Part of the pleasure of loving music is loving some of the artists who make it. Michael Jackson was adored by his fans. But idolising someone is different from knowing them, and according to the recent documentary ‘Leaving Neverland’ Jackson was a closet peadophile who abused the two subjects of the film – James Safechuck and Wade Robson – for more than ten years.
The accusation in the film is that Jackson charmed not just these young fans but their parents as well, by seeming like a child himself – who just needed playmates. Jackson reassured the parents by taking them on the same trips as he took their kids on, and captivated them by allowing them to experience his luxurious lifestyle.
But were Safechuck and Robson lying? The Sun recently reported that Safechuck couldn’t have been abused my Michael Jackson on the dates he said, and that even the film’s director Dan Reed accepted the evidence. James claimed that he was abused from 1988 to 1992 in a room in the Neverland Station, but new evidence has shown that the approval for that station wasn’t granted until 1993, meaning that it wasn’t built until 1994.
The article also throws doubt on Wade Robson’s claim that he was abused by Jackson while his family were away on a family trip to the Grand Canyon in 1990, by showing that Robson’s mother once swore on oath that her son Wade was with him on the trip. According to one Michael Jackson biographer, Wade and Michael weren’t actually left alone in Neverland until 1993.
But the doubts being cast on the documentary come too late to stop the damage already done to Jackson’s legacy, and the decisions made by radio stations in many countries to. stop playing his music.
I’m not the one to say if Safechuck and Robson were abused – even if some of the dates are wrong. But as for the documentary I do ask myself why now? Why make a documentary now when the accused is no longer around to testify, and when the alleged offences took place so long ago that the facts are hard to check? Has money got anything to do with it? Or is it a justified attempt to add another artist to the list of celebrities being accused of past acts of sexual abuse and harassment?
Image – From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository
