I watched some rebuttals of MJ in his defense on YouTube, and I’m starting to seriously question the charges against him and Wade’s, Jimmy’s, Jordan’s, and Gavin’s allegations and the media’s portrayal of him as a child molester. I also have suspicions of Dan Reed.

^ Yep, that was exactly my thought process when I watched these videos of this guy vehemently defending him. I didn’t like him or respect the fact that he wasn’t even willing to consider the very real possibility that MJ could actually have been a serial pedophile who preyed on little boys because there’s definitely valid reasons to believe that he was guilty too, such as Latoya Jackson’s testimony on the Today show, and the fact that this wasn’t just one or two people alleging that MJ was a child molester, but several, and it seems way too much of a coincidence for me to just totally buy the theory that every alleged victim, their families, and five members of the Neverland staff were all conspiring against him for money.

However, I didn’t realize just how morally crooked, incompetent, deceptive, greedy, and emotionally manipulative all the prosecution team was for MJ in the 2005 trial until seeing these videos. It really was suspicious that if they really were so desperate to convict him beyond all reasonable doubt, then why didn’t they just use the obviously incriminating evidence that police investigators reportedly found in articles online in the similarities between the JC’s drawing of his genitalia that they said matched the vitiligo marks on the underside of MJ’s penis, the pornography they reportedly “uncovered”’ in 2016 after his death several years earlier?

I get repressing and dissociating childhood trauma from being abused, and not knowing that’s what it was at the time it happened. I could even understand them believing that what MJ did to them was not at all sexual abuse and totally okay much later into their adulthoods if they had been raised by Michael and his wife, and lived under the same roof * where this sort of abusive behavior towards them was a regularly occurring normalized occurrence in their childhoods growing up with him as their legal guardian or parent who they lived with 365 days a year/seven days a week, and/or also came from families with parents who regularly sexually abused them and normalized/excused themselves for it. But Wade and James seemingly grew up with a non-abusive, albeit neglectful, mom and dad who *never laid a hand on them. I could understand at the age of seven and eleven thinking that it wasn’t a big deal, and not initially realizing they had been abused. However, by the time they reached their mid to late twenties, and still continued to defend him when they supposedly knew the allegations were true on the most basic level, and they were primarily raised by relatively good families in which sexual abuse, physical abuse, and emotional abuse never seemingly and regularly occurred as a normalized or learned behavioral occurrence at their homes with their families, or gave them the mindset that it was okay for them to molest their children after they were born as an expression of love, seems weird.

People talk about Stockholm Syndrome and normalizing and excusing abuse as a learned behavior. I can understand having feelings of conflicting love, guilt, and remorse for Michael, but neither of them were under the same roof as him for more than a few days to weeks at most. They did not grow up in homes in which sexual abuse was ever seemingly a normalized or excused expression of “love” by their parents on the whole. I could understand when they were kids and teenagers hiding the truth out of fear, but to still believe that they would get in trouble if they came out with allegations that MJ sexually abused them from the ages of 7-14 in their twenties and thirties growing up in a home in which abuse was never a normalized occurrence or expression of love, it just feels shady to me upon further reflection.

/r/LeavingNeverland Thread Parent