Sorry, we’re all complicit in Jackson’s sick crimes
IT’S so tempting to blame the parents. What sort of mother lets her seven-yearold son go on ‘sleepovers’ with a strange man in his 30s? How on earth did they trust their precious children to a deeply weird individual who claimed to be celibate and invited small boys to play with him and share his bed? Why did they allow themselves to be fobbed off with gifts and flattery and feeble excuses while he hid his true purpose in plain sight?
The mothers of Michael Jackson’s child victims, James Safechuck and Wade Robson, make easy targets for viewers’ disgust and dismay at the horrifying story that unfolded – and that may have more chapters to come – in the ‘Leaving Neverland’ documentary this week. He might have been a global superstar, the world’s biggest pop icon, but they knew nothing about him when they handed their beautiful little boys into his clutches. Why didn’t alarm bells ring when this peculiar man seemed to prefer the company of young boys to adults, and chose childish toys and games over fast cars, red carpet parties, luxury yachts, celebrity friends?
It’s easy to blame the parents, but it’s also unfair. They weren’t the only ones who didn’t hear alarm bells or see red flags. None of us did. The whole world watched as the King of Pop, Wacko Jacko, toured the globe with an everchanging entourage of little boys. When he played to 130,000 fans over two days in Páirc Uí Chaoimh in 1988, he had ‘his little sidekick Jimmy Safechuck by his side’, according to a newspaper report.
Nobody seemed at all bothered by the fact that a ten-year-old boy was sharing Jackson’s suite in Jury’s Hotel. That was just good old Wacko Jacko, the lonely boy denied a childhood by his ruthless father, the reluctant adult craving the carefree boyhood he never knew, the eccentric but harmless manchild who lived in Neverland and just didn’t want to grow up.
We never blame the parents of the victims of paedophile priests, or swimming coaches or scout leaders, and yet they were duped in the very same way as the Safechuck and Robson families, not to mention those others who may yet emerge with their stories. Jackson also targeted his victims with care, and groomed, disarmed and blindsided their parents just as all paedophiles do. Whether they were devout Catholic families who’d never believe a bad word about a priest, ambitious swimming parents wanting the best of training for their children, or star-struck ‘stage moms’ flattered and bedazzled by the charisma of an enigmatic icon, the abuser’s first step was to insinuate himself into their lives and their trust.
Like the priests and the scout leaders, Jackson cut a reassuringly familiar figure, his very status placing him above reproach. When the King of Pop played Cork in the late 1980s, we were still years away from the first trickle of revelations about Goldenbridge, Brendan Smyth, Seán Fortune, Letterfrack and the Magdalene Laundries, even though there had for years been ample grounds for alarm about these people and places. We just didn’t want to believe them, or perhaps to confront them, and so, like Jackson’s victims’ families, we allowed ourselves to be persuaded that nothing could possibly be amiss. Such respected and admired people would never betray our trust. Would they?
And now it turns out that, just like so many other paedophiles, Jackson relied on a combination of threats, rewards, sweet talk and subtle blackmail to keep his victims’ quiet. If anyone learned their secret, he warned them, they’d both go to jail for the rest of their lives, they’d be taken from their families.
THEY loved each other, he told them, this was how people showed their love, but the grown-ups wouldn’t understand, they’d say it was wrong. When his first accuser emerged, in 2005, Wade Robson and James Safechuck took the witness box to defend him and insist they’d never been touched. And now Jackson’s defenders use their retractions to challenge their credibility: were they lying then, or are they lying now?
As with the church, there will always be those who doubt the victims, cite the goodness and decency of the accused, question the motives and the reliability of their accusers. There will always be those who’d prefer not to believe the worst, to see the crimes hidden in plain sight, to confront the darkness behind the pristine facade. That shouldn’t surprise us – whether it was about the Magdalene laundries, the predatory priests or the peculiar pop star who surrounded himself with small boys, there was a time when we all took refuge in ignorance and denial.