Can’t Leave Neverland Behind

By ROB PATTERSON

Watch “Leaving Neverland”… if you can bear it. The HBO two-part documentary in which two grown men detail their childhood sexual abuse by mega-superstar Michael Jackson is not easy viewing by any means, and at times quite explicit. And utterly believable.

Even if Jackson wasn’t found guilty in the one criminal case against him of abuse that went to trial, there’s zero doubt in my mind that he was a pedophile, albeit a unqiue one. I’ve felt this way for quite a few years based on all the smoke of accusations around him that indicated a fire.

The sexual abuse of underage (read: pre-pubescent) children is a serious problem in our society, a plague if not epidemic, if you will, I do not exaggerate. I am not talking about wacky Internet conspiracy theories that claim that prominent politicians run a child sex ring out of a D.C. area pizza shop’s basement (even if the shop has no basement). I am talking about the abuse that happens in families, schools, churches and youth groups. The owner of a summer camp I attended two years in a row displayed pedophiliac behavior towards me. Psychology Today estimates that 20% of all American youth experiences some form of sexual abuse. It is around us everywhere.

So is it any surprise that a supremely gifted and talented yet wildly dysfunctional man-child such as Michael Jackson turned out to be an abuser? The nature of Jackson’s abuse as described in the movie may not have been as predatory, violent or devastating to its victims as the experiences others have been. Both Wade Robson and James Safechuck, the two grown men who recount their abuse by Jackson, appear to thankfully be not horribly damaged by what happened. Their accounts of the abuse and how Jackson used his fame and cultural stature to gain their trust (and that of their gullible families) are disturbingly similar, ergo credible.

It’s not my place to put degrees of shading or justification on a behavior that is both criminal and in my estimation sinful on the part of Jackson. To me, it’s all just plain wrong. Period.

But what we know about Michael Jackson’s childhood in general – that he was robbed of it by the professional entertainment ambitions his verbally and physically abusive father had for his family (there is no indication at all that Joe Jackson was sexually abusive towards his sons or daughters) – sets the scene for at least some perverse malfunction in maturation for Michael Jackson. Add fame and fortune to the mix and stir in some very common, yet unhealthy manifestations of sexuality in our popular American culture and the potency and toxicity of the abuse he is accused of should come as no surprise.

There are those, many in fact, who simply cannot believe Jackson was an abuser. I do believe he justified his sexual abuse in some strange fashion as a desperate act of preservation of whatever he had left of his childhood. I believe Jackson justified it to himself as acts of love and kindness. But his psyche was so shattered in so many ways that he couldn’t see the damage he was doing.

The immediate question to follow the film was how it would affect the stature of Jackson’s music in the future. Of course it has been sullied, will never be as popular as it was. But it was such profoundly creative pop music that it will last.

The more pressing question should have been if this was – alongside the Catholic Church’s reckoning with its legacy of abuse – the watershed event that prompted a paradigm shift. It is with almost immeasurable sadness that I believe it was not.

Populist Picks:

Film: “Saving Mr. Banks” – As long as “Mary Poppins” was remade recently, this rather charming tale of the struggle between its author P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson) and Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) is even more relevant. And a fun entertainment experience from behind the curtains of entertainment.

Documentary Film: “Color Me Obsessed” – The way in which music critics, musicians and fans so ardently love the band The Replacements is almost enough to make one dislike the 1980s college rock group. Yet at the same time, as this rock doc’s main thread, it does reinforce just how special this group that I also love was.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2019

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