This article was written by Jacob Weisber, in 2005 after the lawsuit brought against Michael Jackson for pedophilia before the Californian justice. I never believed in the pedophilia of Michael Jackson. First of all, he does not fit the profile of the pedophile. Child abusers tend to act the same way over and over again. A study shows that people who sexually assault boys commit nearly 280 such offenses in their lifetime. But today, despite the greed that such accusations against Michael Jackson would generate, only two alleged victims have come forward with detailed allegations.
Moreover, these two accusations, separated by ten years, do not correspond to one model or the other. Frankly speaking, in the most recent case, the accuser – a cancer victim – said he was groped by Michael Jackson. The previous complainant, whose family received twenty million dollars in damages in 1993, accused the singer of more extreme sexual abuse, and spoke in particular of oral sex.
But the main reason I never believed the prosecutor’s description of Michael Jackson as a sexual predator, acting premeditated, ‘preparing’ his victims, is the fact that it doesn’t sound right. from a psychological point of view. Whether or not he touched a boy inappropriately, Michael Jackson seems too emotionally fragile to act like an adult, let alone a sexual deviant. Naive, youthful, and deeply bruised, he seems pitifully incapable of showing the slightest criminal intent, but also of any adult reflection.
People tend to overdo it about Michael Jackson’s weird and multi-faceted behavior. But is it so weird? As a child, from the age of seven, he was forced to work by a cruel and violent father. (If he had been sent to a factory or a coal mine instead of going on stage, we would have felt more compassion for him). As a child, he was deprived of what even abused or disadvantaged children can have: school, friends, games.
Instead, Michael was transformed into a sexually disturbing entertainer, a boy whose soprano voice aroused the passion of women. He was made into a witness to adult sexuality at an age when it could only have been terrifying and incomprehensible to him. By age 10, he was performing in strip clubs and hiding under the covers of hotel rooms while his older brothers rode with groupies. At 11 – the age at which his psyche seems to have frozen – he was a superstar. “My childhood was completely taken away from me,” he said. Almost everything that seems abnormal about him can be explained by his moving but desperate attempt to regain his stolen childhood.
It’s not entirely fair to describe the world that Michael Jackson created around him as a youthful fantasy. Thanks to his health and fame, he was able to live like a retired child. With the help of cosmetic surgery, he made him a teenager, pre-pubescent. He has fun with luxury toys, extraordinary pets, rides in his amusement park and the tricks of his personal magician.
What emerged during the trial (of March 2005) was not the image of a man playing with children to seduce them. It was the image of a man playing with children because he saw himself as one of them. He and his friends at the “Apple Head Club” stayed up all night, playing video games, watching television and eating popcorn.
In the absence of any parental authority, they would sometimes have drunk wine from Coke cans, made prank calls, read obscene magazines and tried to annoy each other (by licking their faces for example) . Child in his head, Michael Jackson sees his behavior as totally innocent. It was a sleepover; it had nothing to do with seduction.
Hence his confession to Martin Bashir, the English filmmaker whose 2003 documentary Living With Michael Jackson initiated the singer’s recent troubles, in which he makes it clear, in a way that sounds sincere, that he doesn’t sleep with young boys. only out of love, not for sexual reasons.
Michael Jackson doesn’t seem to be able to understand adult sexuality well enough to understand why people have attributed far more sinister intentions to him.
There is, of course, a literary precedent here. “I am Peter Pan,” he confides to Bashir. In the Neverland Ranch, as in the Darling Nursery, the boys all sleep in the same room. Michael, like Peter, sees himself as father, big brother, and leader. He leads lost children on gallops and adventures.
A more interesting comparison may be between Jackson and the author of this tale JM Barrie. Like Jackson, Barrie suffered from stunted growth related to the death of his beloved big brother when he was six. According to Andrew Birkin’s book ‘JM Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan’, Barrie’s marriage was never consummated and his deepest relationship was with Llewelyn Davies’ brothers, the five boys he met in Kensington Gardens in London who inspired the characters in Peter Pan.
Barrie played with the children, more or less lived and lived with them and dreamed of sharing his bed with them. There is no evidence of physical relationships. The most likely hypothesis is that Barrie was single and asexual.
Today, we find the idea of non-sexuality stranger than that of deviant sexuality. But in the case of Michael Jackson, it seems more likely than any other explanation. Jackson’s strange behaviors seem to be the result of what he went through as a child.
Martyred by his father, he became extraordinarily kind and generous with children. Terrified by adult sexuality, he froze in pre-adolescent immaturity. “I’ve never been betrayed and deceived by children,” Jackson said. “Adults let me down.”
