The new biopic Michael, about the tortured King of Pop, had a record-breaking opening weekend — despite the fact that the film celebrates the musical legacy of Michael Jackson, a man credibly accused of sexually abusing multiple children.
After the success of the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, it was tempting to think that there was a permanent asterisk next to Jackson’s name. Advertisers stopped using his music, and The Simpsons pulled his episode from syndication. Now, however, Leaving Neverland has been wiped from HBO after legal finagling from Jackson’s estate, and Michael is an enormous hit. We have clear proof that audiences are ready to put that unpleasantness behind them and instead embrace Jackson’s inarguable musical genius.
Some audience members have doubtless made the calculation that with Jackson long dead, the accusations against him are distant, too, leaving them with no particular ethical reasons to deprive themselves of the pleasure of seeing a Michael Jackson concert recreation on the big screen. (“Forget what the ‘professional’ critics are saying theyve completely missed the mark on this one,” begins one audience review on Rotten Tomatoes. “If you want to experience the magic of the King of Pop, this movie delivers.”)
Other Jackson defenders have decided that Jackson was innocent. TikTok is full of videos laying out the basics of the case and asking “Guilty or innocent?”, with the majority of commenters saying “innocent.” “The world owes Michael an apology” is a sentiment that pops up a lot.
Then there’s a variation on that defense, rooted in the long, ugly history of racism in the criminal justice system in America. Some of his defenders — including Michael director Antoine Fuqua — believe that Jackson was unfairly smeared by a system looking to bring down a successful Black man, in the same way that so many other Black men have been wrongly accused and maligned before.
“When I hear things about us — Black people in particular, especially in a certain position — there’s always pause,” Fuqua told the New Yorker. He added that an early cut of Michael showed Jackson brutalized by the police over the course of their investigation, “being stripped naked, treated like an animal, a monster,” before it was excised from the film for legal reasons. According to the New Yorker, he doubts the intentions of some of the accusers’ parents and says he doesn’t know whether the allegations are true or not.
“This may sound like an excuse, but what many don’t understand is how hard it is for older generations to square what has so often happened in the past — the fear that society is just tearing down another good Black man — with the reality that these men could have been, or are convicted of having been, harmful,” wrote Nadira Goffe for Slate, in an article about Jackson’s loyal older Black fandom.
Talking about Michael, then, requires pitting two marginalized groups against each other: Black men and abused children, neither of whom is served by the American justice system. It makes discussing the case even sadder and harder than it already is.
To be clear, the case against Michael Jackson really is extraordinarily strong. At least 10 people have publicly accused Jackson of sexually abusing them as children, in remarkably consistent and detailed stories. Only one accusation resulted in a criminal trial, in 2005, and Jackson was found not guilty. That, however, is par for the course when it comes to child sex abuse cases, even those in which the accused adult doesn’t have millions of dollars to spend in their defense. A 2019 study shows that fewer than one in five of all child sex abuse cases lead to prosecution. Of those, about half result in a conviction.
On the rare occasion that there is a trial, it is almost always a bad experience for the child at its center. There are persistent myths about how child sexual abuse — that children will always have physical injuries, that they will immediately tell an adult, that they can be manipulated into lying about accusations — that affect how their allegations are perceived. A 2017 study of defense tactics in child sex abuse cases found that “just as women are met with doubt when they report sexual assault, the justice system remains skeptical of children’s testimony.” Their mothers are often blamed for allowing the abuse to happen. In Jackson’s 2005 trial, his defense lawyer sarcastically referred to Jackson’s child accusers as “these little lambs,” suggesting that they were involved in “the biggest con of their careers” against Jackson.
At the same time, there’s a reason that a story about the American state attempting to take down a Black man at the top of his game resonates so deeply. It’s based on the real problem of how our criminal justice system treats Black people: unjustly.
According to the ACLU, Black people in the United States are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans, while one in 81 Black adults in the US is serving time in state prison. There is also a long, long history in this country of Black men being falsely accused of sex crimes. That was the stated reason for the unjust imprisonment of the Scottsboro Boys and the Central Park Five, the racist murder of Emmett Till, and thousands of monstrous lynchings. You can understand why someone would look at this history and cry foul.
But boys and children of color — the alleged victim in the Jackson case that made it to trial in 2005 is Latino — face unique barriers when they are sexually assaulted. “As Black and racially minoritised children are located at the intersection of multiple, overlapping structural inequalities, their specific experiences of victimisation are still largely overlooked in the criminological literature,” writes Aisha K. Gill, a professor of criminology and co-editor of the book Child Sexual Abuse in Black and Minoritised Communities. Both racism and culture affect whether they are believed and the support they receive.
All of these numbers and statistics and sad moments in American history represent groups of people whom the justice system bludgeons with the law as though it were a weapon, who are routinely humiliated and rarely protected. To put them in opposition to each other is a dark and uncomfortable thing. It is far, far easier to watch a glorified concert film of Jackson’s greatest hits and bask in the glee of it. But an honest reckoning with Jackson’s legacy would require facing the strength of the evidence against him, darkness and all, and not looking away from it.
