Dan Reed, Bill Whitfield, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and Choke Joe debate Michael Jackson's alleged pedophilia, weighing Wade Robson and James Safechuck's testimonies against LAPD investigations and Whitfield's 2006–2009 security tenure. While Reed cites detective interviews confirming guilt, Boteach defends Jackson's character despite acknowledging shared bedrooms, and Whitfield disputes behavioral changes post-acquittal. The group scrutinizes financial settlements for families like Jordy Chandler's, conflicting witness recantations, and compares the case to R. Kelly and Prince Andrew scandals, ultimately questioning whether the documentaries target Jackson or the adults who enabled him. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Leaving Neverland Evidence00:14:36
He was somebody who was going to war with the record labels and was winning.
And then suddenly there were all of these allegations that he was a pedophile.
We loved each other deeply.
We were very close friends.
Michael wasn't a friend of my children, although he was very close to my whole family.
He was my friend.
Either way, is what happened when those doors shut into those bedrooms.
And I think that's where, you know, that's where I reach a point where I just don't know.
My fear was not that Michael was a pedophile and he was not a pedophile, in my strongest opinion.
My fear was that he was going to die.
You enabled this.
You let him get away with what he did to us as children.
You look for it.
You really do.
You kind of side-eye what things that you may or may not have heard in a tabloid.
Michael Jackson sold half a billion records.
He filled arenas in 50 countries across six continents.
He saw it's a best-selling album in history.
So there's no doubt that he was a pop megastar.
But was he also a pedophile?
17 years after his death, some people don't want that debate to end.
2019 documentary Leaving Netherland detailed graphic allegations of serious abuse by two men who are still awaiting their day in court.
And this week, a new film, Leaving Netherland 2, surviving Michael Jackson, will put the spotlight on their claims all over again.
Pursuing this was the act of fighting back.
They told their story.
Now, after 10 years, where is the justice?
It was knowledge that there was something weird going on.
People must have known.
How do they sleep at night, hiding everything that Michael was really up to?
Michael Jackson got away with this for a long time.
Pedophiles don't operate in a vacuum, especially successful ones.
It's draining to go through this over and over again.
We've got to fight it.
They seek delay.
We seek justice.
I want my day in court.
Clearly, millions of people remain fascinated by Michael Jackson.
Clearly, these two men feel they are pursuing justice.
But since there can be no conclusive proof, is it time that Michael Jackson was left to rest in peace?
Well, join me to discuss all this.
Dan Reed, director of the Leaving Netherlands films, Bill Whitfield, who was a former chief of security to Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson's spiritual advisor and author of the solo Michael Jackson, Rabbi Schmooli, and the producer and cultural commentator, Choke Joe.
Well, welcome to all of you.
Dan, let me start with you.
You and I had a good old ding-dong on Good Morning Britain many years ago when the first film came out.
And I guess the central part of my attack on you at the time about the two men that you are involved with with this film was that they, it seemed to me, had not produced clear, compelling evidence that Michael Jackson was a paedophile.
And there were lots of suggestions that they were doing this because they were motivated by making money, as many people around Michael Jackson have done.
Now, we got into it in a pretty animated way.
And I would say today, I still, I don't feel I'm any the wiser.
You know, I actually spoke to Michael Jackson.
He called me and we did an interview.
And I want to play the clip from there.
It gives an insight into what his mind was like.
This was 1999.
If it wasn't for children, I would throw in the towel.
I would kill myself.
I wouldn't care to live.
They give me my inspiration.
They've tried to use it against me.
It's just been so unfair.
And I'm very upset about it.
I would love to live in London because the press is so hard on me here.
And I try to do so good.
I go to their hospital.
I give present to the children.
As soon as I leave, the next day they go, Echo Jacko left the hospital and he ignored all the children.
And it hurt my heart.
Purposely, I flew Minnie Mouse and Nikki Mouse all the way from Euro Disney.
I brought them with me to surprise the children.
I brought bags of presents and everything.
And I spent time with the kid and they made fun of me.
Leave me alone and let me do what I want to do.
No, look, just cards on the table from where I sit.
I only had that one conversation with Michael Jackson.
I was never in the room when any of this alleged stuff was going on.
I do think Michael Jackson was a weird guy.
I do think it's very weird for a guy in his 30s, 40s, 50s to share a bed with young boys who are not East Child's children, right?
I think that's creepy.
I think it's weird.
It's like it's not something most people would find acceptable behavior.
But does it make him a paedophile?
And Dan, I guess the question I would say to you is: you're back with another film.
It's six years after the first one.
Have you really advanced the debate on whether Michael Jackson was guilty of paedophilia or is it a rehash of these two guys who are making these claims but actually haven't got any more evidence?
Well, it's neither.
So this new documentary is about lawsuits that were filed way before I met Wayne James.
And the lawsuits are against Jackson's companies.
So it's really saying to the people who work for Jackson, you enabled this.
You let him get away with what he did to us as children.
And now we're going to hold you to account.
We're going to try and change the law and we're going to try and make this sort of thing unacceptable in the entertainment industry in California.
And that's what they're trying to do.
But are you 100% certain that Jackson was guilty?
Are you 95% certain?
How would you categorize, after you listen, you've immersed yourself in this for so long?
How would you categorize your own belief about what he may or may not have done?
I'm 100% certain.
I mean, and you can see in the new film, there's interviews with LAPD detectives, there's interviews with Santa Barbara, Sheriff's Department detective who investigated Jackson.
They were all convinced that he was a pedophile, that he liked to have sex with children.
And, you know, I've got to know Wade and James also.
I'd be naturally suspicious.
I don't want to stake my reputation on believing two people who are lying to me.
They had both, just to be clear for viewers who don't follow, they had both sworn under oath at one of Jackson's cases involving the child abuse.
They both swore under oath he hadn't abused them.
Then they, as they, later in their lives, they reversed that and said he had.
And that's one of the reasons why a lot of people have been very skeptical about their testimony.
But that's the whole, that's the story of Leaving Neverland.
I mean, Wade Robson was defense witness number one in the 2005 criminal trial.
And he's probably one of the main reasons why Jackson walked free out of that court, you know?
He was an amazing witness.
And the story of why he's now saying something different, that's the story of Leaving Neverland.
I'd quite like to ask your guests, have any of them ever watched Leaving Neverland?
Because I think that's always a fun question to ask.
Well, let me ask, let me ask, well, I'm getting a nod there.
Okay.
So Choke No Joke, you've seen it.
But the two others haven't.
Yeah, let's ask Choke No Joke, what do he thinks?
My question, I have several questions, if I could get them off.
One is, what is your motivation in doing these documentaries?
Is it financial gain?
Is it you don't like Michael Jackson?
Just out of curiosity.
And then I want you to answer why you don't blame these parents who leave their kids with a stranger and let their children sleep in a bed with a stranger.
Why is your focus not on the parents instead of these co-workers of Michael Jackson?
Well, perfect, valid question.
So Dan, answer those.
Well, Leaving Neverland 1 had the mothers in it, if you remember.
And so my focus was very much on the mothers because I could not believe, and most, I think most parents could not imagine leaving their little child, you know, seven years old, 10 years old, alone with a stranger taking the stranger, taking the child to bed.
It's insane.
I mean, you know, I just couldn't understand it.
That's why I was so interested in trying to understand how the mums allowed this to happen.
And, you know, they were groomed.
They were seduced by Jackson.
They were like dazzled and they couldn't believe that he could do anything wrong.
Rather like his fans, his fans can't believe he could do anything wrong because his music is so amazing and he's such an amazing and important cultural figure.
And people, and he could do the moonball.
And people think, well, so he can't be a pedophile because he's such an amazing guy.
And unfortunately, that's not true.
But my motivation is just to be able to do that.
There was no proof.
Oh, there was no proof that he was a pedophile.
Legally.
Well, this is one of the great things that we're doing.
You don't have no proof of it in any of your documentaries.
Well, I mean, short of like a videotape or something like that, I don't know what proof would you expect?
But isn't that the problem?
Is that there's never been that kind of proof, which absolutely nails Jackson's guilt or otherwise.
That's why he got off, actually, in the cases.
And that's why to this day, this raging debate goes on.
Rabbi Shmurly, you knew Michael Jackson.
You wrote a book about him.
You spent a lot of time with the guy.
What do you feel about Jackson?
Yeah, can I say respectfully, and I say this with all due humility, few people knew Michael as well as I did.
We loved each other deeply.
We were very close friends.
Michael wasn't a friend of my children, although he was very close to my whole family.
He was my friend.
I was his rabbi.
It is inconceivable to me that Michael would have committed any criminal sexual offense against the child.
That doesn't mean he didn't cross lines.
We would fight about this all the time.
When I originally saw Martin Bashir, let's just remember, Martin Bashir is the guy who allegedly doctored fraudulent financial statements that might or might have led to, you know, terrible, lethal consequences for Princess Diana.
He is an absolutely scurrilous reporter, and I kept him at arm's length for Michael.
He called me repeatedly.
Then he got his Jewish producers at Panorama to call me.
The Jew connection, can you get Michael to agree to this?
And I said, you cannot trust this man.
It was in that documentary that Michael said he shared a bed with other children.
And I said to Michael, let me tell you something.
I don't give one damn if you never touch him sexually, which I believe you wouldn't.
I said, any married man who calls up his wife and says, hey, look, to save money for the company, me and my assistant or female colleague are going to share a bed at a motel six.
His wife's going to walk.
You don't share a bed with a child that's not yours.
Having said that, Michael did not get off because of what we just heard that someone testified for him.
He got off because he didn't do it to Gavin Arviso.
Me and my family were at Neverland the first night that there was alleged sexual abuse.
Michael brought the Arvizos to Neverland really to impress me because he wanted me to be involved in his life to help rehabilitate his life.
He knew he was on the downward decline.
He was doing invincible at the time.
He could barely even get to the studio.
He could barely even wake up.
He had fraudulent doctors all around him giving him crap that was going to kill him.
And that was my real fear.
My fear was not that Michael was a pedophile and he was not a pedophile, in my strongest opinion.
My fear was that he was going to die.
And I told him within five years, you will be dead.
And I'm not going to stick around to watch it.
Because when your friend wants to drive a flipping car off a cliff and you can't stop him, you don't sit there and clap.
Everybody clapped.
So when the, I think it's Dan, forgive me, the producer of the film says, they were dazzled.
What do you mean they were dazzled?
Everybody saw the problems.
Michael used to call me up and say, Schmooly, I love you.
And he didn't think that he was a drug addict because it was all prescription medication.
His name was on a bottle.
He used to say to me, other rock stars are injecting heroin.
I said, Michael, if it comes from a fraud doctor and these doctors had degrees from the stupidest medical places in the world, then it's drugs and you're an addict and you're going to die.
But Michael got off because he never sexually molested Gavin Arvizo.
Now, we either believe in the criminal justice system or we do not believe in the past.
But let me ask you.
Okay, but let me ask.
We've crossed lines with children.
That doesn't mean they were on a test.
Let me ask you.
I thought about it all the time.
And that's led to the breakup of our relationship.
Rabbi Schuli.
But the real story.
Shooting.
This new documentation is really about holding Hollywood accountable, almost like Michael Wolfstein and me too, that women should not be taken advantage of in the industry.
Can you hear me?
Then it's the parents who have to be held accountable.
Let me tell you something.
Michael never spent time alone with my kids.
Not because I didn't trust them, but because I'm their father.
I have to raise them, not somebody else.
Okay, Rabbi Schwilly, I don't think you can hear me.
So just to let you know, I don't think you can hear me, so we need to fix that.
Sorry.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me now?
I can hear you now.
Okay, sorry, you couldn't hear me.
I was trying to get in there.
I mean, look, a lot of what you said about the drug abuse is completely true.
There were doctors all over Los Angeles giving him what the hell he wanted.
He had accounts with myriad doctors, and they killed him, right?
There's no doubt about that.
But the thing I would ask you, Rabbi Schwilly, is how can you be sure he didn't abuse those kids, given that you weren't in the bedroom?
Because it is just very creepy.
I'll tell you.
It is very weird that he was going to bed with all these young boys.
It is.
Yeah, so let me be clear.
No one will ever know.
I can tell you, I am nearly certain based on my own observations, not opinions.
I was around Michael for two full years.
I had almost complete and full access to his life.
We were together almost every single day.
So how often in that time?
How often in that time did you know he went to bed with young boys, underage boys?
By the way, by the way, that's the interesting thing about it.
There were no kids around at all.
Even Gavin Arvizo and his family, for which Michael was arrested in 2003, I actually, believe it or not, went into Michael's bedroom one day to say, you invited this family, this kid has cancer, and you're neglecting them.
He wasn't even around them.
There were barely any kids.
Now, did Michael hide it from me?
Very possible.
Am I naive?
Again, very possible.
But you see, the critical mistake Michael made was to believe that he had been robbed of a childhood.
That there's two kinds of living.
The Childhood Robbery Myth00:03:53
There's like doing concerts, finance, you know, a chauffeur, stuff that you do that makes money.
Then there's being.
You just get to be loved.
He never got love from his father because his father was his manager from the earliest age.
So he thought the way he could compensate his coping mechanism was to pretend that he was a kid.
And I used to say, you're a 50-year-old man.
You are not a kid.
But that was the tragic error, that you could somehow take a time machine and go back and be Peter Pan.
You're not Peter Pan.
That does not mean, however, there are sexual offenses.
It means that he had a lot of issues that had to be dealt with.
And for two years, we brought him back.
We did lectures at Oxford University.
We did lectures one block from here at Carnegie Hall.
He got standing ovations.
But you know what, Pierce?
All of the leeches and the bloodsuckers, the moment I brought Michael back to a normal life, they all came back.
Yeah, of course, because he was a good person.
He was the golden goose who laid eggs.
Yeah, yeah, he was the big cash cow.
Bill Whitfield, you were Michael's personal bodyguard for two and a half years.
Now, significantly, that was from 2006 until his death in 2009.
So that was after the court cases.
What did you see in that period that caused you any concern?
Again, like you said, I started working for Mr. Jackson when he came back into the country after he had left the country after the trials.
And I was part of the security team when he arrived back in Las Vegas.
And I tell you, you know, having listened to or heard all the tabloids, you know, I had never met Mr. Jackson before, though I've done security for him for events where he works.
You look for it.
You really do.
You kind of side-eye what things that you may or may not have heard in the tabloids.
And from my point of view, there was just no signs whatsoever.
I mean, listen, I'm former law enforcement and I'm also a father.
Had I seen anything remotely close to it, there would have been a problem just coming from me.
It wouldn't have been anything I would have just walked away from.
No, I would have been the one to blow the whistle.
But that was not him.
I got to know his character.
And when you say personal security, not just any security.
I was one of the first person he spoke to in the morning, last person he spoke to at night.
He trusted me with his kids, taking them anywhere they wanted to go without him.
So that's trust.
And he didn't, like Jonathan said earlier, Mr. Jackson did not allow a lot of people into his world.
He did not.
Let me ask you.
Bill, let me ask you.
The question I would ask you is that obviously it may have been, people might watch you and say, well, look, it was after he got acquitted.
Maybe he changed his behavior because the whole case obviously nearly ruined his life and his career.
Did you have any conversations with anybody who perhaps had been on his security prior to the court cases?
In other words, who would have been around when the alleged comings and goings of these boys was going on?
Yes, I've spoken to one of his former employees, Grace.
Grace had been with him for 17 years.
So that was during all the trials and all the everything.
And we've often spoken.
And her big thing was always, Bill, there was always too many people around.
He was never alone.
There was always too many other others.
Can I just say, I knew Grace.
I knew Grace.
She was from Rwanda.
She was the child's nanny.
It was because of her, I give her tremendous credit, I got involved in the whole Rwandan genocide commemoration.
I got to know President Paul Kagame.
He chose me as the keynote speaker for the 20th anniversary commemoration in Amahoro National Stadium in Kigali.
There was Grace.
There were so many respectable people.
Grace and the Nanny00:15:10
But I want to make one thing absolutely clear.
The first night that the Arvisos, this is the 2003 trial, and now the 20th anniversary of his acquittal.
And he was acquitted within one hour, unanimously by a jury.
I was there that night.
Michael brought them, he barely knew them.
He brought them to show me all the good that he does, and he kind of neglected to them.
Now, did the relationship kind of evolve after that?
But I have to tell you, again, to the point that Choke No Joke, it's good to be on with you again, made, where are the parents?
You know, three blocks from where I am filming in New York City right now, there's the biggest toy store in the world.
God, what's it called?
I think it shut down already.
Someone help me.
Anyway, Michael shut it down.
It was Hanukkah.
And he wanted, we have nine kids at the time.
He wanted them to buy something.
I said to, no, what's the one?
God, what's it called?
Families in the United States.
You're going to be in his account.
And I said to each, I said to all my children, I said to my children, you can spend $25 each on two presents, $12 each.
We go in there, and Michael sees my kids have spent $100.
And Michael says to me, Shmoly, you know, you're not even, even if you're trying to show that you don't use me, et cetera, which is exactly what I was trying to do, because everyone loved him for what they could get from him.
But I loved him.
A soft soul, very spiritual, Jehovah's Witness.
He was a missionary for God's sake.
After throwing away.
There have been lots of missionary purposes.
There have been lots of missionary purposes.
No, I understand.
No, no, I understand that.
I'm saying about our personal connection.
And Michael says to me, it's not fair to the store.
They shut down for us.
We're going to spend 200 bucks.
There was no one like that.
Now, just remember, there's two cases against Michael.
One was Jordy Chandler.
I never knew him.
Michael paid him allegedly $20, $30 million.
Now, I ask any parent watching this, if someone molested your child, would you take a financial settlement?
No, would you want that man locked up?
Rabbi Shmuley, here's the point.
No, I wouldn't.
And nor, as it turned out, would I allow my 13-year-old son, as Jordy Chandler did at the time, to spend 30 consecutive nights in the same bed as Michael Jackson, right?
And then later, of course, Jordy Chandler.
I agree.
That is shocking.
It's immoral and unacceptable.
That's my point.
My point is a sleepover podcast.
I'll come back to Dan on that.
I mean, that one fact alone is just so weird and creepy and unusual that, you know, who knows what went on in that room, except that every night for over a month, Michael Jackson is going to bed in the same bed with a 13-year-old boy.
Now, I think it's reprehensible the parents let him completely agree with Rabbi Shmuly about that.
I would never have ever allowed that.
It's reprehensible.
They took a massive payoff to shut up about it.
We'll never know what was said because there was no admission of guilt on Jackson's part, obviously, as part of the settlement.
And in America, many big stars settle stuff all the time when they're not guilty of crime.
So you can't read anything into that.
But just on the facts alone, Dan, I would say there will be a lot of people who say that alone, that one piece of information, does suggest that there was something very weird about this.
Well, that's the question I always ask of the fans and the people who knew Jackson well.
What was he doing in bed with these little boys?
Wade was seven and James was 10 when they alleged the abuse started.
What was he doing with these little boys alone in bed?
If you're nostalgic for your childhood and you want to be in the presence of children, why not play with the kids all day, late at night, invite their mom into the bedroom, watch a movie, and then when it's time to sleep, let the child leave with his mother or father.
And then start again in the morning.
But the butt, I would say, is we still don't know what actually went on in that bedroom.
And there's allegations that Jordan Chandler's father, Evan, coached his son to reveal allegations about Michael.
And some of these tapes were in the documentary Square One currently on Amazon Prime.
Let's take a look.
This man is going to be humiliated beyond belief.
I will not believe it.
He will not believe what's going to happen to him.
And beyond his worst nightmares.
This attorney I found.
I mean, I interviewed several and I picked the nastiest son of a bitch.
I'm going to find once I make that phone call, this guy is just going to destroy everybody in sight.
Any devious, nasty, cool way that he can do it.
And I've given him full authority to do that.
I mean, choke, no, choke.
There's no doubt this is all very murky.
In fact, the fathers of two of Michael Jackson's alleged victims, including Jordan Chandler's father, both took their lives, as did the father of Wade Robson.
So there's a lot of tragedy around all this.
It's all scandalous, obviously.
It was debated at great length at the time, and it's still being debated now.
But choke, no, choke, putting aside the fact that no decent parent would allow this to happen, putting aside that taking a massive payoff to many people is the wrong thing to do when your child has allegedly been abused.
I still come back to, I don't know what went on when that bedroom door shut, but I do know it is very creepy that a man of that age is repeatedly going to bed with a 13-year-old boy, a seven-year-old boy, a 10-year-old boy.
You know, how do we get past that when we look at Jackson's acquittal and saying, well, he's got a clean slate?
Well, in my opinion, I mean, I hate to keep bringing up the parents, but you keep saying, how does a man sleep in a bed with a young child for 30 days?
No, I blame the parents.
Don't get me wrong.
How does a parent?
I don't think that's even up for debate.
I think we would all agree with that.
But it's still a good idea.
So you don't think it's financial gain on the parents?
Probably, yeah.
I do.
I do, actually, but it doesn't change the fact that he still, as a man in his 30s, 40s, 50s, was getting into a big bed with young boys for many years and doing it repeatedly.
Hey, Mike Baker here, host of the President's Daily Brief podcast.
If you want straight talk on national security, foreign policy, and the biggest global stories going on of the day, this is the show for you.
We publish twice a day, Monday through Friday, once in the morning, again in the afternoon, and on the weekend, we go longer with the PDB Situation Report with excellent guests, including national security insiders and foreign policy experts.
Check us out on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Also on our YouTube channel at President's Daily Brief.
I don't agree with that at all.
Sorry?
I don't agree with that at all.
Right.
I don't agree with that.
But like as a father, right?
You know, I've been in relationships where other women have had kids, right?
I'm not going to allow their kids to come get into bed with us or with me.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
Because that's not my child.
You know, I think Michael Jackson had this weird thing going on with him because of his childhood.
He was ripped of it.
And he probably, as a person that was ripped of his childhood, he has a thing in his heart for kids.
Now, if he was doing weird stuff, that has not been proven.
And I'm not here to defend him to say that he was or wasn't.
But this director guy, he sounds like everybody in the world, OJ was acquitted of the murder.
He still wants to say OJ is a murderer.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, I don't.
And then don't look at me.
I don't think OJ was the best example.
Michael Jackson.
Well, to be honest, to be honest, to be honest, I was going to use the OJ example to Rabbi Smooley when he said you got to trust the justice system as a clear example of where the justice system almost certainly failed.
Because most right-minded people that follow that case know that OJ Simpson was almost certainly guilty.
So he's not the best parallels to use, is he?
And he's an example, Rabbi Smooly, if I may be so bold and to use your phrase, be respectful.
OJ Simpson was definitely guilty.
Okay, OJ, OJ Simpson was a murderer.
Thank you.
You know, case closed.
Let's not compare Michael Simpson.
No, wait, wait, wait, wait, let me know.
But let me tell you why.
Let me tell you why.
This is the, all right, hold on.
If y'all see, he was convicted.
Choke, no joke.
He was convicted in a civil trial, a civil rights trial.
There were many trials.
You're only using the best.
He forgot all the other ones when he was found guilty.
Criminally, he was in a civil trial.
He was convicted of murder.
Yes, he was.
So did you see him?
Let's move away.
You're saying Michael Jackson.
No, Let's come back for a second.
Let me just tell you why this is such an important conversation in Pierce.
I thank you for doing it.
And even, it's Dan, right?
I thank you for doing these documentaries, even though I don't agree with the content.
The content is shocking.
You are absolutely right that Michael should never have shared a bed with a child.
And Michael's greatest mistake was he did really feel for the play of children.
You know, I'm a defender of Israel.
I'm on your show all the time.
Pearson, thank you for having me.
Michael used to call me up and say, Shmueli, I saw the idea of kill a Palestinian child.
He would cry the whole day, and I'd have to explain the war, et cetera.
He cried constantly about the plight of children.
So what was his mistake?
His mistake was to believe that he was the child's messiah, as he said in that clip to you, Pierce.
He had to bring them, you know, Dumbo the Elephant, and he had to bring them.
Why wasn't his message that the parents are the child's Messiah?
Children are neglected all over the world.
That was the speech we gave together at Oxford University, a Bill of Rights, 10 things for a child, to have dinner with your parents, to have a bedtime story from your parents, not from Michael Jackson.
Now, why didn't Michael compute that the parents could do this?
Because his parents didn't do it.
His mother's a very religious woman, Catherine.
I only ever saw her reading a Bible.
His father was checked out.
I traveled all the way to Encino, California to save Michael's life by reconnecting him to his father.
And I sat there and Catherine's crying.
And she says, Joe, listen to the man.
And I say, Mr. Jackson, he says, Shmuley, help me become his manager again.
Everyone's ripping him off.
I said, Joe, your dad, your son, managers are a dime a dozen.
He needs a father.
What don't you get?
So Michael could not compute that parents could actually love their children unconditionally.
I think that's true.
I'm against it.
Yeah, let me bring in Bill again.
I mean, Bill, you know, you said you're a good judge of character.
You spent a lot of time around Michael after he was acquitted, obviously.
Did you ever talk to him about the case?
No, no, we never, no.
There was really nothing to talk about.
I mean, really.
It really wasn't.
There was nothing to talk about.
You know, I got to know him quite well and you paid attention to him.
And going back to the case that he settled out, Mr. Jackson told me himself, or he said it in a conversation.
He wanted to fight that trial, but he was told that it would just go away if he did this.
And that's told by Johnny Cochrane.
That's correct.
And it was the worst legal advice he ever got.
Johnny Cochran made that decision.
I don't know who told him that, but whoever it was.
Well, you know what it reminds me of?
It reminds me of Prince Andrew and the settlement he made with the Jeffrey Epstein thing with one of the women who claimed that she'd had underage sex with Prince Andrew.
He paid her millions of dollars on the Queen's instructions because she wanted to get rid of it as a scandal.
And of course, far from it going away, it became a massive stick to beat him with, as I could have predicted.
And that was a mother trying to do the right thing for her son, even though she was the queen and he was obviously Prince Andrew.
But Bill, you know, it could be, look, you knew him well.
Rabbi Shmuly knew him really well.
Everyone here has a sort of knowledge of him either intimately personally because you knew him or because you've read so much about the case and so on.
What nobody can say to my certainty, either way, is what happened when those doors shut into those bedrooms.
And I think that's where, you know, that's where I reach a point where I just don't know.
I don't know whether Jackson was a paedophile or not.
Why did he have to pay off so many money?
So we can only judge him.
We can only judge him by his character and the other things that surrounded him.
Let me ask you a question, Pierce.
You're a very experienced journalist.
When Martin Bashir has a camera on Michael, and again, remember Martin Bashir.
Bashir is completely discredited.
He's completely discredited.
Disgusting.
Okay, right.
Okay.
So he has a camera on Michael.
I told Michael to stay away from him.
That was another reason me and Michael.
Listen, I left Michael's life because he wasn't listening to me anymore.
And I said, if he wants to make his life a train wreck, go ahead.
I'm not going to watch it.
But Martin Bashir has a camera on him.
And Michael just reveals that I share a bed.
Now, if he really is a pedophile, we know that most pedophiles do everything on earth to conceal absolutely how dumb do you have to be to say that you shared a bed unless in your mind, however warped or however innocent, you think there's nothing wrong with it.
Well, when I watched it, or there was a famous pedophile in the UK called Jimmy Saville, who raped and abused hundreds of women in his case.
And, you know, he was a despicable monster, but he would be seen around women all the time, hugging them, kissing them in public.
It was all a charade and act to distract from the fact he was actually doing this stuff.
He used to answer the phone to journalists by saying, we'd get his assistant to answer the phone and say, she told me she was 15 or 16 or something, right?
Whatever the legal age in the UK was at the time.
In other words, he'd make a blatant joke about the fact that he was secretly raping young girls all the time.
But he would joke with journalists to the extent that we all just assumed, oh, okay, that must be just a subjective humor for him, not a real scandal.
I mean, Dan, I don't know whether any of this debate is fascinating.
You've got four people with very interesting views about this.
But I'm not sure we're any the wiser about that one fundamental question, which is when the door shuts, what actually happened?
Let's always just focus on the parents.
That was to Dan, actually.
I want Dan to respond to that.
Dan.
Yeah, I mean, cases of sexual abuse are very often boiled down to he said, he said.
Rewriting the Narrative00:09:07
And now, you know, unfortunately, Michael Jackson's not alive to be interviewed.
I would love to have interviewed him for Leave Neverland.
The accounts that we've heard from Wade and James, the accounts that we've heard in the new film coming up tomorrow from detectives, the fact that so many other kids were paid off, having made allegations against Jackson, lead one to suspect that what he was doing in bed,
which the fact that he never denied spending time in bed with little children, what he was doing in bed might just be what we all think he was doing in bed, which is molesting them.
And how do you feel about the big biopic coming out by the same people that made the Freddie Mercury Bohemia Rhapsody?
It's going to be a big Hollywood blockbuster.
Miles Teller, Coleman Domingo apparently are all going to be in it.
It's a huge film.
It's going to be massive box office dumbass because Jackson was a huge star.
A lot of suggestions that it really massively downplays this part of the Jackson story.
Is this Hollywood Dan trying to airbrush the myth, the legend, to protect him?
Absolutely, yeah.
I've read the script and they're trying to, you know, they're trying to tackle the child abuse allegations head-on and rewrite the rewrite history using the Geordie Chandler story.
But it so happens that when Geordie Chandler's and his parents signed their settlement, that there was a clause which said that you can't make Geordie's story into a movie.
And so they've slightly come on stop.
But I think, yeah, the movie is definitely an opportunity to try and rewrite history to explain that, you know, these kids were gold diggers.
I mean, what is fascinating, Choke Nerd show?
We've got to wrap things up, but is Jackson's legacy, his musical legacy has continued unabated, really.
There's no sign of any damage in terms of the body of work and how it sells and everything else.
He's as popular today as he ever was.
Or more.
Probably more so.
I mean, it is interesting that in the world of entertainment, you can go one of two ways, but iconic people like Jackson seem to better rise above.
any of this stuff.
Why do you think that is?
Well, he's just won.
And once again, he was found not guilty in the court of law, even though I guess he's guilty according.
Yeah, if y'all want to use the OJ theory, right?
But once again, I'm not defending Michael Jackson, but let me give you a good example, Pierce, right?
R. Kelly case.
I followed it every day, went through the trial, the whole thing, right?
The New York case, right?
The federal case.
Azrielle Clary was the key witness, like this guy in Michael Jackson case, right?
The whole time, you've seen on our friend Gail King's show, her and Joycelyn Savage.
They did the interview.
They said R. Kelly was not doing any wrong, right?
And then turned around, the girl Azrielle Clary, when one of these bloggers released R. Kelly's emails, she got to see that he was talking to another woman.
It turned Azrielle Clary against R. Kelly.
And then she became the witness that said, oh, now he is doing something wrong, right?
But when you go to the origin of the story, where R. Kelly met her, was at an adult concert, 18 and over, right?
She was not supposed to be in there.
She was 17 at the time.
Her parents brought her to the show.
They let her get on stage and dance.
After the show, security gave the girl his number, right?
The mother, Azriel, I mean, Alice Clary and the father, Angelo Clary.
The mother started texting R. Kelly, posing as the daughter, right?
Drove her to the whole show.
So, choke, no, choke, no, we're getting off the subject of Michael for a moment.
Brother, this ain't your show.
This ain't your show.
This ain't your show, right?
They brought her to the hotel to meet him, right?
And then when the trial went on, and R. Kelly got 30 years for this, right?
When the trial went on, not only did the mother allow the daughter to go live with R. Kelly, she signed over her rights for her to go work with him, right?
And then when the daughter became emancipated and stopped giving the money, they turned into this.
I get your point.
Yeah, I get your point, right?
But hold on.
I get your point.
Your point is the parental responsibility is faith.
And the parents brought their children to him, manipulated him, and he got that.
Nobody ever stopped the fact that Michael still was an adult.
Okay, let me just say this.
You know, Pierce, first of all, I just remember the name of the toy store was F.A.O. Schwartz, but they said it's closed.
Okay.
I want to show you.
I've been on your show 50 times.
I've never promoted a book, so I'll have some credibility here.
The only reason I talk about this book, the soul of Michael Jackson, is the subtitle.
A tragic icon reveals his deepest self in intimate conversation.
Me and Michael, we recorded 30 hours of conversation, and I'll tell you why.
Because I said to Michael, you are going to die, God forbid.
You have such an unhealthy life.
And it wasn't the kids at the time.
It was he couldn't wake up.
He had, I used to ask the doctors, he'd go into a room, he'd come out completely high.
Well, I want to play you with a free from Lebanon.
Rabbi Shirley, I want to play you with Click because I interviewed Candice Owens.
Oh, hang on, hang on.
It's relevant to what you just said.
Candice Owens said this about it.
He was somebody who was going to war with the record labels and was winning.
And then suddenly there were all of these allegations that he was a pedophile.
When you look into the genesis of those allegations, it was a father who drugged his son, literally drugged his son to make him say that Michael Jackson molested him.
And so I am not somebody that is moved by the press making allegations.
It's almost the contrary.
When the press really attacks someone, I'm inclined to believe them.
That that's how it works now because I've just seen so many of these cases where they just lie blatantly and it's about taking down somebody who they can't control.
No, no, I'm like, you know what?
You know what?
She also made the point, you know, that all the drug abuse that was going on, that Michael was taking all these drugs from all these pharmacies, a lot of them fake as well, very dangerous.
Ultimately, that killed him.
Yeah, so let me just say, my issue with Choke No Joke, who's a very good man, versus Candace Owens, who is a rabid anti-Semite who said that I killed Michael Jackson.
I didn't see Michael the last years of his life because I was trying to save his life, by the way.
Choke no joke's a good man, but let me just be clear.
I see so many of my African-American brothers and sisters wanting to defend on Michael Jackson.
Let's not compare them.
Michael Jackson was a great philanthropist.
He really did care about kids.
He's not like some other African or even Elvis who, you know, did some good, but was mostly known for his music.
Michael was equally known for his philanthropy and his care for his children as he was for his music.
So, but the problem with defending him is he ended up dead, dead, dead, dead, and yet he speaketh.
He still speaks to us.
And what's his message?
His message is when you get no love as a child, you end up compensating with a cheap alternative called attention.
Michael said to me the Andy Warhol 15 Minutes of Fame would one day come true.
He predicted Instagram and TikTok.
All of us need our friends to help you.
Listen, I don't dispute for a moment that his lack of proper love was one of the big problems in making us so screwed up, plus his gigantic fame and so on.
But I don't think that really pertains in the end.
It doesn't make you an abuser.
I do not believe that Michael was a pedophile.
I know you don't.
You may take any lines.
Celebrity allowed him to do that, but he ended up dead.
All right, but Bill, you were around him in the last period of his life.
It is inexplicable to me that nobody around Michael Jackson in that period was able to stop the relentless drug taking, which ultimately killed him.
Why was that, do you think?
Okay.
I hear, when I hear people talk about the drugs and all that abuse, I go back to the time when on my watch, that was not going on.
That was not going on.
The only time I knew Mr. Jackson using any form of medication was when he fell in a dance studio.
We had to take him to a doctor and they prescribed him something for his wrist because he had like a cast on his wrist.
That was it.
So, but also what it bothers me mostly is so many people talk about as though if I was him, I wouldn't be in the kid bed with kids.
People got to understand.
Mr. Jackson was not like everybody else.
His upbringing was not like all of ours.
So when he innocently says, I share my bed with a kid or whoever, I'm sorry, maybe it's just me, but maybe only those that got a perverted mind would think otherwise.
Because I could say that being a father of a daughter that has sleepovers.
And if I say, oh, you had to, I had to share my bed with my daughter and her friend.
There were so many people in the house.
The Bloody Weird Reality00:01:16
Who's thinking?
Who's thinking that?
But that's something we can't defend.
We can't defend that.
We can't defend.
We can't defend.
No, that can't be the fight.
And that, I'm afraid, we're going to wrap it up.
That ultimately is the great unanswered question, which we may never get the answer to, is what happened when those bedroom doors shut.
We can all agree.
It was bloody weird.
We can all agree it was bloody weird.
Bloody weird that he was doing the stuff with young boys.
We just don't know what stuff happened.
That wasn't him.
That wasn't him.
Listen, I really do appreciate it all.
Dan, good luck with your film.
Thank you.
She'll watch it with great interest tomorrow night and it's airing simultaneously on YouTube in America, but over here on Channel 4, I think you said, in the UK.
Thank you to my panel.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent.
The only boss around here is me.
If you enjoy our show, we ask for only one simple thing.
Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow PiersMorgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate, and entertain.
And we'll do it all for free.
independent on censored media has never been more critical and we couldn't do it Without you.