter to fully confront. But even Palmer in all of her showmanship couldn’t make the accusations against Gaiman into something that benefitted her. As the Vulture piece noted, she recently released a song, ‘Whakanewha’, that is the closest she’s come to publicly addressing the allegations. It’s addressed to a nameless person who is evidently Gaiman. She warbles, ‘You try to cover it with cash, Another falling tree no one can hear but me, Another suicidal mass, Landing on my doorstep, thanks a ton.’ Hearing it then remembering how many women told her about her abusive ex, you can’t help but wonder if there’s an empathy chip missing in Palmer. Turning pain into art can be a wonderful, thing, but hijacking someone else’s struggle, one you allegedly contributed to, into a self-serving musical number is beyond callous.
The Gaiman accusations have spurred on the usual conversations about separating the art from the artist, and that doesn’t feel like my conversation to have since I hadn’t read or engaged with any of his work in years. I’ve never been a Palmer fan either, but with her, I wonder if such divisions are even possible. Her entire career was built on stripping herself down (often literally) and revealing every detail about herself. A lot of people found solace in her songs about surviving rape and having guilt-free reproductive freedom through abortions. But so-called radical honesty and the community you created through your impeccable branding cannot live in conjunction with this level of hurt, betrayal, and misogyny. You don’t get to be the ukulele-strumming feminist leader of art and crowdfunding when you’re sad about ‘another suicidal mess’ on your doorstep. Other people’s trauma deserves to be more than your next Patreon payout. The absolute least she owes the world now is silence.