| ^Looks like 22:57 had the exact thought as myself re. the parents. |
Nice deflection. |
| A bare minimum having unrelated children sleeping in your bedroom is extremely inappropriate. I believe that some of the allegations are true. There is also information out there that when they raided his home they did find cp. |
Vitiligo can cause extreme patchiness with large areas of melanin loss but doesn’t make you entirely white. It was his choice to go that route and if I were a black man I wouldn’t choose that. He also chose to use permanent makeup which is not something the average person with vitiligo does as it’s not necessary. I have 2 family members with vitiligo and the way he decided to deal with it is odd. |
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The man was creepy as hell
He definitely did show all the signs of a predator. Toys and playgrounds, hanging around kids instead of people his age, no boyfriend or girlfriend, list goes on. |
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Gen-Xer here. I'm always fascinated at how younger generations examine this question and come away with idk...maybe he's innocent...
The man is guilty as hell. There are stories upon accounts upon cases corroborating the allegations. But MJ was a God in the 80's, this was decades before me too, and many families were complicit in allowing access to their children in exchange for money/perks. There may also have been episodes that were shake-downs for $$ from his estate, but many things can and usually are true at the same time. Because he was a soft-spoken, gentle-voiced, undoubtedly talented performer, he doesn't fit the profile of what most of us think of as a predator. But there was way too much smoke on this situation for it to be anything other than an inferno. |
How is that a deflection? What parent allows for that nonsense. Whether he did it or not (I think he did) the parents bear equal responsibility. It’s like throwing your kid in front of a bus and blaming just the driver for hitting your kid. |
This. I also think it's hard for people to wrap their heads around MJ being both an empathetic victim of abuse AND a perpetrator of abuse. Yet that's the part of his story that explains what happened. Michael and his siblings were abused their entire childhood. That, plus intense game and huge financial success, messed him up. It's never been totally clear to me if Michael understood himself to be a predator at any point -- I think there's a high likelihood that he was a vulnerable narcissist who was unable to see beyond his own need for a specific kind of physical affection or recognize the ways in which he leveraged his money and game to get it from children who could not consent to what was happening. He could maintain his innocence because he believed it, and he believed it because that's exactly how mentally ill he was, which is to say -- very. But there's never been a question to me whether those kids were abused. Yes, often by their families too. That's sadly not uncommon in situations like this -- think of the family that turns a blind eye to a grandparent or parent abusing children because that person is a position of power over them. It's very sad. It often seems people learn all the wrong lessons from his story. |
You need to read up on how abusers select and groom families. Pedophiles often are very careful about who they pick and often go after kids who have difficult hime situations because people aren't fully looking after them. |
| Fame not game ^ |
This. Wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that many if the parents who took their kids to Neverland and allowed Michael to groom/abuse them were, themselves, victims of abuse. None of this excuses what happened. Michael and the families who allowed Michael to abuse their kids are all accountable to the kids who were abused. |
I think the Gen Xer above also raised a good point about Jackson's godlike status in the 80s. He really sold the "I'm just a kid myself" narrative and all the fame and such and you still see people today parroting those points, even if it's patently ridiculous. |
It's hard to see it as anything other than peak grooming behavior. Gain the trust of the kids by acting like one, then having your way with them. |
I think by acting so childlike he convinced himself that what he was doing wasn't wrong because he was just another kid like them. |
Well, the parents certainly were money/fame hungry. Most parents wouldn't let some random adult, famous or not, have so much access to their kid. Not that it's their fault, but certainly the access created opportunity, whether anything bad happened or not. |