New sex claims haunt Michael Jackson’s legacy

Protest against film exposing pop star as a paedophile hardly gets off the ground

AMID breathless reports of protests, disruptions and personal threats, news outlets swarmed to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, in the US, premiere of Leaving Neverland, a new documentary miniseries detailing accusations of sexual abuse against pop star Michael Jackson.

But the protesters outside the Egyptian Theatre were vastly outnumbered by reporters, photographers and camera crews as teams from Variety, Extra and The Times waited patiently for their turn to interview the poster-carrying defenders. All two of them.

BRENDA Jenkyns and Catherine Van Tighem said they drove 13 hours from Alberta, Canada, to protest against the debut of the docuseries, which HBO will broadcast in coming months. Though only three more protesters showed up after the screening, the two friends said they felt compelled to speak out.

“I’d never actually heard of Sundance,” Jenkyns said. “I just know about Michael Jackson and we also know about the two people featured in this film. So we knew that it would be not true.”

Van Tighem added that the film was “not a voice for victims”.

“There’s another side to the story. The information is there for people, if they want to take the time to look at it.”

She carried a cardboard poster featuring a photo of Jackson, as well as copies of a pamphlet titled “Protect Michael” with a storybookstyle illustration of the pop singer leading a group of children through a garden of flowers.

Leaving Neverland, directed by

Dan Reed, paints quite a different picture of Jackson’s interactions with young people. In two parts running nearly four hours, it details the singer’s history with Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who both spent time with Jackson in the late 1980s, at the height of his post

Thriller fame.

Under 10 at the time they began their “friendships” with the pop star, they say that they were showered with gifts, trips and backstage passes, slowly isolated from their families, and “groomed” for sexual abuse that lasted several years.

The now-adult Robson and Safechuck describe their sexual interactions with Jackson in graphic detail – far more explicit than the euphemisms typical of earlier news reports and documentary accounts.

In 2003, Jackson was indicted on child molestation charges when a young cancer patient accused the singer of groping him at the Neverland estate in California. Jackson was acquitted of all charges. He died six years later at the age of 50.

Jackson supporters like Jenkyns and Van Tighem question the credibility of the documentary’s accounts, noting that the men had previously defended Jackson from accusations by other young men, and that their subsequent efforts to sue Jackson’s companies were dismissed by courts.

“I don’t feel a need to see it. I don’t feel any desire to benefit anybody who’s just trying to make money,” Jenkyns said of the documentary. “I don’t have respect for people who do things without a pure heart.”

That, to her, includes Robson and Safechuck. “I feel it’s taking advantage of real victims of child abuse because it does not respect them… when someone like this who shouldn’t be believed is representing them.”

After the screening, Robson said with a hint of sadness that he understood it was hard for them to believe “because in a way, not that long ago, I was in the same position they are in. Even though it happened to me, I still couldn’t believe it. I still couldn’t believe that what Michael did was a bad thing.”

He added: “We can only accept and understand something when we’re ready, and maybe we’ll never be ready. But that’s their journey.”

The women said they were not disappointed by the meagre turnout for the protest.

“I just knew in my heart that

I had to be here and speak out,”

Van Tighem said, adding “a friend came to join me. There are only two of us here today. If others come, that’s great, but there’s no organised protest”.

The news cameras were long gone when the other protesters showed up.

“I’ve never been to a protest, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect,” Jenkyns said.

“I believe it was made to sound bigger than it was, with police and angry fans. So we wanted to be here to show that a real Michael Jackson fan is about love, not fighting.” |