No it doesn't because none of those people are the Michael Jackson who performed Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad. He is the only person to ever have done this. He's pretty much the only dude who moved 109 million copies of one record by virtue of that record being really fucking awesome. Everything else you're talking about is way down the ladder. Did the captain of the Varsity football team shoot the music video for "Beat It"? He didn't. Did the biggest mattress dealer in the tri-state area come up with the moonwalk? He didn't. Did a police officer find startling early fame as one of the dudes who sang "ABC"? He didn't. There have been more Popes than there have been Michael Jacksons. There have been more U.S. Presidents than there have been Michael Jacksons. Think about that for a second. I wouldn't say this about anyone else because anyone else is not Michael Jackson. That's what I meant when I typed that. I wouldn't be going out on a limb and typing massive defenses of those people because they aren't Michael Jackson.
You're not getting it. I agree with you that Michael Jackson was
Michael Jackson, and that he has done extraordinary things, but you say that as though it means that puts him in a different reality, as though this is some objective thing that makes him special. In the grand scheme of human behavior Michael Jackson was really not special at all. He was just as fucked up as everybody else. He had drug problems just like a mere mortal. He had family issues, just like a mere mortal. He was a person capable of just as much as anybody else, he just happened to achieve relative success. You seem to be saying that he was famous all his life and was successful through most of his life. So fucking what? Really. I can't figure out if you're trying to say here that Michael Jackson was so super goddamn successful he couldn't possibly have hurt anyone, or that he was so exceptionally famous that the chances of false allegations of sexual abuse by a minor go from 1% to some number we would be feel safe betting on. Either way you're making a stunning leap of faith.
Nobody should "automatically suspect" anyone who accuses their pastor or their teacher or their football coach or their lawyer or their doctor or whatever of lying because those people don't have Neverland Ranch, you know?Besides, those people weren't the sort of figure that Michael Jackson is. Those people didn't expressly want to recapture a youth they simultaneously never had and never left by surrounding themselves with children. Far be it from me to speculate or whatever but the dude wasn't interested in hanging out with kids because it put him on a power trip, he hung out with kids because he effectively lived a prolonged adolescence in an attempt to live out the childhood he felt he deserved. What's been documented of his life over the last twenty years is pretty solid proof of this.
No? How does Michael Jackson's ranch make him less likely to commit a crime than any of these other people? Again you're insinuating that it was his wealth that attracted gold diggers, but there are all sorts of rich people, richer people than MJ, who own whole Caribbean Islands. Are they more likely to be falsely accused than Michael Jackson? They'd have to be, they've got even more money than he did. Are you saying that they falsely accused him to get a slice of his fame? That's the only thing that would set him apart from other targets of gold-digging evil children, but it doesn't seem very plausible, especially since they'll forever be known as the people who ruined Michael Jackson's career, hated by millions.
As far as Michael Jackson's psyche is concerned, all I think we can safely say is that it was clearly severely damaged. The "missing childhood" angle is an extremely prevalent pop psych verdict on MJ but I can't say with any certainty that it's actually what was going on with him, even if he said so himself, precisely because he was so damaged. It was probably much, much more complicated than that, and so I can't speak to Jackson's motives as you do.
No it doesn't because like I said pretty much everyone else existed on a completely different scale than Jackson? It's not so much that he, by virtue of being rich and powerful, is untouchable; instead, it's that he, by virtue of being the Michael Jackson whose life has been comparatively well-documented over twenty years, at the very least seemed to have completely different motives for hanging out with these kids, motives confirmed by people like Macaulay Culkin that had spent time with him as children.
For any other case this speculation wouldn't be happening. I wouldn't be typing this argument for anyone else; instead, I'd be letting the evidence present itself and opine once the case was concluded. I'm not a judge. The 2005 case concluded, though, and it concluded with a verdict based not by absence of evidence that there was wrongdoing but testimony that there was in fact no wrongdoing, testimony provided by other kids who could have been potential victims.
Child molesters, as a general rule, do not molest all children that they come into contact with, or even all children that they
could molest without getting caught. You know rapists often have significant others, who will swear up and down that the man they're in a relationship would never in a million years take advantage of anyone? It's a really mind-blowing concept, I know, but if it weren't true then we would never have to worry about sexual assault at all, because perpetrators would be easily identifiable. But they aren't easily identifiable, they almost never are, and that's what makes them so fucking terrifying. Instead of actually coming to terms with this we teach women and children to fear haggard-looking old men wandering the streets. And when the suburban dad or the pastor or the famous pop star is accused of molestation it's so fucking hard to reconcile what we're taught about rapists and child molesters, and how the accused don't match up to that. You're right in that, if you really look, there's been very little from his very public life to suggest that he resembled the "child molester" archetype. He seemed like a sweet, gentle, delicate man. But you know what that means, really?
Absolutely nothing, because there's no such thing as a fucking "child molester" archetype. If Michael Jackson was a child molester, the only people who would know anything about it are Michael Jackson and the victims.
When I said "literally" up there, I meant it. That wasn't hyperbole. Whether you like it or not, the insane amount of errata surrounding the case meant that the allegations against Jackson - like almost all of the events of his weird, tragic life - were a totally unique case of the sort that really didn't happen before him and hasn't happened since. And because of the factors that informed his weird, tragic life, he was acquitted.
You can say all you like that Jackson's wasn't a unique case. You'll be wrong.
Every case is unique in the nitty gritty details of it but in general each type of crime has a basic set of characteristics which make it what it is. There's no really unique murder - there are creative murders, and murders done out of passion or fear or whatever, but you know, somebody got killed intentionally in all cases. Michael Jackson's case was a child molestation case. We can go on and on about his life and how unique it was, and I'm not saying it wasn't, I'm saying that doesn't matter. So what if Michael Jackson led a unique and sad life? All this talk about how this is a "unique case" is really heading towards a single intended goal - to paint things such that if we did accept that he molested children, he would be the
real victim, thus making him a blameless victim in any case and preventing us from ever feeling sick about how we felt about him in the past. And he was probably a victim of something to some degree, but if he did it he was not a victim of the crime he was accused, there were greater victims who deserved greater consideration.
I'll say this though - If I were a victim of sexual assault and I saw the way the MJ saga played out, under no circumstances would I report it to the police.
