Michael Jackson is "evil"

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?

i hear no less mj out and about than i ever have. heard pyt in the mall recently, the local jack fm station still plays him etc.

surely there's some other song to do a fun halloween dance to?

― tylerw, Friday, November 8, 2019 11:03 AM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah bring back the monster mash

I'm imagining a classroom of third-graders doing a dance routine to Everyday is Halloween now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8NaEtxw6hM

People have more cognitive dissonance about jackson than other celebrities discovered to be abusers

I have more cognitive dissonance over Woody Allen than I do about MJ

I don't care about MJ anymore, I only want to make sure his victims are able to move on with their lives and get past what he did to them. As a person he has been dead to me; his music is something I am going to have to listen to because it's part of the fabric of society but I don't have to subject myself to it voluntarily.

of course i googled this morning to make sure Safechuck was doing ok and found this
Safechuck told Vanity Fair in February that he can't even listen to a Jackson song in public without feeling overwhelmed. "It's still really hard for me. And I don't think a day goes by where I don't hear a song," he said. "You go out to have a drink with your friend, you're trying to relax and let everything go, and he'll come on. Every time. It's hard. It gets easier, but it's still hard."

which led me to the VF article, which I haven't read because I need a break atm. still the headline says it all: "Michael is Everywhere"
In the doc, Safechuck's pronoun usage (frequently deferring to "you" when discussing what happened to himself, rather than saying me/I) led me to believe everything is still quite raw for him. :( but he does seem to be doing ok.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/02/michael-jackson-accusers-explain-speaking-out-hbo-leaving-neverland

I can still listen to his music but fault no one who can't.

and, yeah, I hear his music in the wild often, less so on quiet storm R&B, formally a redoubt.

I still hear his stuff all the time and yeah it just sounds different to me now, can't separate them out anymore. of course this stuff was all out there well before the documentary but there was juuuust enough plausible deniability that I figured, hmmm maybe you don't need to think about this every time Billie Jean comes on. but yeah at this point I'm too creeped out by it

funny enough I just got back from a restaurant where the first song I heard was "I Believe I Can Fly"...someone didn't get the memo I guess

idk how anyone can hear "PYT" and not think "hmmm, child fucking"

oddly the Thriller single I've most heard in the wild

that's the thing with some of these #metoo/cancel culture moments - when the stuff is front and center in the work (see also: R. Kelly, "Manhattan", a bunch of Gary Glitter songs) it's just impossible to get around. For me, anyway.

"Billie Jean is not my lover. But the kid is not my son."

yuck.

Glitter in particular is tough for me cuz the *sound* of those singles is so great but then you get to something like the "I'm the man who put the bang in gang!" line and I'm just like... ok, I'm done

after seeing this doc i can't even think about the word "bad" without feeling his unwanted presence

i read the vanity fair interview; there is a lot of interesting stuff about why the filmmakers did the doc the way they did, how much Robson and Safechuck were able to talk before they saw the film (one meeting, supervised) and how grateful they were for each other's presence. interestingly for me, they also talk about dissociation.

I thought the documentary a shoddy piece of work, but it did what it was supposed to, although not enough. I haven't read about what Robson and Safechuck are up to.

there was one point in the doc when i was like "can we please stop talking about the dad?!" and i think that could have been cut out probably, though i can see why they included it to show what was going on with their family dynamic. and it was sad, though not esp relevant to the larger arc.

One of the things I thought most interesting about the VF piece was learning that Robson didn't know what his family had said, or how deeply the relationship w MJ had torn up his family until they all sat down to watch the movie together and their interviews were on screen for the whole world to see. As for Safechuck's quiet demeanor, he seemed like he had been mildly sedated to me. Not in a bad way, like he was fucked up but to keep himself from wigging out on camera. :( can you imagine how hard it was to say all that stuff to a camera and then watch it in a room full of people? i wish him nothing but peace.

ime reporting on someone due in court who suddenly has health issues that preclude travel, or a previously unheralded condition, or injury, that lead to them arriving at court hours or days or years past their scheduled dates, clad in hospital attire or carrying oxygen tanks, in front of cameras, never ends up with that person being a sweet blameless angel

eg from Skase to Pell

hey I got this one in under the wire

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

https://i.imgur.com/807omva.jpg