In don’t believe the allegations. He was a very easy target, and the last one was almost definitely a scam. YMMV of course.
Very sad indeed. I would have loved a comeback, but I would never have thought it was possible. He needed help badly, but he was to lost in his own imaginary world to get it.
I wonder if Weird Al is going to be at the funeral. No, seriously.
You thought I was talking about the child molestation thing? I was talking about his own kids.
RIP.
I send my deepest sympathy to his family. And my appologies. I mean, it’s bad taste to speak ill of the dead, but there are a thousand MJ jokes inside me struggling to come out. I mean, I’ll just be sitting there, and someone mentions Jackson, and I have to share the quote about how America is a great country where a poor black boy like Michael can grow up to be a rich white woman. Really, I’m sorry. I can’t help it. It’s like Tourette’s. Hey, do you know how MJ picks his nose? From a catalogue! Oops, sorry there. Really, I am sorry for their loss. Um, I think I’ll go now.
I think part of the shock is we remember Michael as being a kid. But he was getting long in the tooth. It’s not unusual at all for a 50 year old man to suddenly drop dead of a heart attack. My father did. I have known a lot of people in the their 40s and 50s seemingly OK then just drop dead of a heart attack or heart arrest or other such things.
My father came back from seeing the doctor at 4:30pm and was fine. Then he said he was gonna take a nap before dinner, when I went to wake him up an hour later he was dead. And looked it. Just like that poof…Gone.
Jackson was in his dangerous, so called, “heart attack years.”
I bet all his relatives are now scrambling to hide his assets from probate. And he’s still got a lot. There’s a difference, between being on the street broke and hiding money from creditors you don’t want to pay. I’m sure Jackson has a lot left over to fight with.
Hopefully his kids can fade into obscurity and live the normal life he never had.
Just a quick point of clarification for Mr. Bean:
I’m guessing no one on this board condones child abuse in any form. And I’m not one to molly-coddle perps of serious crimes, especially the one I suspect everyone agrees is the most egregious.
I was just echoing the sentiments that—on stage—the man’s art moved many millions around the globe for quite some time.
Thus the “deeply troubled” in the headline.
I never believed the molestation accusations. I think Jackson wanted to live as a pre-sexual perpetual child. I don’t think he had any sexual interest in anybody.
I feel sad that he never got the therapy he needed, and torpedoed his almost-was Greatest Entertainer Of All Time legacy. I feel sad for his kids*, who’ve never known anything but a fucked-up life with a fucked-up man, and fervently hope they DO get the therapy they will so desperately need.
*I’m with Green Bean. I’ve always believed that he had kids of his own so he could use them as fuck toys, so as to not take the chance of an outsider telling on him again. I’ve always also hoped that I was wrong.
Oh, I guess I missunderstood. I don’t know anything about his kids except there dad is really weird and they will not likely fit in with normal society.
I also don’t know that he wasn’t guilty the first time. We never saw the evidence. I know that he was an easy target.
A very talented musician, but a deeply messed-up individual who became a freakish parody of himself in later years and squandered just about everything he had been given. I believe every pedophile rumor that’s out there, and I can’t say I feel any regret at his passing. And now… how long until one of his kids writes a tell-all book about how terrible a dad he was? Ugh.
How’s he going to manage that; get plastic surgery so he won’t be recognized?
Okay, THAT is funny! 
I randomly read somewhere, quite recently, that he was under 120 lbs and only ate once a day … or something like that. Perhaps he pulled a Karen Carpenter.
I can’t help but believe that he wasn’t a pedophile and probably really just enjoyed hanging out with kids. He didn’t have any sort of childhood himself, and perhaps wanted to have a chance at it. Maybe that would explain the artificially high voice he spoke in, among other things. People, over the past few years, seem to have decided that all of those allegations were true … supposing they weren’t, could you imagine a worse thing than being falsely accused of such a thing? I am sure that didn’t help his already fragile mental state.
I always recognized his talent, but his music just wasn’t my thing. But, as a child of the '80’s, I am rather sad about it all.
You don’t pay $15 million to someone accusing you of molesting them if you didn’t do it. His personality profile was that of a textbook pedophile. Forty year old men don’t sleep with other people’s kids unless they’re fucking them. He was sexually fixated on adolescent boys. I see no point in denying the obvious.
A Demerol overdose? (says a link from Drudge to a tabloid)
The guy was so out of touch with reality that he admited sharing his bed with boys after having been accused of pedophilia over and over again. His personality wasn’t textbook of anything.
As much as it pains me to admit, I think Dio is right on here. I don’t believe for a second that all the allegations were completely without merit. I definitely think there was something terrible going on.
But that said, I liked his music. How do you reconcile liking someone’s work, but condemn them utterly as a person at the same time? It seems simple to me on the surface but I feel kind of dirty as well. 
An unfortunate, and all to common hang up I suppose.
A real shame. I was looking forward to his total meltdown where his surgeries started to go cheap-sci-fi wrong and he had to sell every last little possession to stay alive. Still, good riddance. No matter how much I liked some of his music when he was human.
I’m still not clear on what the consensus is among reasonably people about the pedophile charges.
Personally I didn’t follow it closely, but it did make an impression on me that nothing else ever came up outside of that one accusation. So I had sort of thought - it was probably bogus.
I’m not saying he wasn’t a pedo. I have no idea. I don’t peg him for one, but I have no idea.
But, I do wanna say…is it really fair to use your list to determine what’s really up with him? I mean the average man that sleeps with other people’s kid and is fixated on young boys may be obviously pedos, but he was so weird in so many ways, that it seems not right to use the same measuring stick. Pedos aren’t known for hacking their faces to bits, bleaching their skin to shit, starving themselves to bones, making monkeys their boyfriends, Elizabeth Taylor their imaginary friend, a llama their teddy bear, or whatever.
He was a weirdo in very deep and strange ways. The fact that he also was weird in ways that pedos are weird doesn’t convince me he is a pedo.
Like, in that interview where he admitted to sleeping with kids with so much innocence. He didn’t have to admit to that, but he did; because maybe he honestly didn’t find it dirty…maybe he honestly didn’t molest anyone.
Some cultures think nothing of sleeping in the same bed with children.
I made my daughter leave my bed because I knew it was expected of me by this society. I honestly had no problem with her, me and her dad in the same bed. I simply knew that it is not accepted in society.
Maybe his reasoning was weird, or wrong. But I am not convinced he was a pedo.
I am not saying he wasn’t though. I love him as an artist, even if he was one.