He bought the ranch in early 1988 while the Bad Tour was still running, and the tour did not finish until January 1989. Ride consultant Rob Swinson told Park World that phase one began in June 1990 on bare dirt and ran to June 1993. Eighteen rides were installed between 1990 and 1997.

Neverland Valley Park carousel and entrance sign

Michael Jackson in the amusement park gardens

The station shown in Leaving Neverland is this one. Its blueprints were not approved until September 1993 and construction did not finish until 1994, after the period Safechuk describes. It is also the only station on the property with an upper floor, which rules the other four out, and its ground floor is walled in large windows in full view of the rest of the ranch.

The Main Train Station at Neverland

Pay window, section, elevation and plan, 17 November 1993

Exterior elevations, sheet A-6, approved 2 September 1993

Ground and second floor plans, sheet A-3, approved 2 September 1993

Macaulay Culkin described the layout to Larry King: two stories, three bathrooms, closer to a small house than a bedroom. People slept on the bed, on the two couches in front of it, in sleeping bags on the floor, and watched television on the other level. Coverage that calls the room small and intimate tends to run one tight crop of the bed instead.

The master bedroom emptied, photographed in 2014

The same room furnished

Ryan White was an Indiana teenager with hemophilia and AIDS, barred from his school and hounded by his own town. Jackson befriended him, hosted him at the ranch, and stayed close to his mother after he died in April 1990. He wrote “Gone Too Soon” for him and kept performing it, including at the 1993 inaugural gala.

Michael Jackson and Ryan White, as broadcast by CBS News

Ryan White with his mother, Jeanne White

Michael Jackson and Ryan White at the ranch

Performing “Gone Too Soon”, the song written for Ryan White

The Webster star was a friend from childhood, and one photograph of the two of them gets reprinted endlessly with the room cropped out. In March 2019 Lewis replied to it in public: a conversion van, his mother in the next chair, security driving, and Jackson's photographer along for the ride.

Michael Jackson and Emmanuel Lewis dancing, from home footage

Playing video games on the floor, two children in the room

Emmanuel Lewis with Michael Jackson and an adult present

The photograph the tabloids crop

Emmanuel Lewis answering the crop himself, 2 March 2019

Emmanuel Lewis feeding the tortoises at Neverland

Taylor handed him the title from the stage at the 1989 Soul Train Awards and never took a step back afterwards, through the allegations, the trial and after his death. She married at Neverland. The press preferred to write about his face.

Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson arriving at an awards ceremony

Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson at an AIDS benefit

Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson at the ranch

Vulture, on the theory that his surgeries were an homage to Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson, studio portrait

Singing to Elizabeth Taylor at her birthday tribute

Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor, Christmas 1993

Brando spent long stretches at the ranch in his final years and appeared in the “You Rock My World” short film in 2001. He defended Jackson in public, and his son Miko worked on Jackson's staff for years.

Marlon Brando and Michael Jackson, portrait session

Marlon Brando and Michael Jackson, late 1980s

Michael Jackson with Miko Brando, a member of his staff for years

Far Out, 1 July 2022, on Brando's relationship with Jackson

Los Angeles Times, on a Brando document reviewed by a former prosecutor

Marlon Brando in the “You Rock My World” short film, 2001

Culkin took the stand for the defense in 2005, called the allegations absolutely ridiculous, described the ranch as good old fun, and confirmed he had slept in the room with nothing happening. He has repeated it in interviews for twenty years since, which is rarely the part that gets quoted.

Macaulay Culkin and Michael Jackson at the 30th anniversary concerts

Michael Jackson with the Culkin children and a friend

The bedroom as published, emptied and furnished

Macaulay Culkin in the “Black or White” short film, 1991

UNILAD, 28 February 2024, on Culkin's account of a call at ten years old

Macaulay Culkin and Michael Jackson, 30th anniversary concerts

CNN.com, 2005, reporting Culkin's testimony for the defense

Macaulay Culkin at his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, 2024

Tucker was in the short films, at the benefits, at the press conferences and in the car. One of the last close friends around him, and one of the few who kept saying so on the record.

Chris Tucker and Michael Jackson, portrait session

Chris Tucker and Michael Jackson at a benefit dinner

Chris Tucker and Michael Jackson on the venue screens

Backstage on the “You Rock My World” shoot

Chris Tucker and Michael Jackson in a screening room

At a press conference in Chicago

On stage with Usher and Chris Tucker

Chris Tucker and Michael Jackson in a car

With Serena Williams and Brett Ratner

With Chris Tucker, Bill Clinton, Paris and Prince

Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Whoopi Goldberg, Brenda Harvey Richie, Paris Hilton, Yvette Nicole Brown, Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz, Kurt Cobain in a Michael Jackson shirt. People who knew him, or grew up beside him, or simply refused the story. All easy to find, and rarely quoted.

Whoopi Goldberg and Michael Jackson

Diana Ross and Michael Jackson performing together

Liza Minnelli and Michael Jackson

Brenda Harvey Richie, who grew up alongside him, on the record

Michael Jackson with Nicole Richie, Nicky Hilton and friends

Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz, wearing him

Michael Jackson and Sean Lennon on the set of Moonwalker

Outside the Santa Maria courthouse, 2005

Yvette Nicole Brown: the lies will not survive

Michael Jackson at a public appearance, late 1980s

Paris Hilton, answering a comment on her own page

A contemporary defense of him against the tabloid press

Kurt Cobain in a Michael Jackson shirt

He read constantly and owned something in the region of ten thousand books, many of them gifts from authors, friends and fans. In 1986 the Los Angeles Times ran a piece on the Ojai Public Library opening after hours so he could walk the stacks, and then chasing him for the ones he kept too long. That is the whole of the scandal.

Reading on the floor at Hayvenhurst

The Neverland library

Los Angeles Times, 5 October 1986, “Michael Jackson Overdone”, by Brenda Loree

He commissioned paintings for decades, to the point where the artist doing them says the projects overlapped for twenty years and he never got back to his own work. He also drew: Martin Luther King in coloured pencil, a boy alone in a corner with a line from “Childhood” written beside it, sketches signed and dated himself.

The artist who spent twenty years on his commissions, and one of the paintings

Drawings in his own hand, signed, including the boy in the corner

Michael Jackson with a visitor, mid-1990s

Michael Jackson with one of the artists he worked with

From childhood onward he is behind the lens about as often as in front of it: stills cameras, film cameras, the video camera at the console, a camcorder pointed back at the room. The man the press filed as a recluse documented nearly everything around him.

With a stills camera as a teenager

Loading film, early 1970s

Behind a video camera

Behind a film camera on his own set

With a camcorder, filming the room back

Bookshops and video stores, after hours or in disguise, in Los Angeles and in Berlin, sometimes with his children along. The mask that gets read as pathology is, in most of these frames, simply the price of standing at a shelf and reading.

Crouched at the shelves, masked

In a bookshop after hours

Paris and Prince in the aisles

Picking out films in a rental store

In a bookshop in Berlin

Between 1987 and early 1993 he released Bad and Dangerous, toured the world twice and played the Super Bowl to the largest television audience in American history. Every clipping in this dossier was written inside that same stretch.

Backstage, early 1990s

Super Bowl XXVII halftime show, 31 January 1993

Stephanie Salter, San Francisco Examiner, 1987. “Weirdness” is in the headline, and the word itself appears eleven times in the column. Salter writes that he has “radically elevated the standard of weirdness right out of the reach of you and me,” and that he is starting to look like Diana Ross.

San Francisco Examiner, 1987, “Jackson takes lead in terms of weirdness,” by Stephanie Salter

Jeffrey Heller, Manila Standard, 1988, filed at the start of a ten-week tour. Wembley the night before; the piece spends itself on the nose, the skin and the “freakish image” instead of the concert, and puts the tabloid nickname in its second paragraph.

Manila Standard, 1988, “Michael Jackson impresses British press,” by Jeffrey Heller

New Straits Times, 1992. The Dangerous show in Bucharest was billed as the biggest performance by a Western pop star in the former communist bloc; he visited orphanages across the four-day stay and the concert proceeds went to Romania’s orphans. The paper reports all of it under that headline.

New Straits Times, 1992, “Wacko Jacko in Bucharest”

Brad Lonard, gossip columnist, Sydney Morning Herald, 1987. The column ran a gag on every artist in it, and the others were about records: a Springsteen marathon, a Prince movie. His was that he and Janet are the same person, with a line about looking like Diana Ross and going back to the carving board. Prince wore the same long hair and the same eyeliner that year and got a joke about a film.

Sydney Morning Herald, 1987, “Rock Gossip,” by Brad Lonard

Claude Lewis, The Pittsburgh Press, 1987. The column is largely admiring: best in the business, maybe a better dancer than singer, bigger than the Beatles. It also files his “kookiness,” his “sleeping bags, oxygen chambers and chiseled features.” Then, in the second half, it says the part out loud: “We look for scandal and discover none.” The meanest thing available, Lewis writes, is odd. That is the press describing its own search, six years before it got what it wanted.

The Pittsburgh Press, 1987, “Michael Jackson parodies human nature, bad and good,” by Claude Lewis

The same column, second half: “We look for scandal and discover none”

The Telegraph Herald, 1988. A report on the growth of cosmetic surgery, built on figures about hundreds of thousands of procedures, leads on two names instead: Phyllis Diller and Michael Jackson. The statistics are about neither of them. The story works without either.

The Telegraph Herald, 1988, “More men, young people choosing cosmetic surgery”

The Daily Sentinel, July 1992, on his suit against the Daily Mirror over an article claiming he had been disfigured by plastic surgery: “a scarred phantom whose face is covered with scar tissues, with a hole in his nose, one cheek higher than the other and an oddly sagging chin.” The item runs in a names column, next to a photograph of him with Mickey Mouse at Euro Disneyland.

The Daily Sentinel, July 1992, “Names in the news”

Barry Saunders, February 1992. The column opens with the writer calling himself broke, busted and hardly to be trusted, then calls him the “King of Poop” and the “Can of Pop” and argues he owes the city of Gary something. Most of his giving was done privately, on principle and without announcement, which is precisely what let a columnist claim there was none.

February 1992, “Jackson should heal hometown,” by Barry Saunders

The 1993 Grammy Awards, accepting the Living Legend award from his sister Janet, months before the allegations. “I’ve gone from ‘Where is he?’ to ‘Here he is again,’” he said, adding that it felt good to be thought of as a person rather than a personality, and that because he does not read what is written about him, he had not known the world thought he was weird. Two years later he put it more plainly: people will believe anything about him, because a reporter said it.

1993 Grammy Awards, with Janet Jackson, accepting the Living Legend award

A year after the settlement he put a track called “Money” on HIStory. The exhibit reproduces the song’s lyric screens as they appear in playback, in sequence. He was not vague about what he thought had happened to him.

“Money,” HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I, 1995

“Money,” lyric screen 1 of 7

“Money,” lyric screen 2 of 7

“Money,” lyric screen 3 of 7

“Money,” lyric screen 4 of 7

“Money,” lyric screen 5 of 7

“Money,” lyric screen 6 of 7

“Money,” lyric screen 7 of 7

June Chandler, under oath at the 2005 trial, on the period before the allegations: Evan was spending a lot of time on a screenplay, she had been complaining that he was not spending enough time with his son, and she was happy Jackson was around because Jordan’s father was not. The man later described as the heroic father who stepped in is, on the record, the father who was not there.

June Chandler examination, 2005 trial transcript, on Evan’s screenplay

He was a full-time dentist who, by his own family’s account, hated it and wanted to write. His California dental corporation was filed on 29 August 1978, the same year the Board of Dental Examiners examined restoration work he did on sixteen of one patient’s teeth in a single visit at the Crenshaw Family Dental Center: a finding of “gross ignorance and/or inefficiency,” a revocation that was stayed, ninety days’ suspension and two and a half years’ probation.

California entity record, EVAN R. CHANDLER, D.D.S., INC., filed 29 August 1978

Suzanne Ager sued him over restoration work done between August 1993 and March 1994. Her declaration goes further than negligence: a continuous, repeated course of unconsented sexual touching during treatment, and intravenous sedation he insisted on, which on five dated occasions left her semi-conscious or unconscious. She dates her own recollection of the assault to March 1997, in therapy, after reading his deposition. That detail is worth holding onto: the people who reject her account on those grounds accept identical accounts made against Jackson.

Declaration of Suzanne Ager, page 1

Declaration of Suzanne Ager, page 2

In Shockaholic, Carrie Fisher says he was her dentist, that he was accommodating about drugs to the point of house calls, and that he told her in the privacy of a dental visit that his son was very good looking, in a way she read as letting her know he had something Jackson wanted. Shortly afterwards he told her he was bringing charges, shocked with moral indignation. She confirmed the association again to the New York Times in 2012.

Carrie Fisher’s account in Shockaholic

The New York Times, 8 January 2012, interview with Carrie Fisher

On 5 August 2005 Jordan Chandler obtained a temporary restraining order against his father under New Jersey’s Prevention of Domestic Violence Act. The judge found he had proved that Evan struck him on the head from behind with a twelve-and-one-half pound weight, sprayed his eyes with mace or pepper spray and tried to choke him, and that the weight could cause serious bodily injury or death: evidence which, if believed, would support a finding of aggravated assault. One of those acts might be a lapse. Three in one go is a pattern.

New Jersey appellate opinion on the temporary restraining order of 5 August 2005

He also sued his son. The action was filed in New Jersey in 2005 as Evan Chandler v. Jordan Chandler, docket HUD-C-149-05, reportedly over a trust, and was dismissed in 2007. Where their relationship stood when he died in 2009 is not known.

Draft order, Evan Chandler v. Jordan Chandler, HUD-C-149-05, New Jersey

From the divorce filing of Evan’s second wife: he has few friends, has become either a nomad or a recluse, does nothing to provide for his own living or that of his minor children, and is satisfied to let his eighteen-year-old son support him, having cut himself off from relatives who disagree with his behaviour. She adds that his disappearance followed her demand letter about support for their two children.

Declaration in the divorce filing of Evan Chandler’s second wife

June’s own testimony: divorced from Evan in 1985, sole custody of Jordan, married David Schwartz the same year, divorced him in 1994. Asked when she last spoke to her son, she answered eleven years ago. Subtract eleven from 2005 and you land on 1994, the year of the settlement. She also says the family did not sue Jackson themselves, that Jordan and his family sued through Larry Feldman.

June Chandler examination, 2005 trial transcript, on custody and the eleven years

Even Evan’s own brother, in All That Glitters, picks Schwartz’s account of Evan’s violence apart: a severe beating that left his clothes unsoiled, no medical attention for several weeks, the only claimed damage being an impaired ability to negotiate business deals, and no police report. Instead of the police he went to Bert Fields and Anthony Pellicano, two men he swore under oath he had never met. At that same meeting he agreed to let Jordie spend a week with the man he said had just threatened to kill the boy.

Ray Chandler, All That Glitters, Part One: The Tangled Web, page 71

In August 1994, Schwartz and his six-year-old daughter sued Jackson for emotional distress, fraud and negligence, claiming their family life was devastated and that Jackson had assaulted his stepson “despite Schwartz’s best efforts to protect the minor child.” Those efforts had included secretly taping Evan and playing the tape, on 9 July 1993, to Jackson’s own investigator, Anthony Pellicano. Pellicano’s reading of it after ten minutes: extortion.

The New York Times, 17 August 1994, on the Schwartz lawsuit

On HIStory in 1995 he released a track called “D.S.”, whose subject everyone in Santa Barbara understood at once. The exhibit reproduces the song’s lyric screens as they appear in playback, in sequence. It came out a year after the Chandler settlement and eight years before Sneddon charged him.

“D.S.,” HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I, 1995

“D.S.,” lyric screen 1 of 3

“D.S.,” lyric screen 2 of 3

“D.S.,” lyric screen 3 of 3

In November 1993 an independent panel commissioned by the Franciscan Order concluded that 34 boys had been sexually abused at St. Anthony’s Seminary in Santa Barbara between 1964 and 1987, by twelve identified priests; one friar alone was found responsible for 18 of the victims, a second for seven. The New York Times called it one of the largest cases of clergy abuse ever disclosed. Sneddon declined to prosecute the remaining priests, citing the statute of limitations, and announced that the case was officially closed. Victims and their parents pointed out that these men could still be charged for anything done after they left St. Anthony’s, inside the limitations window. Nobody went to look. In those same months he was opening an investigation into Michael Jackson that produced no charges at all.

The New York Times, 5 December 1993, on the St. Anthony’s Seminary investigation

Santa Barbara Independent, December 1993, by Andrew Rice, on the statute of limitations

In August 2002 Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Deputy David Bruce Danielson, then 49, was accused of touching a 13-year-old girl who was a guest in his home and in bed with his wife. Sneddon’s own description was that Danielson touched the child and then realized it was not his wife. He called it a one-time occurrence and declined to file charges, saying there was not enough evidence to prosecute. The child had also said Danielson told her he had a crush on her. Fifteen months later he charged Michael Jackson, with no admission of any kind on the record.

Santa Maria Times, 25 August 2002, “Everybody knows he did it, but ...,” by Steve Corbett

Sneddon charged Solvang attorney Gary Dunlap with six counts: perjury, witness intimidation, filing false documents and preparing false documents, a stack carrying up to twelve years. Dunlap himself described it as seven felonies thrown at him. In June 2003 a jury acquitted him on every count. That December, a month after Jackson’s arrest, Dunlap filed a $10 million federal suit: a 102-page, 22-count complaint alleging civil rights violations, illegal searches of his property, witness tampering and three counts of civil RICO against Sneddon, his assistants, his deputies and his investigators. Dunlap had practiced in Santa Maria and Santa Barbara for four decades. He described a sting the office manufactured and let get out of hand, and a standing policy of throwing enough charges that a jury convicts on something. He joined Jackson’s defense within months. The suit was dismissed in 2006 for lack of evidence; the acquittals stand.

Santa Maria Times, 5 December 2003, “Attorney files suit against D.A.,” by Mark Abramson

Dunlap on the complaint: 22 counts, civil rights violations and three counts of civil RICO

The Gary Dunlap section of the published account of Sneddon’s conduct

Former Santa Maria City Attorney Art Montandon filed a claim naming Sneddon, Assistant DA Christie Stanley, Deputy DA Kimberly Smith and investigators David Saunders and Dave Tonello, accusing the office of discriminatory, abusive, defamatory and negligent conduct and of obstructing an investigation he was conducting for the city. The DA’s office had accused him of proposing to drop prostitution charges against two Santa Maria sisters in exchange for a videotape said to show former Police Chief John Sterling at their massage business, and called it a possible bribe. Montandon denied it and alleged a conspiracy to damage his reputation by circulating the court papers to his co-workers and the media. Wednesday was his last day in the job. The complaint reached the State Bar of California in July 2004, during Jackson’s trial.

Santa Maria Times, on the claim naming Sneddon and his staff

Santa Maria Times, on Montandon’s denial and his allegation of a conspiracy

April Cummings, facing charges of soliciting prostitution and conspiracy alongside her sister Irene, shouted it in open court on 17 December 2003, in front of Superior Court Judge Rick Brown. Sneddon denied it and said he was considering suing her. The sisters had also named former Police Chief John Sterling as a client and claimed a videotape of him entering the business, which neither they nor their lawyers ever produced. Irene’s own lawyer supplied the explanation: the sisters had probably confused the district attorney with a man who looked like Sneddon, allegedly visited that day, and happened to be named Tom.

Santa Maria Times, December 2003, on April Cummings’ claim in open court

The same reporting: the Sterling videotape was never produced

Irene Cummings’ lawyer on the man who looked like Sneddon and was also named Tom

In September 2003 the Sheriff’s Department, in cooperation with the DA’s office, served a search warrant at rancher Slick Gardner’s Buellton ranch and began removing horses. Gardner said the animals taken were old or ill, that he had spent a million dollars on them inside a year, and that many had been bought out of the slaughter pipeline. Twelve felony counts followed: four of animal neglect and eight of fraud. Gardner said in a televised interview that it felt like a vendetta and drew the parallel with his famous neighbour; his petition over the seizures went before Rodney Melville, the same judge presiding over Jackson’s trial. In September 2004 he pleaded no contest to the animal cruelty count, and the other ten charges, check fraud and grand theft among them, were dropped.

Santa Maria Times, 25 September 2003, on the search warrant at the Gardner ranch, by Quintin Cushner

Daily Nexus, on the twelve felony counts and the horses

Santa Maria Times, September 2004, on the plea and the dropped charges

By the spring of 1993, Jackson had known June Chandler and her children for about a year, and photographers found them everywhere. Nobody in the frame is hiding: Lily in his arms, Jordan walking ahead in a fedora. This is the relationship the tabloids described in May, and the relationship Evan Chandler saw for the first time that same month.

Jackson with Lily and Jordan Chandler, 1993

Ray Chandler’s 2004 book All That Glitters dates June’s first “suspicions” to a February 1993 limousine ride, where he places another boy, later confirmed as Brett Barnes, on Jackson’s lap receiving “soft, lingering kisses.” June Chandler, under oath in 2005, put Brett beside Jackson rather than on him, and described the sleeping arrangements plainly: guest cottages. At no point in her testimony did she say she believed Jackson was an abuser.

June Chandler, 2005 trial testimony: Brett Barnes and the guest cottages

Ray Chandler puts the date Evan Chandler first met Michael Jackson at 20 May 1993. The same day, the New York Daily News ran a syndicated item on Jackson’s relationship with June, Jordan and Lily, sold, by Ray’s own account, by the sister of June’s closest friend. Somebody on June’s side was describing a family on holiday together, phone calls four times a day, “zillions of toys.” Whoever told it was describing the opposite of suspicion.

New York Daily News, 20 May 1993, “Jackson’s New Love: A Model-Family Affair”

The National Enquirer ran its own version five days after the Daily News, with the same details: ranch weekends, the Las Vegas suite, the $1,500 Toys “R” Us trip, Jackson quoted saying the four of them were “like a little family.” Ray’s book treats this second, louder printing as the one the Chandlers reacted to. The detail that becomes the origin of Evan’s suspicions, the toys, was already in print on the day he met Jackson.

National Enquirer, 25 May 1993, “Michael Jackson’s secret family”

For anyone checking the order: the newspaper archive puts the Daily News item on page 363 of Thursday, 20 May 1993, in New York. The Enquirer story is the copy, not the original.

Newspaper archive record: Daily News, page 363, Thursday, 20 May 1993

Ray’s book has Evan “disturbed” by the quantity of gifts in Jordan’s room. Under oath in 2005, June Chandler described the gifts she herself received, a bracelet, earrings, a necklace, a ring, a Fred Segal gift certificate, a shopping trip on Jackson’s credit card in Monte Carlo, and the after-hours Toys “R” Us trip where Lily and Jordan both came home loaded. Generosity aimed at the whole household is not evidence about one child.

June Chandler, 2005 testimony: the jewelry, the gift certificate, the Toys “R” Us trip

The whole chain of suspicion in Ray’s account starts with toys in a thirteen-year-old’s room being “so inappropriate for his age.” Play with toys tapers from around age nine, and collecting past that age is ordinary and documented. It is a long way from a teenager’s shelf to the accusation Evan is said to have made the next day.

KidsCorp Digital on toy play through adolescence

Ray’s book has Jackson asking to live with Evan and Jordan, with Evan requiring Jackson to pay for an added room. Ten years earlier, Mary Fischer’s GQ investigation reported it the other way around: Chandler suggested the addition, and when the zoning department ruled it out, suggested Jackson build him a new house instead. June’s 2005 testimony is the third account, Jackson stayed at Evan’s four to seven consecutive days, and it was her ex-husband who wanted the wing financed.

June Chandler, 2005 testimony: the stay at Evan Chandler’s house and the wing

Reproduced as the lyric screens appear in playback, in sequence. No commentary needed.

“Money,” HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I, 1995, lyric screen 1 of 2

“Money,” HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I, 1995, lyric screen 2 of 2

Memorial Day weekend is where Ray Chandler puts Monique’s verdict that the two were “in love,” and the proof offered is clothes: Jordan walking in wearing black pants, white socks, black loafers and a fedora, Jackson behind him dressed the same. Under cross-examination in 2005, June Chandler agreed her son had dressed like Michael Jackson before he ever met him, from the time he was very young. A fan copying his idol is not a symptom.

June Chandler, 2005 trial testimony: Jordan dressed like Jackson before meeting him

This is the scene Ray offers as evidence of a relationship that had gone wrong: Jackson arriving after dinner for a study session, Jordan’s history paper already overdue, Evan finishing it himself while the two joked. The paper was late before Jackson walked in, which is an indictment of the three adults responsible for it. Read to the end of the page and the book also records, approvingly, what the joking was about: dancing, skinniness and blackness.

All That Glitters, Ray Chandler, 2004, p. 45: the study session

On the morning of 29 May 1993, by Ray’s account, Jackson had a severe headache, weeks after another scalp surgery, testified to at the 2013 AEG trial, and consistent with the migraines Karen Faye described. Aspirin and Tylenol did nothing, so Evan Chandler called in his dental anesthesiologist, Mark Torbiner, who came to the house with Toradol: a prescription NSAID, not a sedative.

Overview of Toradol (ketorolac), a prescription NSAID

Ray’s book has Evan injecting 30 mg, then another 30 mg, after which Jackson was “babbling incoherently and slurring his speech” for the rest of the day. Sixty milligrams of Toradol solution sits inside the ordinary range printed below. Drowsiness is a listed effect; an uninhibited, incoherent state in a patient long accustomed to far stronger medication is not. Evan Chandler had already been suspended once for what the Board of Dental Examiners called gross ignorance, and was later sued by a patient who said he rendered her unconscious with intravenous solutions.

RxList: dosage guidance for Toradol

Evan Chandler’s arrangement with an anesthesiologist who made house calls was not invented for Jackson. In 2012, Carrie Fisher told The New York Times what her dentist, Evan Chandler, had introduced her to, and roughly what it cost.

Carrie Fisher, The New York Times, 2012, on Evan Chandler and the house-call anesthesiologist

On 8 July 1993, Dave Schwartz, June’s second husband, recorded two long telephone conversations with Evan Chandler. The next day the tapes went to Anthony Pellicano, Jackson’s investigator, who needed about ten minutes of listening to call it extortion. Broadcast news later played the excerpts on air. Nothing below is anyone’s summary of Evan Chandler: it is Evan Chandler, five weeks before any allegation was filed and before his son had said a word to him.

CBS broadcast of the taped call: “This man is going to be humiliated beyond belief…”

California is an all-party consent state, with narrow exceptions. One of them: a participant in the conversation may record it to gather evidence that the other party is committing extortion, bribery, kidnapping, harassing phone calls, or a violent felony. Chandler had been leaving threatening messages for Schwartz’s wife and stepson. The recording was lawful, and the transcripts have been public for years.

California Penal Code 632: the participant-recording exception

The first thing Chandler describes is not what he saw. It is a performance: rehearsed lines, a tape recorder he is bringing himself, papers to hand out, two or three minutes and out the door. He says twice that he will say nothing other than what he has been told to say, and explains why, so that nothing he says can be used against him. A father reporting abuse does not need a script vetted for his own liability.

Transcript, Part 1: the rehearsed routine and the tape recorder

Transcript, Part 1: “I’ve been told what to do, and I have to do it”

He interviewed several attorneys and chose Barry Rothman on one criterion, stated twice on the tape. What he wants from the choice is also stated: to get it out in public as fast and as big as possible, and to humiliate as many people as he can. Asked by Schwartz whether that is good, he answers that it is great, terrific, the best.

Transcript, Part 1: choosing the attorney, and what he was chosen for

Over these pages the goal is named repeatedly and it is never the child’s safety. It is attention, escalation, publicity, destruction, full authority handed to a man he describes as nasty, mean and hungry for the coverage. The 7 July message he left the night before had already put all three of them on notice: June, Michael and Jordan. When he says everybody’s lives are over, his son is inside that sentence.

Transcript, Part 1: “I mean, it could be a massacre if I don’t get what I want”

Transcript, Part 1: “their lives are over, if they don’t sit down”

Schwartz asks the only question that matters, four times, in four different forms. Chandler’s answers: he will get everything he wants and they will be destroyed forever; June will lose Jordan and never see him again; Michael’s career will be over. Whether any of it helps his son is irrelevant to him. Asked whether Jordan hates him, he says that if he does not, he will tomorrow. Asked if he is the boy’s role model: not anymore.

Transcript, Part 2: “I win big time … it’s irrelevant to me”

Transcript, Part 3: “he’s gonna hate me for a long time and then some day … he’ll thank me”

Transcript, Part 3: “You’re his role model.”: “Not anymore.”

He claims evidence four separate times: a big screen in court, tape recordings Schwartz will hear, tens of thousands of dollars spent to get information, a phone he taped when his son spoke to Jackson, followed by a laugh. Then Schwartz asks him outright whether he thinks Jackson is molesting Jordan. The answer is “I don’t know. I have no idea.” Not one item of this evidence was ever produced, in the criminal investigation or anywhere since.

Transcript, Part 2: “I have the evidence to prove it”

Transcript, Part 3: the big screen, the tape recordings, the tens of thousands of dollars

Transcript, Part 3: “Do you think that he’s … him?”: “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

Transcript, Part 3: “except I taped … they’re talking about. Ha ha ha.”

Chandler leans on professional opinions, he says they convinced him he had been negligent, that he would be a negligent father if he did not do what he was doing, that according to the experts his son is doomed. By the date of these calls he had not consulted a psychologist, psychiatrist or therapist. The names he did reach were Carrie Fisher, who thought little of him, and Arnold Klein, who told him he had nothing to worry about. What he had instead was Rothman, and a courtroom scene he imagined: the three of them on the stand, psychological examinations, lie detector tests.

Transcript, Part 2: “I would be a negligent father if I did not do what I am now doing”

Transcript, Part 3: the stand, the examinations, the lie detector tests

The grievance underneath is not abuse; it is displacement. Jackson broke up the family, came between June, Evan and Jordan, divided and conquered, made users of Jordan and Michael both. June, testifying in 2005, described a household in which she had been asking Evan to spend less time on screenplays and more with his son long before Jackson appeared. There was no intact family to divide.

Transcript, Part 2: “he broke up the family … I’m blaming all three of them”

Transcript, Part 3: “It was a simple divide and conquer”

Transcript, Part 3: “Jordy and Michael are users”

Transcript, Part 3: “What would be the reason, unless he has something to hide?”

Pressed on his own reasoning, he gives it away. There is no reason they would cut him out unless they needed him away. He admits he might be wrong and that he is not getting the chance to say so. And he describes, unprompted, sitting down with Jackson within days of meeting him to tell him exactly what he wanted out of the relationship. Jackson stopped calling. June, Jordan and Lily did not, they were about to travel with him on the second leg of the Dangerous tour. That is what was done to Evan Chandler.

Transcript, Part 3: “unless they need me to be away … so maybe I’m wrong”

Transcript, Part 3: “I told him exactly what I want out of this whole relationship”

Schwartz makes one last offer: the two of them, a therapist, talk it over. Chandler declines, because it is too late, the thing is already moving, automatically, at 8:30, at 8:36 tomorrow, out of his hands. The meeting he had demanded in the 7 July message was set for the morning of 9 July, the same day the tapes reached Pellicano.

Transcript, Part 3: “Because the thing has already been set in motion”

Michael Jackson wrote “Money” two years after July 1993, and it is the least ambiguous thing he ever recorded about what happened to him: people will lie for money, die for money, sell their souls for it. This dossier is the five days that followed the taped calls, 9 July to 14 July 1993, assembled from a court docket, sworn testimony from Jordan Chandler’s own mother, and two pages from the book Evan Chandler’s brother published. Jordan had still said nothing to his father. The professional whose letter started the criminal investigation had not yet been contacted, and would never examine the child at all.

Michael Jackson, “Money,” HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I, 1995: “Anything, anything, anything for money”

Chandler Evan, Plaintiff, v. Schwartz, David and Schwartz June Chandler, Defendants. Los Angeles Superior Court. Evan Chandler’s response to the existence of the 8 July tapes was not to stand behind what he had said on them, it was to sue his ex-wife and her husband. He never took it to judgment: the status line reads “Dismissed for Lack of Prosecution 09/24/1998,” after two orders to show cause and five years of substitutions of attorney. A man whose recorded words are innocent does not litigate for five years and then abandon the case.

Court docket: Evan Chandler, plaintiff, v. David Schwartz and June Chandler Schwartz, defendants, dismissed for lack of prosecution, 24 September 1998

June Chandler, sworn, 2005. The day after the tapes were made, she and her then-husband Dave Schwartz went to Anthony Pellicano’s office to be interviewed, and she confirms it happened after Evan’s voicemail landed on her machine. Jackson had told her who Pellicano was in plain terms: he can find out anything, he is really good at investigating, if you have a problem he will get to the bottom of it. Then they went to the Century City apartment. This is the sequence, from the mother, under oath, twelve years later.

June Chandler’s 2005 trial testimony: the Pellicano interview, Bert Fields, and the trip to the Century City apartment

Asked whether Jordan was ever interviewed by Pellicano, June answers yes. Where: the Century City apartment. Was she present? Yes. Present during the conversation? No. The apartment she elsewhere calls “The Hideout” is where the boy was asked, five weeks before any allegation, what had happened, and his mother was not in the room to hear the answer. She places Dave Schwartz there too, late August or early September.

June Chandler, 2005: Jordan was interviewed by Pellicano at the Century City apartment; she was present but not in the conversation

June Chandler, 2005: David Schwartz at the Century City apartment she called “The Hideout”

Three or four meetings, at his office, and she travelled there. Asked whether she ever believed Pellicano was her investigator, June Chandler says yes. Asked whether her own attorney Michael Freeman was with her, she says she does not think so. The mother of the alleged victim was meeting Jackson’s investigator repeatedly, without her lawyer, under the impression he was working for her. That is not what a family gathering evidence of abuse looks like; it is what a family being managed looks like.

June Chandler, 2005: three to four meetings with Anthony Pellicano, whom she believed was her own investigator

June entered a stipulation handing Evan custody of Jordan. On the stand she first attributed it to Michael Jackson telling her to, then conceded he was “one of the people.” She remembers signing something about custody. She also remembers the sworn declaration in which she gave the real reason: her ex-husband would not return Jordan to her unless she signed. She believed she was signing away one week. Evan Chandler kept the boy.

June Chandler, 2005: the custody stipulation, and the declaration saying she signed only because Evan would not return Jordan

Shown her own sworn declaration, June confirms it: the only reason she signed was that Evan told her she would not get Jordan back otherwise. Asked whether she said that was the only reason, she answers that it was not the only reason, a document she signed under penalty of perjury. Then the last question, and the answer that matters most: who prepared the declaration for you to sign? Evan Chandler’s attorney. The paperwork that took the child out of his mother’s custody was drafted by the man who, two days later, would go looking for a psychiatrist.

June Chandler, 2005: the declaration was prepared by Evan Chandler’s attorney

From All That Glitters, the book Evan Chandler’s brother Raymond wrote with his cooperation, dated in the book’s own chronology to 14 July. The “professional” is Dr. Mathis Abrams, a child psychiatrist. Note who decides: Evan and Barry, Barry Rothman, the attorney. The first move after the custody paper is not a paediatrician, not a police report, not a child-protection call. It is a lawyer and a father selecting a psychiatrist, three days before a letter that would trigger a criminal investigation.

All That Glitters, “July 14”: Evan and Barry decided to consult a professional about Jordan and Michael

Evan Chandler, in his brother’s book, describing how he briefed Dr. Abrams: he was after the truth, not an ally; it was critical he did nothing to influence the psychiatrist’s thinking; he specifically stayed away from any inference to sex; he told him only provable fact. Abrams never examined Jordan Chandler. The hypothetical he was given came from Evan alone, and Evan’s account of that briefing rules out the one thing that could have made the resulting letter meaningful.

All That Glitters: Evan Chandler on briefing Dr. Abrams: “I only told him what I knew to be provable fact”

The psychiatrist whose letter triggered the 1993 investigation, speaking to reporters a decade on about the second accuser. Children change their minds. Children are easily manipulated. He thinks coaching is a possibility in both cases, and then the admission that closes this dossier: he was not given the opportunity in the initial one to even try to find out. The man whose opinion started it all is on the record saying he was never allowed to test it.

Dr. Mathis Abrams, c. 2003: children are easily manipulated, coaching is possible in both cases, and he was never given the opportunity to find out in the first

All That Glitters, page 90, in Evan Chandler’s own telling. Before a single question about Michael Jackson, the father reminds his son of a threat already made, lie to me and I will destroy Michael, then establishes that the boy loves Michael and would not want to hurt him. Only then does he claim to have bugged the bedroom and to know everything already. Every element of a coerced statement is in this one page: a prior threat, a false claim of existing proof, and a child told that the outcome depends on him.

All That Glitters, page 90: Evan Chandler tells Jordan he bugged his bedroom and already knows everything

Page 91. One last chance to save Michael. If you lie, I take him down in front of the whole world, and it will be all your fault because you are the one person who could have saved him. Then the claim the book itself labels a lie: “I know about the kissing and the jerking off, so you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” Evan lied. He then tells the boy this is not about finding anything out, it is about lying, and reduces it to one question answerable with yes or no. No investigator, therapist or officer may question a child this way, for the obvious reason that the answer is worthless.

All That Glitters, page 91: the ultimatum, and the admission that Evan lied about already knowing

Page 91–92. The single question is asked. Jordan hesitates, then whispers yes, almost inaudibly. His father presses no further: he had heard all he needed to hear. “We never talked about it again,” Evan later told the Los Angeles district attorney. To Evan the details did not matter: “the prison walls had cracked and I was confident the rest would take care of itself.” This is the entire origin of the 1993 allegation: a yes with no detail, no date, no place, no follow-up question, from a child who had just been told what would happen to his friend if he answered the other way.

All That Glitters, pages 91–92: Jordan whispers “Yes,” and the subject is never raised again

Evan Chandler was a dentist. On 4 August 1993 Jordan was at his father’s practice to have a tooth out. These are the standard clinical references for what a paediatric extraction involves and what is administered: x-rays, local anaesthetic, and, for an anxious child or one who fears needles, nitrous oxide or oral medication. General anaesthesia is not preferred for children, “although some dentists offer it.” Nothing here is about Michael Jackson; that is the point. It is the ordinary professional literature against which the events of that afternoon should be read.

Clinical reference: how a baby tooth extraction is performed, and the anaesthesia choices available to a paediatric dentist

Clinical reference: nitrous oxide, mild sedation and moderate sedation in dentistry

The detail that matters is not unconsciousness, it is memory. Under mild sedation a child stays calm and awake and is “sometimes able to do what the dentist or surgeon asks him or her to do,” and afterwards may not remember the visit at all. IV sedation causes partial loss of consciousness and takes six to twelve hours to wear off; general anaesthesia, twelve to twenty-four. A child can be awake, compliant, responsive to instruction, and left with no recollection of what was said. That combination is why the question of what Jordan was given on 4 August 1993 has never stopped mattering.

Clinical reference: IV sedation and general anaesthesia, partial and complete loss of consciousness, and recovery times

Clinical reference: what happens after sedation dentistry, a patient cannot be left to travel home alone

Harvey Levin, then a reporter at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles, interviewed Evan Chandler on 3 May 1994. In it Chandler is reported to have acknowledged that Jordan made the allegations against Michael Jackson while under the influence of a drug; the drug was not named and his exact words remain open to interpretation. The footage has never been released. The station’s video librarian has confirmed the segment exists in the archive and declined to release it, even for research, and licensing requests have also been refused. An interview in which the accuser’s father addresses the drug is sitting in a broadcaster’s vault, thirty years on.

Research note: the 3 May 1994 Harvey Levin / KCBS-TV interview with Evan Chandler, which the station has declined to release

All That Glitters, page 100. Chandler wants a meeting with Jackson with the lawyers out of the room; Jackson will not meet without Pellicano or Bert Fields present. Chandler warns that they may discuss embarrassing things, and says he does not want anyone else to hear them, for Michael’s sake. Then the line goes dead. He later frames Jackson’s refusal as the turning point: if he was not bringing a lawyer, why did Michael need one? A father reporting a crime does not need the other side unrepresented.

All That Glitters, page 100: Chandler asks for a meeting without lawyers; Jackson insists Pellicano or Fields attend

From the Chandler–Schwartz recording. He had a good communication with Michael. They were friends; he liked him; he respected him. There was no reason he had to stop calling. And then the sentence that gives the game away: he sat in a room one day and told Michael exactly what he wanted out of this whole relationship, “so he wouldn’t have to figure me out.” The grievance on the tape is not abuse. It is being cut off, and having told Jackson in advance what he wanted from the relationship.

Chandler–Schwartz transcript, 8 July 1993: “I talked to Michael and told him exactly what I want out of this whole relationship”

Pages 103 and 104. Evan Chandler’s certainty does not arrive from his son, or from a doctor, or from any document. It arrives from a smile: “like the smile you see on a serial killer or rapist who continually declares his innocence.” He knew it immediately. Everyone had been fooled. The following page records what he felt: victorious. Not because he had won anything, but because he had solved the puzzle and glimpsed into the man’s heart. This is the evidentiary basis of the most famous child-abuse allegation of the twentieth century, described by the accuser’s father in his own authorised book.

All That Glitters, page 103: Chandler decides from a smile that Jackson was a child molester

All That Glitters, page 104: “Evan felt victorious … he had finally solved the puzzle”

Pages 108–109, and the single most damaging passage in the book. Chandler states his two goals: his son’s welfare, and punishing Michael. On the first, the concern he cites comes from Dr. Abrams, who had not met Jordan, and was answering the version of events Chandler and his lawyer had given him. On the second, in his own words: “I didn’t want him to get off scot-free. But a few million is chump change to him. I figured twenty million was definitely punishing amount.” He adds that they would have to find a state that did not require psychotherapists to report child abuse to the authorities. A parent seeking justice does not shop for a jurisdiction where the therapist stays silent.

All That Glitters, pages 108–109: Chandler’s two goals, the twenty-million figure as punishment, and finding a state without mandatory reporting

Page 110. With Pellicano on his way to negotiate and Chandler refusing to move, Barry Rothman restructures the demand as a business arrangement: five million apiece for four screenplays over four years, so that the payment can be booked as a development deal. Chandler hates it, he would rather go to court than let Michael benefit, but consents on one condition: negotiate only on the amount, and if Pellicano does not agree to everything else, file the custody action against June immediately. A settlement figure, a delivery mechanism, and a threat held in reserve.

All That Glitters, page 110: the twenty-million demand, restructured by Rothman as four screenplays at five million each

These were not claims made after the fact. Six weeks before the affair became public, on Dave Schwartz’s recording, Chandler describes exactly what he is about to set off: the facts will overwhelm, it is going to be bigger than all of us, the whole thing is going to crash down on everybody and destroy everybody in sight, his son and himself included, and it will be humiliating. Schwartz asks whether that is good. “Yeah. It’s great.” Why? Because June and Jordy and Michael have forced him to take it to the extreme to get their attention.

All That Glitters, page 109: Chandler’s fears aired on Schwartz’s tape six weeks before the affair became public

Chandler–Schwartz transcript: “It’s gonna be bigger than all of us … destroy everybody in sight.”: “And is that good?”: “Yeah. It’s great.”

From Redemption, page 83, the recollection of a legal secretary who found the correspondence suspicious enough to log it in her calendar diary. On 27 July 1993 she typed a letter to Dr. Chandler from Mr. Rothman advising him how to report child abuse through a third party without liability to the parent. The letter itself was brief; the enclosure was documentation setting out how to do it, with the corresponding Penal Codes and Civil Procedures attached. Three weeks before any report was made, the mechanism for making one safely had already been researched, typed and posted.

Redemption, page 83: the 27 July 1993 letter from Rothman to Chandler on reporting child abuse through a third party without liability

Redemption, page 85. When the negotiations halted and the court ordered Chandler to return his thirteen-year-old son to June Schwartz’s custody, he took the boy to the psychiatrist, with Rothman’s full knowledge, coaching and instruction. The codes Rothman supplied explained the ramifications of reporting, how the law would determine the best interest of the child and a parent’s right to injuries, and how to report through a third party who was reputable, believable, and who would make the allegations look credible. Asked whether any of it helped his son, Chandler’s answer was that it was irrelevant to him: it would be a massacre if he did not get what he wanted.

Redemption, page 85: Chandler took his son to the psychiatrist with Rothman’s coaching and instruction

Redemption, page 85, detail: reporting through a third party chosen to make the allegations look credible

All That Glitters, pages 126–127. Rothman informs Pellicano that Evan had made no public or defamatory statements about Michael, and that as a dentist he was a mandatory reporter governed by the same requirements as any licensed health professional: not only was he required to report his suspicions to the proper authorities, “but he could not be sued for doing so even if they turned out to be incorrect.” The immunity was identified and relied upon before the report existed. It is the missing half of the twenty-million demand, the reason the threat could be made at no legal cost to the man making it.

All That Glitters, page 126: Rothman tells Pellicano that Evan, as a dentist, is a mandatory reporter

All That Glitters, page 127: “he could not be sued for doing so even if they turned out to be incorrect”

Page 119. The night before Michael Freeman’s request was to be heard, Rothman told Chandler plainly that without walking into the courtroom and accusing Michael of molesting Jordie, he did not have a prayer of winning: June had legal custody and that was all she needed to get the boy back. The accusation was not a disclosure that forced itself into the open. It was the one move left on a board where his lawyer had already shown him the score.

All That Glitters, page 119: Rothman tells Chandler he cannot win custody unless he accuses Michael in court

Law Offices of Barry K. Rothman to Anthony Pellicano, 17 August 1993: acknowledging the 13 August meeting at which Pellicano, on Jackson’s behalf, offered Dr. Evan Chandler and Jordan Chandler $350,000 by way of a development deal to author a screenplay, in settlement and release of all civil claims: “however your offer is hereby rejected.” Set beside it the book’s own read of the negotiation: Jackson’s side already knew Evan would deal, money was no object, and the deal could have been a fait accompli within hours. Pellicano refused to compromise on what would have been chump change. If the goal had been to silence an accuser, that is not how it was played.

Barry K. Rothman to Anthony Pellicano, 17 August 1993: Jackson’s $350,000 screenplay-deal offer is rejected

All That Glitters, pages 126 and 138: Pellicano refusing to compromise while holding the psychiatrist’s report

The sentence Raymond Chandler chose to print: had Michael paid the twenty million demanded of him in August, rather than the following January, he might have spent the next ten years as the world’s most famous entertainer instead of the world’s most infamous child molester. Demanded, in August, before any report existed. And the family’s own answer to the tapes that captured all of it was litigation: Evan Chandler sued David and June Schwartz, then let the case die, dismissed for lack of prosecution on 24 September 1998, after two orders to show cause and five years of substituted counsel.

All That Glitters: “Had Michael paid the twenty million dollars demanded of him in August, rather than the following January…”

Court docket: Evan Chandler v. David Schwartz and June Chandler Schwartz, dismissed for lack of prosecution, 24 September 1998

Tom Sneddon’s January 2005 motion is the cleanest statement of what the 1993 raid actually produced, because it is the prosecution describing its own evidence: “three hard-cover books and two photographs seized from defendant’s bedroom at Neverland Ranch by the Los Angeles Police Department in August, 1993.” Not a cache. Not a collection. Three legally published books and two photographs, and the People had to file a motion twelve years later asking permission to show them to a jury at all, because on their own they prove nothing.

People v. Michael Joe Jackson, No. 1133603, filed 18 January 2005: request to admit seized erotic materials, describing three hard-cover books and two photographs taken in August 1993

The two titles at the centre of thirty years of insinuation are Boys Will Be Boys! (New York, Book Adventures, 1966) and The Boy: A Photographic Essay (New York, Book Horizons, 1964). Both are in the Library of Congress online catalogue with full records, personal-name headings and “Request this Item” buttons. They are legally published, legally held, publicly catalogued art books from the 1960s, a decade before Michael Jackson was a teenager.

Library of Congress Online Catalog: full records for “Boys will be boys!” (Book Adventures, 1966) and “The boy; a photographic essay” (Book Horizons, 1964)

The period advertisement is worth reading in full, because it is how these books were marketed to the American public: a Dickens epigraph, over 400 photographs, “a giant 9 x 12 size,” handsomely bound in full cloth, available at better bookstores including all Doubledays’ and Brentanos’, with a mail-in coupon for a free colour brochure. The Library Journal reviewed it. Booksellers still catalogue the companion volume with a frank description of its contents and call it “a controversial book.” Both things are true at once, and neither is evidence about the man who owned a copy.

Antiquarian bookseller’s description of the 1966 first printing: 256 pages, cloth over boards, “jacket text describes an innocent photo essay of the magic of boyhood, but this is clearly more than that. A controversial book.”

Dust jacket, Boys Will Be Boys! (Book Adventures, 1966)

The most useful test of whether a book is contraband is whether a retailer will sell it to you. This one is still listed, still shipping, and still collecting ordinary consumer complaints, a two-star review from July 2012 grumbling that the buyer wanted the book and got a CD, that the pictures are too small, and that the cover made him expect something else. That is the status of the material a district attorney spent two decades implying was proof of a crime.

Verified-purchase customer review, July 2012, of a still-available edition

If either book is evidence of anything, it is evidence about the people who produced it. “Georges St. Martin” was the pseudonym of Martin Swithinbank, a major contributor to the NAMBLA Bulletin, deported to England after a seven-and-a-half-to-fifteen-year sentence for sodomising young boys on Long Island; he was released on 19 December 1992. “Ronald C. Nelson” was the pseudonym of Ronald Drew, a New York teacher arrested and indicted for selling obscene photographs of children. Those are the men behind the books. Michael Jackson was a customer of a mainstream 1960s publisher, and he was never charged with anything relating to either volume.

The editors behind the pseudonyms: Martin Swithinbank (NAMBLA Bulletin contributor, convicted and deported) and Ronald Drew (indicted for selling obscene photographs of children)

The detective’s own testimony settles the question of whether these books were left out for children to see. The file cabinet had four drawers. The two books came from the third. Was the cabinet locked? “Yes, it was.” How did police open it? A maid brought the key over to the home, and asked which maid, the officer answers: “I believe it was Blanca Francia.” Every subsequent theory that the books were a grooming tool has to survive the fact that police needed a key from a housekeeper to reach them.

Trial testimony: four-drawer file cabinet, books seized from the third drawer, cabinet locked, key brought by the maid: “I believe it was Blanca Francia”

KNBC Channel 4, citing unidentified sources, reported that police had seized a nude photo of a young boy in a raid at the Jackson family compound in Encino. Jackson’s criminal attorney Howard Weitzman said police had not informed him of any seized photo, had “grave reservations” that a picture existed, and noted that even if one was found it had nothing to do with a man who had not lived at that house for six and a half years. In the same story, civil attorney Bertram Fields wrote to LAPD Chief Willie Williams alleging detectives had told frightened youngsters outrageous lies: “We have nude photos of you”, to push them into making accusations. That letter was filed with the court. The story ran anyway.

Associated Press, c. November 1993: “Report: Raid turned up photo of nude boy,” including Weitzman’s denial and Bertram Fields’ letter to the LAPD chief alleging coercion of witnesses

Eleven years later the rumour resurfaced, Celebrity Justice, citing “sources close to the prosecution,” claimed nude photographs of boys had been found at Neverland. Tom Mesereau got special permission from the judge to read a statement in open court: the information is false, the prosecution has confirmed it is false, and he demanded an immediate retraction from any organisation that ran it. “There were no nude photographs, no child pornography, found anywhere.” The photograph at the heart of the raid story was never produced in 1993, never produced in 2005, and was disowned by the people prosecuting him.

Statement of Michael Jackson’s attorney Thomas A. Mesereau, Jr., 21 September 2004: the photographs story is false and the prosecution has confirmed it false

This is the whole architecture of the story, in her own words, under questioning. Is she 100% sure the tape exists? “I am as sure as I can possibly be.” Has she seen it? “I have not seen it but one of my best sources on the Michael Jackson story has seen it.” The source she has never had a doubt about, ever. And then the tell: she knows the District Attorneys’ Office is looking for it because they are calling up reporters asking whether they have seen it, and she asks, “Do you know where we can get it?” A journalist who is certain a tape exists, has never seen it, and is asking other people to find it for her.

Diane Dimond, questioned about the alleged videotape: “I have not seen it but one of my best sources on the Michael Jackson story has seen it”

Dimond went on the KABC morning show Ken and Barkley on 9 January and previewed that evening’s Hard Copy segment, in which Victor Gutierrez would claim to have seen a videotape of Jackson having sex with a minor. It was also alleged on air that the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office had reopened its molestation investigation. Jackson filed a $100 million suit a week later. Neither claim was true, and the one person who could have made them true, the man who said he had watched the tape, is the one whose name nobody remembers.

Daily Variety on Jackson v. Dimond: the $100 million suit filed a week after the 9 January 1995 KABC appearance and Hard Copy segment

Tom Sneddon, the district attorney who pursued Jackson for a decade, and no friend of the defence, signed a declaration on 23 February 1997 setting out exactly what happened when law enforcement went looking for the tape. He contacted Deputy DA Lauren Weis in Los Angeles. An LA DA’s investigator was assigned to find it and procure it if possible. And then: “I was informed that we could not locate the video tape or definitively prove its existence or the acts that it purported to depict.” He also records that this effort did not begin until after the Hard Copy broadcast. The tape was aired first and searched for second.

Declaration of Thomas W. Sneddon, Jr., District Attorney, executed 23 February 1997: “we could not locate the video tape or definitively prove its existence”

Lauren Weis, Head Deputy of the Sexual Crimes and Child Abuse Division in 1993, declares the rest of it. In late December 1994 or early January 1995 she learned that Victor Gutierrez claimed to have seen a videotape. She called Sneddon to tell him Gutierrez was the man making the claim, Sneddon had heard of the supposed tape but did not know whose claim it was. Senior investigator Jack Gonterman interviewed Gutierrez on or about 5 January 1995. And then the sentence that ends the entire story: “To my knowledge, nothing further was done regarding the search for the videotape after Mr. Gonterman spoke with Victor Gutierrez and Kevin Smith.” They interviewed the source and stopped looking.

Declaration of Lauren Weis, Head Deputy, Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office: Gonterman interviewed Gutierrez on 5 January 1995 and nothing further was done

Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, addressing the two claims that had just been broadcast: “We have not reopened the investigation. We have heard about the alleged tape. We have not seen it, and we don’t have it.” Prosecutors, she added, were not involved in a search for such a video. Both halves of the Hard Copy story were denied by the office it was attributed to, on the record, at the time.

Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office: the investigation was not reopened and the office does not have the tape

A sworn declaration recounting what Gutierrez said in a July 1997 visit to the home of a man named Wells, made unannounced with his attorney. Gutierrez talked about his connections in the tabloid business and said he had sold many stories, some of which had been “B.S.” and simply made up, that money in the tabloid business was easy, even for false stories. Asked about the videotape, he said: “The judge told me to produce the tape and I couldn’t produce it.” Asked whether he had ever had or seen it, Gutierrez smiled and said, “Well, you know how that is. You know how these things are.” Wells understood him to be admitting, without saying it, that he had lied about the tape existing.

Sworn declaration recounting Victor Gutierrez’s July 1997 statements: he sold made-up stories, could not produce the tape, and smiled: “you know how these things are”

A Los Angeles jury found against Victor Gutierrez in Jackson’s slander suit and awarded $2.7 million. Jackson’s lawyer Zia Modabber afterwards: jurors told them they wanted not only to compensate Mr. Jackson and punish Gutierrez, but to send a message that they are tired of tabloids lying about celebrities for money. This is the only judicial finding anyone has ever obtained about the tape, and it is that the man who claimed to have watched it was lying.

Chicago Tribune: “Michael Jackson wins $2.7 million suit against writer” who claimed to have a videotape of the singer with a teenage boy

Jackson v. Dimond, case BC119778. The Sheriff of Los Angeles County certifies a levy on the judgment debtor’s interest in personal property: “any and all copies of books described as Michael Jackson Was My Lover, The Secret Diary of Jordan Chandler by Victor M. Gutierrez, including Spanis [sic] and English versions.” Served 3 December 1998 on a bankruptcy clerk. Gutierrez left the country rather than pay. The book that is still cited by people arguing the case against Michael Jackson is the same book a court seized as the proceeds of proven slander.

Return on attachment/execution, Jackson vs Dimond, case BC119778: levy on all copies of Gutierrez’s book, English and Spanish

Two documents that belong side by side. The first is correspondence describing how the notorious letter to NAMBLA was written by Victor Gutierrez and faxed from a mailbox company on Westwood Boulevard, and recounting an incident in which a housekeeper’s child came to the writer’s door, began undressing, and said Victor liked to touch him in his privates; the writer took the boy to his mother, who had not known. The second is the closing credit roll of Dateline NBC: Inside the Jackson Case, where “Victor Guiterrez” is listed as a consulting producer. Network news put the man a jury found had lied about the tape on its payroll as an expert.

Correspondence: the letter to NAMBLA was written by Victor Gutierrez and faxed to the writer, with an account of a child at Gutierrez’s property

Dateline NBC, “Inside the Jackson Case”, consulting producers Karen Jackovich and Victor Guiterrez

An FBI memorandum, subject MICHAEL JOE JACKSON, dated 27 December 1993. The writer received a call from LAPD’s Sexual Exploitation of Children unit, who had been contacted by someone writing a book about Michael Jackson concerning allegations of molestation. That author’s information: that the FBI had investigated Jackson in 1985 or 1986 for reportedly molesting two Mexican boys, that the investigating agent was Hispanic, that the SAC was Mormon, that the investigation was not pursued because Jackson was to receive an honour at the White House, and that it was covered up. There was no such investigation. This is what a book author’s unsourced claim looks like when it is passed to police, then to the Bureau, then filed.

FBI memorandum, 27 December 1993: a book author’s claim, relayed via LAPD, of a covered-up 1985–86 investigation, for which no record exists

The New York Post, 13 February 2005, on the eve of the trial she was about to cover nightly: Court TV’s primo pundit on anything Michael Jackson literally owns a piece of the performer, the black fedora he wore in Thriller, autographed inside, “I love you. Michael Jackson.” It hung on the wall behind her in her own on-camera setup, visible in her segments. A reporter covering a criminal defendant kept his signed hat as a trophy in the room she broadcast from.

New York Post, 13 February 2005: “Jackson’s shadow, a confidential report led to the story of Diane Dimond’s career”

The signed Thriller fedora on the wall behind Dimond during an on-camera interview

The same pre-trial press run. She frames herself as neutral: “I am just a messenger for all the bad facts that are coming out. Sorry folks. If I had anything good to report I’d report that too”, and then, unprompted, muses about the twenty years he faces: child molesters are not well received, he would have to be in isolation, no makeup, no wigs, no bleaching cream, just the orange jumpsuit, and she doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stand that. In the second piece she promises viewers a bombshell: his biggest nightmare is Debbie Rowe, who “knows who his little friends were.” Then: “Everybody thinks, ‘You hate Michael Jackson.’ No, I don’t. I love a good story and I love to finish a story. And this one ain’t finished.”

“I am just a messenger for all the bad facts…” and the orange-jumpsuit passage

New York Post: the promised bombshell, Debbie Rowe “knows who his little friends were”, and “this one ain’t finished”

Twenty-seven years covering this case, and asked about the detail the prosecution’s own filing turns on, she says she has never heard of it. The reply quotes Sneddon’s motion back to her: he had reviewed Jordan Chandler’s statements and the drawing made at Detective Ferrufino’s request, and the photographs revealed a mark on the right side of the defendant’s penis at about the same relative location as “the dark blemish” located by Chandler on his drawing. Her answer is that there was only one version and she doesn’t know where anyone is getting their facts. The follow-up question is the fair one: are you saying Tom Sneddon lied in his motion?

Diane Dimond on Twitter, 26 February 2020: “Dark blemish? Never heard that one before right now”, answered with Sneddon’s own motion

Confronted with the fact that Neverland’s train station was not built until years after the abuse James Safechuck described in it, her answer was that train stops existed at the time: “Think a 10–12 year old knows the difference between a stop and a ‘station’? come on!” The mockery it earned is the correct response: zoom and enhance on a wooden platform with no walls and no upstairs, and you can see the room where it supposedly happened. The claim required a building. She offered a bench.

Diane Dimond, 24 April 2019, on the Neverland train station, and the reply mocking the “zoom and enhance” defence of a roofed open platform

Court TV and Dimond denied any conflict of interest in her Jackson coverage. The photograph shows her at dinner with prosecutor Ron Zonen, prosecution witness and Arvizo family friend Louise Palanker, and Stacy Brown. Her own posts supply the rest of the worldview: Jackson “made himself a target after the Chandler settlement,” the Canadian kid proved it; and asked directly about the 1960s art books, “Yes. In my opinion the books were shown to young boys as part of a grooming process”, an opinion about two legally published books found locked in the third drawer of a cabinet, offered by a reporter who was never in the room.

Diane Dimond at dinner with prosecutor Ron Zonen, prosecution witness Louise Palanker and Stacy Brown

Diane Dimond: “MJ made himself a target after the Chandler settlement. The Canadian kid proved that.”

Diane Dimond, 13 July 2020: “In my opinion the books were shown to young boys as part of a grooming process.”

“Tabloid Junkie” was released in June 1995, six months after the Hard Copy broadcast and in the middle of the litigation. It is a record about the machinery in this dossier, the anonymous best source, the strange and weird fact file, the story that runs because it sells and gets corrected by nobody. He won the lawsuit, the tape was never produced, the DA’s office denied having it, the source was found liable, and the book was seized by a sheriff. None of that ever travelled as far as the original broadcast.

Michael Jackson, “Tabloid Junkie,” HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I, 1995: “In the news today, from the strange and weird fact file”

On 2 September 1993 Gloria Allred held a press conference at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel and announced that she now spoke for the boy, hired by his parents. She said he was cooperating with authorities and was eager for the district attorney to act: “My client wants . . . the truth to come out. He is ready, he is willing, he is able to testify.” The Times notes the date that matters. The conference came one day after Anthony Pellicano released the recording of the negotiation.

Los Angeles Times, 3 September 1993: “Allred Calls Jackson’s Accuser ‘Courageous’”, by Amy Wallace and Jim Newton

The same article sets out what Allred was answering. Jackson’s representatives had released a tape recorded on 17 August, the same day the boy made his allegation to authorities, of a telephone conversation between Pellicano and Barry K. Rothman, then the lawyer for the boy’s father. On it Rothman says the father has rejected Pellicano’s $350,000 movie development offer, an offer Pellicano says he made in order to set the father up on an extortion charge, and adds four words: “Make me a better offer.”

Los Angeles Times, 3 September 1993: the 17 August recording of Anthony Pellicano and Barry Rothman, and the rejected $350,000 development deal

The Times records the churn as it happened. Allred’s departure made her the latest in a revolving series of representatives for the boy and his family. The father had originally been represented by Barry K. Rothman, the man Jackson’s investigator said was part of an attempt to extort $20 million. By the time this was printed Rothman was gone and the father had a new lawyer. Neither was available for comment.

Los Angeles Times, 3 September 1993: “Allred’s abrupt departure from the case makes her the latest in a revolving series of representatives”

Allred lasted days. Ray Chandler explains the swap himself, on page 167 of All That Glitters: “By the conclusion of the meeting, June and Dave, like Evan before them, had no doubts about switching from Gloria Allred to Larry Feldman. The choice came down to either waging an all-out media campaign to pressure the DA to seek a Grand Jury indictment, or conducting subtle, behind-the-scenes negotiations toward a quick, quiet and highly profitable settlement.” The investigation was two weeks old. Feldman’s later account, in a 2007 Super Lawyers profile, is that the press had made the boy’s life unliveable and “You’ve got to end that.” Judith Regan’s account of what came next is harder to square with it. She says Ray Chandler approached her with a book proposal days after the January 1994 settlement, with Evan’s full authority, on the theory that publishing under Ray’s name skirted the confidentiality agreement. Her verdict on the family was that they were brazen opportunists, and on the proposal, that it was distasteful.

Larry Feldman, attorney profile: the civil litigator retained in Gloria Allred’s place

While the criminal investigation was live, Evan Chandler sued the boy’s mother and stepfather for invasion of privacy, violation of Penal Code section 632, intentional infliction of emotional distress and conspiracy, over the recorded conversations and their handover to Pellicano. The suit is further proof the tapes exist. June and Dave countersued. The docket runs to September 1998 and ends the way cases end when the plaintiff stops turning up: dismissed for lack of prosecution. The money fight behind it is described in Ray Chandler’s own book, where Dave Schwartz demands $4 million and Evan “sprang from his seat and slapped Dave in the face.” Mary Fischer had reported the same scene in GQ ten years earlier, with the line Ray leaves out. Schwartz: “This was all about extortion, anyway, at which point Evan stood up, walked over and started hitting Dave.”

Evan Chandler v. David Schwartz and June Chandler Schwartz, Los Angeles Superior Court: “Dismissed for Lack of Prosecution 09/24/1998”

Robert and Ronald Newt Jr. were child performers managed by Joseph Jackson, and in 1985 they spent two weeks as guests at the Jacksons’ Encino home. The National Enquirer knew that. In 1993 a reporter contacted their father and offered $200,000 for the boys to say Michael Jackson had been sexually inappropriate with them. Ron Newt has told the story on camera more than once: “He said, ‘Say he grabbed you on the butt. Say he grabbed you and touched you in any kind of way.’ He told us he took all these people down. Now he was going to take Michael down.” And the father’s version of the offer: “Just say it. And we’ll give you money.”

Chapter text: the National Enquirer’s $200,000 offer to Ronald Newt Sr. for his sons to say Jackson was sexually inappropriate

The reporter was Jim Mitteager. He met Robert Newt, then 18, and his father at the Marriott in San Francisco. Newt’s account of the coaching is specific: “He didn’t care! He was like, ‘Just say it and we’ll give you the money.’ And I was like, ‘He never touched me!’” The sell was fame. “You know, it’s going to be a huge scandal. You’ll probably have a lot of people not liking you. You’re going to be famous!” After Mitteager died his tape archive passed to private investigator Paul Barresi, which is how the contact is confirmed from a second direction.

Jim Mitteager, the National Enquirer reporter who met the Newts at a hotel in San Francisco

During the 2005 trial the Newts showed reporter Roger Friedman the paperwork: a contract from Mitteager, signed by editor David Perel. They had led the Enquirer along and written “sucker” across it. The reason this exhibit matters is that it is the paper record of an offer to pay for an allegation, held by the people who refused it, with an editor’s name on the signature line.

David Perel, the National Enquirer editor whose signature appeared on the contract the Newts showed to reporter Roger Friedman

Tim Whitehead, Jackson’s cousin, told a jury he had been offered $100,000 to say Michael was gay, and refused, and that he had never seen any behaviour that could be construed as child abuse. On the same Geraldo Rivera special, Alfonso Ribeiro said a tabloid had offered his father $100,000 to say anything negative about Jackson, and that his father refused. Add the Newts and the running total is $400,000, counting only 1993 and 1994, and counting only the people who said no.

Trial coverage: Tim Whitehead testified he had been offered $100,000 to say Michael Jackson was gay, and refused

This is how the allegation was sold while it was still an allegation. “Fatal attraction.” “Peter Pan or pervert?” A subhead promising that a superstar kissed and cuddled innocent kids then took them to bed. Read the words as a description of the crime being alleged and the register is wrong in a way that is not accidental. This is the language of a romance, printed about the supposed abuse of children, because that is what sold on a supermarket rack.

Globe, 14 September 1993: “Michael’s Fatal Attraction For Little Boys”, with the “Peter Pan or Pervert?” banner

The same issue put a photograph of Macaulay Culkin, a child who had accused nobody of anything, on the cover of a story about a sex scandal, under the words “bizarre obsession” and a promise of dramatic photos inside a “secret room”. Culkin has spent thirty years saying nothing happened. The cover was published anyway, and the boy on it had no say in it.

Globe cover, 14 September 1993: “Michael and Mac Shocker”, using a photograph of Macaulay Culkin, then a child

An arrest that never came, announced by an insider who is never named, alongside the claim that Jackson “romps” with two young boys at Elizabeth Taylor’s Swiss chalet and lavished $50,000 of gifts on them. The verb is doing the work. Nothing in the story is checkable, which is the point of building it out of anonymous aides.

Globe: “Aides warn Jackson: Get ready to be arrested!”, sourced to an unnamed insider

Three weeks before the case settled, a front page reported that the boy had rejected the money and would see Jackson in court. “We will see you in court.” The Chandlers’ own book describes the opposite decision being taken months earlier, in the meeting where they chose Larry Feldman precisely because quiet negotiation was the quick and highly profitable route. The paper printed the story anyway, and it is still quoted today as evidence the family wanted a trial.

Today (UK), 5 January 1994: “Stick Your Hush Money”, claiming the boy had rejected a settlement and would see Jackson in court

Brett Barnes flew from Australia to testify for the defence on the first day of the defence case. He told the court he had stayed with Jackson at least ten times. Asked whether he had ever been touched inappropriately, the answer was four words and a fifth sentence that has never changed since: “Never. I wouldn’t stand for it.” He was an adult, under oath, with nothing to gain, in the only forum where the question was ever put to him under penalty of perjury.

Trial coverage, Santa Barbara County Courthouse, 5 May 2005: Brett Barnes leaves court after the first day of defence testimony

Brett’s mother testified the next day. The family from Melbourne got to know Jackson after her son wrote him a letter. She let the boy travel because she believed it would be a learning experience, and she said why she was comfortable doing it: “I trusted him implicitly. He’s a very nice person. You just know when you can trust someone.” The significance is not the sentiment. It is that the mother the prosecution needed to have been deceived came to court voluntarily and said the opposite.

Trial coverage, 6 May 2005: Marie Elizabeth Barnes leaves the Santa Barbara County Courthouse with defence investigator Scott Ross

Karlee Barnes, Brett’s sister, testified that Jackson flew her and her family from Australia for the trial and that they were staying at Neverland while they were here. Note what is being described. Not a boy, singled out and isolated. A family, travelling as a family, and still willing to sleep at the ranch during the criminal trial about that ranch.

Trial coverage, 2005: Karlee Barnes testified that Jackson flew her and her family from Australia to testify, and that they were staying at Neverland

An exhibit entered at trial. Brett is at one end, Jackson beside him, and on the other side of the table are his sister, his mother and his father. This is the ordinary shape of the Barnes family’s time with Jackson, and it is the shape the surviving photographs keep showing. The story that required a child separated from his parents has to explain the pictures in which he is not.

Trial exhibit photograph: Brett Barnes and Michael Jackson at a table with Brett’s sister, mother and father

Asked when the first Neverland visit was, the answer is December 1991. Asked who came, the answer is the family: her husband and both children. Asked how long, about three weeks, and in those three weeks Jackson took all of them to Disneyland and to Las Vegas. Every detail the prosecution would later compress into “Brett Barnes travelled with Michael Jackson” is, in the mother’s own sworn account, a family holiday with the parents present.

Marie Barnes, sworn testimony: the first Neverland visit, December 1991, with the whole family, for about three weeks

This is the passage the accusation is built on, read in full. Did the boy sleep in Jackson’s room during the trip? Not by the fourth night, and she cannot say which night it was, and it may or may not have been in the first week. Did it happen at all? Yes. For an extended period? “On, no, not, not continuously, no. Just on-and-off basis,” on the nights her son fell asleep there rather than walk back out to the guest unit. The honest answer of a witness who is not shaping anything, and it is nothing like the version that gets quoted.

Marie Barnes, sworn testimony: the sleeping arrangement described as an on-and-off basis, not the entirety of the trip

The detail that collapses the innuendo. Brett’s mother found herself in the same situation: watching videos and talking late, rain outside, and Jackson said, “Well, why don’t you stay; stay here.” She stayed a while and then went back to her own room, because it was more comfortable. If staying in that room is evidence of abuse, the evidence includes the mother.

Chapter text and testimony: Marie Barnes describes staying in Jackson’s room herself after watching videos late, because it was raining

Deposition testimony on the sleeping arrangements that weekend: the guests, including Lily, stayed in the guest cottages

Counsel tries to establish that most of the time was spent at Neverland. Not quite, she says: a few days in Las Vegas, a few days at Disneyland, and a stay in Century City. At the Century City hotel, across the street from Jackson’s condominium, was the boy staying with Jackson? “No, he stayed with us.” The question was asked in the hope of a different answer and it was asked under oath.

Marie Barnes, sworn testimony: the hotel in Century City, across the street from Jackson’s condominium, where her son stayed with his parents

Las Vegas, the same pattern. They shared a villa with several rooms. Which room did the boy sleep in? With his sister. Four or five nights at the Disneyland Hotel on the same trip. Each of these nights is a night that gets folded into the total of time Brett Barnes supposedly spent alone with Michael Jackson, and each of them has a sworn answer attached saying he was with his family.

Marie Barnes, sworn testimony: in the shared Las Vegas villa her son slept in his sister’s room, and the Disneyland Hotel stay ran four or five nights

The trip began on 10 February 1992 at the invitation of the son of the president of Gabon and extended across several African countries, some 30,000 miles by the official count. It lasted nine days, crammed with dignitaries, schools and institutions for children with disabilities. It is a real trip and it belongs in the tally. It is also nine days, not a childhood, and it was a schedule of public engagements rather than a private retreat.

Chapter text: the February 1992 Africa trip, nine days and roughly 30,000 miles, beginning at the invitation of the president of Gabon’s son

Here is the document the prosecution’s framing does not survive. The 1992 leg of the Dangerous tour ran through Europe. The North American dates the story needs belong to the Bad tour, when Brett Barnes was five years old and living in Australia, and Jackson never toured US cities again after it. There was no tour of North America for a boy to be taken on.

Dangerous World Tour itinerary, summer 1992: Munich, Rotterdam, Rome, Monza, Cologne, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Werchter

Marie Lisbeth Barnes, deposition: “No, we were present, my family. My husband, my daughter and I were present when we toured South America”

Marie Lisbeth Barnes, deposition: the long-service leave that allowed the family to travel, and her answer that her son did not sleep in Jackson’s room for the entirety of the trip

Put to her as settled fact that there were tours with Jackson in Europe, South America and the United States, she corrects the third one outright: “Well, I didn’t actually tour with Mr. Jackson in the United States.” Pressed for the American places she was present, she can name Chicago, where the Jam video was shot, and Las Vegas, and she knows there was a New York visit. That is the whole of the American itinerary that had been described to the jury as a tour.

Marie Barnes, sworn testimony: correcting the premise that her son toured the United States with Jackson

Added up from the testimony rather than the summary: roughly ten days across Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Disneyland, where the boy stayed mostly with his parents or his sister. The remaining time at Neverland, where he stayed with Jackson on and off. Thirteen days in Africa and London. A New York visit of no more than a few days. A few days in Chicago during the Jam shoot, staying with Jackson at times and with his mother and sister the rest. Far less time, and far less of it alone, than the story requires.

Chapter text: the tally of Brett Barnes’s travel with Jackson, drawn from his mother’s sworn testimony

In the week before the US premiere, Barnes’s lawyer wrote to HBO asking that his client be removed from the documentary. The filmmakers refused. A man who has said for thirty years that nothing happened to him was kept in a film about things happening to children, over his written objection, by people who describe themselves as listening to survivors.

NME, 19 March 2019, by Sam Moore: “‘Leaving Neverland’ filmmakers refused to remove Brett Barnes from Michael Jackson documentary”

Contemporary press report: Nicole Richie, asked about the same sleepovers, said she slept in the same room and that nothing inappropriate ever occurred

The letter says exactly what the harm is. “By depicting Mr. Barnes as a child next to Mr. Jackson in a film devoted to allegations of sexual molestation against Mr. Jackson, the film leaves viewers with the false impression that Mr. Barnes was in fact molested by Mr. Jackson and that Mr. Barnes is simply in denial.” That is the mechanism this whole dossier is about. Put a real child’s face beside an allegation and the allegation borrows the child, whatever the grown man says.

Letter from Allen Grodsky, counsel for Brett Barnes, to HBO, obtained by Billboard, March 2019

Asked when he first went to Neverland, Robson answers 1989. Asked who he went with, he lists his mother, his sister, his father, his grandfather and his grandmother. Asked how long, about a week. This is his own answer, under oath, and it is the first thing the later account has to work around.

Wade Robson, deposition testimony: the first Neverland visit in 1989, made with his mother, sister, father and grandparents, lasting about a week

Deposition testimony on how the visit came about: the family called Norma Staikos, met Jackson at a recording studio, and were invited to stay for the weekend

Joy Robson gave sworn testimony in 1993, while the events were recent and while nobody had any reason to shade them. She describes a couple of days at the ranch, then the family going on to the Grand Canyon, then coming back. And the line that matters: “Never. My son has never been to the ranch without me up until this year.” The abuse described three decades later is placed years before the date her own testimony rules out.

Joy Robson, 1993 deposition: the family trip to the Grand Canyon, and “Never. My son has never been to the ranch without me up until this year”

The post by biographer Mike Smallcombe that published both depositions side by side, 2019

The 2016 deposition covers the same weekend and produces the same answer. Two weekends at Neverland on that trip, and in between, she and her children and her husband and her parents all went to the Grand Canyon. Asked whether her husband was present, yes. Her parents, both times, yes. Two depositions twenty-three years apart, no contradiction between them, and no window in either for a boy left alone.

Joy Robson, 2016 deposition: confirming again that the whole family, including Wade, went on the Grand Canyon trip

The petition’s own introduction is worth reading as a document rather than as a summary of one. The late filing is justified by a complete psychological collapse, said to have been triggered by the fulfilment of a prophecy that the claimant would one day direct films, and by a fear of what had happened to him happening to his own young son. It also dates the relationship to when the claimant was five years old. This is the legal architecture that had to be built because the ordinary route, reporting at the time, was closed by everything he had already said under oath.

Memorandum of points and authorities, Wade Robson’s petition to file a late claim against the Jackson estate

Three weeks after the documentary aired, the depositions surfaced. Biographer Mike Smallcombe set the 1993 testimony against the account in the film and the arithmetic did not work. The point is narrow and it is decisive: the claim is not being weighed against Jackson’s word. It is being weighed against the sworn word of the accuser’s own mother, given at the time, and given again in 2016.

Daily Mirror, 29 March 2019, by James Brinsford: “Wade Robson’s Michael Jackson sex abuse claims ‘disproved by his own mum’”

Robson’s own framing dates the beginning precisely. From seven years old, from day one, with grooming language attached and a threat about both their lives being over. Set that date against his mother’s testimony about the trips he took and who was on them, and against his own deposition answer about the first visit, and the account cannot be fitted into the calendar it requires.

Wade Robson, interviewed in 2019: “From seven years old, from day one of the abuse . . .”

Safechuck’s own declaration describes the 2005 approach. Jackson called asking him to testify, said the accusers were lying and just wanted money, and asked whether he would be there for him. Safechuck refused, and the reason he gives is the one that matters here: he did not want to be in the public eye, he wanted a normal life, and he did not want to be part of a trial in front of the whole world. He characterises the pressure as fear and intimidation. He also records that when he told his mother, in the same period, he was not specific, and nothing more happened. The declaration is the accuser’s own account of twenty years of not saying it.

James Safechuck, supplemental declaration: Jackson’s calls before the 2005 trial, the refusal to testify, and “I didn’t want to be a part of a trial in front of the whole world”

Safechuck’s own later filing records what he did in 1993. He testified for Jackson in the Chandler matter, and his position then was that the claims Jordan made were lies and the whole thing was complete extortion. His explanation is that he had been rehearsed and was intimidated and influenced. That explanation may be argued either way. What is not in dispute, because he swore to it himself, is that the man now describing abuse spent 1993 telling the world there had been none.

James Safechuck, declaration filed in support of a late claim against the estate: describing his 1993 testimony for Jackson at the Chandler proceedings

The declaration itself, paragraph 5: “In 1993, I had testified for the DECEDENT at the Jordan Chandler sexual abuse trial”

The estoppel argument is how the late claim is kept alive: the fear induced by Jackson is said to excuse the decades of denial, and to have persisted past the 2005 disclosure to his mother and past entering therapy in 2013. It is worth reading as what it is, an argument constructed to answer the problem that the accuser said the opposite for twenty years. It is not evidence of abuse. It is a theory about why there is no contemporaneous evidence of it.

Court filing in the Safechuck matter: the equitable estoppel argument, and Safechuck’s statement that the fear never goes away

Start with the law, because the conduct in this chapter is not a matter of taste. Section 201(c)(2) makes it a felony to give, offer or promise anything of value to any person for or because of testimony under oath, before any court, committee, agency or officer authorised to take testimony. Two years’ imprisonment. The question running through the Neverland 5 record is how much of the testimony had money attached to it before it was given.

Section 201(c)(2) of Title 18 of the United States Code: paying or offering to pay a witness for testimony is a felony

Under cross-examination the grievance comes out in the witness’s own words. They were upset at Neverland when other employees got raises and they did not. Security had been hired at around twelve dollars an hour while they were on nine. They complained and nothing happened. This is not proof of anything by itself. It is the answer to the question of why people who saw nothing for years began to remember things after they left.

Trial testimony, 2005: a former employee’s grievance over pay, security staff hired at $12 an hour against their $9

The same grievance in the witness’s own words: security hired at $12 an hour against their $9, a complaint to the lieutenant, and “nothing ever happened”

Thomas Mesereau takes the witness through the financial history and the answer arrives in a loop. A judgment against you for $2,600? I don’t recall. Money delivered to you by Sheriff Russ Birchim? I don’t recall, until the deposition is put in front of them, and then yes. When did you first tell your co-plaintiff about this molestation you say you witnessed? When we knew we were going to be subpoenaed to the grand jury. The memory is selective in one direction and the direction is money.

Trial testimony, 2005: cross-examination on a judgment against the witness, on money received from Sheriff Russ Birchim, and on when the alleged molestation was first reported

Cross-examination on the scope of the suit: Van Norman, Coleman, Johnson, Bray and Merritt were all sued alongside Jackson, and the claims were lost in front of a Santa Maria jury

Put directly, the answer is yes. He had asked Sergeant, now Commander, Birchim for money for his wife, and he recalls why: his wife’s sister-in-law had just died. A prosecution witness asking a law enforcement officer in the same investigation for money, and receiving it, is the exact conduct the bribery statute in the first exhibit describes.

Trial testimony, 2005: a former employee confirms asking Sergeant, later Commander, Birchim for money for his wife

In testimony at the 2005 trial, the maid Adrian McManus acknowledged that she knew nothing about Jackson’s sex life with Lisa Marie Presley, and that she had nevertheless signed contracts to sell details of “kinky sex” to tabloid magazines. Both halves of that sentence came out of the same witness in the same week. It is not an inference about her credibility. It is her account of her own conduct.

Tampa Bay Times trial coverage: Adrian McManus acknowledged she knew nothing about Jackson’s sex life but signed contracts to sell details of “kinky sex” to tabloid magazines

McManus explained the business model herself. The employees used a media broker to sell gossip because they needed the money to finance their multimillion-dollar wrongful-termination suit against Jackson. The suit was the reason for the stories, and the stories were the funding for the suit. They lost in court and were ordered to pay Jackson $1.4 million.

Tampa Bay Times trial coverage: employees used a “media broker” to sell gossip because they needed money to finance their wrongful-termination suit, and were ordered to pay Jackson $1.4 million

This is the substance of what she told the jury she saw. Macaulay Culkin, who was in the building and is not a hypothetical, has denied any such thing for thirty years, most recently and most emphatically under oath at the same trial. One of the two accounts is being sold and one of them is not.

Trial coverage: Adrian McManus testified that she saw Jackson kiss Macaulay Culkin on the cheek with his hand on Culkin’s bottom

Long after the jury rejected her suit and ordered her to pay, McManus was still giving world exclusives, this time to Australian 60 Minutes. “I feel that he was a manipulator,” she says, and that anybody who came in contact with him has been destroyed. The interview does not mention that a court found she defrauded three children, that she was assessed for stealing and selling an artwork she took from him, or that she admitted signing contracts to sell details of a sex life she knew nothing about.

Australian 60 Minutes, reporter Liam Bartlett: Adrian McManus in a “world exclusive” interview accusing Jackson of being a child abuser

The defence did not have to characterise this witness. The record did. She and her husband were found to have defrauded three children of more than $30,500. In a separate action she was assessed $30,000 for stealing a sketch of Elvis Presley drawn by Jackson and selling it to a tabloid. The item she stole from the man she accused, she sold to the industry that paid for accusations against him.

Billboard trial coverage: McManus and her husband found to have defrauded three children of more than $30,500, and assessed $30,000 for stealing a sketch of Elvis Presley by Jackson and selling it to a tabloid

The five plaintiffs appeared on a tabloid television show, had articles published in tabloid papers, and lied under oath in pretrial discovery. That last item is not an accusation from the defence. Ralph Chacon and Melanie Bagnall admitted it in their own earlier testimony at the same trial.

Contemporary newspaper report: counsel questioned the credibility of five plaintiffs who appeared on tabloid television and lied under oath in pretrial discovery, as Ralph Chacon and Melanie Bagnall admitted in earlier testimony

The appellate opinion sets out the discovery history. On 30 January 1996 Jackson’s side learned that Star had published a piece built on an interview with all five plaintiffs, with their photographs. They raised it in court the next day. The court ruled that the Star article and the plaintiffs’ media contacts were a permissible area of discovery. What followed was a year of resistance, culminating in sanctions.

Appellate opinion: on 30 January 1996 the respondents learned that Star magazine had published “Michael Jackson’s Bizarre Marriage”, based on an interview with the five appellants and featuring their pictures

Appellate opinion: the 24 May 1996 sanctions for lying about and failing to produce subpoenaed documents, and the 23 July 1996 sanctions for “obstructionist” tactics at the re-opened McManus deposition

Appellate opinion: the procedural history of both sanctions orders, and the footnote recording perjury by each of the Appellants and collusion by their lawyers

Appellate opinion: “an extraordinary amount of resistance” from the deponents, and all of the Appellants deposed claiming they could not recall any specifics

On 25 March 1996 the court ordered the plaintiffs’ counsel to comply with subpoenas covering their transactions with the news and entertainment media, hand delivered by the 29th. What arrived was obviously incomplete. They faxed two letters claiming everything in their possession had been produced. Appellant Ring filed a declaration under penalty of perjury saying the same. By 17 May 1996 the other side had concrete evidence that this was a lie, and filed the supplemental declaration proving it.

Appellate opinion: the 25 March 1996 order to comply, the incomplete production, and Appellant Ring’s declaration under penalty of perjury that all documents had been produced

Appellate opinion: the supplemental declaration disclosing withheld tabloid correspondence, including a sketch of Elvis Presley by Jackson that McManus had stolen

The deposition of tabloid media broker Gary Morgan is where the paper trail opens up. Morgan testified that McManus provided him with the original stolen Elvis Presley sketch that then appeared in a tabloid. He also testified that the 6 February 1996 Star article contained quotes attributed to McManus that he had not obtained, which left two possibilities for the reporter, Peter Burt: he spoke to her directly, or he made them up.

Appellate opinion: tabloid broker Gary Morgan testified that McManus gave him the stolen Elvis sketch, and that the 6 February 1996 Star article contained quotes he had not obtained

Trial testimony: speaking to “a book author named Gutierrez” before the move to Star, and the denial of splitting tabloid money with other former employees

Appellate opinion: McManus, Abdool, Bagnall and Chacon had extensive conversations with Gutierrez, whose Spanish-language book quoted the Appellants verbatim, with McManus quoted on the dust jacket

Appellate opinion, the 12 July 1996 hearing: “I’ve heard enough . . . this is clearly obstructionist,” and the $11,482 cost bill that followed

A Santa Barbara County jury heard the whole thing and rejected it. Jackson and five staff members were found not liable on a suit that had charged, among other things, that workers were forced out for cooperating with a child molestation investigation. The jury then awarded Jackson $60,000 on his countersuit. Every witness in this section had already been weighed by twelve people, under oath, with cross-examination, before any of them appeared on television.

Los Angeles Times, 19 March 1997, from the Associated Press: a Santa Barbara jury rejected the wrongful-termination suit and awarded Jackson $60,000 on his countersuit

Trial coverage: Chacon ordered to pay Jackson $25,000 for the theft, and more than $1 million in legal expenses he had not paid, having claimed bankruptcy

Ralph Chacon acknowledged under cross-examination that he and the other plaintiffs planned the lawsuit as early as May 1994, while they were all still on Jackson’s payroll, where they remained until August. The report also records the defence position: the plaintiffs were not forced out by harassment, they resented bodyguards who wielded authority over them. The harassment they described is dated too, and the date matters, it began after they had cooperated with the investigators.

The Lompoc Record, 13 November 1996, from the Associated Press: “Jackson’s former guard planned on lawsuit”

The figure is the story. A former employee acknowledged that he once asked half a million dollars to tell a tabloid what he claimed to have seen, and that he received no money in the end. Culkin has repeatedly denied that anything inappropriate happened and did not want to be part of the case. A claim with a price attached, and the only person it concerns saying it is not true.

Trial coverage: Neverland chef Phillip LeMarque acknowledged asking $500,000 to tell a tabloid he saw Jackson with a hand up Culkin’s shorts

McManus told the jury she wanted justice, from a wrongful-termination suit that had already backfired into a large judgment against the plaintiffs. Mesereau put the obvious question: was her idea of justice millions of bucks? Her answer was that a simple apology would have been enough for her, said by a witness who had signed contracts to sell what she knew, and who had sued for millions.

Trial coverage: Adrian McManus insisted she was not out to get Jackson’s money, even as she and four others sued him for millions

Trial coverage, continued: “But your idea of justice was millions of bucks?” asked Jackson attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr.

Twenty-two years after a jury rejected their suit, another exclusive. The former security guard, one of the five plaintiffs who lost and were ordered to pay Jackson’s costs, gave a television interview about what she says she saw at Neverland. The pattern the dossier documents does not end with the verdict; it simply waits for the next buyer.

Mamamia’s write-up of Melanie Bagnall’s exclusive interview with Sunday Night’s Matt Doran

The contemporaneous account of Bagnall on the stand sets out what the suit was actually about: sexual harassment claims against Jackson’s security chief and other employees, a formal complaint, a letter faxed to Bray in January 1994. The report also fixes the sequence the plaintiffs later blurred, the five said they were harassed and forced to leave their jobs after cooperating with the 1993 grand jury investigation.

Contemporary newspaper report by Judy Hirni: “Plaintiff gives teary testimony, former Michael Jackson employee details sexual harassment”

A fellow employee, called back to the stand, testified that Bagnall had told her what her grand jury appearance was worth to her: $50,000, to be paid by the man she was testifying about. Read next to the federal statute at the top of this dossier, the sum is not a detail of the civil case. It is the whole method, stated by the plaintiff to a colleague before any jury heard a word of it.

Contemporary trial report: Violet Silva returned to the stand and testified that Bagnall told her she wanted $50,000 from Jackson for appearing before the grand jury

The appellate record establishes that four of the five plaintiffs talked extensively to Gutierrez and that his book quoted them verbatim. This letter, written by Rodney Allen to Tia and Paula, describes the man on the other side of those conversations: the correspondence with NAMBLA sent from his own fax, the toys kept at the house on Beverly Glen, and the account of a housekeeper’s child who came to Allen’s door after Gutierrez had begun to undress him. The Neverland 5 chose him as their outlet.

Letter from Rodney Allen to Tia and Paula describing Victor Gutierrez: the NAMBLA letter faxed from his home, the apartment near Beverly Glen, and the child who came to the door undressed

The network credit, in its own typeface. The man whose self-published book was assembled out of paid and unpaid conversations with former employees was hired as a consulting producer on a network news programme about the case. The tabloid chain does not stop at the tabloids; it is the same sourcing, laundered through a broadcast credit.

Dateline NBC, “Inside the Jackson Case”: the closing credits list Victor Gutierrez as consulting producer

Blanca Francia sold her account to Hard Copy before she gave it to a jury. At the 2005 trial the figure came out: $20,000 for the interview, against an annual wage she described as less than $20,000 a year. Her friend Evangeline arranged the booking and took a cut. The order of events is the whole point. The story existed as a paid product before it existed as testimony.

Broadcast still: Blanca Francia’s paid Hard Copy interview, Paramount Television

This is the shower account as she gave it in 2005. She had to go through the bathroom, she was going to walk out to the garden, and on the way back she peeked. She says she saw him in the shower with Wade, and underwear on the floor, more than one pair. Read on its own it sounds like an eyewitness account. It is the version that survives until cross-examination.

Blanca Francia, trial testimony 2005: the shower account, the underwear on the floor, and “on my way back, I peek”

The same account under questioning: white briefs on the bathroom floor, water running, the radio playing, and “I hear two people, you know, playing”

The prosecution’s own examination establishes it. Hard Copy gave her $20,000. What was she going to say for $20,000? She thought it would be just talking about how it was working for him and how he was. How much was she making a year at the time? Less than $20,000. She was paid more for one interview than she earned in a year, by a programme she would later testify was not honest, and she never watched the broadcast.

Blanca Francia, trial testimony 2005, questioned by prosecutor Ron Zonen: the $20,000 Hard Copy payment set against her annual earnings

The exchange in full: “How much money were you making a year at that time?”: “Less than $20,000.”

Cross-examination: the meeting with Prosecutor Zonen and Terry Cannon, and the confirmation that the paid Hard Copy interview came before the deposition

Cross-examination: “the people from Hard Copy are not honest, right?”: “Yeah.”

Direct examination: what she understood the interview to be about, and the $20,000 Hard Copy represented it would pay her

Mesereau puts her own deposition to her. Under oath she had said all she could see was a shadow. Was that the truth? “A shadow, an image, yeah.” The glass was fogged. She heard two voices, giggling and laughing, but she could see only one person through the glass. Asked whether she had said in the deposition that she never saw anyone else in the shower but Mr. Jackson, she does not think she said it, until the transcript is offered. The eyewitness account is a silhouette and two voices.

Blanca Francia, cross-examination 2005: in the deposition she had said all she could see was a shadow through fogged glass, and only one person

The deposition read back in open court: “I just saw the shadow”, the foggy glass, and “You saw only one figure at that point?”: “Yes.”

Asked whether she threw out the Hard Copy contract before her January 1994 deposition, the answer is that she thinks she destroyed it. The document that would have shown what she was paid, and for what, was gone before the first time she was questioned under oath about it. She then denies having told that deposition she showed the contract to Larry Feldman.

Blanca Francia, cross-examination: “Yeah, I think I destroy, I destroyed it”, of the Hard Copy contract, before the January 1994 deposition

The deposition answer read into the record: “after the deposition here, the first time that I came, I got really upset about all this. And I got rid of my contract”

Cross-examination on the same point: she did not have the contract any more, and thought she had thrown it away

Asked what she had asked him to give her, she lists knickknacks and clothes and a couple of jackets from his tour. Asked whether he gave her cash, she does not remember. Approximately $5,000 in total? She does not remember. Five hundred or three hundred or two hundred at a time? She does not remember, until she is reminded that she said so in her own deposition with Feldman, at which point she probably did, yeah.

Blanca Francia, cross-examination: the things she asked Jackson for, and the cash gifts she could not recall receiving

Cross-examination on the cash: $200, $300 or $500 at a time, and the deposition estimate of about $5,000 in total

Two other former Neverland housekeepers, Francin Orosco and Shanda Lujan, went to CNN to say the stories were made up. “I think it’s ridiculous,” said Lujan, who had worked there almost a year. Both had already left Neverland before the allegations became public, neither was on the payroll, and neither was paid for saying it. The record also carries what Francia was asked about herself: possessiveness, habitual lateness, and going into a colleague’s purse.

Ian Halperin, Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson, pp. 71–72: Francin Orosco and Shanda Lujan discrediting Blanca Francia’s allegations to CNN

Halperin, continued: the former maids said their chores took them into Jackson’s room and they never saw anything suspicious, and neither woman was on the payroll or paid for the interview

Read back to her at trial from the deposition taken eleven years earlier, line by line, with timestamps. She saw what appeared to be a man. She saw only one figure. She turned around and went back out. And that was all she saw. Six times in that deposition she described one person. The two-people version arrived later, and it arrived after the money.

Blanca Francia’s January 1994 deposition, read back at the 2005 trial: one figure, and “that’s all you saw”

Direct examination on the deposition itself: she was asked about Wade Robson in the shower, and told the attorneys she had not seen him

The 2016 deposition, page 268, read back: at least six times under oath she had said she saw only one figure in the shower

Hard Copy was not the only buyer. In her 2005 testimony Francia admitted that in 1993 she also contemplated selling her story to the National Enquirer. On the Mitteager tapes, Enquirer editor David Perel explains the staffing: “the reason why Lydia Encinas is involved is because she speaks Spanish and she’s got a good relationship with Blanca.” The deal reportedly fell through because the police put her under wraps after the Hard Copy interview. The same editor’s name appears on the contract the Newt family refused.

Chapter text: the National Enquirer’s approach to Blanca Francia through reporter Lydia Encinas, and editor David Perel on the Mitteager tapes

Cross-examination: her friend Evangeline arranged the Hard Copy interview and was paid a share of the fee, and the National Enquirer and Los Angeles Times also made contact

The account of how the interview was obtained. She had been hiding at the hotel for five days, afraid of Bill Bray, Norma Staikos and Anthony Pellicano. She said Pellicano had contacted her after the Chandler allegations surfaced to declare, “I am your protector”, and offered her a job at his home helping his wife with their nine children, which she refused. The interview that followed was the one she was paid for.

Book extract: the interview arranged at a Hilton near Neverland on 9 December 1993, after five days in hiding

A small admission, put to her under oath and conceded without argument. She went into a colleague’s handbag to read her pay cheque. She told Jackson about it herself, and nothing happened to her. It is not the allegation in the case; it is the measure of the witness the case rested on.

Cross-examination: she admitted going into Gayle Goforth’s purse to see how much the head housekeeper was being paid

Cross-examination, continued: “I told Mr. Jackson about it”: and he did not get her into any trouble

Asked whether Jackson had given her a watch, she answered that she took it from his room. A promotional toy watch from Captain EO, worth about ten dollars, shown to him afterwards, “look what I got from his room.” The value is irrelevant. What the exchange establishes is a housekeeper who helped herself to items from the bedroom she would later describe to a paying television programme.

Cross-examination: the Captain EO toy watch taken from Jackson’s room, and the answer that she used to get things from his room

Asked whether he remembered speaking to the police in 1993, Barnes does not hedge. “Yeah. The pair of detective liars, yeah. Trying to intimidate and lie to a child. Unbelievable.” He was a child, there was no guardian present, and the two plainclothes officers told him they had nude photographs of him. There were no such photographs. This is the interview technique, described by the child it was used on, as an adult, under oath.

Brett Barnes, deposition testimony: “Yeah. The pair of detective liars, yeah. Trying to intimidate and lie to a child. Unbelievable.”

Deposition testimony: two detectives at the door, the claim that they had naked pictures of him, and “I sat there and told them they were liars”

Deposition testimony: what he told his mother, and that the officers were in plainclothes and were not nice to him

Deposition testimony: “They lied to me saying they had photographs that they didn’t have . . . this whole page is complete bullshit”

Deposition testimony: “I really hope they got fired”: and the reason, that they lied straight to a child’s face

The lie, stated plainly by the child it was told to. They said they had naked pictures of him. How does he know that was a lie? Because there are none. Did he answer their questions truthfully? Yes. Would he lie to the police? No, and then the line that closes it: as I just stated, the police were lying to me. Two detectives invented evidence to a minor with no guardian present, and the tactic produced nothing, because there was nothing to produce.

Brett Barnes, deposition testimony: “They tried to lie and say they had naked pictures of me . . . Because there are none. That’s how I know.”

Deposition testimony: “They were trying to intimidate a child,” and no memory of any photographs being taken

Deposition testimony: the security guard Leroy Thomas, the torn photograph of a boy with Asian features, and its introduction as Exhibit B

Deposition testimony: counsel’s objection that the photograph never existed to be destroyed, and the witness’s answer, “That’s fine. It wasn’t me.”

Deposition testimony: the objection that the questioning misstated what the witness had actually said about the photograph

The report puts the interview on 4 October 1993 at 5:45 in the evening, at the apartment where the boy lived with his mother, conducted by two named officers. The document exists. What the document does not record is a parent in the room, or a caution, or any basis for the photographs the officers said they had. Everything about the encounter is on paper except the part that would have made it lawful.

Deposition testimony: the police report logging the interview on 4 October 1993 at 5:45 p.m., at 5055 Coldwater Canyon #217, by officers Sicard and Ferrufino

In 1993 Detective Birchim and Sergeant Deborah Linden interviewed Corey Feldman. Feldman told them he had been a victim of molestation, and he named the man: Jon Grissom. He also said, of the person the detectives wanted, that nothing ever happened with Michael, and that Grissom was probably jealous of how much he respected Jackson. The tape sat unheard for twenty years. Santa Barbara later confirmed finding it.

Transcript of the 1993 police interview of Corey Feldman, aired on the Dr. Oz Show: Feldman names Jon Grissom as the man who molested him

Broadcast still: the Dr. Oz episode presenting the 1993 detective tapes

Transcript of the 1993 interview: “Jon Grissom was the guy who molested me”, and Feldman’s age at the time

Transcript: “Nothing ever happened with Michael”: and Detective Birchim’s reply, that Jackson would be molesting children because he loves them

Broadcast still of the Birchim quote as aired

Feldman says the detectives told him he had to file a formal report if he wanted his own abuse investigated, and he agreed. They never did. Asked whether they ever clarified that they were actually interested in Jon Grissom, he pauses and answers no: they weren’t interested in Jon Grissom. A named suspect, a willing complainant, and no report. The 1993 investigation was not short of leads. It was short of interest in any lead that was not Michael Jackson.

Corey Feldman on the Dr. Oz Show: the formal report he agreed to file, which the detectives never filed, and “They weren’t interested in Jon Grissom”

The department’s response: “Our records do not indicate that he named any suspects”

A young man has just named the person who molested him to two officers. The response on the tape is “If we run across him, we’ll let you know,” followed by laughter. Feldman’s report was never filed. The investigators did not ask whether he wanted to make a formal complaint to the LAPD in the jurisdiction where the abuse happened. They were not looking for a child molester. They were looking for one particular name, and he would not give it to them.

Transcript of the 1993 police interview of Corey Feldman: Sgt. Deborah Linden’s response to the name of his abuser

The programme’s framing of the recovered 1993 tapes, and Feldman on what vindication would mean

Transcript: Feldman states he is a victim of molestation; Detective Birchim and Sergeant Linden respond

Transcript: “He is not a sexual person! It doesn’t even come across a conversation with him!”

Transcript: Linden raises Jon Grissom’s jealousy, then laughs, “Did I hit a sore spot? Hahaha”

Broadcast still of the line as aired: “If we run across him, we’ll let you know. Ha-Ha-Ha”

The complaint was made in writing, at the time, by Bertram Fields to Chief Willie Williams, and reported by the Los Angeles Times: officers were telling frightened youngsters that they had nude photographs of them, in order to push them into making accusations. The deposition testimony elsewhere in this dossier is a child describing that tactic from the receiving end. This is the same tactic, described by counsel to the Chief of Police, three decades earlier.

Los Angeles Times, 17 November 1993, by Jim Newton: “Jackson’s Lawyers Attack LAPD Investigation”

The books that were seized in 1993 came out of a locked drawer in a four-drawer cabinet, and the officers could open it because a maid brought the key to the house. Asked which maid, the answer given under oath was Blanca Francia. The witness who sold her account to Hard Copy was also the person who handed the police the key.

Trial testimony on the 1993 search: four drawers, the books taken from the third, the cabinet locked, and the maid who brought the key

The story went out on a single anonymous sourcing, and Jackson’s attorneys addressed it directly: police had not informed them of any seized photo, and his client had not lived at the Encino house for several years. Bertram Fields called the leaked claims outrageous lies used to push youngsters into making accusations. The photograph never surfaced in any proceeding, because there was none to surface.

Associated Press report on the KNBC story: police were said to have seized a nude photograph of a boy at the Encino compound

Twelve years later, the prosecution listed what it wanted the 2005 jury to see. Alongside the material taken in the November 2003 search, the filing asks to admit three hard-cover books and two photographs seized from the bedroom by the LAPD in August 1993. That is the entire 1993 yield, itemised by the office that would have used anything better: adult books and two photographs, and no photograph of any child.

People v. Jackson, filed 18 January 2005: the prosecution’s request to admit seized erotic materials, including items taken by the LAPD in August 1993

Jason Francia met Jackson when he was about six or seven. He went to the Encino house perhaps ten, eleven, twelve times, usually because his mother was working and needed to bring him. By his own account he was in the bedroom twice. This is the baseline the 1993 and 1994 interviews were conducted against, and it is worth holding in mind while reading how those interviews were conducted.

Jason Francia, trial testimony 2005: meeting Jackson at six or seven, and going to the Encino house ten, eleven or twelve times

Trial testimony: he was in Jackson’s bedroom on two occasions, once with a group of children watching television

Asked whether he constantly told the 1993 interviewers that he did not remember Jackson doing anything improper, he says he does not remember now, but that listening back to the tapes, at first he was denying everything. He told them Jackson tickled him, he tickled back, they laughed, he went home. He says he told them he had blocked it out. What the record shows is a child saying no, repeatedly, and interviewers who did not accept it.

Jason Francia, trial testimony 2005: “in listening to the tapes, I remember when I was, at first I was denying everything”

Trial testimony: “in listening to the tapes, I remember when I was, at first I was denying everything”

Trial testimony: after telling the police “you guys are pushy”, he eventually said yes, and the explanation, “I was trying to figure out how to get out of there”

Trial testimony on his own words in the interview: “They made me come out with a lot more stuff I didn’t want to say. They kept pushing.”

Read the detective’s own words. Told by an eleven-year-old that he did not remember Jackson putting his hand anywhere that made him uncomfortable, Detective Vincent Neglia says he is not being obvious enough, and then supplies the allegation himself: maybe he put his hands someplace he shouldn’t have, maybe someplace that made you feel uncomfortable, and the reason you can’t remember is that you are choosing not to. He reframes the boy’s account of tickling as forced forgetting. This is not a witness interview. It is a script with a blank in it.

Transcript of the police interview of Jason Francia, 4 November 1993: Detective Vincent Neglia supplying the answer he wants from an eleven-year-old

The same interview, continued: Macaulay Culkin invoked, “He’s doing worse stuff”, “It’s much worse with him”: and Corey Feldman, “he’s going to die by the time he is 22”

This comes from a hostile source, which is what makes it useful. Dimond writes that after Blanca Francia spoke with police, they arranged for her and Jason to be admitted into a state-run therapy programme for molested children. Jason’s first police interview was 3 November 1993. The disclosure did not come until March 1994. The boy was placed in a programme for molested children months before he said he was one.

Diane Dimond’s book on Blanca Francia: after she spoke with police, they arranged for her and Jason to be admitted into a state-run therapy programme for molested children

Trial testimony: the counsellor Mike Craft, and Sneddon present at a meeting when the witness was thirteen

Asked whether he remembers being interviewed by Tom Sneddon and two district attorneys in 1994, and shown the document, the answer is that it does not refresh his memory. He remembers his counsellor Mike Craft being there, and a woman, because he thinks that was the first time he told a woman what happened. He does not remember Lauren Weis of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. The witness whose memory was reconstructed for him in 1993 cannot, eleven years later, remember the room it was reconstructed in.

Jason Francia, cross-examination 2005: unable to recall being interviewed by Tom Sneddon and two district attorneys in 1994

Trial testimony: the court intervenes, “Just answer”: and the witness questions counsel instead

Trial testimony on the October and November 2004 interviews, and the claim that the tickling lasted more than ten seconds

Trial testimony: asked about an hour-long interview on 19 November 2004, “it’s all kind of blending in together”

Trial testimony: the police report does not refresh his recollection, but he “could probably agree with it”

The two settlements contained no admission of wrongdoing by Jackson, and settling a civil suit has never prevented anyone from testifying in a criminal court. Both Francias did testify, at length, in 2005. The allegations were heard in open court with cross-examination, and the jury did not find them credible. That is the disposition, and it is the part the retellings leave out.

Chapter text: both Francia settlements contained no admission of wrongdoing, and both Blanca and Jason Francia testified at the 2005 trial

Trial testimony: no criminal charges were filed against Jackson after the 1993 interview, and none after the 1994 interview either

This is the allegation in his own words on the stand, and it is worth reading in full rather than in summary. It begins as tickling in front of the television, moves to the floor, and then, in the telling, moves to the crotch area, over the clothes. He was seven. What follows in the same testimony is the qualification the account never loses: he cannot completely remember it now.

Trial testimony: the account of tickling that moves from the back to “my little private region”, over the clothes

Trial testimony, continued: tickling “from behind, and in my genital area”, contact from the top of the clothes, and the shorts he says he always wore

The same passage, marked: “I can’t completely remember right now”

Trial testimony: he told the police he had a blackout, “I blocked it out. I didn’t blank it out.”

The contemporaneous record of where the second investigation ended. Two grand juries, two boys interviewed repeatedly, and no charges filed. The reporting is not a verdict of innocence and does not claim to be one; it is the documented fact that the accounts assembled through those interviews were not chargeable, in the judgement of the prosecutors who built them.

The New York Times, 22 September 1994, by Seth Mydans: “No Charges for Now Against Michael Jackson”

Asked whether anyone told him to review the transcript of his 1993 interview before taking the stand, he said yes, and named the prosecutor questioning him. The rest of the sequence follows in the same testimony: the December 2004 meeting with Zonen, his attorney Terry Cannon present without his knowing why, and his request that the interview not be tape-recorded.

Trial testimony: asked who told him to review the transcript before testifying, he names Prosecutor Zonen

Trial testimony, continued: “I’m really bad at names. Even to this day. I called you ‘Mark’ earlier.”

Trial testimony: asked whether Terry Cannon still represents him, “I don’t think so, no.”

Trial testimony: the December 2004 interview with Zonen, the first time he met the prosecutors, with Cannon present

Trial testimony on the 6 December 2004 interview: he did not know why his lawyer was there, or whether the advice he gave was legal advice

Trial testimony: asked whether he requested that the interview not be tape-recorded. “It does not, but I probably said that.”

Trial testimony: “Let me just try and get this straight. You don’t know why Mr. Cannon was there, correct?”: “Correct.”

Within the same cross-examination he gives both answers. He had told the prosecutors he never told his mother; put to him, he says he was mistaken, and that he had told her. Asked plainly a few lines later whether he ever told her, the answer is no, and that he does not think she knows to this day. The third page fixes the sequence: he is pretty sure he never told his mother before Hard Copy.

Trial testimony: having said he never told his mother he was molested, he is taken back to the answer, “I was mistaken”

Trial testimony, the same cross-examination: “Did you tell your mother, ever?”: “No. I don’t even think to this day she knows.”

Trial testimony: “I’m pretty sure that I never told my mom that he molested me before Hard Copy”

The assessment comes from one of the investigators who took the statements. Asked directly whether he believed the accuser, Rodriguez said they had a problem with the account: he did not know where his money came from, he did not want them speaking to his mother, and he acted as though he knew nothing about the case he was central to. The phrase the detective chose was loopholes.

Detective Rodriguez, interviewed by Nancy Grace: “we had a hard time believing him . . . he was leaving too many little loopholes in his statements”

The Associated Press report that built the rumour, sourced to unidentified leaks and to KNBC. Read it closely and it undermines itself: Jackson’s criminal attorney had not been informed of any seized photograph, Jackson had not lived at the Encino house for years, and the same story carries Bertram Fields’ 28 October letter to LAPD Chief Willie Williams alleging that detectives had told frightened children they held nude photographs of them in order to push them into making accusations. The photograph was never produced in 1993 or 1994.

The Associated Press, 10 November 1993: “Report: Raid turned up photo of nude boy”, sourced to unidentified leaks, with Weitzman’s denial and Fields’ coercion letter in the same story

Twelve years later the prosecution filed its motion to admit seized erotic materials, and the inventory names the provenance of everything it intends to use, down to the room. The two photographs attributed to the August 1993 LAPD search are now described as coming from the bedroom at Neverland Ranch, not the Encino family compound the 1993 wire story named. A piece of evidence that changes counties between tellings, and is entered into evidence in neither trial, is not evidence.

People v. Michael Joe Jackson, 18 January 2005: the prosecution’s motion to admit seized materials, listing “two photographs seized from defendant’s bedroom at Neverland Ranch by the Los Angeles Police Department in August, 1993”

The contemporaneous account of the week the tour ended. Jackson cancelled the remaining dates and said he would seek treatment for an addiction to painkillers, the medication he had been on since the 1984 Pepsi burn, following a further scalp operation in the spring of 1993. The report describes a man who has disappeared from public view, not a man evading a warrant, because no warrant existed.

Los Angeles Times, 14 November 1993: “Jackson Vanishes From Public View”, one day after cancelling the world tour to seek treatment for an addiction to painkillers

The single most effective answer to the “he cancelled to avoid arrest” claim is the itinerary itself. The remaining dates were Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, New Delhi, Singapore, Puerto Rico and Monterrey. The United States was never on the schedule, and Jackson did not tour America on the HIStory tour three years later either. The same report records that almost a third of the thirty stops had already been cancelled for illness and scheduling before any of this, a body already failing to reach the finish line.

Los Angeles Times, 13 November 1993: the remaining tour dates were Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, New Delhi, Singapore, Puerto Rico and Monterrey, with almost a third of the thirty stops already cancelled for illness and scheduling

The fallback version of the myth is that the next dates were in Puerto Rico, which is United States soil, so the arrest was imminent. Puerto Rico is a territory, but it holds primary jurisdiction on the island and has a single centralised police force of its own. Californian detectives could not simply land and take a man into custody, and in any case the predicate was missing: there was no arrest warrant in the Chandler matter in November 1993, and there never would be.

Reference: unlike the municipal, county and state forces common in the United States, Puerto Rico has a single, centralised police force, which includes a body of detectives

The Justice Manual sets out what an interstate or international pickup actually requires. Formal requests are lengthy; provisional arrest exists only for urgent cases involving fugitives, and even then an order of arrest must issue first. Jackson was not a fugitive and no warrant had been sought. The claim that he would have been seized on the tarmac describes a legal mechanism that does not exist.

U.S. Department of Justice, Justice Manual 9-15.230, Request for Provisional Arrest: formal extradition requests are lengthy, and provisional arrest applies to fugitives in urgent cases following an order of arrest

The cleanest disproof is what occurred when he actually returned. Jackson was back in the United States by mid-December 1993 and was not arrested at the airport, or that week, or that year. What did happen a few days later was the strip search, carried out under a search warrant, not an arrest warrant, and covered in its own dossier.

The New York Times, 14 December 1993, by Bernard Weinraub: “Michael Jackson Returns to Fight Sex Accusation”

The received version has Jackson settling to avoid a criminal trial. The record has him asking for the opposite sequence, the criminal matter first, the civil suit after, which is the ordinary order of things, and the Chandlers’ counsel pressing hard the other way. On 16 November 1993 Larry Feldman filed a Motion for Trial Preference, the special request that sets a civil trial within 120 days where the plaintiff is under fourteen. It was granted. Jackson’s request to wait was denied.

Los Angeles Times, 2 November 1993, by Jean Merl: Jackson seeks a delay in the civil suit so the criminal investigation can finish first, while the accuser’s lawyer presses for a trial by March

On 23 November 1993 Bertram Fields told reporters that a grand jury had convened in Santa Barbara and was about to take evidence, so a charging decision was coming very soon. Outside the courthouse he backpedalled: the district attorney had issued subpoenas for two witnesses and no grand jury had been sworn. Howard Weitzman said Fields had misspoken, and a hostile exchange with reporters followed. No indictment was ever returned. Fields resigned from the case on 3 December 1993, leaving Weitzman and Johnnie Cochran.

Variety: Fields tells the court a Santa Barbara grand jury has convened and a charging decision is imminent, then backpedals outside the courthouse. Weitzman says he “misspoke”

Before any individual memo, read the summary the FBI itself published with the release. It states the period, the agencies, the Bureau’s role, technical and investigative assistance to California authorities, and the outcome: he was acquitted of all such charges. It also records the other half of the file that is almost never mentioned: the Bureau investigated threats made against Jackson, and the person who made them went to prison.

FBI Records: The Vault, Michael Jackson file summary: investigated by California law enforcement between 1993–1994 and 2004–2005, the FBI provided technical and investigative assistance, and “He was acquitted of all such charges”

A letter arrives from London concerning United Kingdom press coverage of a British man who alleged an indecent telephone call in 1979. The airtel forwards it to Los Angeles for information only, records that the relevant authority intends to take no action, and states that Legat London is taking no further action. Handwritten across the face of the document is the notation that tells you everything about the referral’s weight: opened and closed.

FBI airtel, 2 September 1993, Legat London to SAC Los Angeles: background on U.K. press articles alleging an indecent telephone call in 1979, provided for information only, “Legat London is taking no further action in this matter”

The same airtel, enlarged: the file number 62D-LO-11779-1 and the handwritten “Open & Close” notation across the page

This is the coverage the London letter was about, and it is worth seeing in full because the story contains its own refutation. The account describes an autograph-hunting fan who pursued the singer at stage doors and hotel lobbies, a friendship conducted by telephone, and a final rejection four years later when the calls stopped being returned. The same page carries Mark Quindoy’s press appearance, the $283,000 back-pay claim, and the flat denials of Macaulay Culkin and Wade Robson, printed side by side without comment.

U.K. press coverage, August 1993: the Terry George account, printed alongside Mark Quindoy’s claims, the back-pay demand, and denials from Macaulay Culkin and Wade Robson

Attached to the London material is the provision that would have applied: section 43 of the Telecommunications Act 1984, improper use of a public telecommunication system. It is a summary offence, punishable by a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale. That is the legal ceiling on the allegation the British press ran as a front page, and it is why the Bureau’s file records no action taken.

Telecommunications Act 1984, section 43, attached to the FBI file: improper use of a public telecommunication system, an offence liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale

The later retellings quietly upgrade the story. Contemporary reporting on the same account notes that the contact ceased after the call and that the British press only caught wind of it in 1993, when a friend talked. The tabloid framing of the time was “phone sex” between two parties, not the non-consensual framing applied decades later. The claim did not change; the description of it did.

Later reporting on the same account: contact ceased after the call, the British press learned of it in 1993 after a friend talked, and lurid tabloid headlines described it as “phone sex” rather than a non-consensual act

The origin of the 1993 file. The LAPD’s Child Sexual Abuse Section telephoned on 7 September 1993 and requested assistance with its molestation investigation. The FBI did not initiate anything; it was asked in, under a Domestic Police Cooperation matter, and opened a file so the request could be assigned. This is the whole basis of the claim that the FBI “investigated Michael Jackson for decades.”

FBI memorandum to SAC Los Angeles, 16 September 1993: the LAPD Child Sexual Abuse Section requested assistance in its investigation, and the writer asks that the matter be opened and assigned

The LAPD’s federal theory was the Mann Act, transportation of a minor across state lines for immoral purposes. An Assistant United States Attorney was invited to the 10 September meeting at the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. Her answer, checked with her front office, was that the United States Attorney was not interested in prosecuting Jackson for a Mann Act violation, and she would not be attending. The FBI’s role was reduced to assisting local agencies.

FBI SAC notes, September 1993: the LAPD asks about a possible Mann Act violation; AUSA Patricia Donahue advises that the United States Attorney has decided against prosecuting Jackson and will not attend the District Attorney’s meeting

An author writing a book told the LAPD that the FBI had investigated allegations in 1985 or 1986 and buried them because Jackson was to receive a White House honour. The agent searched the indices, manual and automated, for any reference to the investigation described. The memo records the result in one line: no references were found. The rumour survives anyway, because the search that disproved it is in a file nobody reads.

FBI memorandum, 28 December 1993: a claim that a 1985–86 FBI investigation was covered up because Jackson was to receive a White House honour, “Writer searched indices, both manual and automated . . . No references were found”

After the November 2003 Neverland search, the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department asked the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team to process the seized machines. The request is mundane paperwork, and that is precisely its value: it establishes that the forensic examination of Jackson’s computers was done by federal specialists, under a search warrant, with the sheriff asking for examiners with particular backgrounds.

FBI CART Service Request 482, 15 January 2004: the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department requests assistance processing computers and related media in the Michael Jackson case, Apple Macintosh and Windows machines, under search warrant

The FD-340a log of what the examination generated: case notes across March 2004, the list of all specimens, a review of string search and keyword hits running eighteen pages, and further notes from February to April. It matters because it shows the work was real and documented. Something was searched for, thoroughly, over months.

FBI evidence log FD-340a, 13 April 2004, file 62D-LA-236081-CART: case notes from the examinations, the list of all specimens, and an eighteen-page review of string search and keyword hits

The inventory of what was examined, with the room each machine came from: laptops from the office, from the master bedroom, from a locked closet, from the upstairs video library bathroom, an iMac from the desk, a machine from a suitcase in a stairwell closet. Sixteen devices across three pages. Nobody can say the search was narrow or that the obvious places were missed.

FBI list of specimens, file 62D-LA-236081: sixteen Apple and Windows machines seized from Neverland, itemised by room, office, master bedroom, locked closet, upstairs video library bathroom, stairwell closet

This is the heart of the file and it needs no interpretation. The examiner works through the seized machines one specimen at a time and records the result of each string search in his own hand. QLA1_4. QLA1_5. QLA2_1. QLA2_2. QLA2_5. QLA2_6. QLA2_8. QLA2_9. The entry, page after page, is the same word. Sixteen computers from the bedroom, the office and the locked closet of a man on trial for crimes against children, examined by federal specialists with a warrant, and the finding is nothing.

FBI examiner’s notes, specimen QLA2_8: “STRING SEARCH / NOTHING” (page 8 of 18)

FBI examiner’s notes, specimen QLA2_1: “STRING SEARCH / NOTHING” (page 3 of 18)

FBI examiner’s notes, specimen QLA1_5: “STRING SEARCH / NOTHING” (page 2 of 18)

FBI examiner’s notes, specimen QLA2_9: “STRING SEARCH / NOTHING”, file 62D-LA-236081-CART-1A4 (page 1 of 18)

FBI examiner’s notes, specimen QLA2_2, the eMac from the master den floor area: “NOTHING” (page 10 of 18)

FBI examiner’s notes, specimen QLA2_6: “NOTHING NOTABLE” (page 9 of 18)

FBI examiner’s notes, specimen QLA2_5: “STRING SEARCHES / NOTHING” (page 11 of 18)

FBI examiner’s notes, specimen QLA1_4: “NOTHING” (page 12 of 18)

The computer examination file is closed two days before the verdict comes in, in the flattest language the Bureau has: the writer requests that the captioned investigation be closed, there are no outstanding leads or evidence items. No referral, no retained material, no unresolved thread. That is how the forensic examination of sixteen computers ended.

FBI closing communication, 13 June 2005, case 62D-LA-236081 (Closed): “The writer request that the captioned investigation be closed. There are no outstanding leads or evidence items.”

A VHS cassette labelled as a Michael Jackson “all boy” anthology was submitted to the FBI Laboratory by U.S. Customs. The examination found a poor-quality third or fourth generation recording, mistracking throughout, with the stop/start transitions produced during an earlier recording rather than the latest one. In plain terms: an unsourced dub of a dub, of unknown origin, with no chain of custody to anyone. It was returned to the submitting office and no case followed.

FBI Laboratory report, 24 January 1997, file 95A-HQ-1148159: examination of a VHS cassette labelled “Michael Jackson’s Neverland Favorites An All Boy Anthology” reveals a poor quality third or fourth generation recording with mistracking throughout

The same report, lower portion: the stop/start transitions were produced during a previous recording, and Q1 was returned to the submitting office on 25 November 1996

The bench notes behind that report, in the examiner’s hand. Smeared colours, poor resolution, noise bars from mistracking throughout. No signs of wear or abuse on the housing. Record events do not appear to have been made on this tape; it appears to be a straight-through recording of previous material, third or fourth generation. A tape that has been copied this many times can be attributed to nobody, which is why the item that launched a thousand claims produced no prosecution.

FBI Laboratory video analysis worksheet, 26 June 1996, lab number 51024020: poor quality video, smeared colours, noise bars from mistracking throughout, third or fourth generation, a straight-through recording of previous material

Mark Quindoy’s employment length is the load-bearing fact in everything he later claimed to have witnessed, and he gave the honest figure before there was anything to gain. Asked on air in February 1992 whether Jackson was in a relationship, he said he did not think so, and explained why he would know: being there six months. Every subsequent version of the Quindoy story requires him to have been there far longer.

Hard Copy, 5 February 1992: asked whether Jackson was in a relationship with a woman, Mark Quindoy answers “I don’t think so” and adds “Being there 6 months we would be in a position to know”

The 2005 prosecution motion sets the employment at 25 May 1989 to 30 August 1990, a year and three months, and, more importantly, ending more than three years before the Chandler allegations and in a period that does not overlap the events several of his claims describe. The prosecution needed the window wide. It still could not make it wide enough.

The prosecution’s 2005 #1108 motion: the Quindoys commenced employment on 25 May 1989 and terminated it on 30 August 1990

By the time the story reaches Diane Dimond’s book the period has become 1987 to 1991, four years, and is presented as Mark Quindoy’s own statement, made at the Manila press conference while holding out what he said was his personal diary. Set the four accounts side by side: six months from his own mouth, about a year in a civil complaint, fifteen months in the prosecution’s motion, four years in the book. The claim grows to fit whatever it is being used to prove.

Diane Dimond, 2005: the Quindoys are said to have worked for Jackson from 1987 to 1991, presented as Mark Quindoy’s own statement at the 1993 Manila press conference while holding what he said was his personal diary

The Quindoys were already giving broadcast interviews about their time at Neverland in July 1992, more than a year before Jordan Chandler’s name existed publicly. Whatever they told the world then was told without the 1993 allegations to shape it, and it was not what they said afterwards.

“Servants to the Stars”, aired 24 July 1992, featuring interviews with assistants and staff of Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and others, the Quindoys on television a year before the Chandler allegations

The tabloid journalist who bought the story first is the best witness against it. Allan Hall signed the Quindoys to a $25,000 contract for the full and frank account of their lives beside Michael Jackson, spent time with them in Los Angeles, and got nothing. Eccentricity, speakers in the hibiscus plants, dollar bills thrown like confetti, upbeat, high, and, in his own word, nothing anti. They did not have a bad word to say about the man. They were paid, and they still had nothing.

Allan Hall, the first journalist to interview the Quindoys, to Frontline: The Sun drew up a $25,000 contract for the full and frank account, and the result was upbeat and eccentric, “nothing anti . . . not one bad thing”

The motive is not inferred, it is stated. The Quindoys said they came forward after Jackson refused to pay $283,000 they claimed in back salary. Their representatives called it an extortion plot. Whatever else is true, the sequence is a money dispute first and allegations second, and the paper reported both in the same breath.

Los Angeles Times, 1993: Jackson’s representatives said the accusations stemmed from an extortion plot; the Quindoys said they came forward after Jackson refused to pay $283,000 in back salary they claim he owes them

California investigators travelled to the Philippines to take the Quindoys’ statements. The couple told reporters they had given details of child abuse they witnessed, and gave no details. Neither investigator would comment on the interviews. No charge, no testimony and no evidentiary use ever followed from that trip.

Los Angeles Times, 23 September 1993: police travel to the Philippines to interview two former housekeepers, who say they reported child abuse but give no details

The most damaging Quindoy headline, that he witnessed Jackson abuse at least three children, in London’s News of the World, was denied by Quindoy himself, to Reuters, in the same week. The claim that circulates to this day was disowned by the man it is attributed to, on the record, immediately.

The Washington Post, 1993: Mark Quindoy, 59, denied having told London’s News of the World that he witnessed Jackson abuse at least three children

The same reporting records the shape of the enterprise: two years’ employment ending in 1990, a signed confidentiality agreement with the singer, and a former estate manager now working on his memoirs, dangling the promise of the whole truth in the next few days. The truth was always coming in a few days, and always in a book.

The Washington Post, 1993: the Quindoys worked for Jackson for two years until 1990 and had signed a confidentiality agreement; the former estate manager “is now working on his memoirs” and “has dangled the promise of revealing ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’”

The FBI’s Jackson file contains a genuine criminal investigation, and Jackson is the target of it, not the subject. A man wrote to the Bureau, to the Daily News and to others, threatening to kill the President, naming John Gotti, and stating that he would commit mass murder at a Michael Jackson concert in an attempt to murder Jackson if his grievance was not addressed. He was imprisoned for it. This is what the Bureau actually investigated, and it is the part left out of every retelling of “the FBI files.”

Threat letter in the FBI file, 21 May 1992: the writer states he is going to Washington D.C. to threaten to kill the President, “P.S. I Dare you to call this a bluff”

Threat letter to the Daily News, 1992: “With Michael Jackson and John Gotti it’s about financial compensation . . . Michael I will personally attempt to kill, if he doesn’t pay me my money”

Threat letter, 18 May 1992, distribution “THE FBI / John Gotti”: “I’ll commit mass murder at a Michael Jackson concert if necessary, in an attempt to murder Michael”

In June 2004 the Santa Barbara District Attorney met the Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico and was told a federal case could still be pursued. Los Angeles opened an IINI Travelers/Enticement investigation and arranged to interview the person it was built around. This is the strongest federal interest in the entire file, and it is worth noting what it rests on, because the next document is the interview.

FBI communication, 23 September 2004, case 305B-LA-239204 (Pending): after the Santa Barbara District Attorney met the Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico, Los Angeles opened an IINI Travelers/Enticement investigation and the writer plans to interview the captioned individual in New York

The agents met him in New York on 28 September 2004. He told them he had no interest in testifying against Jackson, that he would legally fight any attempt to compel him, and that he believed he had done his part. The federal theory the prosecution had carried to Quantico collapsed in a single meeting, because the person at the centre of it declined to support it.

FBI communication, case 305B-LA-239204: at the 28 September 2004 meeting the individual advised the agents that he had no interest in testifying against Jackson and would legally fight any attempt to compel him

Ten weeks later the case is closed, in the same formula as the others: no outstanding leads or evidence items. The 2004 federal investigation was shut down before the Santa Barbara trial started, and nothing from it was ever presented to a jury.

FBI closing communication, 9 December 2004, case 305B-LA-239204 (Closed): “Writer requests that captioned matter be closed. There are no outstanding leads or evidence items.”

The most quietly devastating document in the release. It records that there is no indication that evidence of child pornography has been collected; that with the exception of duplicating video media, all offers of federal assistance in reviewing the Neverland search evidence were respectfully declined; that intelligence sought on threats of violence by “Jackson people” produced negative results; and that the threats actually received were against Sneddon, the sheriff, Jackson and Jackson’s attorney. The prosecution did not want federal eyes on its evidence.

FBI communication, case 300A-LA-236475, January 2004: the FBI met the Santa Barbara Sheriff and District Attorney to discuss assistance, “particularly if there is any child pornography involved. However, there is no indication . . .”

The same communication, continued: no indication that evidence of child pornography has been collected; all offers of assistance regarding review of the Neverland search evidence “have been respectfully declined”; intelligence on threats of violence by “Jackson people” returned negative; threats were received against Sneddon, the sheriff, Jackson and Jackson’s attorney

The last word in the file. Two weeks after the verdict, the Behavioral Analysis Unit closes its case for the plainest possible reason, written into the record by the Bureau itself: on 14 June 2005 Michael Jackson was acquitted of all charges brought against him by the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s Office, the case is complete, and no further assistance will be required. Thirteen years of federal attention end in an administrative closure.

FBI communication, 29 June 2005, case 252B-IR-6808 (Closed): “On June 14, 2005, the above captioned subject, Michael Jackson, was acquitted of all charges brought against him by the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s Office . . . it is requested that the above captioned case be administratively closed.”

Before anything else, be clear about what the warrant was for. It was not a fishing expedition. Police had a boy’s detailed account of Jackson’s body and they wanted to test it against the body itself. The Associated Press reported the warrant plainly: police had obtained permission to strip-search Michael Jackson to corroborate the allegations. That is the whole logic of the exercise, and it is why the result matters so much.

Associated Press, 16 November 1993: “Warrant allows a strip-search of Jackson”: police have a warrant to strip-search Jackson to corroborate a 13-year-old boy’s allegations he was molested

The same report narrows it further. The warrant existed to check the boy’s description of spots on Jackson’s genitals. And it notes the complication the prosecution would spend the next decade not resolving: in February of that year Jackson had publicly disclosed vitiligo, a condition that produces white patches and, crucially, does not hold still.

Associated Press, 16 November 1993: Los Angeles police obtained a warrant to check the boy’s description of spots on Jackson’s genitals; in February the singer revealed he had vitiligo, which can produce white patches

Here is the description itself, as reported from the sealed 1993 affidavit of Santa Barbara Sheriff’s deputy Deborah Linden. Jordan Chandler gave detectives what the reporting calls a roadmap: distinctive splotches on the buttocks and one on the penis, where the splotch fell when erect, the length of the pubic hair, and that Jackson was circumcised. Read that last detail and hold on to it. It is the one item in the description that cannot change with time, lighting, treatment or disease.

The Smoking Gun, “Case File Skids,” on the sealed 1993 affidavit of former Santa Barbara Sheriff’s deputy Deborah Linden, filed to secure court permission to photograph Jackson

The Smoking Gun, the description in full: distinctive “splotches” on the buttocks and one on the penis, “which is a light color similar to the color of his face,” where the splotch fell while erect, the length of the pubic hair, “and that he was circumcised”

The same passage enlarged: “The boy’s information was so precise, he even pinpointed where the splotch fell while Jackson’s penis was erect, the length of the performer’s pubic hair, and that he was circumcised”

Sergeant Gary Spiegel was present at the examination and swore a declaration describing what he saw. His account is specific about location: while Jackson complied with Dr. Strick’s request, Spiegel observed a dark spot on the lower left side. That is the contemporaneous observation, written by a law enforcement officer who was standing there.

Sgt. Gary Spiegel, 1993 declaration: “When Mr. Jackson complied with Dr. Strick’s request to lift his penis, I observed a dark spot on the lower left side of Mr. Jackson’s penis”

The boy told police Jackson was circumcised. On 25 June 2009 the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner examined the body and recorded the finding in the autopsy report, page five, in the ordinary course of an external examination: the penis appears uncircumcised. Vitiligo can spread, fade, respond to treatment and move. Circumcision status does not. This is the point at which the description fails outright, and it is a government document.

Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, autopsy report 2009-04415, JACKSON, MICHAEL, page 5: “The genitalia are those of an adult male. The penis appears uncircumcised.”

This was reported at the time, and then forgotten. A source close to the investigation told Reuters that the description the youth gave turned out to be at variance with the photographs taken by police, the pictures simply didn’t match the boy’s description. The same report carries two other facts worth keeping: settlement of the civil suit did not end the criminal investigation, and when police questioned the other boys the accuser had named, they denied being molested.

Reuters, January 1994: “Photos may help Jackson”: a source says pictures don’t match a description of the singer’s genitalia, which may mean no criminal charges; “The pictures simply didn’t match the boy’s description”

At the hearing on Jackson’s motion to quash, Sneddon defended the warrant in the strongest terms available to him and described the alleged acts in graphic detail, which drew an angry objection from Johnnie Cochran. Note what Cochran says in response, because it is the argument the record ultimately vindicates: if he has the evidence, let him file it. He doesn’t have a case.

Associated Press, by Jeff Wilson: “Pop star asks court for photos”: Sneddon tells Judge James Slater the warrant “stands on itself as a good lawful warrant”; Cochran responds, “If he has the evidence, let him file it. He doesn’t have a case”

Jackson’s lawyers were entitled to the affidavit justifying the search. What they received was an edited copy, a document, as Steve Cochran put it, with a lot of stuff crossed out, conspicuously absent the informant statements critical to the finding of probable cause. The photographs themselves sat in a safe deposit box at a local bank, viewable only by top law enforcement officers and only with the judge’s approval.

Associated Press: “Jackson’s lawyers push to see justification for strip search”: the defence receives an edited 14-page affidavit; Sneddon tells the court the photographs are secured in a safe deposit box at a local bank

The same report enlarged: only top law enforcement officers have access to the box, and permission to view the photographs must first be approved by Judge Slater

This is the detail that tells you how the photographs were really regarded. Larry Feldman, the boy’s own attorney, the man with every incentive to use them, asked Jackson’s lawyers and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office for copies, and both refused. He was reduced to filing a multiple-choice motion: hand over the photographs, submit to a second search, or let the court bar the photographs from the civil trial entirely. Evidence that corroborates your client does not need to be pried loose like this.

Los Angeles Times: Feldman files a “multiple choice” motion, Jackson may provide copies of the police photographs, submit to a second search, or the court may bar the photographs from the civil trial as evidence; he asked Jackson’s attorneys and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office for copies, “but they refused”

By the time the grand jury called Katherine Jackson, investigators had shifted from testing the description to explaining it away. The Times reports them attempting to determine whether Jackson had done anything to alter his appearance so that it did not match the description. That is the posture of a prosecution that already knows the comparison went badly.

Los Angeles Times, by Jim Newton: “Grand jury calls Jackson’s mom to testify at hearing”: Howard Weitzman, “It’s just done in real poor taste. It borders on harassment”

The same report enlarged: “Investigators have been attempting to determine whether Jackson has done anything to alter his appearance so that it does not match a description provided to them by the alleged victim”

The prosecution’s fallback was that vitiligo explains any mismatch. It is worth understanding what the clinical literature actually says, because the argument is double-edged. Vitiligo patches are measured sequentially precisely because they move: baseline photographs, dermoscopy and tracings, repeated at six months and superimposed on the originals.

Peer-reviewed dermoscopic study of vitiligo: sixty patients with 200 patches examined sequentially over six months, with baseline lesional photographs, dermoscopy and tracing repeated and superimposed

The findings are unambiguous: pigment network changes were statistically significant for both responsive and progressive patches, with satellite lesions, ill-defined borders and trichrome patterns marking active disease. A mark observed in December 1993 is not reliable evidence of a mark described months earlier. Which means the vitiligo defence does not rescue the identification, it destroys its evidentiary value in both directions.

The same study, results: “Pigment network changes were statistically significant for both responsive and progressive patches”; satellite lesions and micro-Koebner’s phenomena suggestive of progressive disease

They understood the problem immediately, and said so on the record. In a transcribed conversation reproduced in Evan Chandler’s own brother’s book, Larry Feldman relays that vitiligo is capable of changing anywhere you look, so that anything Jordie says is irrelevant. The response is the part to read twice: because if he’s right, he’s right. And if he’s wrong, we’ve got an explanation. Yeah, it’s a no-loser for us. That is the accuser’s side describing their own identification as unfalsifiable, a claim that wins whether or not it is true.

All That Glitters, page 202: “Lauren Weis told me today that this disease Michael says he’s got, vitiligo, that it’s capable of changing anywhere you look, so that anything Jordie says is irrelevant… if he’s right, he’s right. And if he’s wrong, we’ve got an explanation!… Yeah, it’s a no-loser for us.”

The investigation needed other children to say yes. This is one of them describing, under oath, how detectives came to his door and told him they had pictures of him naked, a claim he says was false, put to a minor with no guardian and no legal representation present. It is the method that produced the denials Reuters reported, and it belongs in the record alongside the photographs.

Wade Robson, deposition testimony, on the 1993 police interview: “The pair of detective liars, yeah. Trying to intimidate and lie to a child. Unbelievable.”: two detectives told him they had pictures of him naked, “all with a minor without a guardian, without any sort of legal representation”

Start with what he actually requested. Jackson sought a delay in the civil suit on the ground that the criminal probe should be finished first, while the boy’s attorney pressed for a trial by March. The dispute that decided everything was not about guilt. It was about running order.

Los Angeles Times, 2 November 1993, by Jean Merl: “Jackson Requests 6-Year Delay in Child Molestation Lawsuit, Courts: His attorney says criminal probe should be finished first. Accuser’s lawyer presses for a trial by March”

Jackson’s side stated the principle publicly and without hedging: he was legally entitled to have the criminal aspects of the case resolved before the civil case proceeded. This is the position of a defendant who wants to testify, not one who wants to disappear.

Los Angeles Times: Anthony Pellicano, Jackson’s director of security, says “the singer is legally entitled to have the criminal aspects of the case resolved before the civil case proceeds”: “The criminal charges have to be wrapped up first”

For readers who have never had to think about this: the same conduct can generate a criminal prosecution brought by the state and a civil suit for money brought by the complainant. Running both at once does not raise double jeopardy, because only one of them is criminal. The two cases are separate machines with separate standards of proof.

Legal reference, “If I Face Criminal Charges and a Civil Lawsuit, Can I Postpone Either Case?”: many criminal acts can be the basis of civil lawsuits for damages; dual cases don’t invoke double jeopardy because only one is criminal

Here is the bind Rothman’s ruling created. When criminal and civil charges are simultaneously pending, the civil plaintiff will want the defendant’s deposition, and because the criminal case is unresolved, the defendant’s lawyer will advise him to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination. Jackson was ordered to stand in a civil courtroom and answer, under oath, questions that a still-open criminal investigation could feed on.

Legal reference: “When criminal and civil charges are simultaneously pending, litigation can get thorny… because the criminal case is unresolved, the defendant’s lawyer will likely advise him to remain silent in order to avoid self-incrimination”

The standard remedy is exactly what Jackson asked for. Where civil and criminal cases share the same facts, judges have discretion to stay the civil matter, and the criminal case almost always takes priority. Judges frequently opt for the stay because resolving the criminal litigation avoids precisely this problem. The request was routine. The refusal was not.

Legal reference, “Pressing Pause”: where civil and criminal cases share the same underlying facts, judges typically have discretion to grant a stay, “The criminal case almost always takes priority” (State ex rel. Stovall v. Meneley, 271 Kan. 355 (2001))

Rothman denied the stay and set trial for 21 March 1994, putting the boy’s interest in a prompt hearing ahead of Jackson’s concern that he might have to withhold testimony to avoid incriminating himself. The judge acknowledged the exact dilemma he was creating and imposed it anyway.

Superior Court Judge David M. Rothman refuses to postpone the civil trial, “putting the boy’s interests ahead of Jackson’s concerns that he might have to withhold testimony in the civil trial to avoid incriminating himself”; trial set for March 21

The mechanism was California’s 120-day speedy trial rule, which requires a trial date within 120 days where the alleged victim is under fourteen. In the judge’s view that superseded Jackson’s request to clear his name in the criminal investigation first. Bert Fields stated that Michael wanted to testify, and the book notes, drily, that this would of course have hurt the plaintiff’s case in the civil suit.

All That Glitters: Rothman denies the request to postpone the civil suit and sets 21 March 1994 under California’s 120-day speedy trial rule; “Bert Fields stated that Michael wanted to testify and clear his name in the criminal proceedings before the civil trial”

The same passage enlarged: the 120 day rule requires a trial date within 120 days when the alleged victim is under fourteen, and in the judge’s view superseded Jackson’s request to delay

You do not have to infer the strategy. Feldman later described the contested decision to set trial in 120 days as a devastating tactical loss for the other side, and said it was significantly powering efforts to resolve the case. The schedule was not incidental to the settlement. It was the instrument that produced it.

Larry Feldman: “the decision that was hotly contested, in terms of having a trial in that case, set in 120 days was a devastating tactical loss for our team, and it was significantly powering efforts in trying to resolve the case”

The pressure was not only about timing. A Superior Court judge cleared the way for the boy’s lawyers to share information with prosecutors, over aggressive objection from Jackson’s attorneys. Whatever was produced in civil discovery could flow directly to the people deciding whether to charge him.

Los Angeles Times, 18 December 1993, by Jim Newton: “Judge Gives Prosecutors Access to Information in Jackson Civil Suit”: a move that Jackson’s attorneys aggressively contested

Because the “if he were innocent he would have talked” argument still circulates: invoking the Fifth Amendment is a constitutional right protecting against self-incrimination, and pleading the Fifth should not be seen as an admission of guilt. It exists to stop statements being misinterpreted or twisted by law enforcement or the prosecution.

Legal reference: “Does pleading the Fifth make me look guilty? No, invoking the Fifth Amendment is a constitutional right that protects you from self-incrimination. Pleading the Fifth should not be seen as an admission of guilt.”

The asymmetry is the point. Fifth Amendment protection applies in civil cases, but invoking it there carries different consequences, including negative inferences drawn against you by the jury. So the choice Rothman handed Jackson was: answer and risk the criminal case, or stay silent and lose the civil one. Settling was the third door.

Legal reference: “Can I plead the Fifth in a civil case? Yes… However, invoking the Fifth in a civil case can have different consequences, such as negative inferences being drawn against you by the jury”

The papers were signed by Jackson and his then-attorneys Johnnie Cochran and Howard Weitzman in January 1994, providing for a trust fund for the boy and a lump sum. It is a civil resolution of a civil claim for money, subject to a strict confidentiality agreement negotiated by the parties. It contains no admission, and no finding of fact was ever made by any court.

Reporting on the 1994 settlement papers: signed by Jackson and his then-attorneys Johnnie Cochran and Howard Weitzman in January 1994, providing a $15.3 million trust fund for the boy plus a seven-figure lump sum; spokeswoman Raymone Bain on the strict confidentiality agreement

This is the fact that dismantles the whole “he bought his way out” story. Prosecutors in Los Angeles said settlement of the civil suit did not end their investigation, and lawyers for the boy confirmed there was no provision in the settlement barring him from testifying in a possible criminal case. The money bought a civil release. It did not buy silence, and the state remained free to charge.

Reuters, January 1994: “Prosecutors in Los Angeles said settlement of the civil suit did not end their investigation and lawyers for the boy said there was no provision in the settlement to bar him from testifying in a possible criminal case”

And the sum did not emerge from a negotiation about harm. Evan Chandler’s brother records that twenty million dollars had been demanded of Jackson in August, before any lawsuit, before any criminal referral, before any photographs. The figure preceded the process that was supposed to determine it.

All That Glitters: “Had Michael paid the twenty million dollars demanded of him in August, rather than the following January, he might have spent the next ten years as the world’s most famous entertainer, instead of the world’s most infamous child molester.”

If the settlement had ended the matter, this statement could not exist. In April 1994 District Attorney Gil Garcetti denied reports that the investigation was concluded or that a decision not to file charges had been reached: the matter is still under investigation. Prosecutors had the boy, the photographs and no settlement-based obstacle to charging. They kept looking.

Los Angeles Times / Variety, 12 April 1994, by Adam Sandler: “D.A. Garcetti denies Jackson probe ended”: “The matter is still under investigation,” Garcetti said. “I’m reasonably confident that the investigation will be completed by the end of the month.”

Eight months after the settlement, prosecutors announced they had closed the child molestation investigation. They stressed they were prepared to reopen it if any child would testify. No one did, and no charges were ever filed. That is where the 1993 case ends: not with a payment that stopped an investigation, but with an investigation that ran to its own conclusion and found nothing it could bring to a courtroom.

Los Angeles Times, 22 September 1994, by Jim Newton: “Jackson Not Charged but Not Absolved”: prosecutors announce they have closed their child molestation investigation, stressing that authorities are prepared to reopen the case if any of the children decide they are willing to testify

Jim Moret’s Showbiz Today segment on the grand jury disbanding. The full transcript was posted by MJEOL in September 2004, a few months before the 2005 trial began.

CNN Showbiz Today transcript: the grand jury investigating Michael Jackson disbands (1 of 2)

CNN Showbiz Today transcript: the grand jury investigating Michael Jackson disbands (2 of 2)

Hard Copy said the case would be written off as a “D.A. reject”. Variety reported that Jordan was still meeting prosecutors after the settlement, that prosecutors privately said their case would be stronger if the boy testified, and that none of the witnesses had offered anything that directly implicated Jackson.

Variety, 1994: Hard Copy reports the case may be a “D.A. reject”

Variety, 1994: Jordan scheduled to meet prosecutors again that week

Variety, 1994: “their case would be stronger if the boy would agree to testify”

Variety, April 1994: no witness directly implicated Jackson

Prosecutors said they had found a nude photo of a minor boy, and said it again in a motion a decade later. A photo like that would have been child pornography and a crime in itself, and in 1993–94 nobody was charged with possessing one.

Prosecution motion repeating the claim of a nude photograph found in 1993 (1 of 2)

Prosecution motion repeating the claim of a nude photograph found in 1993 (2 of 2)

The Los Angeles Times on the grand juries disbanding in late June or early July 1994, again with no indictment. The Los Angeles panel sat for months longer than Santa Barbara’s.

Los Angeles Times, July 1994: the grand juries disband without an indictment (1 of 2)

Los Angeles Times, July 1994: the grand juries disband without an indictment (2 of 2)

At the 2005 trial the first of the “two victims” turned out to be Brett Barnes, who has defended Jackson for more than thirty years. Investigators never spoke to him. His mother says Sneddon flew to Australia and was “heavy-handed, demanding, and determined to prosecute”. Lauren Weis confirms they never spoke with Brett. Sneddon’s own December 2004 motion concedes that Ralph Chacon, the proven liar and thief behind the claim, may have confused Brett with Jordan.

2005 trial: Brett Barnes identified as “one of two victims”

Declaration of Lizette Barnes: the investigation misrepresented

Lizette Barnes: Sneddon was “heavy-handed, demanding, and determined to prosecute Jackson”

Filing: the defense report contradicted by two witnesses

Declaration of Lauren Weis: they never spoke with Brett

Sneddon motion, December 2004: Chacon may have confused Jordan and Brett

They first met in the 1970s. In November 1992 they met again at their mutual friend Brett Livingston Strong’s house, to talk about Presley’s music career. This was nine months before the Chandler allegation.

Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson, November 1992

With Brett Livingston Strong and his son, November 1992

Seen together in Atlanta around May 1993 at a children’s event connected with Jimmy Carter, again before the allegation.

Group photograph at the Jimmy Carter children’s event, Atlanta, c. May 1993

Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson, Atlanta, c. May 1993

Both of them always said it was a real marriage. In her posthumous memoir she wrote that on their honeymoon she was “so happy”, and that she had never been that happy again.

Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson, hand in hand

Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson in France

Dewayne Wickham’s report on what Evan asked for: $60 million, plus the chance to release his own music. His brother’s 2004 book gives a very different reason for why the family had wanted money in the first place.

Gannett News: the $60 million demand

Ray Chandler, All That Glitters (2004): the family’s stated reasons

Two years after his father’s suit, Jordan, now eighteen, files a nearly identical lawsuit with similar accusations and wording, using the same legal team.

Jordan Chandler’s lawsuit, filed through his father’s counsel (1 of 2)

Jordan Chandler’s lawsuit, filed through his father’s counsel (2 of 2)

Jordan’s claim was filed in Los Angeles County, not Santa Barbara like his father’s. He had signed the settlement as a minor, and in California a minor can void a contract within a reasonable time of turning eighteen. Jackson’s side argued that it was the Chandlers who had broken the non-disclosure agreement.

Court document from the consolidated Chandler cases (1 of 3)

Court document from the consolidated Chandler cases (2 of 3)

Court document from the consolidated Chandler cases (3 of 3)

Jordan acknowledges that the Chandlers were in contact with Victor Gutierrez for his book. Gutierrez had paid four of the five former employees $200 each.

Jordan Chandler acknowledges contact with Victor Gutierrez

News archive: Gutierrez paid former employees $200 each

Court documents archived by The Michael Jackson Allegations. Lisa Marie Presley’s lawyers put the responsibility on Evan and his counsel.

Court documents from Evan Chandler’s second lawsuit (1 of 2)

Court documents from Evan Chandler’s second lawsuit (2 of 2)

The first photograph is Christmas 2008, the last Christmas the children spent with their father. Carrie Fisher was with them. The rest show him with each of them when they were small. Everyone who saw them together said the same thing: the children were the centre of his life.

Christmas 2008, his last with his children: Michael Jackson with Carrie Fisher holding Blanket, and Paris and Prince

Michael Jackson with Prince as a baby

Michael Jackson with Paris

Michael Jackson with Blanket