If what he had was considered to be child pornography by law, would you still defend it?
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Leaving Neverland, HBO documentary on Michael Jackson's alleged child sexual assaults, review thread: Currently 94% on Rotten Tomatoes
- Thread starter Brian McDoogle
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I'm curious because I know from your posting that you're a reasonable guy, so I am not trying to put you on the spot. I'm reading reams of contradictory information about the events and his accusers' veracity.
I can think of lots of reasons false accusations are leveled - or making a documentary about them -- money or attention being two easy ones. Coercion from parents or other greedy or self interested parties. Granted. Those are all things that happen.
I'd balance those with the equally well documented false testimony from victims that happens because of shame, fear, humiliation, pressure, money and other deeper more troubling effects from the nature of abuse itself. I don't think you'd disagree with that as a blanket statement even if you see specifics in this case that you believe refute that thesis - that's fine and you actually have verdicts and contradictory statements to point to. But in general - the preceding phenomenon are very real and difficult victim experiences.
But Let's remove every crime and every contested allegation from the picture of his life at that time and stick to just the uncontested facts and testimony. This isn't a court, it's a conversation and an argument about what we do know.
How do you, if not defend, then at least frame the things that DID happen - sleeping with more than one pre-teen boy literally hundreds of times, collecting and hiding art featuring naked children and being surrounded by a staff and cadre of people who we know for a fact did enable and help him achieve some of his worst instincts on personal physical appearance, his inner circle, lifestyle and environment, medication and so on?
And assuming that there's a straightforward framing of those known events and circumstances - why is it so unreasonable for lay persons to be suspicious of him - distrusting of the legal verdicts at the time - and willing to entertain the new accusations from the individuals in the documentary?
Here's a YouTube link:
Mother Goose Story Time at Neverland
Edit: And Jackson's own words:
1995 interview with Diane Sawyer said:
This is a wild thought, I know, but maybe he's telling the truth?2003 interview with Martin Bashir said:
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Just the fact that kids were allowed around a drug addict like Michael and the staffers enabled and aided him to suppress this information is extremely disturbing in of itself. Children shouldn't be around that lifestyle, period.
If he victimized them too, then yeah I feel bad for them as well.
First and foremost I would like to thank you to have a good discussion. That is very important in these days I think. I agree with most of what you say. I don't really know if I agree if he is a pedophile (with the information I saw), it is clearly wrong to have slept with these children in my view. But with that information alone I don't know if he had sexual attraction to these kids.
Again it was wrong and he should have been penalized for that, and from the very beginning he admitted to that (or would have to been investigated from the first minute someone knew about that).
If that would have happened then I think it would have been a big benefit to everyone.
The case would not be so difficult and it would have been faster to know if he was such a horrible person as some say or if he is innocent of being a pedophile and/or molester. So in that case Michael failed and also those around him. If these two speak the truth I don't know and I will not accuse them. Like everyone they have the right to be heard, to be believed and to have their case investigated.
I don't think me answering you is going to stop you making straw man arguments or calling me unwell or anything, but I thought I should answer to make a general point for the rest of the people here.
The letter and the fact that Michael didn't rape Macaulay Culkin aren't proof of anything. I never said they were. But I do believe that both of these weaken both the argument that he was a pedophile and perhaps more importantly specific points brought up in this new documentary.
What Wade Robson and James Safechuck are saying now is that Michael didn't understand that a sexual relationship was harmful to a child. That he thought it really was innocent and good.
There's also the song that another user posted on the previous page that he wrote, Do You Know Where Your Children Are, in which he specifically writes/sings about the evil of people in the business preying on children and sexually abusing them.
So we have written evidence through a private letter and a song written in 1987 by Michael that clearly show that he knew child molestation was wrong. That just doesn't gel for me, at all, with the idea that Wade Robson says Michael didn't realize what he was doing was wrong.
Secondly, as I said, if he really was a pedophile his relationship with Macaulay Culkin could reasonably be seen as an incredibly high risk situation. Moreover, the new documentary itself heavily implies that Robson and Safechuck were replaced by Macaulay Culkin and Brett Barnes as Michael's newest victims. While both have been incredibly adamant, both over the years and recently, that there was no sexual abuse whatsoever and that their relationship with Michael was completely innocent. Barnes has been vocal to on Twitter to defend Michael and to say that Robson and Safechuck are lying. As I said in another post way back too, among many other people who Robson harassed to support him, Robson went after Jonathan Spence, a kid who befriended Michael in the 80s, to join him in his allegations. Per official court documents: "Plaintiff Wade Robson and his counsel have treated Spence in the most abominable manner – without the slightest regard for Spence's concerns and objections regarding Spence's unilaterally-noticed deposition" and "[Robson's] bullying behavior toward a non-party is inexcusable and speaks for itself."(Legal document in question): https://www.scribd.com/document/360297273/Robson-Case-Spence-Protective-Order-Motion)
On another note, the documentary also mentions the seemingly damning testimony of Michael's former maid Blanca Francia - she had said in a tabloid that she had seen Robson and Jackson together nude in a shower. What isn't mentioned is that Francia admitted in her 1994 and 2016 depositions that she admitted she never saw them together like this, and she only saw Jackson alone in the shower.
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Sigh. I only have time right now to refer to one of the points by quoting an earlier post of mine but no, Jordie Chandler's drawing was not a match.
This isn't the Bill Cosby shit where there was mountains of evidence against him and people still denied it.
The fucking MJ child abuse/pedophile circus has been RIFE with lies, falsehoods, lawsuits, and the very people themselves repeatedly stating that they made shit up to get rich quick. Hell even the kids who were supposedly molested have said years later that their parents set the whole shit up for fame.
It's a fucking musical chairs at this point. I'm tuning out of this documentary.
Yes, people should read the transcripts of the those secretly recorded phone conversations with Jordan's father Evan Chandler. The calls took place before any sexual allegations were made and it was Jordan's then-stepdad Dave Schwartz who secretly taped the calls. (I wonder why Dave was discretely recording Evan?) Here are some excerpts from those phone conversations. It's all Evan speaking to Dave, and again, this is just prior to the first sexual allegations materializing.
1993 - Evan Chandler pre-allegations said:
Now let's return to the Diane Sawyer interview from a few years later and see what Jackson had to say about the Chandler allegations.
1995 - Interview with Diane Sawyer said:
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My take is that Michael Jackson wasn't this innocent Peter Pan character, he was a sexually active adult and the parents are as much to blame as him for ever allowing their kids to spend the night with him in a bedroom. The same with the people around him. He was surrounded by enablers. At the most innocent of levels, at no point during his lifetime was what he did considered appropriate. It shouldn't have been legal either.
But he also suffered abuse as a child and was evidently as messed up as a person could be as an adult. I don't think he was evil like some of these predators. Whether it's as a child performer or the This Is It rehearsals, when I see footage of him, I still feel a degree of sympathy and sadness at what the world did to him. He needed help that never came in many aspects of his life and this ultimately ended with his doctor killing him.
But he also suffered abuse as a child and was evidently as messed up as a person could be as an adult. I don't think he was evil like some of these predators. Whether it's as a child performer or the This Is It rehearsals, when I see footage of him, I still feel a degree of sympathy and sadness at what the world did to him. He needed help that never came in many aspects of his life and this ultimately ended with his doctor killing him.
Do better, Vanity Fair.
That sixth "fact"... People like the VF writer continue to use art books and perfectly legal porno as a bogus substitute for child pornography that simply didn't exist in Jackson's homes or personal computers. Investigators were unable to find anything damning after multiple raids, so hey, let's just scrutinize two photography books that can be purchased on Amazon.
No, that doesn't cut it.
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That's the bottom line, but people keep arguing. I don't doubt that MJ thought he was innocent, but that doesn't mean he actually was. He was a toxic individual for these kids to be around, and without a doubt the way he treated them had a detrimental effect on their development. Just look at his own kids.
Compare him to someone like Mr. Rogers who actually had healthy and beneficial interactions with kids.
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So as long as nude pictures of children are legal - a collection of then mind you - its morally ok to have them? Especially in the vicinity of children? If so for what purpose would Michael have it stashed away in a lock box in his bedroom that was innocent?
So MJ didn't sleep 30 consecutive nights in bed with a child boy, didn't have alarms and the like set up to detect people coming toward his own bedroom?
Why are there fingerprints for the boys on such things?
lmfao, how the fuck do people square away the fact that he regularly slept in beds alone with pre-teen boys (which alone is a huge red flag) and then had an elaborate security system put in place to signal if people were coming? This wasn't for his security since he lived in a heavily secured ranch-estate, this was for other obvious reasons...
Like come the fuck on here. Connect the obvious dots instead of trashing these victims. The fact that there are NUMEROUS boys saying something happened establishes that he was a serial abuser and that he had a pattern of preying on boys in open sight. The porn was 100% definitely a part of that too in terms of grooming and normalizing sex with his young victims who didn't know any better.
Like come the fuck on here. Connect the obvious dots instead of trashing these victims. The fact that there are NUMEROUS boys saying something happened establishes that he was a serial abuser and that he had a pattern of preying on boys in open sight. The porn was 100% definitely a part of that too in terms of grooming and normalizing sex with his young victims who didn't know any better.
https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2004/03/michael-jackson-alleged-child-molestation-maureen-orth
I'm not doing this morality police bullshit on art books. They were legal. That's it. Where was the actual child pornography? Why was he never charged with possession? Dude's supposed to be a giant pedophile, so where is it all?
Lmao if someone said there's a dude down the street who likes to sleep in bed with 12yo boys, plies the parents with expensive gifts and has a fucking alarm system so he's alerted to anyone coming to the bedroom you'd have the fucking authorities there in a heartbeat.
That you have no issues finding the fingerprints of child boys on legal porn material and bondage books in the bedroom of a grown man is fucking weird.
It's not about the fucking legality of the fucking books, it's what he used them for... and it wasn't for him. It was to show his young victims and to help coerce them into sex.
Why is the legality important when the content is still bad to have?
You don't get it! He's just a special snowflake that loves kids!
I still don't get why people argue over investigation details when the basic information we have strongly suggests he was a pedo.
13-year-old Gavin Arvizo is running around Neverland Ranch and comes across Mike's porn stash. Uh-oh, time to call the police. You got 'em.
One of the two photography books had the following note written in it:
Look at the true spirit of happiness and joy in these boys' faces. This is the spirit of boyhood, a life I never had and will always dream of. This is the life I want for my children, MJ.
Could it be that you're misconstruing this stuff? Could it be that it's just another benign art book out of thousands in Jackson's vast library?
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Yeh, again, that you have no issue finding the fingerprints on that in his room is worrying. That you seem to ignore everything else surrounding that, like the fucking security system, means I find it really weird.
It was stated earlier in the thread that the fingerprints on those books were the result of the police giving the boy the magazine to hold in order to create "evidence", wasn't it?
READ: Magazine and Fingerprints
Looks like falsified prints and a magazine that wasn't even published until months after the accuser had last visited Neverland Ranch. Way to go on that reporting, Vanity Fair.
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Exactly! But people are still attempting to argue tooth and nail about semantics when admissions from this own man's mouth are indicative of activity that is typical of an individual who is a pedo.
Guys, it's just a super big coincidence that the grown man who admitted to sleeping and cuddling in bed with random young boy had pictures of naked boys in books in his bedroom.
And they're art books. Not porn. It's not like it's some weird pedo Playboy or something.
In Playboy, it's women posing naked in tasteful layouts that showcase their naked bodies.
In these art books, it's young boys posing naked in tasteful layouts that showcase their naked bodies. Totally different.
A secret pedo would have no use for some artsy fartsy books that display the genitalia of young boys. There's literally no way a pedophile could get sexual gratification from looking at those pictures. It's ridiculous to suggest such a thing.
Just like it's ridiculous to suggest they were in his bedroom to serve the dual purpose of sexual gratification and plausible deniability. Books like that only ever serve one purpose: So that a famous art and photography lover could admire the artistic merit of naked young boys' penises.
It's like when I was thirteen or so and my mom found a collection of Victoria's Secret catalogs under my bed. She insisted I was using them as masturbatory aids. I tried to tell her I had them because I love quality advertising, and that the pages were all stuck together because I also love quality glue, but she didn't buy it.
All you anti-MJ people are just like my mom: Haters.
And they're art books. Not porn. It's not like it's some weird pedo Playboy or something.
In Playboy, it's women posing naked in tasteful layouts that showcase their naked bodies.
In these art books, it's young boys posing naked in tasteful layouts that showcase their naked bodies. Totally different.
A secret pedo would have no use for some artsy fartsy books that display the genitalia of young boys. There's literally no way a pedophile could get sexual gratification from looking at those pictures. It's ridiculous to suggest such a thing.
Just like it's ridiculous to suggest they were in his bedroom to serve the dual purpose of sexual gratification and plausible deniability. Books like that only ever serve one purpose: So that a famous art and photography lover could admire the artistic merit of naked young boys' penises.
It's like when I was thirteen or so and my mom found a collection of Victoria's Secret catalogs under my bed. She insisted I was using them as masturbatory aids. I tried to tell her I had them because I love quality advertising, and that the pages were all stuck together because I also love quality glue, but she didn't buy it.
All you anti-MJ people are just like my mom: Haters.
Exactly. Remove the name Michael Jackson from all of this and look at it. No grown man sleeps with random kids in his bed.
The security system could be explained as Neverland having hundreds of employees walking in and out his house and him wanting to know if someone was nearby his private bedroom. Also combined with his deep rooted paranoia (he once stopped eating and has to be hospitalized in 2005 due a belief that someone was trying to poison him), it would make sense he would have an alarm. Here it is in action:
Really goob job doubling down on those photography books.
Nah I'm with you. They're just photography books. Full of pictures of naked young children. In Jackson's bedroom.
There's nothing at all odd about that.
Right. Absolutely zero child pornography, not even a suspicious Internet search on Mike's computer, but two photography books that were legally published in the United States and at least one of which was sent to Jackson from a fan. Again, awesome job. I tip my pitchfork to you.
The problem is with there being so many fucked things with this is that you get people that focus on disproving each little thing instead of the large picture and how fucked a landscape it paints.
Like I said:
Lmao if someone said there's a dude down the street who likes to sleep in bed with 12yo boys, plies the parents with expensive gifts and has a fucking alarm system so he's alerted to anyone coming to the bedroom you'd have the fucking authorities there in a heartbeat.
Not "but the police doctored the fingerprints", "but the security could be because he was paranoid", "but they were just legal pornography and art books".
No, you have an adult male who repeatedly slept with little boys in his (or their) bed, sometimes for days on end. That in itself is worthy of rebuke without the mountain of dodgy shit around it.
The fathers of two boys committing suicide, the security system, the extravagant gifts to the parents. More.
Also paranoia? If I was molesting little boys in my bedroom and elsewhere over the course of years I might be a little paranoid too.
The attacking of the small bits around the outside to ignore and detract from the very real issues is disgusting.
Focusing on the minutae like "they were art books" to make the situation seem normal when, to any normal functioning adult, there's an immediately alarming situation occurring.
Like I said:
Lmao if someone said there's a dude down the street who likes to sleep in bed with 12yo boys, plies the parents with expensive gifts and has a fucking alarm system so he's alerted to anyone coming to the bedroom you'd have the fucking authorities there in a heartbeat.
Not "but the police doctored the fingerprints", "but the security could be because he was paranoid", "but they were just legal pornography and art books".
No, you have an adult male who repeatedly slept with little boys in his (or their) bed, sometimes for days on end. That in itself is worthy of rebuke without the mountain of dodgy shit around it.
The fathers of two boys committing suicide, the security system, the extravagant gifts to the parents. More.
Also paranoia? If I was molesting little boys in my bedroom and elsewhere over the course of years I might be a little paranoid too.
The attacking of the small bits around the outside to ignore and detract from the very real issues is disgusting.
Focusing on the minutae like "they were art books" to make the situation seem normal when, to any normal functioning adult, there's an immediately alarming situation occurring.
Dude had access to children on tap and repeatedly slept with them in his or their beds for days at a time.
Then you're all here like "where's the child porn".
That fits the narrative that he was a pedo. It also fits the unlikely but, at worst, conceivable narrative that he was telling the truth.
The whole situation is deeply weird and alarming but I don't see how a reasonable person can be absolutely positive MJ was manufacturing the image of a disturbed but innocent man. A screwed up childhood can do a real number on a person. It's not impossible that he really was fixated on this idea of the childhood innocence he was never allowed to experience. Doesn't that seem at least plausible?
Humans can go really damn weird, and that weirdness doesn't always manifest as sexual perversion. I'm not saying I actually buy this, but it does give me pause.
Just a man who pleaded, begged and gave expensive gifts to parents to allow him to sleep with their boys. Totally normal behavior. Pack it up, guys, nothing to see here.
Having just watched Abducted in Plain Sight, it's hard not to see similarities between MJ's behaviour with young boys and Berchtold with Jan Broberg.
But yeah, totally normal. There's no way a pedophile would buy these specific things so he could plausibly claim he just had them because he loved art. I tip my blinders to you.
We should test this. You go ahead and buy all these same books. Then scan the images and save them to your computer hard drive. When you're done, I'll call the police on you. Then you can convince the cops that you're simply an art lover. We'll see how far you get without access to Jackson's expensive lawyers and millions of dollars.
Look at all that evidence
Hmmm I wonder how he got a not guilty veridict when everyone wanted his head at the time
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