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If you happen to be the sort of person who’d try to balance, say, the multiple counts of child molestation Jackson was charged with in 2003 and acquitted of later with extenuating details from Jackson’s biography (Wasn’t he abused and too famous too soon and prematurely sexualized? He never had a childhood! He’s still a child!), if you partook in the steady diet of fluffy news stories about Jackson and some little boy (often identified as “Jackson’s friend”) and thought mostly that they were cute or banal and that Jackson just related to kids as kids - like, platonically - if you thought that he couldn’t know there was a real difference between adult passion and child’s play, then perhaps you’ll find Safechuck’s memory of the ring particularly shattering. The story of the ring and the vows feels as graphic as the memories of masturbation and French kissing and nipple tweaking. Here he is, forlorn, holding the ring that he’s kept, all this time, in a handsome box.
LEAVING NEVERLAND DOCUMENTARY TV
But here he is, talking in a TV documentary about the vows he says that he and Jackson exchanged. But there’s something about the way the filmmakers reserve this scene for the back end of Part 1 that ices your bones, something about the way an adult Safechuck doesn’t seem to want to go back there. I’ve heard all of this - and a distressing deal more - by the time the documentary gets to the part where Jackson allegedly takes Safechuck shopping for a ring. I’ve seen Wade Robson, a doll-faced Michael Jackson impersonator from Brisbane, Australia, say he was 7 when Michael began abusing him, describing a grim scenario in which he was naked on all fours at the edge of the bed, poised - trapped - between his idol, who was masturbating to him, and a cutout of Peter Pan. I’ve heard about Michael buying the Neverland complex in Santa Barbara County, Calif., (mansion, amusement park, zoo!) and the elaborate system of doors and bells to alert Jackson of any encroachment on the lair in which some of the abuse supposedly occurred. The way Safechuck remembers it, there was so much sex, and he says Jackson told him that if anybody found out about it, their lives would be over. By the time you get to the ring, I’ve already heard how Jackson lured Safechuck into sex, by masturbation (James, again, is about 10), and how the closer he got to James on tour, the farther the parents’ hotel room would get from their son’s. I’ve stared at a lingering shot of a photograph of Jackson, who would have been around 30 and Safechuck who was about 9 or 10, and Jackson is beaming in sunglasses and a military jacket, flashing a peace sign, and James, in a too-big baseball cap, is turning to the camera, looking alarmingly ruminative for someone whose life should be rumination-free.
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I’ve heard a recording of a mock interview Jackson does with Safechuck, a solidly middle-class Southern California boy, in which Jackson says the best part of a trip to Hawaii that he arranged for the boy and his mom was “being with James Safechuck.” Now, this is 90 minutes into a four-hour movie, which HBO is showing in two parts starting Sunday, and I’ve learned how Jackson has ingratiated himself into two families, starting around 1987 or ’88, after the release of his album “Bad,” during his world tour.
LEAVING NEVERLAND DOCUMENTARY MOVIE
The movie devotes itself to two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who claim, in separate accounts, that Jackson sexually abused them for years, from boyhood into adolescence.Īnd of all the allegations, the moment that really got me is the ring. There’s a moment in “ Leaving Neverland,” Dan Reed’s documentary about Jackson’s alleged pedophilia, where I simply ran out of hooks. You also need to do a lot of looking the other way.īut, eventually, all the suspension reaches a logical end. You need to do a lot of looking at him to feel this way. For so long, so much about Michael Jackson won our awe, our pity, our bewilderment, our identification, our belief that he was a metaphor, an allegory, a beacon, a caveat - for, of, about America. Just the odyssey of his nose from bulb to nub seemed somehow like a people’s journey.
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He lived in defiance of physics and race and gender, and we just kind of lived with that.
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If the average cultural experience demands the suspension of disbelief, if we oughtn’t think too much about this movie we’re watching, this novel we’re reading, this magic trick being performed right before our eyes, if being entertained means setting aside skepticism, logic and possibly a sense of morality, then what a magic trick we had in Michael Jackson.