You said, “However I disagree that there’s no evidence.”
Ok, it isn’t intellectually dishonest to claim there is evidence and then not provide any of it. It’s just a curious way to argue a point.
Sorry. I concede to your logic: I guess I did start it.
Read my first post: my view is that the best explanation for his behavior (sleeping with kids, settling lawsuits with families of said kids, including one who was able to describe markings on his genitals) is that he was into them sexually, and was not just clueless about what everybody else thought was proper. If you think I claimed I had forensic evidence of Jackson’s guilt that had been undiscovered, you misread quite thoroughly.
Now we’re talking about forensic evidence? I suppose that falls under the rubric of all evidence, but I didn’t narrow my request to just that.
I asked for any piece of evidence you claim exists.
Does the Bashir documentary, where he admitted to sleeping with children, not exist? Did the settlement not happen?
It’s not proof he molested children on those occasions, of course. But then again, I didn’t say it was. I said I thought it was the most likely explanation for what we do know, given the large number of crazy people, strange stories and questionably-trustworthy witnesses involved with the man’s life.
Sorry, again, I thought you meant evidence about him being a pederast. My mistake. I’ll drop it.
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t have a visceral, negative reaction to the idea of a forty year old man co-sleeping with someone else’s children, but the plain facts are that we’re asked to choose between two contrasting accounts about what happened, and the defense’s account is consistent, while the prosecution’s appears to be a tissue of fairly obvious lies and distortions.
Jackson averred (even before the trial) that he slept in the same room with children, and we are meant to accept that this was… (I won’t say Platonic, 'cuz I’ve read Symposium,) non-sexual.
We can’t really just assume that paedophilia is the only possible motivation for this behaviour, even if seems quite frankly batshit crazy. It is possble that he was isolated from consensus reality enough that he was acting out on some weird idealization of childhood.
Well, okay, he’d been accused. Some will say, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” but the reason that the jury brought in the verdict that it did is because the prosecution’s witnesses testimony resembled not so much smoke as hot gas.
Things that were made out to be sinister turned out to be pretty innocent after all. (How many people use the chime feature on their alarm systems? Are they all afraid of being caught out at something?) More importantly, the witnesses’ (or their parents) characters were generally dubious, and their testimony was completely unconvincing.
When we’re talking about very concrete events, and the accounts are so wildly variable, there’s only one reasonable conclusion to make. The kid says “No, there was no alcohol in the room,” and then later says, “There was an open bottle of vodka and two glasses,”; the same incident is variously described as “He put his hand on my penis and testicles,” and “He touched my leg, but not near my private area,” and from “I watched for a full minute” to “I saw them for three seconds,” and the victim is described at various times as wearing “pants shorts,” “Hanes’ briefs,” “pyjama bottoms,” or “boxers,” well… it becomes pretty clear that these are not memories that are being related, but a narrative fiction in development.
The defense didn’t have to work hard at all for the verdict - the accusers’ story was incredible. At a glance, “Oh, it’s just an innocent cross-generational sleepover” is :dubious:[sup]10[/sup] --but this is actually much more plausible that the prosecution’s case, and that’s saying something.
If you look at it dispassionately, it seems quite clear that the accusers (or their custodians, more appropriately) were venal, lying scammers. Jackson was a socially retarded idiot, and made himself vulnerable to this sort of attack, which could have been avoided with just a teaspoon of GrowTheFuckUp.
I don’t see any logically consistent way to get “He must have sexually abused children” out of the facts as they have been presented. The jury brought in the only verdict they could. Absent a convincing assertion that touched any child inappropriately, it looks like the most reasonable assumption is that things are as he asserted them to be.
I still think this sort of non-sexual co-sleeping was fundamentally unhealthy and wrong, but well short of criminal.
[several posts added since I started this - relatively busy today]
For me, the idea that other children were abused, and that they and their parents are somehow motivated to keep silent about it — this is a much more incredible scenario for me than the possibility of the “innocent sleepover” idea.
If kids were regularly (or even occasionally) being inappropriately touched during those sleepovers, I would expect something like Leopold Bloom’s indecency trial nightmare from UIysses, with a crush of “Me, too!” cases crowding the witness chair. Yet, this isn’t what happened – instead we had a chorus of "Hell, no!"s from people who were there.
We’re left with nothing that substantiates claims of sexual abuse. Sure, the facts as presented by the defense & supporters are deeply weird to the point of pathology (but nothing criminal or harmful to children*) and this side is presented so consistently (indeed even before the complaint was made) such that it’s difficult to find any objection to it, apart from “That squicks me out, rather.”
There’s a pretty huge spectrum from squicky to paedophile, and I think it’s irresponsible to colour someone with that crayon when without something a little more substantial.
(Except men who wear short-pants, t-shirts and sneakers while carrying a skateboard around, into their thirties. Those guys have clearly got two fingers in.)
(bolding mine)
Excellent post. Say, is the emboldened section there trademarked yet? =P
I’m shockered! Shockered to discover there’s peterpannism going on here!
Possible? Yes. And I think he did have a fascination with childhood. I don’t believe the excuse that he was so tormented and divorced from reality that he did these things (more or less) innocently. For one thing it’s just too convenient.
I acknowledged earlier that the accusers in the criminal trial weren’t trustworthy, and so were plenty of the other people who offered to sell Jackson stories to the tabloids. I haven’t accepted every accusation against him at face value. But I also don’t think he slept with kids only because he wanted to be a kid.
This was never something he claimed, but he certainly had the appearance of child-like naiveté.
When you look at the Bashir documentary, his position was “Sure we slept in the same room, what of it?”
His position makes sense if he was totally asexual and genuinely surprised that that anyone would make an issue of it. Without any credible testimony to the contrary, isn’t it reasonable to consider the possibility that that he was Ronseal?
Personally, I’d keep my kid away from anyone that wide-eyed and gushy about universal love and woo-woo blah blah, because I think that even if it’s genuine, it’s a sign of pernicious and contagious mental atrophy. …but I think that’s probably what he was, or at least aspired to be. Otherwise, something that was actually damning would surely have come out, no?
A lot of pedos are extremely clueless about social norms.
I do think that Jackson was almost akin to this woman I ran into once who thought that b/c she saw me dancing I was her friend.
He was so socially and emotionally stunted that he thought that “sex play” between a grown man and a young teen was OK…Ewww… Granted it did seem to be mostly about improper touching or improper display of genitalia rather then a full blown NAMBLA-esque relationship. (the type where the man “primes” the kid for a real honest to god “romantic” realtionship")
I’m not excusing it…however it’s hard to say whether or not he was a true pedo or just so fucked up that he SEEMED to be pedo-like. Make sense?
Not really. You’re on the one hand saying that he is a pedo, but a mild one (only heaving petting? I guess), but on the other he might not have been one, just a really strange guy who seems like one. Ok, sounds about right: either he was, or wasn’t a pedophile. I’m convinced.
And lots of pedophiles, independent of molesting children, seem to be otherwise normal. Indeed, there are even profiles of what a likely kid rapist would be. Jackson doesn’t seem to fit it.
Seems to me that a large number of Dopers either can’t read the thread title or elected to ignore it. The question was about what we know. The question was not what can we guess, form an opinion on or speculate about. The question was not what can we recycle from journalists filling the gaps between the ads with pieces where they promote their own opinions and speculations.
MJ formed close relationships with young boys that do not fit our social norms and conventions. These relationships extended at least as far as sharing his bed or his bedroom or a large part of his home in which several people could sleep (depending on which source you prefer). Some say the relationships were sexual, but no-one knows for sure if this was true. MJ denied it and it was never proved in court, but many point to the circumstantial evidence to support their case.
That’s what we know.
The best I’ve seen is either a weak argument, or not-very-inventive observation of reality. When pressed for evidence, the response is “there’s no proof, but I think that . . .” or in the alternative, “he had little boys in his house and they sometimes slept together. So, it’s possible that I’m right and he’s a pedophile.”
Well, that’s true of anyone I suppose. It’s possible you, me, my neighbor, the president, whoever, is a pedophile. But a possibility does not proof make. From that, somehow the argument turns to that he was probably one or it’s likely. No, sorry. You want to make a claim that something is probably or likely, then whip out the evidence supporting the claim. To date, zero evidence to support the claim has been offered by anyone anywhere.
It make it a lot more likely for him to be a pedophile than the person who isn’t sharing a bed with young boys or looking at pictures of boys or who hasn’t fielded several accusations of child molestation.
I’ve assumed for many years that he was schizophrenic.
I think a lot of this sounds much worse than it turns out to be when you investigate it more closely. “Sharing a bed” turns out to be more accurately “offering a bed in a suite,” with the only reported instance of being in bed together being McCauley Culkin together with his sisters, “when they were little.” “Looking at pictures of little boys” turns out to be possession of a couple of fairly mainstream art books, like Bruce Weber’s “Chop Suey Club” - unlikely wank material, and the “boy” in this case is a sexually mature young man. Hell, I have some of Weber’s work: Let’s Get Lost. More potentially damning (should anyone ever give me a hard look) might be my possession of Lewis Carroll: Photographer, which does indeed contain some photos of unclad juveniles. I assure you that I derive no sexual stimulation from this book; I hope that I can avoid the scarlett “P.”
The accusations in-and-of themselves can hardly be considered incriminating - since they haven’t been borne out by thorough investigation, and appear to be quite obviously spurious. There has been no reliable account of the man inappropriately touching a child.
That leaves us to consider the possibility that his motivation for behaviour that (quite rightly) makes people wonder WTF is as he insists it was: His wanting to mentor/nurture these kids and provide them with what he felt was missing from his own messed up childhood.
This is actually pretty plausible. I personally think it’s also unhealthy, and probably had a lot more to do with his own psychological issues than fulfilling any actual need that the kids had. The guy had no frame of reference for normal family life, and after deciding that such-and-such and this-and-that was what Little Michael missed out on and desperately needed, tries to balance things out by providing same to other kids.
This is extremely misguided, and it’s clear from the way he talked about it that he didn’t really have a clue how deeply messed up it was bound to appear to everyone else.
…but it ain’t child molesting.
First, your link is messed up, there appears to be text that should have been in the post corrupted in the link.
link
rest of text
[formatting probably mangled]
Larry Mudd said:
No, “sharing a bed” means repeatedly sleeping in the same bed with a 12 year old boy at the boy’s house, among other instances.
Not that that necessarily voids the rest of your comments, but it is a necessary correction of facts.
Thanks for fixing my messed-up link, Irishman.
Do you have a source for the assertion that he slept in the same bed with a twelve-year-old? I don’t find one.
Question–I’m reading a book about the molestation allegations. Those who think it was all drummed up by greedy parents, how do you account for the fact that Jordie Chandler correctly identified the markings on Jackson’s penis? Including the fact that he said there was a spot under his penis at the base that would only be visible if it was erect or lifted up? Coincidence? Evan Chandler drugged Jackson and pulled his pants down in the night to find it?