'Leaving Neverland' Leaves Huge Michael Jackson Fan Torn

by Philip Price
I am so torn. I have been a fan of Michael Jackson for more of my life than I haven't. In so many instances there are "good enough" reasons to counter and dismiss the claims of Wade Robson and James Safechuck, but deep in your gut you know these guys are telling the truth; that they wouldn’t expose such private and potentially embarrassing details about themselves and furthermore - their vulnerabilities - just for the sake of hope that an appeal might pay out. I've gone back and forth for days watching interviews and reading articles from opposing viewpoints in an attempt to paint as well-rounded a perspective as possible including the “After Neverland” interview with Oprah Winfrey. While Oprah’s emphasis was not so much on the fact this was about Michael Jackson, but about the epidemic of sexual abuse and crafting a better understanding for what might be perceived as contradictory behavior by the victims, but the fact of the matter is this is still that, but with the biggest pop star ever. In the case of Safechuck and Robson the truth that comes to be revealed is not that they were forced into lying on behalf of Michael Jackson, but that they were groomed to protect him; to return his love and affection with their own only to not realize until much later in life what their entire lives had actually been in service of.

The conflict for most people of a certain age will not be that they like Michael Jackson’s music (who doesn’t?), but rather that so many memories of good things and of good times are often attached to the music MJ produced and how these new revelations of who this man might have also been in the privacy of his own home scars those memories and that music. The idea of Michael Jackson doing these things challenges the everyday idea that things are not always what they appear to be. Michael Jackson was a musical genius. Michael Jackson was one of the greatest and most talented performers and human beings to ever grace the planet and yet the world that built this performer and by virtue of those performing talents, this celebrity, may have also inadvertently conditioned him into a grown man that desired childhood so extensively that such desires crossed over into sexual ones.

There is an infinite amount of times one could go back and forth with this no matter how convincing one side or the other might be at any given moment or in any certain context, but while it is important to maintain the many layers at play here what connected with me the most was this idea of getting to know someone like Jackson, at the peak of his career no less, on a level that transcended the image the world held of him and what I, myself, might have been too blind to see was happening right in front of me if someone at the status of Jackson was so willing to take care of everything in my life. It's chilling. The general consensus prior to the release of Bad was that the guy was weird, sure, but he was also the guy who made Thriller.

As a young man who loved performing, who emulated the Jackson 5 with his own brothers, who looked up to Michael Jackson as a perfectionist performer and tried to mold body movements and shape after him in order to achieve the same aesthetic it’s difficult to even fathom what it was like to not only meet your idol, but to get to know them as a person and interact with them as if friends is nearly incomprehensible. Sometimes we’re afraid to meet our idols due to the expectations held of them when looking through the veil of celebrity, but that Michael Jackson not only fulfilled these expectations for Robson and Safechuck to then allegedly use them for his own perverse purposes is a mindfuck of a game that both Robson and especially Safechuck are very clearly still dealing with. I don’t want to believe these things could be true about Michael Jackson due to the joy his work has brought and the ambition his talent has instilled, but I can’t believe these men are lying either.

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