Secrets and lies | 14 March 2019

Halfway through the first part of Channel 4’s extraordinary documentary Leaving Neverland (Thursdays), I flicked through the comments on social media in order to gauge the global reaction. Surely, I thought, Michael Jackson’s reputation will never recover from these bombshell revelations.

If you sat, squirming, though Dan Reed’s excruciatingly prurient documentary you’ll know what I mean. Lots of those who didn’t have been justifying their decision to ignore it with excuses like ‘Yeah, but we knew this already. Michael Jackson was a paedo. It’s hardly news, is it?’ But this strikes me as glib and dishonest.

Sure, Wacko’s fondness for prepubescent boys — such as Jimmy Safechuck, the ten-year-old Australian lad who joined in his dance routines on the late 1980s Bad tour — was the subject of much ribald speculation. Comics, especially, had a field day seeing how close to the edge they’d dare go. Jimmy Carr: ‘I’m not saying Michael Jackson is guilty. But if I was a billionaire paedophile, I’d buy a funfair for my back garden.’ But most of us, I think, still preferred to tell ourselves that Wacko was simply a very strange man who’d been kept in a state of arrested development by his grim father and his demanding tour schedules; that, as a consequence, he was just a sexless Peter Pan figure who simply preferred the company of boys his own mental age.

If this seems naive with hindsight, it didn’t at the time. ‘Why did the parents let their kids sleep with him?’ everyone’s asking now. But this painstaking, sensitive, utterly damning documentary makes the answer perfectly clear: because Jackson’s genius for pop was surpassed only by his genius for hiding his pederastic tendencies. His entire career and persona, you might argue, were just one gigantic honeytrap, erected with the purpose of luring pretty little boys into his web of sin.