olioster: Joe Jackson is a horrible human being. When they interviewed him at Michael’s funeral, he spent the entire time promoting a music act he was managing.
DownTrunk: Not only “fat-nose,” his dad used to call him “nigger-nose,” and a lot of other racist and demeaning terms. No wonder he had image issues, huh?
screenwriterjohn: Man didnt hate black people. He hated his dad.
Eloquium: Didn’t the dad also beat all the Jackson kids?
RivadaviaOficial: Michael Jackson’s childhood is fucking devastating to learn about. The guy was pretty much abused every which way, and had Jehovahs Witness style guilt laid on him nonstop.
I don’t really ever believe he molested anyone. It’s not appropriate, but I really, sadly, believe he just wanted to be around kids because he never had a childhood.
CheekyLass99: My mother knew the family personally when they were still in Gary. Everyone in the neighborhood knew how Joe Jackson treated his family, especially his sons. People felt sorry for the children, but there wasn’t much outsiders could do, as back then it wasn’t illegal to use corporal punishment on children in Indiana…I even think it’s still legal in Indiana for schools to use corporal punishment, with parents permission, last I looked.
2cool4life: John Lennon made fun of his sons laugh so his son never had fun again.
seaboardist: Christ, what an asshole. (Dad, that is.)
Deked: Anybody who has spent any time reading anything about Joe Jackson knows hes a piece of shit.
He would get along with Marv Marinovich real well.
cock_pussy_up: That’s probably why half the Jackson family got themselves narrow plastic surgery noses.
Quacks_dashing: I remember when he died, his father was being interviewed on one of those news shows. He used his own sons death as an opportunity to talk about some new business idea of his.. What a terrible person.
TooShiftyForYou: Missing out on childhood made Michael have a very bizarre adulthood.
Grusselgrosser: His father is a piece of shit.
Michael Jackson was a kind and gentle soul who lived a tortured existence.
ContrarianHero: TIL Peter Pan Syndrome
Damasticator: Joe was a fucking monster. He’s to blame for every negative thing that happened with Michael.
strumpelstiltskin: He’s also alive still. Michael is a really, really sad story.
Watch the Oprah interview.
PhysicalGraffiti75: Everyone I knew as a kid was constantly putting me down about anything I did and now I live as a broken human being with more problems than you can shake a stick at. The little things you do to a kid can have such far reaching consequences it’s insane. I’m just blown away at how my childhood shaped me into the garbage I am today.
Don’t be mean to kids cuz that shit fucks them for life.
JibbityJabbity: His father was such an asshole.
my_name_is_cooler: I thought it was pretty well known Joe Jackson is just a huge piece of shit… Making fun of Michael’s nose is just a joke if you wanna talk about the shitty things he’s done to his kids.
jonloovox: The user’s name was /u/jonloovox. Here’s the comment in full. I’ve copied/pasted in other threads as well, but he’s the author:
The story is rather tragic. I do believe that had the internet existed in 1994 in it’s current form, Jackson would still be alive today. Jackson was very much the victim of public perception. Yes, he was clearly an eccentric with many quirks, but the “child molestation” thing was hogwash. GQ published a non-bias article in 1994 entitled “Was Michael Jackson Framed?” that you can find all over the net. Here’s one link: http://floacist.wordpress.com/2007/08/22/gq-article-was-michael-jackson-framed/ … It’s a pretty fascinating read that details exactly what happened during that first accusation. Most people haven’t read it, though… because it’s easier and more “interesting” (and at the time, “funnier”) to imagine him as some kind of freak.
Anyone unfamiliar with what actually happened there, I’d really recommend reading it. The TL;DR: version is pretty god damn fucked up. He befriended a young boy, his mother and step-father. The biological father wanted money to produce “Robin Hood Men In Tights” so he brainwashed his son with sodium Amytal in an attempt to extort money out of Jackson… knowing full-well he wouldn’t want to go through a long career-tarnishing trial. There’s taped conversations between the father and step-father where the father lays out his entire plan.
“And if I go through with this, I win big-time. There’s no way I lose. I’ve checked that inside out. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever. June will lose [custody of the son]…and Michael’s career will be over.”
It’s whack. Seriously… read it. FYI, the father ended up killing himself in 2009 only 5 months after Jackson died: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Chandler
My point is, public perception in 1994 was so heavily dependent on shock media, magazine covers, radio, talk show monologues, etc. Had Reddit existed back then, we would have seen the smoking gun. People would be chatting over the details on a daily basis. It would have been very difficult for the public to remain that misinformed and warped by rumor and heresay.
But the perception stuck. And clearly it weighed heavily on Jackson… someone who had dedicated his life to helping children in need. He was clearly depressed. He turned to drugs. As we later found out, he needed to be medicated to even sleep. I can’t imagine what that had to have been like..
That was the only time anyone ever accused Jackson of wrongdoing… until 11 years later in 2005, but this time it was CLEARLY bullshit and a clear attempt at extortion. Anyone following that trial was aware of how ridiculous the claims were. I’ll summarize. It was right after the huge documentary “Living with Michael Jackson” that Martin Bashir did. Jackson was all over the news for the “baby dangling” incident. In the documentary, it showed that Jackson took in a young cancer patient, his mother and sister and was paying for the boy’s treatment (last I heard, he’s now cancer-free). He was close with the boy and the family. It made the news, because of the scene where Jackson says, “What’s wrong with sharing a bed with someone you love?” in reference to the young boy. The public took it (or twisted it) to be a sexual thing… Jackson intended it as an innocent remark… hanging out late playing video games on a massive bed and someone passes out. Inappropriate? Maybe. Molestation? No. Anyways… the mother of the boy had been in and out of mental institutions and had attempted to con money from celebrities in the past (the reason for Jay Leno and George Lopez being at the trial). She also claimed her family had been “sexually fondled” by JC Penny security after her punk kids shoplifted… she settled out of court for $152k. So anyhow, the Bashir documentary was a shitshow, people like Gloria Allred were petitioning to have Jackson’s kids taken away… and Jackson’s handlers told him to distance himself from the young boy and the family… so he cut them off. It was only after that, that the woman and the boy accused Jackson of misconduct. The funny part was, they literally claimed the molestation started AFTER the documentary aired. As if Jackson hung out with the kid, let them live at Neverland, passed out playing videogames, filmed a documentary admitting that it was innocent… and then when the entire world started looking at the relationship with a magnifying glass and wanted to take away Jackson’s kids (and apparently the family had already been interviewed by police)… THAT’s when Jackson decided to start molesting the kid. Come on… Whole thing was a crock of shit. The woman also claimed they were held hostage at Neverland… to which they pulled up the creditcard receipts showing all the shopping sprees she was doing with Jackson’s money during the “kidnapping”. At one point they point out, “How could you be kidnapped if you were shopping at Nordstroms, Tiffanys… here’s a receipt for a body wax”. The woman snapped back , “IT WASN’T A BODY WAX!!! IT WAS A LEG WAX!! HE’S LYING TO YOU!!!” …. Total shitshow. Read up on it. It’s was fucked. You can read most of this on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Michael_Jackson
That 2005 Trial doesn’t happen without the 1993 situation. It was the same DA (Tom Sneddon) who tried to get Jackson in 1993 that was pushing for the 2005 thing. It was only mildly plausible, because of the 1993 thing. They tried to find other boys to step forward (out of the thousands who Jackson had been in contact with over the years) and nobody stepped forward. They had a former body guard (who had sold his story to National Enquirer and had previously been arrested for armed robbery) claim he saw Jackson blowing Macauley Culkin in a shower… they brought Culkin up there to respond and he’s like, “WUT?” … As one journalist put it:
“the trial featured perhaps the most compromised collection of prosecution witnesses ever assembled in an American criminal case…the chief drama of the trial quickly turned into a race to see if the DA could manage to put all of his witnesses on the stand without getting any of them removed from the courthouse in manacles.””
Nobody following that trial was surprised by the outcome.
It’s some sad stuff, man. Despite this, the perception stuck. People continued to hate him and paint him as a monster. People continued to take the rumors and tabloid gossip as truth… and I think ultimately it killed him.
Edit: I should admit I’m slightly bias… my cousin spent a lot of time at Neverland hanging out with MJ when she was a kid and she said it was ALWAYS filled with children (mostly underprivileged kids, children with disabilities or sickness) and that Jackson was a fucking saint. She’s still depressed about his death and doesn’t like talking about it.
Edit 2: Someone forwarded this to me. A short interview from 2003 with the author of that GQ article (Mary A Fischer) right after the second allegations broke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIxU3cWkqW0 … In the interview, she points out a detail I forgot. In both the 1993 and 2003 allegations, the parents’ first instinct wasn’t to go to police… but to lawyer up. In both instances, they went to the same lawyer (Larry Feldman) who specializes in civil litigation. Strange behavior if you actually think your kid has been abused.
Edit 3: Regarding 2016 child porn allegations: That was a false story fabricated by the tabloid Radar Online.
Almost immediately after the “report” went viral, the police department who did the investigation, denied releasing any report.
All the porn that was found in MJ’s possession was presented at the 2005 trial. Not only was there no child porn, but all of it was heterosexual adult porn.
http://michaeljacksonallegations.com/books-magazines-and-internet-material-found-in-michael-jacksons-possession/
The prosecution spent days displaying the magazines that they had confiscated from Jackson’s bedroom on a big screen. Observers wondered what point they were trying to make with the detailed, graphic presentation of this completely legal collection that only pointed to Jackson’s sexual interest in women, other than perhaps trying to publicly humiliate him and prejudice the conservative jury against him in the absence of real, relevant evidence.
Oh, and the FBI investigated Michael for 15 years. Not one shred of evidence of child molestation or child porn was ever found.
Can’t believe that even years after his death – tabloids continue to fabricate stories about him. Just disgusting.
xxHikari: Joe ripped everything from not only Michael but all his children. He’s an abusive fuck and he made his children “successful” by force, and it didn’t make them happy; it just made them have money. He’s an awful human being, and the opposite of what being a father is like. I really feel for all of them, but most of all Michael, who wanted a childhood so badly that he miss out on that he was lost in normal society.
You can in fact do things that fuck someone up for life. It’s not exactly their fault, but it’s so hard to see through that stuff that his father put him through. Abuse and neglect. I don’t wish that on anyone.
HookLogan: Also I’ve heard he really hated the fact he was starting to look like his father. Everytime he’d look in the mirror he’d be disgusted to see him staring back
sir_joe_cool: Cory Feldman is on record stating that Michael Jackson was one of the few adults in his childhood who never abused him in any way.
humidifierman: It’s sad that 8 years after his death people are only just now finding out how tormented he was. MJ has been victimized by basically everyone he ever trusted in his life. No offense OP, it’s not your fault.
The child molester jokes are just too fucking much… you wonder why the guy needed basically anesthesia to fucking fall asleep every night… He tried to give other people the childhood he never had, and he only got fucking crucified for it. He was not a creep, he was just trying to find some comfort in the laughter of children, because he was never allowed to laugh as a child.
When you hear that he “had sleepover parties with kids in his bedroom” you never hear the fact that his “bedroom” was bigger than the house you grew up in, and the children’s families were also invited. He didn’t even fuck his WIFE. The idea that Michael ever harmed a child is the most ludicrous thing he could have ever imagined. He was betrayed by so many people that he let into his life. He died for our greed. He died to give us the music that we all love. I will never forgive Martin Bashir for that piece of shit documentary that he pushed out.
I am not offended by very many things, but when people make child molester jokes about MJ it really upsets me. I see my own children in him, because he was basically a child. He was never allowed to be a child when he was young, so he tried to buy a childhood when he was older. What did he get in return? He was murdered, not by his doctor, but by everyone who ever laughed at a MJ joke, or accused him of child molestation, or tried to con him out of a dollar, and his father.
In 500 years they will read the tragedy of Michael Jackson in English class.
Walnut156: Who could have thought that when a figure you are born to respect and look up to keeps telling you you look like shit would affect you?
But really there is shit I got told as a kid that still bothers me so I can imagine how bad it was for him
portcity2007: Sometimes, parents are the worst bullies. RIP sweet man, we all love you.
Griffolion: I was verbally bullied as a kid for being fat. Stopped once I got into highschool but I never had much success romantically because I was obviously unattractive. Eventually got in shape (better shape), but I still hate how I look and criticize every little thing.
Cultivating a bad body image can have devastating lifetime effects on a person.
ToTYly_AUSem: God, Micheal is absolutely heartbreaking.
Jazigrrl: When traumatic experiences happen to people they tend to stay at that mental age. Some major shit happened to MJ as a child, he was allegedly forced by his brothers to lose his virginity at a VERY young age to a grown woman. It makes sense that he wanted to stay a kid and be around kids. Every person older than him, forced him to do things that he associated with fear, shame, and guilt. Thus MJ developed an aversion to adults. Whether this feeling of safety with children led him to do other things with them, we will never know. He was a broken person and it’s a shame that somebody can be so damaged by those who are supposed to protect you
Bathysphere710: When I was a kid, mom would always stand in the mirror, and ask if she had a “poofy’ stomach. She constantly called my curvy (legitimately curvy) sister fat. I developed an eating disorder and a fear of midriff tops. Now that I’m older, I wish I wouldn’t have been so self conscious. Parents pass on thier issues with themselves.
Bennyhaha372: It’s sad to think that the man that was said to be a sexual predator towards children was probably the most normal person out of all of Hollywood.