The Man in the Mirror

You can't close your, your mind!
(Then you close your, mind!)
That man, that man, that man, that man
With the man in the mirror
(Man in the mirror, oh yeah!)
That man, that man, that man,
I'm asking him to change his ways
(Better change!)
You know, that man
First, full disclosure: I was never what you would call a Michael Jackson fan. I enjoyed some of his music as it made its way into our home via our daughters in the 80s; I was duly dazzled by his showmanship and moved by his undertaking a role as good global citizen. On the other hand, I found the physical makeover downright hideous and his denials about the self-evident truth of it bewildering. As to the accusations of child molestation, I was just not engaged enough in his career to follow them beyond the bottom-line court findings. 
It is with this background that I set about watching the new HBO documentary Leaving Neverland featuring extensive, granular interviews with two men who say Jackson molested them from their very pre-teen years forward. Upon originally hearing about the documentary I had little interest in watching it…old scandalous news about a dead man when we have so much scandalous news about a very much alive and dangerous man to digest. But compelling reviews led Lorna and I to commit to watching a half hour of it at least. At that we were hooked and at the end of its four-hour running time, plus an hour Oprah Winfrey discussion following, we both came away convinced that we had just seen one of the most important documentary films ever made (and we have seen most of the great ones…from Shoah to Man on Wire). What I want to do in this post is not so much a review of Leaving Neverland, but address some of the issues it raised in my mind. The first is one that is very much in the news lately with the Congressional testimony of convicted liar Michael Cohen. Like Cohen, the two men in Leaving Neverland, Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck, are self admitted liars. Like Cohen, the lies they now confess to they told in public under intense scrutiny. Unlike Cohen, they were both children at the time…and as the documentary makes crystal clear they were emotionally blackmailed children. The question of their credibility, then, is fundamental to the documentary. The Jackson estate and a worldwide legion of fans have taken to the barricades to defend Jackson by discrediting his accusers as liars. But as in Cohen’s case, who lied to protect Donald Trump, the lies the men now recant were made to protect Michael Jackson when they both appeared before a court to deny, respectively, that in all the many times he took them alone to bed with him (undisputed by Jackson's family) that he ever molested them. Though the Jackson family maintains that Michael was found not guilty of the child molestation charges in 2005, they ignore the fact that the verdict was largely due to the now admitted perjured testimony of Wade Robson. The second defense the Jackson forces have mounted against the documentary is that it has all been staged to bilk millions from the estate. Let’s face it, the in-it-for-the-money defense is the go-to gambit for every lawyer in such cases. The fact is that outside of criminal proceedings leading to jail time, the options for any victim to collect on real damages done to them in a civil case is pretty much limited to a financial payout. Although it’s fair to ask if money is the motivation for anyone who brings a lawsuit, it’s equally fair to consider that money is often the only compensation available for damage done…legs lost, lungs destroyed, emotions scarred for life. The trickier part of this defense is the suggestion that the documentary is whole fiction…a staged event to garner fame and fortune. With this the Jackson defenders take on the burden of proof. It’s not an impossible burden. They could find copies of edited scripts for the documentary, outtakes from the making of it, witnesses to its fraudulent production. There are numerous possibilities for them to gather material evidence to expose the documentary as a hoax. They are probably going to have to do that if they ever hope to counter the devastating impact the documentary is going to have on the Jackson financial empire. It is hard to imagine a generation of mothers who screamed in adoration for Michael at concerts and at his death continuing to support his brand financially and emotionally after watching this documentary. It’s not just that the two young men who have come forward to tell their story in painful detail are so believable, it’s everybody who appears on camera exudes verisimilitude, including the boys’ moms who are unsparingly portrayed as Michael Jackson’s accomplices in his seductions of their children. The two men, their wives, their mothers, a grandmother, a sister and a brother all appear to make an impression of frankness as distinctive as a fingerprint and beyond the contrivance of any film director or screenwriter.   I’ve written about my own experience as a victim of childhood molestation here. I thought of it throughout Oprah Winfrey’s follow up discussion with Wade and Jimmy before an audience of victims, and I realized once again why I was not traumatized by what happened to me: I told my father what happened immediately, he reported immediately to the authorities, and the authorities acted promptly. No one ever doubted my word or made me feel ashamed. Thus the event just receded into my memory to take a place among my other memories of growing up…rather than something to fester, haunt and dominate my memories as a grown up. It really did take this documentary for me to fully understand the deep, dark web of exploitation, deceit, and perversion of love that child sexual abuse entails. It’s a small thing, I know (and I’m glad for that), but after the doc and in preparation for this post, I watched the Michael Jackson video for Man in the Mirror. There was a time when that video would’ve pushed so many of my emotional buttons that I hardly could’ve gotten through it without a tear. But this time I watched it full of contempt for the blatant way the man in the mirror used it to exploit and ultimately cheapen the many images of humanity to mask his own inhumanity. I can only imagine what a horror it was for Wade and Jimmy to finally pull that mask off.