Neither heaven nor hell will get rid of Michael Jackson
A documentary returns to the scene of the crime: the accusations of sexual abuse of children of the king of pop
“If people listen to a lie long enough, they will believe it. I am a proud African American - the rumor that I lighten my skin is not true. The rumor that Lisa [his wife Marie Presley] said she wanted a white boy to play me as a child in the movies is just that: a rumor. The rumor that I did not want to sing at the Clinton inauguration is just that: a rumor. And I'm not gay. "
It is Michael Jackson recorded on March 1, 1996 in a room at the Four Seasons in New York; He does not respond to an interview but to a police questioning about sexual abuse. Jackson, lightly made up, with long hair and a black wide-brimmed hat, yawns, laughs uncontrollably and, when asked if he has ever been accused of sexually abusing a child, he widens his eyes and covers his face with both hands. white with thin and very long fingers.
Three years earlier, in 1993, Jordan Chandler became the first child to report Michael Jackson. The world's biggest star, the man who got on and off planes with children, who posed with children sitting on his lap, who took children on stage, composed songs for them, and invited them to his Neverland ranch with their families, was charged with abuse them. 13-year-old Jordan Chandler gave the jury such accurate details about Jackson's genitalia that California police photographed the private parts of his most zealous protector of privacy;
"They came forward with a search warrant, it was the most humiliating moment of my life," Jackson said. The Thriller songwriter called off his Dangerous tour and later paid more than $ 20 million in an out-of-court settlement. According to him, in order not to prolong the hell of a false accusation; according to the child's family, to get rid of a secure sentence.
The elephant had been in the room for years. So great and for so long that in a documentary made in 2002, years after he falsely closed the Chandler case, Michael Jackson opened the doors of Neverland to Martin Bashir, a director who promised he would make the portrait "more honest." that they would ever do. Jackson was convinced that this would work out wonderfully; he ended up testifying before the courts until the director Bashir. In the tape, the star recounted how he had slept with children. “It was not sexual. I would tuck them in, put on some music and read a book to them (…) We would go to bed with the light on and I would give them hot milk and cookies. It was nice and very sweet (…) It's what the whole world should do. Why can't the bed be shared?
The most affectionate thing is sharing a bed with someone. It is a magnificent thing. It is very correct ”. Next to him, a 13-year-old boy, Gavin Arvizo, nodded, resting his head on his shoulder and holding the star's hand. Jackson clarifies that he sleeps on the floor and the boy on the bed. The interviewer asks if there are no more rooms in the house. Jackson says yes, but the children want to sleep with him. It is not known if the image of him sleeping in bed with the child or choosing the floor of a mansion with dozens of rooms is more disturbing, taking into account that he died of addiction to the drugs with which he treated back pain than him. they had been tied to drugs for decades.
That was, to say the least, disturbing; an adult man going to sleep with his best friends, children to whom he publicly declared his unconditional love and said to give them the childhood that he did not have, that he knew in dance competitions, children with and without talent, children whose families gave unconditionally while they were entertained with houses and cars. And here is one of the darkest shadows of the eternal Jackson case: the behavior of the parents, delivered when they believed Jackson to be innocent and erratic when they blamed him.
The question runs through Leaving Neverland, Dan Reed's documentary that collects the overwhelming testimonies of Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck, two men who now accuse Jackson of having abused them when they were children. Robson and Safechuck's parents, Chandler and Arvizo, Brett Barnes, Macaulay Culkin himself, their parents. The parents who received money in spades when their children slept with a thirty-year-old man while they rested in the guest pavilion, and who, once the relationship or the money ended, claimed more millions by complaint (or not to report). In the case of the Chandlers, is it decent for them to sexually abuse your 13-year-old son and set the monster free, with unlimited capacity to reoffend, in exchange for money?
Leaving Neverland is a documentary that collects two chilling testimonies full of details and overwhelming evidence, putting the public before a primitive situation: that of believing or not believing, that is, sentencing or acquitting, skipping justice. The film blasts Jackson, who does not have a defender in all the footage because it is, according to its director, “a detailed study, four hours long, on the psychology of child sexual abuse, which is told through two families that had an emotional bond for 20 years with a pedophile disguised as a trusted friend ”.
All of this delves into a truly delicate issue. Can the justice system work with someone like Michael Jackson? Witnesses who accuse and recant, witnesses who defend and back down, parents of children who contradict themselves, an overflowing media and social pressure; all bathed in huge amounts of money and a jury that, as Guillermo Alonso said in Icon, when he saw one of the tests that begins with a video with music by Billie Jean, he unconsciously moved to the rhythm of his chords.
"The new documentary raises a delicate question: does the justice system work with someone like Jackson?"
Months after Bashir's documentary, the boy who rested his head on the shoulder of the King of Pop, Gavin Arvizo, denounced him for sexual abuse, Jackson was arrested, his home searched of him and he was indicted. They asked him for an 18-year sentence, which he would have served in the same jail as Charles Manson. He was acquitted of all charges for lack of conclusive evidence.
He helped him with the testimony of Wade Robson, who defended Jackson for years and now accuses him, giving details with hair and signs, in Leaving Neverland. Members of the jury expressed their doubts at the end. Raymond Hultman: “I don't think this man could sleep in the same room 365 days in a row with a child and do nothing but watch TV and eat popcorn. But that he does not make sense does not make him guilty ”.
The last sentence is key: nothing about Michael Jackson made sense. After Chandler's first accusation, his reaction was to record a video in which he declared his love for children from all over the world and of all races, saying that they were the great love of his life and that he wanted to live his childhood through them. that he didn't have. Years later, to defend himself against accusations of sexual abuse, he records a documentary holding the hand of a child while he says that he loves sleeping with them and that it seems to him a great proof of love. It makes no sense in a guilty person; he doesn't have it in an innocent person either.
“Like many other people in this world, our post-OJSimpson and Post-Tyson, I am not very willing to deal with the acquittal in a California court of a star who has behind a team of lawyers with million-dollar minutes like a plated card. in gold to get out of jail free, ”music industry executive John Niven told The Guardian after the artist's death in 2009, in an article recalling that police had confirmed the existence of the stains on Jackson's penis that He had described the Chandler child, and it was after investigators contrasted that that the King of Pop agreed to the settlement. Of course, by Niven's logic, any star who can afford great defense is guilty by default.
The world cannot get rid of Jackson. We all judge him and we are being judged because in some way we are all complicit in having built an impunity that has more to do with the divine than with the earthly. He noted it at the Four Seasons, 1996: “Jesus said that you have to love children and be like them. Be youthful, innocent, pure and honorable. He always surrounded himself with children. That's how they raised me: to believe in him and be like him, imitate him ”. But if Michael Jackson was raised like Jesus, it was not in love but on the way to Calvary, beaten and tortured by a despotic father who wanted to make a god of him without knowing that, far from heaven, it is difficult for God to distinguish him from the devil.
