Michael Jackson is "evil"

Dolby is wrong about Wade Robson: he has
/had a very successful emmy award winning career as a choreographer. So I'm not sure ab gaining sth from admitting he was sexually abused. (Well, financial gain maybe but for the rest? It is emotionally not so. On the contrary, it is exceptionally hard to come forward.)

I simply don't know what to think really. Deep down I think, yes, there was abuse to some extent. How much, we'll never know for sure. And for me it was very hard to swing the other way: going from admiring him as the King of Pop to a pedophile...

swing the other way

phrasing!

The cafeteria at work was playing some Jackson 5 songs at lunch today. I haven't heard any later-era Jacko in a while though.

The two accusers originally swore there was none at all, and it is not clear why they are only claiming now that he abused them. Granted, childhood abuse victims often only come forward in middle age,

how do you type this bit and then keep typing, instead of realising what you just typed and then closing the tab

They weren’t “paid handsomely” to take part in the documentary. The director says were not paid at all.

xpost

"granted, i've seen incontrovertible photos of numerous victims of the holocaust...."

jfc, indeed. he was a 40something man when this stuff was alleged to have happened. do we think he had his gonads snipped off? after he died tons of pornography was found in his home.

plus, haven't some of his bodyguards come out and said MJ had many different girls across the country? like, I actually kinda understand Dolby's POV in a way, MJ comes off about as asexual as pop stars come, but I don't think he actually was.

idk, Thomas Dolby has always been a pretty thoughtful and even-keeled dude, but yeah his take on this is bad

I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to be paid to take part in a documentary. In the UK at least.

he blinded us with science

he blinded us with fake science

fixed

Fuckin ridiculous that anyone ever fell for the “hE wAs A cHiLd HimSeLf!” line of defence, I guess if you’re a rich child molester just go out and buy a literal Peter Pan hat to wear all the time and you’re off to the races

plus, haven't some of his bodyguards come out and said MJ had many different girls across the country? like, I actually kinda understand Dolby's POV in a way, MJ comes off about as asexual as pop stars come, but I don't think he actually was.

There are also stories of him dropping the high-pitched voice off-camera/backstage, of people having phone conversations with him where he spoke in the voice of any other middle-aged man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdTI6Tjy8Rw

I guess if you’re a rich child molester just go out and buy a literal Peter Pan hat to wear all the time and you’re off to the races

yeah just imagine if this worked

http://www.thecommentator.com/system/articles/inner_pictures/000/001/776/original/Jimmy_Saville.jpeg

https://assets.change.org/photos/8/wz/kt/LpwZkThemSeWzSO-800x450-noPad.jpg

https://i.warosu.org/data/cgl/img/0069/20/1371769194284.jpg

Quite. Jackson and savile v similar in that I’m like wait the “cover” was to openly act like the world’s molestiest molester 24/7?

Christ who's that fucker at the bottom there?

_swing the other way_

phrasing!

Saville was also widely considered to be "asexual"

Was he?!? I never read/heard ab that. Then again he always came across as an arrogant annoying asshole to me. Hated him as a kid. But that doesn't mean shit. My radar for spotting assholes is defective. Lol.

Christ who's that fucker at the bottom there?

― piscesx, Tuesday, March 26, 2019 8:33 PM (forty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The founder of DragonCon.

Christ who's that fucker at the bottom there?

and in other "kept going to court very late in wheelchairs and oxygen tanks in order to somehow prove they couldn't be child molesters" news, Dragoncon founder Ed Kramer lasted two months out of his 5-year house arrest before getting caught photographing a child in a doctor's office

also added a yarmulke to the ensemble so that it would be anti-semitic to convict him

(He'd spent decades running a nerd convention known for being the most welcoming place on earth to dress as an elf with your buttocks exposed) (and many years fighting his business partners as they tried to remove him from the organisation and keep it a safe place to dress as etc)

Watched a Neverland bootleg the last couple of nights.

I'm so late to this, I'm sure I can't add anything to the 500 previous posts (which I haven't looked at yet). The subject's so big--too big, like a Holocaust film--I think it did as well as could be expected. I concluded pretty much right from the '93 case that Michael Jackson was guilty of every charge; this was a big topic of conversation when I was doing Radio On in the mid-90s, and there was a single of his in virtually every issue, so I want to go back and look up what I wrote at the time, but I'm pretty sure I was convinced early on. (Before '93, I was probably as stupid and as oblivious--oh, he's just weird--as everyone else.) I know this must be an exceedingly common reaction: I come up so short in understanding the parents (or three of them anyway--the Australian father is a separate issue), that I don't even want to attempt to say anything until I've read something that tries to give an empathetic explanation of what they might have been thinking.

The cafeteria at work was playing some Jackson 5 songs at lunch today. I haven't heard any later-era Jacko in a while though.

― ☮ (peace, man), Tuesday, March 26, 2019 6:32 PM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Got Remember the Time today.

can’t believe that anyone in the world still doubts he did it

Halloween will be just the same without "Thriller." I promise.

Watched this yesterday. Considering the whole process of selecting and grooming and brainwashing these kids, and the extent to which sex was completely central to each relationship, I just don’t see how it’s possible that he didn’t also molest Macaulay Culkin and ever single one these other boys.

Like it doesn’t make sense that he wld abandon his whole m.o. for a year w/ one kid and then pick it right back up w/ the next.

it makes sense that he wouldn't molest a particularly famous kid

the many, many boys he acted like an overgrown child with, and didn’t molest, were cover for the ones that he identified as vulnerable and susceptible

tbh the first halloween i remember was when thriller came out

just replace Thriller with Werewolf Bar Mitzvah tbh

xps I wld be more inclined to accept this if he wasn’t “monogamous” (ugh) with these other kids—spending seemingly 24hrs a day with the given boy of choice....

But I guess I don’t know enough abt what kind of time Culkin spent with him. Did it overlap other relationships? Did they also share a bed?

He took time grooming the kids in groups until he figured out which ones would go along with his advances, wouldn’t talk about it, and had successfully starstruck parents. He wasn’t fucking every child around him all the time. The number of unfucked children at his play parties and in the press also helped convince the desperate-to-be-convinced parents of the victims.

I’ve always assumed that fucking Emmanuel Lewis or Corey Feldman or Culkin would have been insane bcz they were famous and beloved and the public would have believed them if they said “Michael sucks my penis in bed, it feels nice and he says it makes us special friends,” and because their parents had access to a) good lawyers and PR and b) money to pay good lawyers.

Being seen cuddling and lap-sitting and hand-holding famous, beloved children who say “Michael is my friend, we play trains, he’s just like any other kid” might, in theory, convince millions of people that Jackson was an innocent giant child. We can’t for sure test the intention, but we can test the results.

(strike “always,” replace with “for a couple of decades, once I thought about it a bit & read details of Jackson’s Neverland-based behaviour”)

My guess also, that he stayed away from famous, financially secure kids.

In addition to everything you say, they'd also be like an insurance policy; he could always call on them as impeccable character witnesses.

He took time grooming the kids in groups until he figured out which ones would go along with his advances

Was this the case with Robson and Safechuck? I gathered from the doc that MJ was confident enough in his wiles that these two were "auditioned" more or less privately and brought into Neverland alone—away from other kids—won over by one-on-one attention.

to be clear, I wan't suggesting above that he molested all of these kids (and I agree that he surrounded himself w/ groups of kids to foster that image as "a friend to children")...only that I find it hard to believe he *wasn't* molesting each of the exceptional few that he chose to spend all of his time with for months on end: traveling, bed-sharing, etc.

I find it easy to believe that he and Macauley had a genuine friendship based on their individual experiences as enormously famous child stars. Jackson was a predator, and he also genuinely was someone who'd been badly damaged by his upbringing and childhood.

He could dance pretty well and sing okay, too.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/weird-al-yankovic-wont-do-his-michael-jackson-songs.html

Saw today that Missy Elliott is getting the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award from MTV this year. They still call it that. Quite surprised--I suspect that ain't gonna last very long.

I will def need to watch the doc in installments because it sounds like beyond-Frontline levels of awfulness

Once i committed myself to watching it, I found that I wanted to do it as quickly as possible so as not to drag it out any longer than I needed to. The times in between when I was sitting to watch it were filled with thoughts about it, so I wanted to condense it so I would lose less time with the content leaking into my daily life. I felt that I needed to watch to be a witness to what these two men went through if they were going to be brave enough to talk about it. Had an avalanche of feelings and I am still processing. Intense. <3 Safechuck & happy that Wade was able to have success in his choreography in spite of it being so intricately connected to his experience w MJ.

i just finished it last night and woke up thinking about it
that's one of the most insidious things -- intrusive thoughts. i can't imagine how difficult it was for them to first come to terms with what happened and then go on with their daily lives. seems impossibly difficult.

My son's third-grade class did a cute Halloween dance to "Thriller" and. Um. I am sorry but.

Reader, I had thoughts along the lines of: I am not really sure my brain wants to contemplate 8-year-old boys and Michael Jackson in the same sentence anymore.

Makes very little sense because he's not currently harming anyone but still. The dissonance was strong.

This type of abuse reverberates forever I’m afraid :(

It’s always going to be in the air when one of his songs plays.

Yes, it's weird to me, I would never consider playing MJ now to people. I might play it myself occasionally (although haven't yet since the doc came on TV). I can tell you though that he's definitely not cancelled in continental europe.

I no longer deliberately listen but if I chance to hear something in a grocery store or whatever it makes me very sad. The J5 stuff particularly.

MJ is ultimately a tragic figure and has been since about 1980 or so

The cafeteria at my work still includes MJ in the daily rotation. This isn't Muzak; just an employee's phone hooked up to a bluetooth speaker. Some of my colleagues are definitely bugged by it.

My son's third-grade class did a cute Halloween dance to "Thriller" and. Um. I am sorry but.
yeah my kid's class did the same thing ... it seems pretty uncomfortable to me. surely there's some other song to do a fun halloween dance to?