It is, to this day, the only film screening I’ve attended that was inspected by bomb-sniffing dogs.
The premiere of “Leaving Neverland,” a documentary exploring Wade Robson and James Safechuck’s child sexual-abuse allegations against pop legend Michael Jackson, had received numerous terroristic threats from Jackson loyalists in the days leading up to its unveiling at Park City’s Egyptian Theatre during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. In the film, Robson and Safechuck come forward to accuse Jackson of a cycle of abuse that began when they were young children — 7 and 10 years old, respectively — in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. They allege that Jackson convinced their younger selves that they were in love, plying them with expensive gifts, alienating them from their parents, and even throwing a mock wedding between Safechuck and Jackson replete with rings. Robson and Safechuck also recount, in graphic detail, how Jackson allegedly subjected them to various sex acts when they were kids. Jackson had paid millions to Jordan Chandler and Jason Francia, two boys who’d accused the King of Pop of child sexual abuse, but he could not silence Robson and Safechuck. By the end of the four-hour-plus film, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
But you won’t find any sign of Michael Jackson’s alleged abuse of children in “Michael.” The new biopic of Jackson from director Antoine Fuqua and the Jackson estate paints the gloved one as the one true victim — a harmless Peter Pan figure whose own childhood was snatched away by a domineering father. The film conveniently concludes in 1988, five years before Chandler’s abuse allegations came to light. It’s become a box-office smash, grossing $219 million in its opening weekend.
And it infuriated the award-winning director of “Leaving Neverland,” Dan Reed, who aired his grievances to Variety.
Have you seen Michael?
I went last weekend. I watched it. The first part of Michael as a child, I could kind of buy that. But as soon as we go to the adult Jackson, played by his nephew Jaafar, that burst my bubble. I thought, he’s a great dancer, but his performance is very wooden, and one of the reasons for that is he didn’t have much of a script to work with. He becomes this waxwork who performs these jukebox songs, but there’s zero insight into what makes Jackson tick. He’s this asexual plastic action doll of a figure in the film. And of course, the issue of his relationship with children is completely distorted by the fact that they portray him as an eccentric, overgrown child, which we know is not the full story.
Most of the scenes of Jackson with children in the film are him visiting sick kids in the cancer ward of a hospital.
That made me feel really icky. It suggests that Jackson’s engagement with children was entirely benign and motivated by nothing but philanthropy. Jeffrey Epstein was a great philanthropist, and Harvey Weinstein was a great filmmaker, but there’s unfortunately another dimension to their stories. In Jackson’s case, he’s such a cultural phenomenon that there’s nothing you can do to eclipse that. I want to clarify that I’m not calling for Jackson to be “canceled” and for nobody to listen to his music, but Wade and James’ story needs to be respected as well, and what the movie does is creates a version of events that essentially portrays Wade, James, and others who’ve accused Jackson of child sexual abuse as liars without actually articulating it. They’re saying that the reason Jackson liked children is because he’s an angel and just wanted to be nice to children, not that he wanted to have sex with them.
The biopic casts his security guard, Bill Bray, as essentially the hero of the film — as Michael Jackson’s knight in shining armor — but in the “Leaving Neverland” films, both Wade and James allege that Jackson’s security guards were very complicit in his alleged abuse of them, at times waiting on the other side of the door while the abuse was allegedly occurring.
The film just flips the truth on its head — black is white, white is black, and two and two make five — and none of the people who go and see the movie will ever question that, but it’s a movie that’s impossible to take seriously as a counter-narrative to “Leaving Neverland.” It was supposed to be the retort to “Leaving Neverland,” and they tried that in an early script and it fell apart, so they created this jukebox movie but haven’t managed to create a plausible narrative that would explain Jackson’s fondness for children.
How do you feel about the ways the Jacksons have shielded his legacy by producing musicals and films that sidestep his alleged abuse of children? The biopic rather conveniently wraps up in the ‘80s before the abuse allegations came to light.
Why are they dancing around this? It’s well-known that Jackson spent a long time with small-boy companions, including taking them into his bed at night and locking the door, which is undisputed — and that alone, if someone made a claim, is probably enough to convict him in a court of child sexual abuse — but with Jackson, none of this stuff seems to matter. And neither the estate nor the writer of the film nor anyone else has provided an alternative narrative apart from, oh, he didn’t have a childhood, so he needed to spend the night alone with kids, which makes no sense.
That rationale from his ardent defenders has always baffled me — that it was OK for Jackson to sleep in bed alone with children because he was childlike himself since his father had robbed him of his own childhood.
Let’s say he didn’t have a childhood, in common with many other people who’ve had difficult childhoods — he had immense power, immense influence, great charisma, and he compensated for not having a childhood but stealing the childhoods of his young companions. To claim that because he had a difficult childhood he therefore needed to spend the night alone with a 7-year-old boy in his bed just doesn’t stack up, does it?
Apparently, there’s a clause in Jackson’s settlement with one of his accusers, Jordan Chandler, that says he can’t be depicted in any film, so that’s one possible reason why we haven’t seen that allegation explored on screen. And perhaps there are similar clauses in his settlements with other accusers.
That doesn’t stack up either because Wade and James never reached a settlement. If you want to create a retort to “Leaving Neverland,” why not make a direct retort to the story it tells, which is the story of Wade Robson and James Safechuck?
How have you felt about the public reaction to Michael? Critics were not impressed, but the public went to the cinema in droves to see it to the tune of a $219 million opening weekend, and his streams have gone up 95%.
Jackson is an American myth, in addition to being an actual person, so he’s metastasized into something much bigger than who he actually was. When that happens, it doesn’t actually matter what the person was, because the person has been transfigured into something that is owned by the culture. He’s become part of the collective imagination, and the collective imagination can never include the fact that he’s a pedophile. It’s just not possible. You can’t say, God, that guy liked to have sex with children, but isn’t his music great? That’s not a narrative people can hold in their minds.
That would require Jackson’s fans to come to the realization that their childhood was also a lie.
Exactly. To the culture, Jackson is like a religion. So, what I’ve done is essentially blaspheme, and this biopic reinstates the myth. As absurd as any religion, people have to believe in the miracle of Jackson being this asexual, pure being who only wished good for little children and helped them. They’ve given him the attributes of a deity. But there was a human Jackson and he was what we know he was. As a documentary filmmaker, I was focused on telling Wade and James’ story — not Jackson’s story.
For someone who’s covered the Kosovo War, the Moscow theater crisis, and 9/11, what drew you to Wade and James’ story? It stands apart from your other work up to that point.
It was literally the product of a conversation between me and a television executive, Daniel Pearl, who said, “Dan, all of your films have a high body count in them. Don’t you want to make a film that doesn’t feature violence?” And I said, “Absolutely, I do. My kids have long wanted me to make something they could watch.” And he asked me to look at the big, unsolved questions of our time, and then he said, “What about Michael Jackson? Was he or wasn’t he a pedophile? Why don’t you explore that?” I initially wasn’t interested because I didn’t care much about Jackson, but they gave me a small amount of development money, I hired someone, and I took a look. I noticed among all the research that there were two people that had filed a lawsuit, and I thought, well, we’ve never heard or seen any Jackson accuser on camera, and if these two guys who I’d never heard of just filed a lawsuit, it just might be possible that they’d be willing to go on the record. That’s where the journey began, and eight or nine months later I was interviewing Wade. My jaw hit the floor after a couple of hours of him explaining his relationship with Jackson as a 7-year-old child. Slowly, I started to understand the nature of the grooming process that predators employ to gain access to their prey, and I felt like I was doing something useful that was in line with the rest of my work: trying to convey what these devastating conflicts felt like on the inside.
What made you believe Wade and James? And what sort of reporting and research backed up that belief?
Apart from interviewing them for a total of many days, being skeptical at the outset, and analyzing their stories for any internal contradictions or inconsistencies, I then delved into all the files of the investigations into Jackson in 1993, around the Jordan Chandler accusations, and in 2005, around the criminal trial. I read tens of thousands of pages of documents, interviewed detectives, prosecutors, members of the judiciary who had direct knowledge of contents of the investigation, and came away with the distinct feeling that these two guys were telling the truth. I’ve never come across anything that made me doubt what they were saying, and I’ve come across a huge amount of corroborative evidence.
Jackson’s defenders tend to point out that both Wade and James initially defended Jackson before reversing course, as well as the large amount in damages — $400 million — they’re seeking from his estate.
But both of those points are completely hollow. On the one hand, yes, Wade Robson was defense witness no. 1 and vouched for him at the trial, but that’s the whole point of “Leaving Neverland.” It’s about how this kid went from a 5-year-old performer at a competition in Brisbane, Australia, to defending his abuser in the dark, to realizing when he had a child of his own that the relationship he had had with Jackson was unhealthy and abusive, and turning himself around. That’s the whole point! It’s not a bug; it’s a feature. And as far as the money goes, [director] Antoine Fuqua reportedly earned $25 million for making “Michael.” Obviously, the estate is going to make a huge amount of money. Everyone’s going to make money except — guess who? — Wade and James. They’ve never made a penny. They didn’t make a penny from my film, and they haven’t made a penny from anything else associated with Jackson. The money’s all being made by people close to Jackson who want to tell a distorted narrative that really dishonors them. Someone that was that abusive to children in plain sight doesn’t deserve to be celebrated as a human being. You can celebrate their music, fine, but he was not a human being worth celebrating.
And Fuqua remarked of the abuse allegations against Jackson, “sometimes people do nasty things for money.”
Someone who’s made tens of millions pushing a false narrative around a man who’s a pedophile, that’s a nasty thing. Mr. Fuqua has described his own actions while attempting to smear the protagonists of my documentary, and that makes me laugh.
You’ve said that Michael Jackson was “worse than Epstein” in a recent interview, and I just wanted you to clarify what you meant by that.
Well, look, it’s kind of apples and oranges, isn’t it? Epstein has contaminated the reputations of a great many powerful and influential people, so he’s had an outsized influence in the world of politics.
And abused many minors.
And abused many minors. The distinction I was making was simply that the sexual abuse of very young children from the age of 7, 8, 9 years old is in a slightly different category to the abuse of teenagers or pre-teenagers. In our culture, very little children are especially vulnerable and especially loved, and to brutalize and rape a child who’s so young makes you a special kind of evildoer. That’s what I meant.
What about the complicity of the parents in these situations? Who would let their child sleep alone at night with a stranger?
They are groomed similar to the way the kids are groomed. They were seduced. And Jackson didn’t pick strong, well-adjusted families to prey on. He picked ones that were weak and easily to manipulate. You look at Wade and James’ story, like, how the hell did their moms let them spend the night with Michael Jackson? I do fault the mothers, but I don’t blame them. They were drawn into this web of deceit by Jackson, and he was very skilled at deception. This is a powerful man with God-like status within the entertainment world, and these were ordinary, suburban women. He was too much.
We’ve recently had the four Cascio siblings come forward claiming that they too were abused by Jackson for nearly a decade in the ‘90s. What did you make of their allegations?
I’ve never met the Cascios. All I know is what I read in the press. What gives me pause is the fact that their first move when “Leaving Neverland” came out and the penny dropped where they realized what happened to Wade and James was part of their experience as well, their first move was to go to the estate and ask for money. I wasn’t there and all I know is what I read in the press, but it seems like their first move was to ask to be paid off. It’s worth noting that Wade and James have never done that. They’ve never asked for a payoff and never tried to trade silence for money. So, I don’t know what to make of the Cascios. I don’t doubt that they were abused, since Jackson abused many children and they fit his pattern of abuse, but they’re a strange case because they were a much bigger part of Jackson’s inner circle for a much longer time than Wade and James were, and so I’m very curious to know what the reasons are now for their disclosure.
I will never forget attending that first 8 a.m. screening of “Leaving Neverland” at the Egyptian during Sundance. It’s the only film screening I’ve ever attended where they had bomb-sniffing dogs go through the aisles before and during the intermission because Jackson’s fans had made bomb threats against the cinema.
We’d heard that there had been bomb threats and heightened security, but we were kind of cocooned and I didn’t realize until we were driving away after the premiere and looked back to see the parking lot absolutely full of black-and-whites. There must have been two dozen cop cars there. I was subsequently told there was a SWAT team nearby and bomb-sniffing dogs. It was a very intense premiere because we didn’t know what the audience reaction was going to be, and it was super emotional for Wade and James. You could hear people sobbing in the audience and running outside to cry. Then the whole theater erupted in applause and that was life-changing for Wade and James, who suddenly realized that they were being believed and that their story was being taken seriously. It was quite a cathartic and validating moment.
Do you think many of the Michael Jackson truthers online are paid bots? Because I was at the premiere and despite all the online threats over it, I remember only observing a handful of protesters outside the actual venue — most of them kids.
I agree. The evidence was that a lot of the Twitter accounts and emails where we were getting death threats and abuse had been created the day before and had a string of numbers and letters as their handle. It was clearly a bot operation. There were genuine fans who were emailing me and threatening me, but the bulk of them were fake. I know that someone paid a private investigator to obtain my personal bank account details, to get my phone number and to access my phone logs. I know this because the U.K. had a Subject Access Request where you can request your data, and I’d managed to obtain phone calls that this person had made to my gas company, water company, and phone company. They posed as me and tried to get my private information. Did fans pay that person or did someone else pay that person? I don’t know.
Have you spoken to Wade and James around Michael’s release and their reaction to it? How are they faring amid all this?
I haven’t spoken to them. I’ve exchanged brief text messages with them. Clearly, they’re not fans of the film — or the idea of the film. I don’t think they have plans to watch it. James has released a video message, and Wade has released an Instagram post expressing solidarity with other victims of child sexual abuse because Wade and James’ abuser is being celebrated and part of this huge, successful movie.
And “Leaving Neverland” was removed from all HBO platforms. What happened there?
HBO had signed a deal to televise a Michael Jackson concert in Eastern Europe in 1992. The contract contained a non-disparagement clause, and in law, the special thing about disparagement is that unlike defamation, the truth is not a defense against disparagement. The very resourceful lawyers at the Jackson estate found this contract and pushed to have that clause in the contract moved to arbitration. It went back and forth. HBO was trying to get it in open court, and the estate was insisting on closed arbitration. I wasn’t a part of this and don’t know all the ins and outs, but I do know that HBO reached an amicable settlement with the estate, and that involved taking “Leaving Neverland” off the HBO platform. So, “Leaving Neverland” remains accessible to everyone in the world apart from people in the United States and Canada, and it’s going to be that way until 2029 when HBO’s license expires, and then I can make a new deal.
And its sequel, “Leaving Neverland 2,” was relegated to YouTube. Was that also due to the HBO licensing issue?
Exactly. HBO wasn’t able to consider “Leaving Neverland 2,” which to be fair, was a much more modest film that didn’t claim to contain any new revelations. It was an attempt to keep the story alive while the wheels of justice were turning very, very slowly. The estate was doing everything they could to delay the trial, which is coming next year.
Wade and James had very nice things to say about Oprah and how she treated them during her big “After Neverland” special tied to the release of “Leaving Neverland.”
Hats off to Oprah. She didn’t have to do what she did and chose to stand with Wade and James and “Leaving Neverland” because she recognized that the picture it painted of child sexual abuse was something that she had direct experience of. She understood and valued that, and I think paid the price as far as making herself unpopular with some of her followers. I was very impressed by what she did.
Joe Rogan had a very strange response to the revelations in “Leaving Neverland.” Did you manage to see that?
No. I don’t know when he made his comments but there was a wave after a while where a bunch of right-wing people like Megyn Kelly supported “Leaving Neverland” initially and then it became in vogue to say it was debunked.
Rogan was rather dismissive of the film and its allegations, and repeated the unsubstantiated claim by Dr. Conrad Murray, Jackson’s doctor, who said that Joe Jackson had had Michael chemically castrated.
Conrad Murray didn’t meet Jackson until he was quite old, right? These people are so intellectually sloppy, and they don’t seem able to hold a thought in their mind for half a second. There’s a lot of weak-minded bullshit that gets said and a lot of groupthink that gets followed. My film is rock-solid. Wade and James are absolutely credible. Joe Rogan can say what he likes, but if it’s intellectually feeble or just wrong, I don’t really have any time for it.
The trial is tentatively set for November 2026. Do you think Wade and James will actually get their day in court?
I believe it will happen next year, and I do think they’ll go to trial. In “Leaving Neverland 2,” the appeal court’s verdict was very, very compelling and really strongly indicative of a trial taking place. I think it’s going to be difficult for the Jackson legal team to escape from this one. And if there is a trial, I think a jury will make what they will make of these two young men. There’s a gusher of evidence and witnesses who will tell of what Jackson did to them or what they witnessed Jackson do to children, and I don’t know what evidence the Jackson defense team will have to contradict that.
Will you be covering the trial? Will that be “Leaving Neverland 3”?
One hundred percent. Yes.
