( Leaving Neverland is not appropriate for kids. Their accounts of these incidents are precise, graphic and extraordinarily difficult to hear. At Neverland-which offered “a fairy tale every night,” according to Safechuck’s mother-and on tour, Jackson would allegedly perform and request all manner of sex acts from them. He ingratiated himself with their starstruck mothers, who saw a childlike soul in need of a playmate as well as a figure who could change their family’s lives, only to turn the boys against their parents once he got them alone. Jackson hung out at Safechuck’s modest suburban home and courted Robson from afar with daily phone calls. As the two men tell it, both cases began with extensive grooming. (He’s now 40.) Raised in Brisbane, Australia, 36-year-old Robson taught himself dance moves that earned him an audience with the King of Pop when he was only five. A child actor in California, Safechuck starred opposite Jackson in a Pepsi commercial at age eight. Even more indelible is the way director Dan Reed ( Three Days of Terror: The Charlie Hebdo Attacks) and his two disarmingly open subjects demonstrate how complicated the relationships between young victims and their abusers can be-and how they can poison the child’s life regardless.Īs kids, James Safechuck and Wade Robson had three things in common: creativity, talent and moms determined to make the most of those gifts.
The two-part film, which airs March 3-4 on HBO, offers damning evidence to support the longstanding child molestation accusations against Michael Jackson. It’s a relief, then, that Leaving Neverland makes the plight of survivors paramount. It’s all a blur of undifferentiated trauma. But even as we keep believing the worst about these alleged predators, we’ve become desensitized to the lived experiences of (non-famous) victims of sexual assault and abuse. Despite his ascension to the Supreme Court, more Americans trusted Christine Blasey Ford than Brett Kavanaugh.
In the #MeToo era, reports of gross sexual misconduct have brought down so many once-untouchable men: Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, Roy Moore, Catholic priests around the world. Sometimes I worry we’re so busy “believing” survivors that we’ve stopped listening to them.
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