After enduring a year of public scrutiny and investigation, best-selling fantasy author and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman admitted to being the sole source of all the funds raised by his wife, musician Amanda Palmer, during her 2012 Kickstarter campaign. The revelation came during an emotional press conference last Thursday. “There just comes a point when the lie is too much to maintain,” Gaiman told a crowd of reporters gathered outside his home near Minneapolis. “It’s time that I owned up to the truth. Every cent that went into my wife’s 1.2 million dollar Kickstarter for Theater Is Evil came directly from me.”
Palmer, who has recently come under fire for her controversial poem dedicated to Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnev, made headlines last year by breaking the record for the most money raised through popular crowdsourcing site Kickstarter. The campaign attracted donations from 24,883 contributors, each of which was revealed to be a dummy account set up by Gaiman.
“It started out innocently enough,” stated Gaiman. “I thought I’d just prime the pump by creating a few fake backers and give Amanda enough money to buy a new whalebone corset.” When other donors failed to materialize, however, Gaiman found it necessary to continue to create even more new donors in an effort to protect what he described as his wife’s “fragile ego.”
“This one time she went on a two-day crying jag because she posted on Facebook about having a salad for lunch, and no one ‘Liked’ her status,” Gaiman stated.
While Palmer and Gaiman appeared to be under considerable strain during the press conference, the author admitted to feeling relieved about coming forward with the truth. “After the Kickstarter thing, I thought life would get back to normal,” said Gaiman, “but I found that I had to keep all of these characters going in order to prevent Amanda from catching on.” Gaiman estimates that he spent roughly seventy to eighty percent of his day responding to Palmer’s tweets, Facebook statuses, and Tumblr posts through tens of thousands of fictional user accounts, in what the author described as his most ambitious writing project since the conclusion of his critically acclaimed comic book series, Sandman.
“Plus, it became kind of obvious that something was up when she would show up to a sold-out gig and there were no people in the audience,” Gaiman added. “My mum would see photos from her shows online and ask me ‘Neil, is that you standing up front? Why are you wearing your Da’s old bopkin?’ In truth, I felt a little disappointed,” Gaiman said as he wistfully paged through a binder full of photographs of Sandman tattoos on women’s breasts, “that my mum could pick me out of a grainy Instagram photo, but Amanda never could.”
When asked where the proceeds from the Kickstarter went, Gaiman admitted “mostly mascara and arm-length gloves.”
Many fans of contemporary music remain unfazed by Gaiman’s revelation. “It kind of makes sense,” said Minneapolis record store clerk Brian Davis. “I mean, has anyone ever actually met an Amanda Palmer fan?”
Asked to comment on the recent ordeal, longtime friend and acclaimed comic book creator Alan Moore stated, “Neil was a cute kid. He was always riffing off some old thing I wrote. It seems to have worked out well for him; how he spends his money is his business. Never heard of Laura Palmer, though. Do you think she’d be up for a blood orgy?”
Reporting Technician: Joe Hemmerling
Photo: Maya Mackrandilal
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