Michael Jackson

Sir_Cliff

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
I agree with you to a large extent, but it still disturbs and puzzles me that so many of us were ever OK with his intense relationships with young boys. Acceptance of (and sympathy for) his eccentricities should not have entailed overlooking such plainly inappropriate behaviour.
Oh definitely. Just looking just at the images of him wandering around holding hands with young boys now makes you wonder why everyone just sort of went along with that. I was a child myself during the peak of Jackson's fame, but were people generally less savvy about child abuse back then?
 

21stamps

Well-Known Member
Oh definitely. Just looking just at the images of him wandering around holding hands with young boys now makes you wonder why everyone just sort of went along with that. I was a child myself during the peak of Jackson's fame, but were people generally less savvy about child abuse back then?

No, there was an uproar back then. There was also many people coming to his defense, and they were believable.
(I think we’re close in age so you’ll probably remember Ryan White)








 
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21stamps

Well-Known Member
This article below is the best I've seen so far. We live in a time where people thrive on finding victims and equally thrive on destruction, all while claiming some moral outrage. They hop from subject to trending subject, over and over. There are real victims, and some horrible men have been brought down recently, justifiably so.
However, let's not forget to use critical thinking. Many people have ended up looking foolish lately, assigning guilt without facts. Try to tread carefully there.


When Michael Jackson died in 2009, Wade Robson—the former choreographer whose allegations of abuse are at the center of a controversial new documentary, Leaving Neverland—wrote in tribute to his friend:
Michael Jackson changed the world and, more personally, my life forever. He is the reason I dance, the reason I make music, and one of the main reasons I believe in the pure goodness of humankind. He has been a close friend of mine for 20 years. His music, his movement, his personal words of inspiration and encouragement and his unconditional love will live inside of me forever. I will miss him immeasurably, but I know that he is now at peace and enchanting the heavens with a melody and a moonwalk.



Robson was twenty-seven years old at the time. Four years earlier, he testified at Jackson’s 2005 trial (as an adult) that nothing sexual ever happened between them. Prior to the trial Robson hadn’t seen Jackson for years and was under no obligation to be a witness for the defense. He faced a withering cross-examination, understanding the penalty of perjury for lying under oath. But Robson adamantly, confidently, and credibly asserted that nothing sexual ever happened.
What changed between then and now? A few things:



  • In 2011, Robson approached John Branca, co-executor of the Michael Jackson Estate, about directing the new Michael Jackson/Cirque du Soleil production, ONE. Robson admitted he wanted the job “badly,” but the Estate ultimately chose someone else for the position.
  • In 2012, Robson had a nervous breakdown, triggered, he said, by an obsessive quest for success. His career, in his own words, began to “crumble.”
  • That same year, with Robson’s career, finances, and marriage in peril, he began shopping a book that claimed he was sexually abused by Michael Jackson. No publisher picked it up.
  • In 2013, Robson filed a $1.5 billion dollar civil lawsuit/creditor’s claim, along with James Safechuck, who also spent time with Jackson in the late ‘80s. Safechuck claimed he only realized he may have been abused when Robson filed his lawsuit. That lawsuit was dismissed by a probate court in 2017.
  • In 2019, the Sundance Film Festival premiered a documentary based entirely on Robson and Safechuck's allegations. While the documentary is obviously emotionally disturbing given the content, it presents no new evidence or witnesses. The film's director, Dan Reed, acknowledged not wanting to interview other key figures because it might complicate or compromise the story he wanted to tell.
It is tempting for the media to tie Jackson into a larger cultural narrative about sexual misconduct. R. Kelly was rightfully taken down by a documentary, and many other high-profile figures have been exposed in recent years, so surely, the logic goes, Michael Jackson must be guilty as well. Yet that is a dangerous leap—particularly with America's history of unjustly targeting and convicting black men—that fair-minded people would be wise to consider more carefully before condemning the artist. It is no accident that one of Jackson’s favorite books (and movies) was To Kill a Mockingbird, a story about a black man—Tom Robinson—destroyed by false allegations.

The media’s largely uncritical, de-contextualized takes out of Sundance seem to have forgotten: no allegations have been more publicly scrutinized than those against Michael Jackson. They elicited a two-year feeding frenzy in the mid-90s and then again in the mid-2000s, when Jackson faced an exhaustive criminal trial. His homes were ransacked in two unannounced raids by law enforcement. Nothing incriminating was found. Jackson was acquitted of all charges in 2005 by a conservative Santa Maria jury. The FBI, likewise, conducted a thorough investigation. Its 300-page file on the pop star, released under the Freedom of Information Act, found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, dozens of individuals who spent time with Jackson as kids continue to assert nothing sexual ever happened. This includes hundreds of sick and terminally ill children such as Bela Farkas (for whom Jackson paid for a life-saving liver transplant) and Ryan White (whom Jackson befriended and supported in his final years battling AIDS); it includes lesser-known figures like Brett Barnes and Frank Cascio; it includes celebrities like Macaulay Culkin, Sean Lennon, Emmanuel Lewis, Alfonso Ribeiro, and Corey Feldman; it includes Jackson’s nieces and nephews; and it includes his own three children.


The allegations surrounding Jackson largely faded over the past decade for a reason: unlike the Bill Cosby or R. Kelly cases, the more people looked into the Jackson allegations, the more the evidence vindicated him. The prosecution’s case in 2005 was so absurd Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi described it like this:

Ostensibly a story about bringing a child molester to justice, the Michael Jackson trial would instead be a kind of homecoming parade of insipid American types: grifters, suckers and no-talent schemers, mired in either outright unemployment… or the bogus non-careers of the information age, looking to cash in any way they can. The MC of the proceedings was District Attorney Tom Sneddon, whose metaphorical role in this American reality show was to represent the mean gray heart of the Nixonian Silent Majority – the bitter mediocrity itching to stick it to anyone who’d ever taken a vacation to Paris. The first month or so of the trial featured perhaps the most compromised collection of prosecution witnesses ever assembled in an American criminal case – almost to a man a group of convicted liars, paid gossip hawkers or worse…
In the next six weeks, virtually every piece of his case imploded in open court, and the chief drama of the trial quickly turned into a race to see if the DA could manage to put all of his witnesses on the stand without getting any of them removed from the courthouse in manacles.

What’s changed since then?

In Robson’s case, decades after the alleged incidents took place, he was barbecuing with Michael Jackson and his children. He was asking for tickets to the artist’s memorial. He was participating in tributes. “I still have my mobile phone with his number in it,” Robson wrote in 2009, “I just can’t bear the thought of deleting his messages.”

Then, suddenly, after twenty years, his story changed and with his new claims came a $1.5 billion dollar lawsuit.


As an eccentric, wealthy, African American man, Michael Jackson has always been a target for litigation. During the 1980s and 1990s, dozens of women falsely claimed he was the father of their children. He faced multiple lawsuits falsely claiming he plagiarized various songs. As recently as 2010, a woman named Billie Jean filed a frivolous $600 million paternity lawsuit against Jackson’s Estate.

As someone who has done an enormous amount of research on the artist, interviewed many people who were close to him, and been granted access to a lot of private information, my assessment is that the evidence simply does not point to Michael Jackson's guilt. In contrast to Robson and Safechuck’s revised accounts, there is a remarkable consistency to the way people who knew the artist speak of him—whether friends, family members, collaborators, fellow artists, recording engineers, attorneys, business associates, security guards, former spouses, his own children—people who knew him in every capacity imaginable. Michael, they say, was gentle, brilliant, sensitive, sometimes naive, sometimes childish, sometimes oblivious to perceptions. But none believe he was a child molester.




 

righttrack

Well-Known Member
Why does it have to benefit anyone? Maybe it's just better to not play a child molesters music?

We all hear Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2" at every sporting event, every event period it seems. He's a convicted child molester. I'm just not a fan of boycotting music or art in general. When someone hears this music, someone will tell the story and the story won't die. That will prevent it from happening again maybe. If the music dies, so does the story. Either way, I just think the art stands on it's own. There are terrible human beings who are honored in all sorts of arenas, sports, media, etc. The baseball hall of fame is filled with drunks, wife-beaters, etc. I'm not justifying anyone's behavior. If someone likes the music, they like the music. They don't have to like the person who made it. That was only my point.
 

LittleBuford

Well-Known Member
This article below is the best I've seen so far. We live in a time where people thrive on finding victims and equally thrive on destruction, all while claiming some moral outrage. They hop from subject to trending subject, over and over. There are real victims, and some horrible men have been brought down recently, justifiably so.
However, let's not forget to use critical thinking. Many people have ended up looking foolish lately, assigning guilt without facts. Try to tread carefully there.


When Michael Jackson died in 2009, Wade Robson—the former choreographer whose allegations of abuse are at the center of a controversial new documentary, Leaving Neverland—wrote in tribute to his friend:




Robson was twenty-seven years old at the time. Four years earlier, he testified at Jackson’s 2005 trial (as an adult) that nothing sexual ever happened between them. Prior to the trial Robson hadn’t seen Jackson for years and was under no obligation to be a witness for the defense. He faced a withering cross-examination, understanding the penalty of perjury for lying under oath. But Robson adamantly, confidently, and credibly asserted that nothing sexual ever happened.
What changed between then and now? A few things:



  • In 2011, Robson approached John Branca, co-executor of the Michael Jackson Estate, about directing the new Michael Jackson/Cirque du Soleil production, ONE. Robson admitted he wanted the job “badly,” but the Estate ultimately chose someone else for the position.
  • In 2012, Robson had a nervous breakdown, triggered, he said, by an obsessive quest for success. His career, in his own words, began to “crumble.”
  • That same year, with Robson’s career, finances, and marriage in peril, he began shopping a book that claimed he was sexually abused by Michael Jackson. No publisher picked it up.
  • In 2013, Robson filed a $1.5 billion dollar civil lawsuit/creditor’s claim, along with James Safechuck, who also spent time with Jackson in the late ‘80s. Safechuck claimed he only realized he may have been abused when Robson filed his lawsuit. That lawsuit was dismissed by a probate court in 2017.
  • In 2019, the Sundance Film Festival premiered a documentary based entirely on Robson and Safechuck's allegations. While the documentary is obviously emotionally disturbing given the content, it presents no new evidence or witnesses. The film's director, Dan Reed, acknowledged not wanting to interview other key figures because it might complicate or compromise the story he wanted to tell.
It is tempting for the media to tie Jackson into a larger cultural narrative about sexual misconduct. R. Kelly was rightfully taken down by a documentary, and many other high-profile figures have been exposed in recent years, so surely, the logic goes, Michael Jackson must be guilty as well. Yet that is a dangerous leap—particularly with America's history of unjustly targeting and convicting black men—that fair-minded people would be wise to consider more carefully before condemning the artist. It is no accident that one of Jackson’s favorite books (and movies) was To Kill a Mockingbird, a story about a black man—Tom Robinson—destroyed by false allegations.

The media’s largely uncritical, de-contextualized takes out of Sundance seem to have forgotten: no allegations have been more publicly scrutinized than those against Michael Jackson. They elicited a two-year feeding frenzy in the mid-90s and then again in the mid-2000s, when Jackson faced an exhaustive criminal trial. His homes were ransacked in two unannounced raids by law enforcement. Nothing incriminating was found. Jackson was acquitted of all charges in 2005 by a conservative Santa Maria jury. The FBI, likewise, conducted a thorough investigation. Its 300-page file on the pop star, released under the Freedom of Information Act, found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, dozens of individuals who spent time with Jackson as kids continue to assert nothing sexual ever happened. This includes hundreds of sick and terminally ill children such as Bela Farkas (for whom Jackson paid for a life-saving liver transplant) and Ryan White (whom Jackson befriended and supported in his final years battling AIDS); it includes lesser-known figures like Brett Barnes and Frank Cascio; it includes celebrities like Macaulay Culkin, Sean Lennon, Emmanuel Lewis, Alfonso Ribeiro, and Corey Feldman; it includes Jackson’s nieces and nephews; and it includes his own three children.


The allegations surrounding Jackson largely faded over the past decade for a reason: unlike the Bill Cosby or R. Kelly cases, the more people looked into the Jackson allegations, the more the evidence vindicated him. The prosecution’s case in 2005 was so absurd Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi described it like this:


What’s changed since then?

In Robson’s case, decades after the alleged incidents took place, he was barbecuing with Michael Jackson and his children. He was asking for tickets to the artist’s memorial. He was participating in tributes. “I still have my mobile phone with his number in it,” Robson wrote in 2009, “I just can’t bear the thought of deleting his messages.”

Then, suddenly, after twenty years, his story changed and with his new claims came a $1.5 billion dollar lawsuit.


As an eccentric, wealthy, African American man, Michael Jackson has always been a target for litigation. During the 1980s and 1990s, dozens of women falsely claimed he was the father of their children. He faced multiple lawsuits falsely claiming he plagiarized various songs. As recently as 2010, a woman named Billie Jean filed a frivolous $600 million paternity lawsuit against Jackson’s Estate.

As someone who has done an enormous amount of research on the artist, interviewed many people who were close to him, and been granted access to a lot of private information, my assessment is that the evidence simply does not point to Michael Jackson's guilt. In contrast to Robson and Safechuck’s revised accounts, there is a remarkable consistency to the way people who knew the artist speak of him—whether friends, family members, collaborators, fellow artists, recording engineers, attorneys, business associates, security guards, former spouses, his own children—people who knew him in every capacity imaginable. Michael, they say, was gentle, brilliant, sensitive, sometimes naive, sometimes childish, sometimes oblivious to perceptions. But none believe he was a child molester.





You could have just shared the article without the snide, patronising, and dismissive opener.

We’re not following a trend. We’re not indulging in outrage. That’s your reductive and misleading spin; don’t involve us in it.
 

21stamps

Well-Known Member
You could have just shared the article without the snide, patronising, and dismissive opener.

We’re not following a trend. We’re not indulging in outrage. That’s your reductive and misleading spin; don’t involve us in it.

Are you calling yourself an “us” now?
Anyway, I spoke about exactly what we’ve seen in society lately. There’s really no way around that, you can’t deny it. It is what it is.

I’m guessing you skipped the article since you only focused on my words. You could try to use critical thinking, just a tad, it doesn’t make you any less righteous. It’s just the right thing to do. If you are offended by anything that doesn’t fit into a specific narrative, then you may want to question that. Looking at a complete picture should never be a problem.
 

21stamps

Well-Known Member
It became a petty drama fest when you introduced your accusations of trendy outrage and mob mentality.

That’s called reality. It’s what we are all seeing. Outrage after outrage whether someone is guilty or not.
Sometimes, the accused is guilty.
Sometimes, they’re not.

I posted videos and an article, reminding people that’s there’s more than one side to this documentary.

If critical thinking is lost, and guilt is only dependent on accusations, if we erase MJ’s contributions to this world (which are a hell of a lot more than just his music), then we’ve failed in the worst way.

The man is dead, nothing is provable, and there are a ton of red flags when it comes to the accusers. Wanting to see more than a narrow view should not be a problem.

Maybe, instead of looking for drama, spend the same amount of time watching those videos and reading the article. Maybe even spend time learning more about him and his contributions, and you’ll possibly understand why I’m defending the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
It can’t hurt.
 

LittleBuford

Well-Known Member
That’s called reality. It’s what we are all seeing. Outrage after outrage whether someone is guilty or not.
Sometimes, the accused is guilty.
Sometimes, they’re not.

I posted videos and an article, reminding people that’s there’s more than one side to this documentary.

If critical thinking is lost, and guilt is only dependent on accusations, if we erase MJ’s contributions to this world (which are a hell of a lot more than just his music), then we’ve failed in the worst way.

The man is dead, nothing is provable, and there are a ton of red flags when it comes to the accusers. Wanting to see more than a narrow view should not be a problem.

Maybe, instead of looking for drama, spend the same amount of time watching those videos and reading the article. Maybe even spend time learning more about him and his contributions, and you’ll possibly understand why I’m defending the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
It can’t hurt.

As always, you’re assuming that you’re the only one who’s thought things through and done their research. It’s hopeless—the “conversation” invariably and inevitably goes the same way with you.
 
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bclane

Well-Known Member
I haven’t seen the documentary so I’m not prepared to comment on that, but have been reading through the thread. Regarding whether his music will continue to be played/enjoyed, I wonder if the majority of people will feel more comfortable with the music he made as a child and kind of compartmentalize it that way or if it will be more of an all or nothing thing with most people. Just wondering out loud.
 

21stamps

Well-Known Member
I've already stated that i'm also wary of the accusers myself given their own behavior and flip flopping. But answer me this as plainly as you can- do you really not see a ton of red flags surrounding Michael Jackson as well?

Yes and no. I don’t think it’s “normal” to us because we’re normal (relatively, right? ;) )... MJ never has a memory where he wasn’t famous, or performing. Not one.
That’s not normal. I can’t fathom what that would be like. I understood his want/need for Neverland, because I thought “He has the money, why not give himself the childhood favorites that he never had”. I understood why he gravitated to children.. for 2 reasons- because they couldn’t take advantage of him, and he wanted to help them, because he uniquely understood what they were going thru.

There was a time when I thought the accusations could be true, but then I watched person after person come out and defend him, and I thought about the way he always conducted himself.. I realized that I believed he was innocent. When you think about his passion for goodness, a better world, the planet.. all of it, the idea that he could hurt someone just doesn’t mesh with the sensitivity he showed, in public and in private (according to first hand accounts of friends).

I think he is one of the most, if not the most, misunderstood person of my lifetime. How could we be expected to understand him though? It’s too difficult to grasp all of it. There was nothing normal about his life in our terms of what normal is. I just don’t believe that it has to equal “wrong” or “child molester”. There’s too much that shows otherwise.
 

LittleBuford

Well-Known Member

NYT has an article today about why it takes sex abuse survivors so long to disclose the abuse. The average age of someone is in their 50s! For me, that’s a startling statistic.

My ex-boyfriend’s mother was abused by her own brother as a child but didn’t reveal it until she was in her 50s. He had daughters of his own and regularly looked after my ex while he was growing up. At first, I couldn’t understand how she could allow her brother to be near children—including her own son—when she knew what he was capable of. But I soon realised that I was in no position to judge, as the psychology of being a victim of child abuse is something I’m lucky enough to have no grasp of.
 

bclane

Well-Known Member
Oh definitely. Just looking just at the images of him wandering around holding hands with young boys now makes you wonder why everyone just sort of went along with that. I was a child myself during the peak of Jackson's fame, but were people generally less savvy about child abuse back then?
It was definitely different back in those days...at least as I remember my childhood. I remember a teacher sexually assaulted several boys at my school back in the early 80s and instead of being locked up, he was transferred to a different school where he continued to teach. I know this because my father was an admin at the school and I overheard him discussing it with my mom. I was friends with a couple of the boys and it really shook me up. Anyway, I don’t know why they did that. Was it because the boys weren’t believed? Was it because the crime was so disgusting that people didn’t know how to deal with it? I don’t know. But with regards to MJ, I remember feeling so relieved when he was found innocent while at the same time thinking that if someone asked me to sleep with my kids in the same bed (I didn’t have kids yet but was thinking about it the future) that I would have beat the hell out of them. After the trial, I remember still loving his music but thinking he was the weirdest creepiest human being on the planet and wondering why those parents were willing to just leave their kids with him for overnight slumber parties or whatever.
 

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