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?
www.forbes.com
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:
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.
- 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.
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.
What You Should Know About the New Michael Jackson Documentary
Recent allegations against the pop icon are disturbing. But do they hold up to scrutiny?
I’m not at all shocked.
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?
)... MJ never has a memory where he wasn’t famous, or performing. Not one.
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.
