By Sam Adams, Jan 28, 2019<\/p>\n
And the allegations aren\u2019t the most revealing part.<\/em><\/p>\n When the Sundance premiere of Leaving Neverland<\/em> hit its intermission, it was difficult to imagine what could possibly be left. In the first two hours of Dan Reed\u2019s documentary, Wade Robson and James Safechuck had already recounted in exacting detail their memories of how Michael Jackson sexually abused them when they were children: how, they said, he groomed them and their parents until the boys were allowed to sleep over in his bedroom alone; how he began with a touch on the thigh and moved on to their crotches, reaching inside their pajamas to fondle their genitals and telling them to follow suit on his own body; how he instructed them to spread their buttocks so he could see their anuses as he masturbated to completion. If that was only half the story, what horrors could the movie\u2019s second half hold?<\/p>\n The headlines out of Sundance have naturally focused on Robson and Safechuck\u2019s allegations. But in its second half, it becomes clear that Leaving Neverland<\/em> is not merely a film about enduring child sexual abuse. It is a film about surviving it, and the decades it can take to reckon with that trauma.<\/p>\n The greatest hurdle Leaving Neverland<\/em> has to clear is explaining why Robson and Safechuck are coming forward now and alleging acts that they have previously denied, including during their testimonies in defense of Jackson against other accusers. (Jackson\u2019s estate has issued statements after the premiere denying all charges against him<\/a>, calling the fallout a \u201cpublic lynching<\/a>\u201d and saying in part, \u201cThe entire film hinges solely on the word of two perjurers.\u201d) When Jackson was sued for sexual abuse in 1993, Robson, then 11, appeared at a press conference to say that he and Jackson had slept in the same bed without incident, and when criminal charges were filed against Jackson in 2005, Robson was called as a witness for the defense. Some reports in 2013, when Robson came forth with allegations of his own, suggested he had repressed the memories of what happened to him, but he made clear from that time on that that was never the case<\/a>. He knew both times that he was lying; in 1993, Robson and Jackson still had a sexual relationship. But he says now he was simply unable to deal with the consequences of telling the truth and, even in his early 20s, afraid of severing his last remaining tie to the pop star he idolized and even loved.<\/p>\n As the Jackson estate\u2019s response underlines, Leaving Neverland <\/em>is not a movie that allows for two sides to this story. The only interview subjects are Robson and Safechuck (each of whom was interviewed for several days) and members of their immediate families\u2014including their mothers, who made the fateful and now unimaginable decision to allow their sons to spend evenings and sometimes days with Jackson unsupervised. Robson came into Jackson\u2019s orbit after winning a dance contest in his native Brisbane, Australia. Safechuck was cast as a starstruck child exploring Jackson\u2019s dressing room in a Pepsi commercial. They both ended up dancing onstage with him as part of a concert number where Jackson was surrounded by children, a Pied Piper who, it now seems, was masking his abuse by parading it in plain sight.<\/p>\n Onstage after the Sundance premiere, Reed said he shot interviews with lawyers and prosecutors but decided this was ultimately not their story. Even Jackson himself is scarcely heard from, although the film does use excerpts from the \u201cLive From Neverland Valley<\/a>\u201d broadcast in 1993 in which Jackson said the \u201cmany disgusting statements\u201d made about him were \u201ctotally false.\u201d We see him as Robson and Safechuck saw him, first as an almost godlike celebrity of a kind whose cultural dominance is almost unimaginable today, then as a figure who descended from the heavens to bless them and their families with his attention and his love and finally, much later, as a manipulative monster.<\/p>\n To reckon with why it took Robson and Safechuck so long to tell their stories is, in a way, to reckon with why it has taken the culture so long to believe them. The allegations against Jackson have been public record for 26 years, but even before that, it was as if Jackson existed in a bubble where the rules and judgments that would have applied to anyone else simply did not exist. One moment in Leaving Neverland<\/em> that particularly haunts me is a news broadcast from 1992, in which Jackson is shown on a hotel rooftop, peering over the edge to give the fans massed in the streets below a tantalizing glimpse of his sunglasses-framed face. He\u2019s accompanied by a 9-year-old boy, who also sticks his head over the edge, participating in the playful spectacle, soaking up a moment shared by the two of them alone. In the film, it\u2019s presented as evidence, received via a TV news broadcast, that Robson had been replaced as Jackson\u2019s favorite\u2014which even now, it seems, still feels to him like a betrayal. But I was struck by the way the broadcast referred to the 9-year-old boy as Jackson\u2019s \u201ctraveling companion,\u201d as if that required no further explanation and was certainly no cause for alarm. We were collectively, willfully blind, because the thought of losing, or even tarnishing, Jackson\u2019s monumental contribution to popular culture was too much to bear. As Dave Chappelle put in in a Chappelle\u2019s Show<\/em> sketch, \u201cHe made Thriller<\/em>. Thriller<\/em>.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n