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BPX037: Jackson's HIStory

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    #76


    The Pro Jackson bus campaign survives the Advertising Standards investigation...

    Ofcom has rejected over 200 complaints from viewers who found the controversial Michael Jackson documentary Leaving Neverland to be "misleading". 


    As does Channel 4 for airing the ant-Jackson Leaving Neverland documentary

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      #77
      This one will just keep on giving as both sides keep trying to make the cases for and against Jackson but over the weekend this update occurred:

      The director of Leaving Neverland has denied a biographer's claims that his newfound evidence could disprove some of the child sexual abuse allegations levelled at Michael Jackson by Wade Robson and James Safechuck.

      A Jackson biographer says he has evidence that disproves some of the claims made in the Finding Neverland documentary. The first is a claim that Robson makes that Jackson abused him whilst his family was away at the Grand Canyon on a trip. The biographer has raised testimony from Robsons mother in 1993 that states Robson was with his family and not Jackon on that trip.

      The second is in relation to Safechucks accusation that he was abused by Jackson in the upstairs section of the Neverland Train Station in between 1988 and 1992, the span of his abuse. The biographer dug out the permits filed for the Neverland Ranch and confirmed that the permit to build the train station was granted in 1993 and it opened in 1994 so the accused window of abuse in the building was impossible.

      EXCLUSIVE: Michael Jackson biographer Mike Smallcombe has alleged dates in Leaving Neverland do not add up and director Dan Reed agrees


      It's the Mirror but this is a follow up to the above reporting that Reed has commented on the evidence about the Neverland Train Station seemingly u-turning on his documentary's accounts and changing the details of Safechuck's abuse, something the biographer says evidences the directors poor standards of basic fact checking for the documentary and the unsettling ease at which Reed is willing to change an accusers account of abuse to fit his own narrative purposes.

      Comment


        #78
        Originally posted by Superman Falls View Post
        It's the Mirror but this is a follow up to the above reporting that Reed has commented on the evidence about the Neverland Train Station seemingly u-turning on his documentary's accounts and changing the details of Safechuck's abuse, something the biographer says evidences the directors poor standards of basic fact checking for the documentary and the unsettling ease at which Reed is willing to change an accusers account of abuse to fit his own narrative purposes.
        It's a difficult thing, right? Because it's all about their memory of something traumatic which happened as a kid.

        I had a pretty severe accident once, as a kid. I was thrown from a piece of playground equipment by an older kid who, quite honestly, was a sociopath. Like they did it without any sense of regard for my safety, and the kicker is that I didn't even know them - I was on a resort holiday in Spain and they were just some random person. I hit my head and believe I passed out, but was awake long enough to watch them calmly walk away. My parents found me some time later and fortunately I was alright, but had a lot of bruising. It was only years later that I realised that I could've been killed.

        If pushed, I'd say this happened in Playa Bara, Spain, in 1989, in a sand-covered playground. However, that's a rationalisation after-the-fact. In seriousness, I don't know precisely when it happened. But if you were to say "oh, that resort wasn't built until 1990, so your story is false" then I would be quite put out by that assertion, because the fact that my more "rational" memories of it are somewhat fictitious doesn't mean that it didn't happen.

        The thing is, they say that all our long-term memory, or at least most of it, is not the way we think. It's a cobbled-together distortion of our recent experiences that matches the sequence of events we can recall. This is the reason things like The Mandela Effect exist.

        To use a similar example to the above, I recently revisited Majorca, a place I hadn't been in over 20 years; my last visit was in my teens. We visited several locations I had previously been, but I realised then that my memories of the spaces and what they looked like were so rough as to be little better than a verbal description, and we're talking about places that don't change here, like cathedrals and historic buildings.

        Consequently I don't think this is ever something fans or analysts could "disprove", short of finding overwhelming evidence to the contrary which just doesn't exist - and that's because MJ did do things with kids that we would consider "untoward", even if they weren't "illegal" - like that's beyond contention.

        Comment


          #79
          The trouble with the normally perfectly fine line of it being down to memory of traumatic events is that it negates the special circumstances that the Jackson accusations find themselves in.

          Typically it would be an accusers account versus a defendant and authorities have to really pick at those account to establish facts from lies or from genuine blurred memories. For these accusers though that line of approach doesn't work because they're making accusations about such a renowned, public and heavily scrutinised individual. Both accusers have been making claims against Jackson for years on public record and in the courts and when it comes to Jackson there's less room for uncertainty when it comes to some things.

          Like the Train Station incident, there's the prior accusation about abuse during a concert. It's not the usual case of one person claiming one thing and another claiming it not to be true, we know it's definitively not true because neither the accusers or Jackson was there - neither did the gig happen on the date given, or even in the place claimed. This goes beyond blurred memories or their long term memories being mixed up because it's in direct relation to open public record information available to all. They are in the beneficial position of being able to verify several of their blurred memories with a simple Google search and yet across all these years, two failed court case attempts, this documentary and more they failed to check this, instead opting to state in in a documentary.

          At the very base level it shows that the reliability of the filmmaker and the documentary is fundamentally broken meaning that nothing can be taken as trustworthy account within the film - important because of how many have taken it as gospel.


          What I find fascinating with this documentary is that prior claims against celebrities have opened the doors to further claims and accounts and yet in this instance the vast majority of updates explicitly disprove claims with evidence or are individuals supportive of Jackson. A common view is that where there is smoke there is fire, but by that same virtue if you turn towards looking at whether the accusers are genuine you need a hazmat suit to fend off suffocation from smoke inhalation increasingly.

          That's what it's always come down to for me, that Jackson definitely had, in one way or another, inappropriate relationships with children and whether he took that all the way to physical abuse remains a fair and open question. But that is a separate question as to whether any accuser is genuine. It can both be that he is guilty and they are liars and the eagerness of various sites, networks and forums to condemn Jackson based on such increasingly disputable claims is beyond alarming.

          Comment


            #80
            You raise and interesting point there SF.
            If the victims are simply Misremembering the facts it would be very easy for them to verify if its correct. And for the sake of evidence against Jackson, a lawyer would definitely want to do this. It's striking to me that this doesn't seem to have happened. Even a psychiatrist would ask that they probe their memories and verify the facts to help with the healing process.

            I don't know what investigations are happening in the background, maybe the FBI are all over this. With most cases like this, things seem to move quite quickly with new victims coming forward. Either we are not hearing about new victims, or there aren't any.

            Comment


              #81
              Originally posted by Cassius_Smoke View Post
              maybe the FBI are all over this
              Maybe they are but people are unfortunately making judgements based on a documentary television event. And this isn't the only one. I'm seeing a bunch of people talking about various "what REALLY happened" type shows and there are a whole rake of them on Netflix and people all over are showing a startling lack of media literacy when it comes to these shows. Documentaries can be informative and they can certainly be interesting but they usually have a singular point of view, are far from unbiased and use all the media tools at their disposal to make a case without a counter-case being made. This is how they work. Given we have generations growing up with such vast and varied media exposure, it's a sad state we're in that people can't make these distinctions. Worse still, I see it from people in the media - people who themselves use these same storytelling tools to do the same thing on a daily basis, as if they don't know that others are using those same tools. It's bananas.

              Comment


                #82
                It's also interesting that there's a startling lack of consistency in media portrayals of Jackson.

                They accuse of him of being a mentally fragile, child like creep with many mental instabilities that led to his surgery, paranoia and interest in kids. Simultaneously they portray him as a criminal mastermind of child abuse who spent a staggering amount of his non-performing time orchestrating a myriad of grooming methods and secret room abuses on multiple children simultaneously whilst also going through multiple court proceedings where he navigated and evaded the guilty judgement of the courts and also kept hundreds of friends, business associates, employees and family members in line with a near water tight silencing ring that included the childrens families in order to conduct said abuse.

                ... and openly admitted sharing a bedroom with children on international television repeatedly.


                Now when you take the fact he's been dead 10 years and how Jimmy Saville operated in an open secret way that saw many accusers come out against him after his death and authorities be able to still find him guilty despite him no longer being alive and the incidents being decades old you end up having Michael either be a mentally damaged individual or one of the most successful, prolific and post-humously loyally conspiracy conspired child abusers in human history. The chances of him being both are pretty slim yet the media never makes its mind up on which one. When the 90's and 00's sensationalist stories become the sole basis for grounded documentary works, especially pointed accusational ones, it's vile.

                You could do it about anything, QualityChimp could put out a one hour documentary of himself looking sad because he claims in 1994 Freddie Starr gobbled up his hamster too. Starr is then imprisoned for 10 years. Doesn't need an ounce of verifying or reliable account to his story, a non-fact checked or accountable reel of filmed accusation is all you need now.

                Comment


                  #83
                  Originally posted by Superman Falls View Post
                  You could do it about anything, QualityChimp could put out a one hour documentary of himself looking sad because he claims in 1994 Freddie Starr gobbled up his hamster too. Starr is then imprisoned for 10 years. Doesn't need an ounce of verifying or reliable account to his story, a non-fact checked or accountable reel of filmed accusation is all you need now.
                  I was once on holiday in Spain around 1989 and I was on a sand-covered playground and a smaller kid refused to let me go on the slide.
                  He pushed me and I flinched, accidentally kicking him off. He bumped his head and I was really worried and went to the hotel staff to tell them he'd hurt himself and needed first aid and they said they'd go and help him.

                  Next thing I know, he's telling everyone that I'm a sociopath and I tried to kill him, just to get some sweets, toys and sympathy.

                  Find out the whole sordid truth in a new 6-hour documentary!

                  Comment


                    #84
                    I'm keenly watching the new contradictory evidence thread on Era given they just introduced new rules on Jackson discussion stating that the community is banned from labelling Robson and Safechuck as potential frauds. They're... unsure how to approach it so far.

                    Oprah Winfrey isn't though it seems, magically all her social media updates she's ever made about the documentary have suddenly disappeared...

                    Comment


                      #85
                      Originally posted by QualityChimp View Post
                      Find out the whole sordid truth in a new 6-hour documentary!

                      Comment


                        #86
                        Hilariously Era has already locked the thread

                        Comment


                          #87
                          As a child I adored Michael Jackson. I loved his music, his videos, his dancing, his clothes. I was a proper hardcore fan, even got quite good at the moonwalk. Don't like him that much these days, not because of the allegations of abuse but because a lot of his music hasn't withstood the test of time. The album Thriller is still brilliant, so too a lot of the stuff he did with the Jackson Five:



                          Man, he was a handsome kid. Shame his insecurities kept that fact from him.

                          Comment


                            #88
                            Why isn't there a 'I don't know' poll option? Let's be honest, unless you were actually abused by him, it's the only conclusion to arrive at. Indeed it's the only conclusion to 99% of life!

                            Comment


                              #89
                              Given Era won't allow non-Robson/Safechuck supporting discussion it means Jackson can't be discussed at all on there anymore so I've been looking at the thread on Gaf instead which is interesting. Some people on there have been deep diving on facts and there's a proper battle between Jackson accusers and Jackson defenders on there lately. It's not going the accusers way at the moment.

                              Comment


                                #90
                                Rise from the grave!

                                Came across this and remembered this thread existed. Jackson has been absolved in court. Wades case has been thrown out 3 times now by 2 different judges.

                                “Leaving Neverland,” the documentary in which two men accused Michael Jackson of child molestation, has been repudiated in court. The Los Angeles Superior Court this morning ruled against Wade Robson in CASE NO. BC508502 in claims against corporations owned by Michael Jackson and/or the Estate of Michael Jackson and dismissed his case again. The Michael […]

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