I know deep down I shouldn't engage but let me get this straight... the rich and powerful are all involved in weird, shady shit but not this one rich and powerful guy who, at minimum, literally publicly admitted to thinking it was OK to sleep in the same bed as children? No reason to suspect that such a man might have a weird, fucked sense of boundaries? Would this reason happen to be "Thriller was kind of a bop tho?"
Actually, you know what, since the fine upstanding defenders of Jackson's legacy seem to take issue with my "acting like a catty bitch," I'll drop any such pretence. Michael Jackson owned books curated and published by unrepentant pedophile Hajo Ortil, who boasted in interviews about having "had sexual encounters with maybe 800 boys." You can hem and haw about whether or not Jackson's motivations for keeping such books were as sexual as Ortil's own in making them, but to me, at least, it is pretty deeply suspect to do so, and I don't actually fucking care all that much about what possible non-sexual reason somebody could cook up to justify their owning a book full of nude photographs of young boys.
Because ultimately, I have been on the receiving end of abuse and grooming as a child, and I know that people who engage in it try their best to skate by on plausible deniability, hiding in plain sight. They'll employ all sorts of euphemisms and misdirections to make it seem like their behaviour is perfectly reasonable, because it's generally seen as tremendously gauche to come out and say you're sexually attracted to children, even among those rich and powerful enough to wield completely unrelated non-disparagement clauses to try and bury allegations that tarnish someone's image. Oh no, I'm being a catty bitch again.
And even outside of the whole "using bullshit legalese to try and hush stuff up" thing, the euphemism game is, y'know, exactly what Jackson did, whether in his proclamation that he thought it was fine to share his bed with random underage boys or his bold-faced attempt to deny owning copies of Ortil's books in the first place. He didn't just own them, he fucking signed them, and that, at least, would be more than enough for me to feel distinctly uncomfortable about him even if it weren't for the allegations of actual straight up abuse.
But of course herein lies the double bind of admitting you have any personal history of trauma or abuse. You're too close to the issue, it's clouding your judgment, you're being *checks notes* "over-emotional and hyperbolic." The funny part is, I don't aim to be hyperbolic with any of this. Child abuse might have the air of the squalid and the sensationalist, but it's actually aggressively, depressingly mundane. It's not even the exclusive purview of the obscenely rich, nor is it even true that they're the only ones who are insulated enough to avoid getting caught.
They are insulated, but then so's every beloved family man about whom everyone acts so utterly shocked when it turns out that he's consuming child sexual abuse material and/or abusing his own children.
No, the real difference is that those men don't have an army of credulous dipshits who will pop up all over social media to unwittingly propagandise for how victims of child abuse that speak up are actually liars out to smear the name of a good man.
But then, they don't actually need that. It's trickle down apologia! If these devilish, money-hungry liars are willing to go after the King of Pop, well, what's stopping them from going after that nice, saintly family man whose daughters just seem to coincidentally get that little bit quieter whenever he's around? From going after that gymnastics coach who might be a little touchy-feely with his students, but who doesn't mean any harm by it, honest?
The more people keep turning their gaze aside from the harsh reality of a man like Michael Jackson, the more his estate tries to hush everything up under the rug, the easier it becomes for abusers to dissemble and obfuscate when called out for their misdeeds. Because, hey, one of the most successful pop stars in the world was able to keep books by an open pedophile in his bedroom and sleep in the same bed with underage boys and there was nothing untoward about that, right?
So. How'd I do? Catty enough for you?
