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  • 2003-03-09 12:12:14
    Thank you to Linda Sharp for letting us post her articles here. These were originally published at her site: www.lindasharp.com

    "The response [to this article] has been truly heartwarming and I believe Michael Jackson is completely deserving of the unconditional love and support he has all around the world.

    "What I believe in my writing and in my life is simple, 'To be a person of truth, be swayed neither by approval or disapproval. Work at not needing approval from anyone and you will be free to be who you really are.'"

    --Linda Sharp



    Maybe I'm Wacko Too? by Linda Sharp

    Maybe it was all the publicity. Maybe it was an accidental switch of the channels after Will & Grace. Maybe it was just plain and simple curiosity. Whatever it was, I joined the millions of people in the United States who tuned into 20/20 to watch the highly, hotly, hugely hyped broadcast of British journalist Martin Bashir's documentary of Michael Jackson.

    I like to think of myself as an open-minded, thinking individual and went into the viewing knowing that 8 months worth of interviews, footage and folly would be "packaged" into a mere 90 minutes. And that those 90 minutes would not be filled with him brushing his teeth or eating his breakfast or any of the other mundane rituals that fill anyone's average day, celebrity or not. I think we have seen enough interviews, exposes and "behind the scenes" shows to know that if there ain't sizzle, the steak ain't gonna sell.

    That said, the televisions across the USA were pungent with the "sizzle" of Michael Jackson's life being first grilled to medium well, then well done, and finally to charcoal burnt.

    Let me also state that I do not know the man personally. I have never attended his concerts, seen him in person or been invited to ride the Merry-go-round at Neverland Ranch. That does not prevent me from being compelled to play devil's advocate.

    I will be the first to state that I do not believe anymore than anyone else watching that the man has only been under the plastic surgeon's knife twice. Yes, it is normal for a person's face to change as they age, but people do not spontaneously grow clefts in their chins, permanent eyeliner under their eyes, or noses that shrink to the size of a Barbie doll's. But, he is also not the only person in this world to make repeated visits to an aesthetician. I have lived in southern California and Dallas, Texas and can tell you that plastic surgeons are not hurting for business. I can also tell you that I have been a patient, and unless I choose to tell someone what I had done, it is none of their damned business. That same rule applies to Michael Jackson, or at least it should.

    What about his lifestyle and spending habits? An amusement park ranch, millions spent on single shopping sprees, and security so tight that Peter Pan himself could not fly into his airspace unannounced? It is his money, he earned it, he has every right to spend it any way he sees fit. There have been enough trailer park lottery stories to see that average people can be just as extravagant, childish or just plain strange in their desires and purchases. So if Elmo Earlobe from Armpit, Arkansas wants to spend his lottery winnings by adding to his Star Trek memorabilia collection, buying new mopeds for all his buddies and one of Elvis' original Las Vegas jumpsuits, it is Elmo's money.

    And as for the security? Quite frankly my dears, if I were that famous and had that much money, I would ensconce myself in the same way. How many celebrities do we need to see stalked, shot, killed before we understand that we force their seclusion. We do not allow them to have normal, go-to-WalMart-on-Saturday lives.

    Finally, the issue of children, his and the ones he welcomes to his ranch and yes, gasp, into his bedroom.

    Beginning with his own childhood, I don't think anyone would argue the fact that his childhood was nonexistent. Started in poverty and lived under the oppressive abuse of a father hell bent on making his children music icons, Michael Jackson was not a Boy Scout, he did not climb trees with other kids or hang at the Mall on Friday nights. His puberty was lived in the glare of a spotlight, and normalcy could never be experienced, let alone hoped for.

    That does not make him dangerous. Eccentric maybe, emotionally different - yes, but dangerous? I do not consider his Neverland Ranch to be dangerous or warped. I believe it is the embodiment of everything he was never able to experience as a child, plain and simple. I was never allowed to experience concerts by my favorite performers when I was a child. As a parent, I have been known to fly my daughters across this country to sit in the front row of the Backstreet Boys and Nsync - as much for their enjoyment as for mine.

    As to the characterization of his children and the ways in which they were conceived? Again, so what? Every single day, average people desperate for a child of their own, travel to other countries, employ technology, and yes, contract with surrogates to fulfill their wish to be a parent. If we consider it normal for Joe and JoBeth Schmoe, why do we look sideways at Michael Jackson? I'll tell you. Because he is Michael Jackson. And we have an impressive track record of loving to build up our celebrities, only to be able to revel in knocking them back down.

    Oh, and in his case there is that nasty issue of the molestation allegations from the 90's. Bear in mind, I am again playing devil's advocate here, but how many times a year do people cave in and quietly settle lawsuits brought against them? Not because the charges have actual merit, but because the person does not want their life, family and reputation dragged through the filthy spotlight that would be shined on them? Everyday, doctors, companies and individuals throw money at unworthy plaintiffs, simply to shut them up and make them go away. Remember a little old lady and her hot coffee? Our society has a very unfortunate attitude that nothing is their fault, and if money can be made by pointing a finger, point, point, point till paid.

    Michael Jackson was a very easy target at which to point. In his situation, I would have done the same thing. Get out the checkbook and get on with my life, subtracting both the millions and the friends who had traded a friendship for easy wealth. One need only look at the people who set up Space Shuttle Columbia debris auctions to be reminded that many in our society have no moral compass.

    So his children wear masks in public? You don't think there are more than a few sick individuals who would love nothing better than to snap their unmasked photos for the Enquirer or worse, kidnap them for a huge ransom? There are numerous celebrities who guard their children's privacy and identities, whether by blacked out car windows or blankets thrown over their heads, or full-time body guards. If this, or any other eccentricities, makes them suspect or criminal, then no celebrity should be allowed to procreate. Personally, I never take my eyes off my daughters when in public. And I thought the Mardi Gras masks worn by Michael's children were cute. For the record, one of my daughters wore a crown, taffeta dress and sparkly shoes for a solid month when she was three. Did I get strange looks? Sure. Only from people who have no children.

    To the issue of him dangling his baby over that balcony? Bad decision. No doubt about that, he has admitted it. But he did not intentionally endanger that baby any more than you or I intentionally set out to hurt our children by tossing them into the air as babies, swinging them around like airplanes, or buying them a bike that they fall off of and break their arm. I have yet to meet the "perfect parent", and highly doubt that I ever will.

    Finally, the issue of the "other" children in his life. He surrounds himself with them. He welcomes them - sick, impoverished, challenged or healthy to his Ranch. He rides the Merry- go-round with them, climbs trees with them, watches Disney movies with them. Everything he never got to experience as a child. I believe he is more comfortable with them than with adults. I have news for you, so am I. Children are innocent, honest, they enjoy simple things, they are not contrived and they do not have hidden agendas. I like children far more than adults.

    If that makes me warped or "Wacko", then make some room at the ranch for me, Michael.

    And I totally agree with his assessment of what is missing in so many children's lives: love, compassion, attention, and parents. Yes, parents. I spend time every week in my daughters' school and have seen it for years - children who desperately want only to be hugged, listened to, wanted. It is shameful to know these children have parents who don't give a damn about the children they brought into this world. Whether outright physical abuse, or the more subtle abuse of emotionally ignoring their child, I see it first hand every single day.

    And while it is not condoned or politically correct, I hug them, I get on the floor at their level and talk to them. I ask about their interests, I joke with them, I touch them, I hold their hands, when they sleep over at my house, I kiss them good night. I make them feel special.

    That does not make me a pedophile.

    No, I do not think it sounds right to have him say they sleep in his bedroom, or in his bed. But that is because I also agree with him that it is a sad fact every thought and notion we have somehow manages to filter through S.E.X. And yes, there are thousands of people who have no business being on the same planet with a child, let alone in a bedroom, but I do not believe Michael Jackson is one of them.

    If anything, he strikes me as a.s.e.x.u.a.l, non.s.e.x.u.a.l in every respect. I do not believe these children are in danger of being molested. Perhaps in danger of being cared for, coddled and doted on, but if that is the definition of danger, than all children should be put in such peril.

    Again, 8 months were edited, angled and spun into a minuscule 90 minutes of footage. I daresay that if you or I were filmed for almost a year, it would be extremely easy to show only the outbursts, tantrums, nose picking and farting. And no one would be any closer to knowing the real us, than we are closer to knowing the real Michael Jackson. So until that invitation to Neverland Ranch shows up in our mailboxes, maybe we need to stop judging him and begin judging ourselves.

    As my mother always told me, "Sweep your own doorstep". You'll have to excuse me now, I need to go get the broom and dustpan."

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    Priority Check, Please?
    by Linda Sharp

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t we currently stand on the brink of a war with Iraq? And as far as we know, Osama bin laden has still been hidin’? What about the fact that our gas prices are currently creeping as high as a share of stock in Krispy Kreme? And lest I forget those RayBan wearing bad boys of North Korea?

    The reason I ask is that with all these real, serious issues threatening to take away our hard earned money, our way of life and well, our life, period, you would think this is where the media would be concentrating all its paper, print and prime-time, right?

    Wrong.

    If the aliens came down right now, and turned on a television or grabbed a paper in order to gauge what we human beings are concerned with, Saddam Hussein and the Korean Chorus line run second page to a nefarious, marauding menace named MICHAEL JACKSON.

    God save us from a man who has championed children, given millions to charity, and chooses to live in a place called Neverland! His face is everywhere! He MUST be evil! Grab your duct tape and seal up your eyelids, lest they take in another 20/20 special morphing his face from age 5 to 40! (Note: I find it humorous that the same Barbara Walters who looks younger today than twenty years ago, can keep a straight face while speaking critically of him. Oh wait, that would be the Botox . . .)

    Somehow, Martin Bashir’s recent documentary has given birth to a throttling media mania against Mr. Jackson that is equaled only by the thrilling media mania that heralded him when he was, in fact, a Thriller.

    Frankly, I’m bored.

    I’m bored with the hashing, rehashing and thorough trashing of this man. I’m tired of Gloria Alred’s face on The Today Show every week screaming that his children should be taken away. Gloria, go after the people who actually abuse their children. The ones who burn them with cigarettes, beat them into unconsciousness and leave them in locked cars on 100 degree days. Wait, what am I saying? Going after John Doe won’t get her time with Katie Couric.

    I’m bored with magazine covers of his face and terrible headlines maligning it. And it’s not just Michael Jackson, I’m bored with J Lo and Ben, Brad and Jennifer, Simon from American Idol and Evan from Joe Millionaire. I would even hazard a guess that they are bored with seeing their lives dissected on a weekly basis!

    Can we please have a priority check here? There was a brief shining moment after the horrors of 9/11 when society actually came to its senses and saw how completely shallow we are. When we stopped wondering about Gwyneth Paltrow’s macrobiotic diet and started wondering how to feed our souls. We didn’t give a rip about who Julia Robert’s love was because we were busy concentrating on the people we love. Would Brad and Jen create life? Who cared? We were simply thankful to be alive.

    Now it seems that with each day we move further away from that devastation, we also move closer towards being the same mindless, shallow, voyeuristic vagabonds we were before the towers fell. Only this time, we are worse. For we had our reality check and we apparently learned nothing from it. Star tripping and ripping win out. North Korea may have nuclear weapons that can reach California, but Renee Zellweiger has a new Gucci purse and an Oscar nomination! I may not be able to afford gas for my minivan much longer, but Britney Spears and Colin Farrell swapped spit at a movie premiere! And Saddam may kill thousands of our soldiers, but Michael Jackson still wins "by a nose".

    It is saddening and sobering to me that it will obviously take something equally as earth shattering and heart wrenching as 9/11 to remove Mr. Jackson, J Lo and Gwyneth from the spotlight and shine it back onto the rubble of reality that will remain.

    And no amount of duct tape will fix the lives that are ripped apart.

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    Linda Sharp is an internationally recognized author and columnist. Her work appears across the Internet and wraps around the globe to appear in print publications from Maine to Malaysia. Linda's latest book, Stretchmarks On My Sanity - The Growing Pains of Raising a Child has earned her rave review and comparisons to the late Erma Bombeck. Find out more about Linda Sharp at www.lindasharp.com or stop by her award winning website, Sanity Central - A Time Out From Parenting, www.sanitycentral.com.


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    Mikey are you OK?
    By Anne-France White

    It is impossible to overestimate the impact of Michael Jackson on the entire generation that grew up in the eighties. He was everybody's immortal hero, the most amazing showman in the universe, the living myth who danced like a God. I don't know anyone who hasn't shuffled across many floors in a feeble attempt at the moonwalk, or hidden behind the sofa during the Thriller video. And Billie Jean, twenty years after the song's release, still makes entire crowds leap to their feet. Let's admit it, we're all Michael Jackson worshippers, though some of us hide this like a shameful secret.

    So when Martin Bashir's interview of Michael Jackson was aired last week, featuring an unprecedented glimpse into the singer's life and soul, it was a whole generation's collective subconscious that was dissected under the eyes of 15 million viewers.

    And yes, the documentary confirmed everything we already knew: Michael Jackson is a weirdo, a deluded 44-year old who thinks he can be a little boy all his life. The show was followed by the expected avalanche of self-righteous indignation: "Jacko the child-abuser!" "Failed publicity stunt of the century!" And even, in The Scotsman, "Bashir goes to meet Peter Pan and finds the Elephant Man!" This last headline shows the public's exploitative relationship with the singer: we gasp in horror at his freaky lifestyle, but there would have even more of an outcry had we learned that he's just an ordinary guy who likes pizza. Michael Jackson is the modern Freak, the object of the self-righteous contempt of the masses who'd rather demonize a lonely eccentric star than question all the things that are freaky and messed-up about our world.

    Certainly, there was plenty in the documentary to fuel the wild unabated gossip-mill which has surrounded Jackson since the late eighties: the strange cocoon of self-worship, the hallucinatory spending- sprees, the obsession with childhood.

    But my dominant impression at the end of the show was mainly sadness at the fate of a scarred and naive man manipulated by a ruthless public. Yes, he is a weirdo, and yes, his relationship to his children is manic and overprotective. But this is all the result of frenzied media worshipping, obsessive-compulsive coverage, and the heroicizing and multimillion brokering of a vulnerable starry-eyed five-year old. So beat it. Get out of his life. Leave Michael alone - he doesn't want to spend his life being a colour.


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    From SMH.com.au
    Sweet-talking in forked tongues
    By Miranda Devine

    Feb. 27, 2003.

    By flattering Michael Jackson to deceive him, Martin Bashir has degraded ethical journalism, writes Miranda Devine

    The reputation of journalists has just plunged a few more rungs towards the gutter thanks to the latest Michael Jackson special, which Channel Nine aired on Tuesday night. Take 2: The Interview They Wouldn't Show You was Jackson's rebuttal to the deeply damaging two-hour documentary by British journalist Martin Bashir, in which the 44-year-old singer was portrayed as a sinister weirdo with a penchant for sharing his bed with young boys.

    But, with footage taken by Jackson's camera, Take 2 exposes how Bashir used one of the most powerful tools of his trade - empathy - to persuade Jackson to open up, and then betrayed him.

    Bashir's documentary, Living With Michael Jackson, laid out a compelling cirmcumstantial case for Jackson as child molester. There was the admission from the singer that he often invited children to sleep in his bed. There was mention of the 1993 allegations by 14-year-old Jordy Chandler that Jackson had molested him. And there was Jackson's eccentric behaviour, including the celebrated baby-dangling incident off a hotel balcony in Berlin.

    Most convincing of all were Bashir's reasonable voice telling the audience of the deep "unease" he felt while making the documentary and his damning conclusion.

    "Neverland is a dangerous place for a vulnerable child to be," he said. "I was angry at the way his children were made to suffer."

    But in Take 2, Jackson's footage shows Bashir saying quite the opposite. "Your relationship with your children is spectacular," Bashir is heard telling Jackson, his voice dripping with sincerity. "It almost makes me weep when I see you with them because your interaction with them is just so natural, so loving, so caring."

    After a day when Jackson invited a group of underprivileged children to spend the day at Neverland, Bashir tells Jackson: "The problem [with your bad press] is nobody actually comes here. But I was here yesterday and it's nothing short of a spiritual kind of thing."

    There would hardly have been a journalist on the face of the planet who didn't squirm a little while listening to Bashir butter up Jackson, recognising the familiar technique of drawing him out, listening sympathetically, seeming to understand his troubles.

    The ambiguous nature of the intimacy that builds up between interviewer and interviewee is something most journalists will grapple with at some time in their career. It is a murky ethical area that writer Janet Malcolm harshly described as "morally indefensible" in her controversial 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer.

    "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible," she wrote. "He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

    Malcolm was writing about a 1983 bestseller, Fatal Vision, in which the author, Joe McGinniss, teamed up with a US Army doctor, Jeffrey MacDonald, who was charged with murdering his pregnant wife and two children. McGinniss said he would write a book proving McDonald's innocence, lived with him during the trial and became his best friend. But after MacDonald was convicted, McGinniss betrayed him, portraying him as a drug-addled narcissist with a repressed hatred of women.

    In a more recent book, Beat the Press, published in the United States last October, authors Al Guyant and Shirley Fulton take a club to their former profession. They say journalists set out to manipulate their subjects into saying something "stupid, guilty, foolish or worse", using sneaky tricks to "coax information" from reluctant people.

    Of course journalists use their wiles to obtain information. At journalism school I was taught that silence is the most powerful interviewing tool of all, that it is human nature to try to fill gaps in a conversation and if the journalist resists that urge, the interviewee will rush to speak and usually divulge more than intended.

    Such techniques could be regarded as "tricks" but are really just about listening. Journalists interview unsavoury characters all the time - politicians, organisations, crooks, bureaucrats and even pop stars - to extract information which otherwise would be kept secret from the public. There are inevitably elements of deception involved, not least the repression of the journalist's revulsion for the subject.

    Yet most journalists regard theirs as a noble calling, which, even with its faults, and its unscrupulous practitioners, is crucial to the functioning of democracy. The fabled US journalist, Joseph Pulitzer, wrote in 1904 that "an able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery". But he also warned that "a cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself".

    What Bashir has done to Jackson goes far beyond the bounds of responsible journalism. He perpetuated a fraud on a man who has been charged with no offence, deliberately lying and concealing his true motives. Bashir has said that in eight months of close scrutiny and unprecedented access, Jackson committed no crime and was nothing but loving and kind to his own children and others.

    Bashir had no "smoking gun", yet still he clung to his deception. "I didn't set out to ensnare him with a child," Bashir said in one online interview. "I am not, repeat not, accusing anyone of being a child molester or a pedophile or anything like that." Sure.

    Bashir may be convinced his duplicity was justified in the interests of children who might be hurt by Jackson in order to tell the world the truth about a monster. But there is something deeply disturbing about his approach. Ultimately he perverted his journalism for no reason than to make a more dramatic show. He used his skills to con Jackson and his audience.

    But in the end, all any journalist has is their reputation. Bashir made his name interviewing Princess Diana and has probably ended his career by interviewing Michael Jackson. Who would ever trust him again?

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    From: Brachman.com
    Michael Jackson: Just Stop Talking Him Around
    By Jim Brachman

    Feb. 26, 2003.

    Why does the media demand that we hate Michael Jackson?

    Barbara Walters was shocked, absolutely shocked. There she was, hosting the myopic 20/20 “news magazine” program that consisted of British reporter Martin Bashir’s lengthy interview with Michael Jackson.

    To Walters, as well as to the Brit (who, toward the end of the two-hour piece, apparently decided he was the subject of the interview, rather than Michael), it was devastating.

    How devastating was it? Quite devastating. For example, a breathless Walters reported the shocking scandal that Michael Jackson said he was “worth” one billion dollars, when the figure is actually somewhere between 200 and 300 million.

    Wow. What an outrage. Never mind that Jackson didn’t want to discuss the subject of his personal fortune, and eventually just went along when the reporter kept asking if he might be worth one billion.

    Are you ready for more? Well, it turns out that when Jackson’s two older children go out with him in public, he makes them wear masks. It’s another huge scandal. Never mind that it is because Jackson doesn’t wish them to be photographed, for their own protection and that both kids seemed to be having a grand time with their father.

    Naw, that’s not important.

    In fact, the more Walters and her colleague tried to argue that Michael is a one-man freak show, the more it appeared the brilliant entertainer and song writer was simply being used by the two of them.

    If Jackson never again agrees to any kind of interview, it would certainly be understandable after this latest betrayal by people whom, I suspect, are utterly incapable of appreciating his music, his talent or his art.

    Among the things rehashed – the dangling baby incident. From the tone of the 20/20 piece, you’d have thought Michael Jackson caused the world to come to an end. It was nothing. It was less than nothing, and yet these whining crybabies can’t stop talking about it.

    Oh, but wait, there are even more horror stories. Michael Jackson likes to visit Las Vegas and, ohmygod, spent over one million dollars during a recent shopping spree.

    And I guess that puts him in the same company of every other rock star and movie star, though you wouldn’t think so from the disdain of Ms.Walters and her colleague.

    And then we got to go (once again) through the whole controversy about Michael’s plastic surgery. How dare Michael not admit to having numerous surgical procedures on his face, Walters wonders.

    Jackson insists he’s had very little plastic surgery. Okay, so it doesn’t look that way, but there’s just one thing – who cares?

    Interestingly enough, Walters missed a wonderful opportunity – to comment on all the plastic surgery she has had. Nor does it disturb her that journalists like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw all insist they don’t wear makeup and toupees, when it couldn’t be more apparent that they do – and it appears that they, too have had plastic surgery.

    We all know Barbara’s golden rule: one set of standards for people I admire, a totally different set of standards for those I do not.

    Then there are all the “issues” with other children. None proven, nothing the government ever had the slightest interest in prosecuting, but that didn’t stop anyone associated with this program from convicting Michael – but of what, they couldn’t say.

    He's had a child with a surrogate mother. So? He has an unusual arrangement with the mother of his two older children. So? What about the alternative lifestyles practiced by Walters’ countless and oh-so-trendy show business friends?

    Same story. It’s perfectly okay for them; it’s only wrong for Michael Jackson.

    Here’s another destruction-of-the-planet calamity as documented by the telecast. Michael Jackson went to accept a lifetime achievement award in Europe. And you know what? Michael made a mistake -- he started up the stage to accept the award… before he was supposed to!

    Oh no! Not that! Anything but that!

    You’re watching this and you’re thinking, what’s the problem? Haven’t the idiots who put this “documentary” together ever watched an awards program before? Haven’t they seen a missed cue or a camera focus on the wrong person who freezes in terror? Haven’t they seen someone announce a winner before all the nominees are read? Here’s a classic -- someone wins an award but he or she isn't in attendance -- a fact the program's executives seem to have missed.

    So a mistake was made that had absolutely no impact whatsoever on the show. Who the hell cares? No one. Yet this program made it sound like Michael Jackson will be embarrassed for the rest of his life because of it.

    What was missing from the overseas awards ceremony discussion? Mention of the fact that when two notes from Michael Jackson’s single “Thriller” were played – just two – all present reacted with joy.

    A point the documentary inadvertently makes, even though Bashir and Walters didn't quite grasp it, is Michael’s respect for and accommodation of his fans – never mind that most celebrities want as little to do with their fans as possible.

    Michael Jackson is not merely one of the world’s great entertainers; he’s also one of its youngest. A rock/pop star in the stratosphere of Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, he is only 44, and thus their junior by close to 20 years.

    Temporarily putting aside for the sake of discussion all the excellent work of the Jackson Five, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is among the great albums of all time, maybe the greatest. “Off The Wall” is a smaller masterpiece, but these are collections of songs that are not only a pleasure in their own right, they clearly inspired the work of countless artists who have followed Jackson.

    Now, it’s a safe assumption that the musical composition libraries of the Beatles and Rolling Stones easily surpass Michael’s, but guess what? Michael Jackson is a better performer than the Beatles and Rolling Stones combined.

    There is only one entertainer who was better at it than Michael Jackson; he’s no longer with us and his name is Elvis Aaron Presley.

    Turn on MTV, VHI, or just watch an installment of “American Idol” or shows like it and watch the dance steps. Everyone seems to be doing a Michael Jackson impersonation – and it’s been going on for 20 years.

    As for the team that assembled this rubbish, this mindless broadside, this intended hatchet job that ends up having the opposite effect, there is no escaping the conclusion of another great entertainer, Frank Sinatra.

    Asked his opinion of the media, Sinatra described them succinctly: “pimps and hookers.”

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    From the American Politics Journal: http://www.americanpolitics.com/20030220Koop.html

    The Lynching of Michael Jackson
    Does Bill O'Reilly have more power to foment hate than we thought?
    By Jeff Koopersmith

    Feb. 20, 2003 -- NEW YORK (apj.us) -- Bill O'Reilly, master hatemonger for Rupert Murdoch's/Roger Ailes' FOX News Channel, should be proud of himself this week.

    His vicious, nonstop attacks on Michael Jackson have come to fruition in the massively frenzied media lynching of the once-innocent, now-trampled persona of the little boy who led the Jackson Five, and later lost himself to what I call "The American Nightmare": reaching the pinnacle of success only to be gunned down from the envy of it.

    O'Reilly, who claims to be master of a "No Spin Zone," spent months gnawing away and grinding his gnashing teeth at Jackson -- almost certainly because O'Reilly was sentient that ABC, NBC and FOX were working on outsized pieces slamming Jackson, his regrettable childhood, his plastic surgery, and most notably his conspicuous and seemingly unwholesome empathy for children.

    O'Reilly wanted to cash in on it, take credit for it, and pretend that he actually has "The Power."

    Yet what is loathsome about Bill O'Reilly is shared, in spades, by Stone Phillips, Barbara Walters, Josh Mankiewicz, and the producers of NBC's prime-time ersatz-news program "Dateline" and ABC's awful "20/20". To be honest, if I woke up as any of these so-called journalists, I would commit ritual suicide rather than look in the mirror.

    Of course, television broadcasters excuse their near-pornographic slaughter of Jackson's reputation by playing up the sub-theme, "We must save the children" - specifically, "the children" with whom Jackson admits having sleepovers in his bedroom at the Santa Barbara ranch he has named "Neverland."

    Under the guise of "policemen of the electronic age," these large corporate broadcasters offer and re-offer, over and over and over again, Michael Jackson's head on a bloody platter for viewers of all stripes to consume.

    Now, it is true that Mr. Jackson settled litigation brought against him by the parents of a 13-year-old boy claiming to have been sexually seduced by the "King of Pop", but both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara District Attorneys declined to prosecute Mr. Jackson because of lack of evidence to do so.

    And it is true that Jackson openly and oh-so-naively admits that he invites kids to sleep in his bedroom -- but claims he sleeps on the floor and bewails the sexual overtones that television plants.

    This did not stop a retired detective from leading both NBC and ABC through a litany of "proof" that Jackson was an evil child molester who used his Disneyesque home-cum-theme-park as bait to bed young boys.

    Put aside any preconceptions you may have about the "Michael Jackson scandals" and ask yourself a simple question: what is wrong with this picture?

    That's not a tough question to answer. What is wrong is the same thing that is wrong with America in general these days.

    We have forgotten about who we are, and what we stand for.

    We have forgotten about the law.

    We have forgotten about common decency.

    And let me be the first to say that if Michael Jackson is indeed molesting children by the dozens, as powerful broadcasters would have us believe, then he should be arrested, perhaps jailed, and certainly treated for his mental illness.

    But Michael Jackson has not been proved to be a child molester in a criminal or civil court. He has not even been charged with such an offense and one must believe, if we are truly a nation of laws, that he is, IS, innocent until PROVEN guilty by a jury of his peers.

    Certainly he is altered, he is poles apart from you and I, but this doesn't prove that his love of children is not innocent or that his longing for his own mislaid-in-greed childhood results in perversion.

    Perhaps the networks should spend as much time documenting proven pedophiles instead of "suspected" ones. That way they would less apt to be accused, as I am accusing them, of being nothing better than the Hitlers or Milosevics of this world who piled those they hated into mass graves much as the broadcast industry kills the reputations of celebrities gone off beam.

    It's not enough for O'Reilly, Walters, Phillips, Mankiewicz, and the others working this celebrity "story" to trump up a case against Jackson. The power of network television has destroyed dozens of others -- only recently another black American superstar and her husband, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown. And before that, we saw the virtual demonization of Robert Downey Jr., Nick Nolte and Paul "Pee Wee Herman" Reubens. And let's not ever forget what they did to President Bill Clinton and his wife.

    It was Bill O'Reilly, again, who led the charge against Ms. Houston when she admitted to a drug problem. It is as if O'Reilly is acting as a "special prosecutor" trying to wrest custody of Ms. Houston's children from her. To listen to this phony pseudo-intellectual moralizer one cannot help but wonder how American families would take in another 30 million kids whose parents might light up a joint after a tough day on the construction site.

    On just one night earlier this week, television viewers across the nation were treated to four hours (three on ABC and one on NBC) of contemptible "revelations" concerning Michael Jackson's troubles with growing up and his increasing age. Last week FOX Television did a "Special" lynching of Jackson which seemed to whet the appetite of a viewing public with a near-insatiable desire to see the powerful crushed, no matter the expense, no matter the lack of substantiated evidence.

    To say these were American networks' sorriest hours would be an understatement.

    For three hours, ABC -- The "American" Broadcasting Network, owned largely and ironically by the Disney Corporation who created the Magic Kingdom upon which Mr. Jackson seems to have modeled his "ranch" -- exploited and abused the "King of Pop" so ferociously that one might think it was endeavoring to force the man who won't grow up toward suicide, much as the editorialists as the Wall Street Journal drove Vince Foster to snuff out his own life on a park bench.

    On NBC, the "General Electric Network," the Jackson story was likewise presented in as revolting a manner as could be slipped by their increasingly lax "censors", with that network choosing to go nose to nose with ABC in a sordid contest to see who could capture more avaricious and covetous American viewers while torching a pitiable little man who gave us all such great musical pleasure for most of his life.

    I don't think I have ever been quite so riveted by a display of insufferable heartlessness.

    Many, from the e-mail these programs have generated, did not watch to learn about Jackson, but sought to gloat and rejoice over what at least appeared to be his psychological instability, the terror of his childhood, his loneliness, and his desolation.

    All three networks featured ghastly interviews with plastic surgeons studying only photographs of Michael Jackson's face and giving their "expert" opinions on how many surgeries he'd undergone, and how botched they were in a contemptible flaunt of the Hippocratic Oath: "Do no harm."


    Martin Bashir
    America was treated to hours of Martin Bashir, the British "journalist" who was fortunate enough to "get" Princess Diana to talk about how she cheated on her husband, Prince Charles -- himself "a little odd."

    It seems Mr. Bashir is fond of ingratiating himself with the famous, and more so the super wealthy, so that he can use them and abuse them -- and of course, cash in.

    Bashir was at his most repellent pretending to take Mr. Jackson into his confidence, feigning concern for the singer, protecting Jackson's children from the paparazzi, and then humiliating him repeatedly -- for nothing more than money.

    ABC, in cahoots with REAL Video, is offering up video of the Bashir interview -- the only catch being that you have to subscribe -- again for more money -- in order to wallow in the heartbreak that is Jackson's life.

    Dateline, at NBC.com, featured a ghostly Flash Film of Jackson's face morphing eerily using six pictures taken over 30 years of the singing star's life making him appear as a monster to excite its Web surfers.

    After all is said, Mr. Bashir -- who seems not to be a journalist at all but merely a pig wallowing in the mud of another's broken life -- and the network executives who participated in this modern Anglo-American lynching should be put in stocks and mocked in Times Square.

    Bill O'Reilly would shout me down if I were across from him on "The Factor." He would yell "What about the children, Mr. Koopersmith? What about the children?"

    I might answer -- "Yes, what about the children?"

    I must add that Barbara Walter's participation in this dreadfulness was deplorable. I thought at least she had reached a zenith, where she like the others could have just said "No!"

    Sadly, she chose to participate in this high-tech lynching.

    She -- and all the other pilers-on -- should hang their heads in shame.



     
  • GQ: Was Michael Jackson Framed? 2003-03-09 11:31:55 October 1994

    DID MICHAEL DO IT?

    The untold story of the events that brought down a superstar.

    by Mary A. Fisher

    Before O.J. Simpson, there was Michael Jackson -- another beloved black celebrity seemingly brought down by allegations of scandal in his personal life. Those allegations -- that Jackson had molested a 13-year-old boy -- instigated a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, two grand-jury investigations and a shameless media circus. Jackson, in turn, filed charges of extortion against some of his accusers. Ultimately, the suit was settled out of court for a sum that has been estimated at $20 million; no criminal charges were brought against Jackson by the police or the grand juries. This past August, Jackson was in the news again, when Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis's daughter, announced that she and the singer had married.

    As the dust settles on one of the nation's worst episodes of media excess, one thing is clear: The American public has never heard a defense of Michael Jackson. Until now.

    It is, of course, impossible to prove a negative -- that is, prove that something didn't happen. But it is possible to take an in-depth look at the people who made the allegations against Jackson and thus gain insight into their character and motives. What emerges from such an examination, based on court documents, business records and scores of interviews, is a persuasive argument that Jackson molested no one and that he himself may have been the victim of a well-conceived plan to extract money from him.

    More than that, the story that arises from this previously unexplored territory is radically different from the tale that has been promoted by tabloid and even mainstream journalists. It is a story of greed, ambition, misconceptions on the part of police and prosecutors, a lazy and sensation-seeking media and the use of a powerful, hypnotic drug. It may also be a story about how a case was simply invented.

    Neither Michael Jackson nor his current defense attorneys agreed to be interviewed for this article. Had they decided to fight the civil charges and go to trial, what follows might have served as the core of Jackson's defense -- as well as the basis to further the extortion charges against his own accusers, which could well have exonerated the singer.



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    Jackson's troubles began when his van broke down on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in May 1992. Stranded in the middle of the heavily trafficked street, Jackson was spotted by the wife of Mel Green, an employee at Rent-a-Wreck, an offbeat car-rental agency a mile away. Green went to the rescue. When Dave Schwartz, the owner of the car-rental company, heard Green was bringing Jackson to the lot, he called his wife, June, and told her to come over with their 6-year-old daughter and her son from her previous marriage. The boy, then 12, was a big Jackson fan. Upon arriving, June Chandler Schwartz told Jackson about the time her son had sent him a drawing after the singer's hair caught on fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. Then she gave Jackson their home number.

    "It was almost like she was forcing [the boy] on him," Green recalls. "I think Michael thought he owed the boy something, and that's when it all started."

    Certain facts about the relationship are not in dispute. Jackson began calling the boy, and a friendship developed. After Jackson returned from a promotional tour, three months later, June Chandler Schwartz and her son and daughter became regular guests at Neverland, Jackson's ranch in Santa Barbara County. During the following year, Jackson showered the boy and his family with attention and gifts, including video games, watches, an after-hours shopping spree at Toys "R" Us and trips around the world -- from Las Vegas and Disney World to Monaco and Paris.

    By March 1993, Jackson and the boy were together frequently and the sleepovers began. June Chandler Schwartz had also become close to Jackson "and liked him enormously," one friend says. "He was the kindest man she had ever met."

    Jackson's personal eccentricities -- from his attempts to remake his face through plastic surgery to his preference for the company of children -- have been widely reported. And while it may be unusual for a 35-year-old man to have sleepovers with a 13-year-old child, the boy's mother and others close to Jackson never thought it odd. Jackson's behavior is better understood once it's put in the context of his own childhood.

    "Contrary to what you might think, Michael's life hasn't been a walk in the park," one of his attorneys says. Jackson's childhood essentially stopped -- and his unorthodox life began -- when he was 5 years old and living in Gary, Indiana. Michael spent his youth in rehearsal studios, on stages performing before millions of strangers and sleeping in an endless string of hotel rooms. Except for his eight brothers and sisters, Jackson was surrounded by adults who pushed him relentlessly, particularly his father, Joe Jackson -- a strict, unaffectionate man who reportedly beat his children.

    Jackson's early experiences translated into a kind of arrested development, many say, and he became a child in a man's body. "He never had a childhood," says Bert Fields, a former attorney of Jackson's. "He is having one now. His buddies are 12-year-old kids. They have pillow fights and food fights." Jackson's interest in children also translated into humanitarian efforts. Over the years, he has given millions to causes benefiting children, including his own Heal The World Foundation.

    But there is another context -- the one having to do with the times in which we live -- in which most observers would evaluate Jackson's behavior. "Given the current confusion and hysteria over child sexual abuse," says Dr. Phillip Resnick, a noted Cleveland psychiatrist, "any physical or nurturing contact with a child may be seen as suspicious, and the adult could well be accused of sexual misconduct."

    Jackson's involvement with the boy was welcomed, at first, by all the adults in the youth's life -- his mother, his stepfather and even his biological father, Evan Chandler (who also declined to be interviewed for this article). Born Evan Robert Charmatz in the Bronx in 1944, Chandler had reluctantly followed in the footsteps of his father and brothers and become a dentist. "He hated being a dentist," a family friend says. "He always wanted to be a writer." After moving in 1973 to West Palm Beach to practice dentistry, he changed his last name, believing Charmatz was "too Jewish-sounding," says a former colleague. Hoping somehow to become a screenwriter, Chandler moved to Los Angeles in the late Seventies with his wife, June Wong, an attractive Eurasian who had worked briefly as a model.

    Chandler's dental career had its precarious moments. In December 1978, while working at the Crenshaw Family Dental Center, a clinic in a low-income area of L.A., Chandler did restoration work on sixteen of a patient's teeth during a single visit. An examination of the work, the Board of Dental Examiners concluded, revealed "gross ignorance and/or inefficiency" in his profession. The board revoked his license; however, the revocation was stayed, and the board instead suspended him for ninety days and placed him on probation for two and a half years. Devastated, Chandler left town for New York. He wrote a film script but couldn't sell it.

    Months later, Chandler returned to L.A. with his wife and held a series of dentistry jobs. By 1980, when their son was born, the couple's marriage was in trouble. "One of the reasons June left Evan was because of his temper," a family friend says. They divorced in 1985. The court awarded sole custody of the boy to his mother and ordered Chandler to pay $500 a month in child support, but a review of documents reveals that in 1993, when the Jackson scandal broke, Chandler owed his ex-wife $68,000 -- a debt she ultimately forgave.

    A year before Jackson came into his son's life, Chandler had a second serious professional problem. One of his patients, a model, sued him for dental negligence after he did restoration work on some of her teeth. Chandler claimed that the woman had signed a consent form in which she'd acknowledged the risks involved. But when Edwin Zinman, her attorney, asked to see the original records, Chandler said they had been stolen from the trunk of his Jaguar. He provided a duplicate set. Zinman, suspicious, was unable to verify the authenticity of the records. "What an extraordinary coincidence that they were stolen," Zinman says now. "That's like saying 'The dog ate my homework.' " The suit was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

    Despite such setbacks, Chandler by then had a successful practice in Beverly Hills. And he got his first break in Hollywood in 1992, when he cowrote the Mel Brooks film Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Until Michael Jackson entered his son's life, Chandler hadn't shown all that much interest in the boy. "He kept promising to buy him a computer so they could work on scripts together, but he never did," says Michael Freeman, formerly an attorney for June Chandler Schwartz. Chandler's dental practice kept him busy, and he had started a new family by then, with two small children by his second wife, a corporate attorney.

    At first, Chandler welcomed and encouraged his son's relationship with Michael Jackson, bragging about it to friends and associates. When Jackson and the boy stayed with Chandler during May 1993, Chandler urged the entertainer to spend more time with his son at his house. According to sources, Chandler even suggested that Jackson build an addition onto the house so the singer could stay there. After calling the zoning department and discovering it couldn't be done, Chandler made another suggestion -- that Jackson just build him a new home.

    That same month, the boy, his mother and Jackson flew to Monaco for the World Music Awards. "Evan began to get jealous of the involvement and felt left out," Freeman says. Upon their return, Jackson and the boy again stayed with Chandler, which pleased him -- a five-day visit, during which they slept in a room with the youth's half brother. Though Chandler has admitted that Jackson and the boy always had their clothes on whenever he saw them in bed together, he claimed that it was during this time that his suspicions of sexual misconduct were triggered. At no time has Chandler claimed to have witnessed any sexual misconduct on Jackson's part.

    Chandler became increasingly volatile, making threats that alienated Jackson, Dave Schwartz and June Chandler Schwartz. In early July 1993, Dave Schwartz, who had been friendly with Chandler, secretly tape-recorded a lengthy telephone conversation he had with him. During the conversation, Chandler talked of his concern for his son and his anger at Jackson and at his ex-wife, whom he described as "cold and heartless." When Chandler tried to "get her attention" to discuss his suspicions about Jackson, he says on the tape, she told him "Go fuck yourself."

    "I had a good communication with Michael," Chandler told Schwartz. "We were friends. I liked him and I respected him and everything else for what he is. There was no reason why he had to stop calling me. I sat in the room one day and talked to Michael and told him exactly what I want out of this whole relationship. What I want."

    Admitting to Schwartz that he had "been rehearsed" about what to say and what not to say, Chandler never mentioned money during their conversation. When Schwartz asked what Jackson had done that made Chandler so upset, Chandler alleged only that "he broke up the family. [The boy] has been seduced by this guy's power and money." Both men repeatedly berated themselves as poor fathers to the boy.

    Elsewhere on the tape, Chandler indicated he was prepared to move against Jackson: "It's already set," Chandler told Schwartz. "There are other people involved that are waiting for my phone call that are in certain positions. I've paid them to do it. Everything's going according to a certain plan that isn't just mine. Once I make that phone call, this guy [his attorney, Barry K. Rothman, presumably] is going to destroy everybody in sight in any devious, nasty, cruel way that he can do it. And I've given him full authority to do that."

    Chandler then predicted what would, in fact, transpire six weeks later: "And if I go through with this, I win big-time. There's no way I lose. I've checked that inside out. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever. June will lose [custody of the son]...and Michael's career will be over."

    "Does that help [the boy]?" Schwartz asked.

    "That's irrelevant to me," Chandler replied. "It's going to be bigger than all of us put together. The whole thing is going to crash down on everybody and destroy everybody in sight. It will be a massacre if I don't get what I want."

    Instead of going to the police, seemingly the most appropriate action in a situation involving suspected child molestation, Chandler had turned to a lawyer. And not just any lawyer. He'd turned to Barry Rothman.



    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


    "This attorney I found, I picked the nastiest son of a bitch I could find," Chandler said in the recorded conversation with Schwartz. "All he wants to do is get this out in the public as fast as he can, as big as he can, and humiliate as many people as he can. He's nasty, he's mean, he's very smart, and he's hungry for the publicity." (Through his attorney, Wylie Aitken, Rothman declined to be interviewed for this article. Aitken agreed to answer general questions limited to the Jackson case, and then only about aspects that did not involve Chandler or the boy.)

    To know Rothman, says a former colleague who worked with him during the Jackson case, and who kept a diary of what Rothman and Chandler said and did in Rothman's office, is to believe that Barry could have "devised this whole plan, period. This [making allegations against Michael Jackson] is within the boundary of his character, to do something like this." Information supplied by Rothman's former clients, associates and employees reveals a pattern of manipulation and deceit.

    Rothman has a general-law practice in Century City. At one time, he negotiated music and concert deals for Little Richard, the Rolling Stones, the Who, ELO and Ozzy Osbourne. Gold and platinum records commemorating those days still hang on the walls of his office. With his grayish-white beard and perpetual tan -- which he maintains in a tanning bed at his house -- Rothman reminds a former client of "a leprechaun." To a former employee, Rothman is "a demon" with "a terrible temper." His most cherished possession, acquaintances say, is his 1977 Rolls-Royce Corniche, which carries the license plate "BKR 1."

    Over the years, Rothman has made so many enemies that his ex-wife once expressed, to her attorney, surprise that someone "hadn't done him in." He has a reputation for stiffing people. "He appears to be a professional deadbeat... He pays almost no one," investigator Ed Marcus concluded (in a report filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, as part of a lawsuit against Rothman), after reviewing the attorney's credit profile, which listed more than thirty creditors and judgment holders who were chasing him. In addition, more than twenty civil lawsuits involving Rothman have been filed in Superior Court, several complaints have been made to the Labor Commission and disciplinary actions for three incidents have been taken against him by the state bar of California. In 1992, he was suspended for a year, though that suspension was stayed and he was instead placed on probation for the term.

    In 1987, Rothman was $16,800 behind in alimony and child-support payments. Through her attorney, his ex-wife, Joanne Ward, threatened to attach Rothman's assets, but he agreed to make good on the debt. A year later, after Rothman still hadn't made the payments, Ward's attorney tried to put a lien on Rothman's expensive Sherman Oaks home. To their surprise, Rothman said he no longer owned the house; three years earlier, he'd deeded the property to Tinoa Operations, Inc., a Panamanian shell corporation. According to Ward's lawyer, Rothman claimed that he'd had $200,000 of Tinoa's money, in cash, at his house one night when he was robbed at gunpoint. The only way he could make good on the loss was to deed his home to Tinoa, he told them. Ward and her attorney suspected the whole scenario was a ruse, but they could never prove it. It was only after sheriff's deputies had towed away Rothman's Rolls Royce that he began paying what he owed.

    Documents filed with Los Angeles Superior Court seem to confirm the suspicions of Ward and her attorney. These show that Rothman created an elaborate network of foreign bank accounts and shell companies, seemingly to conceal some of his assets -- in particular, his home and much of the $531,000 proceeds from its eventual sale, in 1989. The companies, including Tinoa, can be traced to Rothman. He bought a Panamanian shelf company (an existing but nonoperating firm) and arranged matters so that though his name would not appear on the list of its officers, he would have unconditional power of attorney, in effect leaving him in control of moving money in and out.

    Meanwhile, Rothman's employees didn't fare much better than his ex-wife. Former employees say they sometimes had to beg for their paychecks. And sometimes the checks that they did get would bounce. He couldn't keep legal secretaries. "He'd demean and humiliate them," says one. Temporary workers fared the worst. "He would work them for two weeks," adds the legal secretary, "then run them off by yelling at them and saying they were stupid. Then he'd tell the agency he was dissatisfied with the temp and wouldn't pay." Some agencies finally got wise and made Rothman pay cash up front before they'd do business with him.

    The state bar's 1992 disciplining of Rothman grew out of a conflict-of-interest matter. A year earlier, Rothman had been kicked off a case by a client, Muriel Metcalf, whom he'd been representing in child-support and custody proceedings; Metcalf later accused him of padding her bill. Four months after Metcalf fired him, Rothman, without notifying her, began representing the company of her estranged companion, Bob Brutzman.

    The case is revealing for another reason: It shows that Rothman had some experience dealing with child-molestation allegations before the Jackson scandal. Metcalf, while Rothman was still representing her, had accused Brutzman of molesting their child (which Brutzman denied). Rothman's knowledge of Metcalf's charges didn't prevent him from going to work for Brutzman's company -- a move for which he was disciplined.

    By 1992, Rothman was running from numerous creditors. Folb Management, a corporate real-estate agency, was one. Rothman owed the company $53,000 in back rent and interest for an office on Sunset Boulevard. Folb sued. Rothman then countersued, claiming that the building's security was so inadequate that burglars were able to steal more than $6,900 worth of equipment from his office one night. In the course of the proceedings, Folb's lawyer told the court, "Mr. Rothman is not the kind of person whose word can be taken at face value."

    In November 1992, Rothman had his law firm file for bankruptcy, listing thirteen creditors -- including Folb Management -- with debts totaling $880,000 and no acknowledged assets. After reviewing the bankruptcy papers, an ex-client whom Rothman was suing for $400,000 in legal fees noticed that Rothman had failed to list a $133,000 asset. The former client threatened to expose Rothman for "defrauding his creditors" -- a felony -- if he didn't drop the lawsuit. Cornered, Rothman had the suit dismissed in a matter of hours.

    Six months before filing for bankruptcy, Rothman had transferred title on his Rolls-Royce to Majo, a fictitious company he controlled. Three years earlier, Rothman had claimed a different corporate owner for the car -- Longridge Estates, a subsidiary of Tinoa Operations, the company that held the deed to his home. On corporation papers filed by Rothman, the addresses listed for Longridge and Tinoa were the same, 1554 Cahuenga Boulevard -- which, as it turns out, is that of a Chinese restaurant in Hollywood.

    It was with this man, in June 1993, that Evan Chandler began carrying out the "certain plan" to which he referred in his taped conversation with Dave Schwartz. At a graduation that month, Chandler confronted his ex-wife with his suspicions. "She thought the whole thing was baloney," says her ex-attorney, Michael Freeman. She told Chandler that she planned to take their son out of school in the fall so they could accompany Jackson on his "Dangerous" world tour. Chandler became irate and, say several sources, threatened to go public with the evidence he claimed he had on Jackson. "What parent in his right mind would want to drag his child into the public spotlight?" asks Freeman. "If something like this actually occurred, you'd want to protect your child."

    Jackson asked his then-lawyer, Bert Fields, to intervene. One of the most prominent attorneys in the entertainment industry, Fields has been representing Jackson since 1990 and had negotiated for him, with Sony, the biggest music deal ever -- with possible earnings of $700 million. Fields brought in investigator Anthony Pellicano to help sort things out. Pellicano does things Sicilian-style, being fiercely loyal to those he likes but a ruthless hardball player when it comes to his enemies.

    On July 9, 1993, Dave Schwartz and June Chandler Schwartz played the taped conversation for Pellicano. "After listening to the tape for ten minutes, I knew it was about extortion," says Pellicano. That same day, he drove to Jackson's Century City condominium, where Chandler's son and the boy's half-sister were visiting. Without Jackson there, Pellicano "made eye contact" with the boy and asked him, he says, "very pointed questions": "Has Michael ever touched you? Have you ever seen him naked in bed?" The answer to all the questions was no. The boy repeatedly denied that anything bad had happened. On July 11, after Jackson had declined to meet with Chandler, the boy's father and Rothman went ahead with another part of the plan -- they needed to get custody of the boy. Chandler asked his ex-wife to let the youth stay with him for a "one-week visitation period." As Bert Fields later said in an affidavit to the court, June Chandler Schwartz allowed the boy to go based on Rothman's assurance to Fields that her son would come back to her after the specified time, never guessing that Rothman's word would be worthless and that Chandler would not return their son.

    Wylie Aitken, Rothman's attorney, claims that "at the time [Rothman] gave his word, it was his intention to have the boy returned." However, once "he learned that the boy would be whisked out of the country [to go on tour with Jackson], I don't think Mr. Rothman had any other choice." But the chronology clearly indicates that Chandler had learned in June, at the graduation, that the boy's mother planned to take her son on the tour. The taped telephone conversation made in early July, before Chandler took custody of his son, also seems to verify that Chandler and Rothman had no intention of abiding by the visitation agreement. "They [the boy and his mother] don't know it yet," Chandler told Schwartz, "but they aren't going anywhere."

    On July 12, one day after Chandler took control of his son, he had his ex-wife sign a document prepared by Rothman that prevented her from taking the youth out of Los Angeles County. This meant the boy would be unable to accompany Jackson on the tour. His mother told the court she signed the document under duress. Chandler, she said in an affidavit, had threatened that "I would not have [the boy] returned to me." A bitter custody battle ensued, making even murkier any charges Chandler made about wrong-doing on Jackson's part. (As of this August [1994], the boy was still living with Chandler.) It was during the first few weeks after Chandler took control of his son -- who was now isolated from his friends, mother and stepfather -- that the boy's allegations began to take shape.

    At the same time, Rothman, seeking an expert's opinion to help establish the allegations against Jackson, called Dr. Mathis Abrams, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist. Over the telephone, Rothman presented Abrams with a hypothetical situation. In reply and without having met either Chandler or his son, Abrams on July 15 sent Rothman a two-page letter in which he stated that "reasonable suspicion would exist that sexual abuse may have occurred." Importantly, he also stated that if this were a real and not a hypothetical case, he would be required by law to report the matter to the Los Angeles County Department of Children's Services (DCS).

    According to a July 27 entry in the diary kept by Rothman's former colleague, it's clear that Rothman was guiding Chandler in the plan. "Rothman wrote letter to Chandler advising him how to report child abuse without liability to parent," the entry reads.

    At this point, there still had been made no demands or formal accusations, only veiled assertions that had become intertwined with a fierce custody battle. On August 4, 1993, however, things became very clear. Chandler and his son met with Jackson and Pellicano in a suite at the Westwood Marquis Hotel. On seeing Jackson, says Pellicano, Chandler gave the singer an affectionate hug (a gesture, some say, that would seem to belie the dentist's suspicions that Jackson had molested his son), then reached into his pocket, pulled out Abrams's letter and began reading passages from it. When Chandler got to the parts about child molestation, the boy, says Pellicano, put his head down and then looked up at Jackson with a surprised expression, as if to say "I didn't say that." As the meeting broke up, Chandler pointed his finger at Jackson, says Pellicano, and warned "I'm going to ruin you."

    At a meeting with Pellicano in Rothman's office later that evening, Chandler and Rothman made their demand - $20 million.

    On August 13, there was another meeting in Rothman's office. Pellicano came back with a counteroffer -- a $350,000 screenwriting deal. Pellicano says he made the offer as a way to resolve the custody dispute and give Chandler an opportunity to spend more time with his son by working on a screenplay together. Chandler rejected the offer. Rothman made a counterdemand -- a deal for three screenplays or nothing -- which was spurned. In the diary of Rothman's ex-colleague, an August 24 entry reveals Chandler's disappointment: "I almost had a $20 million deal," he was overhear telling Rothman.

    Before Chandler took control of his son, the only one making allegations against Jackson was Chandler himself -- the boy had never accused the singer of any wrongdoing. That changed one day in Chandler's Beverly Hills dental office.

    In the presence of Chandler and Mark Torbiner, a dental anesthesiologist, the boy was administered the controversial drug sodium Amytal -- which some mistakenly believe is a truth serum. And it was after this session that the boy first made his charges against Jackson. A newsman at KCBS-TV, in L.A., reported on May 3 of this year that Chandler had used the drug on his son, but the dentist claimed he did so only to pull his son's tooth and that while under the drug's influence, the boy came out with allegations. Asked for this article about his use of the drug on the boy, Torbiner replied: "If I used it, it was for dental purposes."

    Given the facts about sodium Amytal and a recent landmark case that involved the drug, the boy's allegations, say several medical experts, must be viewed as unreliable, if not highly questionable.

    "It's a psychiatric medication that cannot be relied on to produce fact," says Dr. Resnick, the Cleveland psychiatrist. "People are very suggestible under it. People will say things under sodium Amytal that are blatantly untrue." Sodium Amytal is a barbiturate, an invasive drug that puts people in a hypnotic state when it's injected intravenously. Primarily administered for the treatment of amnesia, it first came into use during World War II, on soldiers traumatized -- some into catatonic states -- by the horrors of war. Scientific studies done in 1952 debunked the drug as a truth serum and instead demonstrated its risks: False memories can be easily implanted in those under its influence. "It is quite possible to implant an idea through the mere asking of a question," says Resnick. But its effects are apparently even more insidious: "The idea can become their memory, and studies have shown that even when you tell them the truth, they will swear on a stack of Bibles that it happened," says Resnick.

    Recently, the reliability of the drug became an issue in a high-profile trial in Napa County, California. After undergoing numerous therapy sessions, at least one of which included the use of sodium Amytal, 20-year-old Holly Ramona accused her father of molesting her as a child. Gary Ramona vehemently denied the charge and sued his daughter's therapist and the psychiatrist who had administered the drug. This past May, jurors sided with Gary Ramona, believing that the therapist and the psychiatrist may have reinforced memories that were false. Gary Ramona's was the first successful legal challenge to the so-called "repressed memory phenomenon" that has produced thousands of sexual-abuse allegations over the past decade.

    As for Chandler's story about using the drug to sedate his son during a tooth extraction, that too seems dubious, in light of the drug's customary use. "It's absolutely a psychiatric drug," says Dr. Kenneth Gottlieb, a San Francisco psychiatrist who has administered sodium Amytal to amnesia patients. Dr. John Yagiela, the coordinator of the anesthesia and pain control department of UCLA's school of dentistry, adds, "It's unusual for it to be used [for pulling a tooth]. It makes no sense when better, safer alternatives are available. It would not be my choice."

    Because of sodium Amytal's potential side effects, some doctors will administer it only in a hospital. "I would never want to use a drug that tampers with a person's unconscious unless there was no other drug available," says Gottlieb. "And I would not use it without resuscitating equipment, in case of allergic reaction, and only with an M.D. anesthesiologist present."

    Chandler, it seems, did not follow these guidelines. He had the procedure performed on his son in his office, and he relied on the dental anesthesiologist Mark Torbiner for expertise. (It was Torbiner who'd introduced Chandler and Rothman in 1991, when Rothman needed dental work.)

    The nature of Torbiner's practice appears to have made it highly successful. "He boasts that he has $100 a month overhead and $40,000 a month income," says Nylla Jones, a former patient of his. Torbiner doesn't have an office for seeing patients; rather, he travels to various dental offices around the city, where he administers anesthesia during procedures.

    This magazine has learned that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is probing another aspect of Torbiner's business practices: He makes housecalls to administer drugs -- mostly morphine and Demerol -- not only postoperatively to his dental patients but also, it seems, to those suffering pain whose source has nothing to do with dental work. He arrives at the homes of his clients -- some of them celebrities -- carrying a kind of fishing-tackle box that contains drugs and syringes. At one time, the license plate on his Jaguar read "SLPYDOC." According to Jones, Torbiner charges $350 for a basic ten-to-twenty-minute visit. In what Jones describes as standard practice, when it's unclear how long Torbiner will need to stay, the client, anticipating the stupor that will soon set in, leaves a blank check for Torbiner to fill in with the appropriate amount. the appropriate amount.

    Torbiner wasn't always successful. In 1989, he got caught in a lie and was asked to resign from UCLA, where he was an assistant professor at the school of dentistry. Torbiner had asked to take a half-day off so he could observe a religious holiday but was later found to have worked at a dental office instead.

    A check of Torbiner's credentials with the Board of Dental Examiners indicates that he is restricted by law to administering drugs solely for dental-related procedures. But there is clear evidence that he has not abided by those restrictions. In fact, on at least eight occasions, Torbiner has given a general anesthetic to Barry Rothman, during hair-transplant procedures. Though normally a local anesthetic would be injected into the scalp, "Barry is so afraid of the pain," says Dr. James De Yarman, the San Diego physician who performed Rothman's transplants, "that [he] wanted to be put out completely." De Yarman said he was "amazed" to learn that Torbiner is a dentist, having assumed all along that he was an M.D.

    In another instance, Torbiner came to the home of Nylla Jones, she says, and injected her with Demerol to help dull the pain that followed her appendectomy.

    On August 16, three days after Chandler and Rothman rejected the $350,000 script deal, the situation came to a head. On behalf of June Chandler Schwartz, Michael Freeman notified Rothman that he would be filing papers early the next morning that would force Chandler to turn over the boy. Reacting quickly, Chandler took his son to Mathis Abrams, the psychiatrist who'd provided Rothman with his assessment of the hypothetical child-abuse situation. During a three-hour session, the boy alleged that Jackson had engaged in a sexual relationship with him. He talked of masturbation, kissing, fondling of nipples and oral sex. There was, however, no mention of actual penetration, which might have been verified by a medical exam, thus providing corroborating evidence.

    The next step was inevitable. Abrams, who is required by law to report any such accusation to authorities, called a social worker at the Department of Children's Services, who in turn contacted the police. The full-scale investigation of Michael Jackson was about to begin.



    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


    Five days after Abrams called the authorities, the media got wind of the investigation. On Sunday morning, August 22, Don Ray, a free-lance reporter in Burbank, was asleep when his phone rang. The caller, one of his tipsters, said that warrants had been issued to search Jackson's ranch and condominium. Ray sold the story to L.A.'s KNBC-TV, which broke the news at 4 P.M. the following day.

    After that, Ray "watched this story go away like a freight train," he says. Within twenty-four hours, Jackson was the lead story on seventy-three TV news broadcasts in the Los Angeles area alone and was on the front page of every British newspaper. The story of Michael Jackson and the 13-year-old boy became a frenzy of hype and unsubstantiated rumor, with the line between tabloid and mainstream media virtually eliminated.

    The extent of the allegations against Jackson wasn't known until August 25. A person inside the DCS illegally leaked a copy of the abuse report to Diane Dimond of Hard Copy. Within hours, the L.A. office of a British news service also got the report and began selling copies to any reporter willing to pay $750. The following day, the world knew about the graphic details in the leaked report. "While laying next to each other in bed, Mr. Jackson put his hand under [the child's] shorts," the social worker had written. From there, the coverage soon demonstrated that anything about Jackson would be fair game.

    "Competition among news organizations became so fierce," says KNBC reporter Conan Nolan, that "stories weren't being checked out. It was very unfortunate." The National Enquirer put twenty reporters and editors on the story. One team knocked on 500 doors in Brentwood trying to find Evan Chandler and his son. Using property records, they finally did, catching up with Chandler in his black Mercedes. "He was not a happy man. But I was," said Andy O'Brien, a tabloid photographer.

    Next came the accusers -- Jackson's former employees. First, Stella and Philippe Lemarque, Jackson' ex-housekeepers, tried to sell their story to the tabloids with the help of broker Paul Barresi, a former porn star. They asked for as much as half a million dollars but wound up selling an interview to The Globe of Britain for $15,000. The Quindoys, a Filipino couple who had worked at Neverland, followed. When their asking price was $100,000, they said " 'the hand was outside the kid's pants,' " Barresi told a producer of Frontline, a PBS program. "As soon as their price went up to $500,000, the hand went inside the pants. So come on." The L.A. district attorney's office eventually concluded that both couples were useless as witnesses.

    Next came the bodyguards. Purporting to take the journalistic high road, Hard Copy's Diane Dimond told Frontline in early November of last year that her program was "pristinely clean on this. We paid no money for this story at all." But two weeks later, as a Hard Copy contract reveals, the show was negotiating a $100,000 payment to five former Jackson security guards who were planning to file a $10 million lawsuit alleging wrongful termination of their jobs.

    On December 1, with the deal in place, two of the guards appeared on the program; they had been fired, Dimond told viewers, because "they knew too much about Michael Jackson's strange relationship with young boys." In reality, as their depositions under oath three months later reveal, it was clear they had never actually seen Jackson do anything improper with Chandler's son or any other child:

    "So you don't know anything about Mr. Jackson and [the boy], do you?" one of Jackson's attorneys asked former security guard Morris Williams under oath.

    "All I know is from the sworn documents that other people have sworn to."

    "But other than what someone else may have said, you have no firsthand knowledge about Mr. Jackson and [the boy], do you?"

    "That's correct."

    "Have you spoken to a child who has ever told you that Mr. Jackson did anything improper with the child?"

    "No."

    When asked by Jackson's attorney where he had gotten his impressions, Williams replied: "Just what I've been hearing in the media and what I've experienced with my own eyes."

    "Okay. That's the point. You experienced nothing with your own eyes, did you?"

    "That's right, nothing."

    (The guards' lawsuit, filed in March 1994, was still pending as this article went to press.)

    [NOTE: The case was thrown out of court in July 1995. Click here to read details.]

    Next came the maid. On December 15, Hard Copy presented "The Bedroom Maid's Painful Secret." Blanca Francia told Dimond and other reporters that she had seen a naked Jackson taking showers and Jacuzzi baths with young boys. She also told Dimond that she had witnessed her own son in compromising positions with Jackson -- an allegation that the grand juries apparently never found credible.

    A copy of Francia's sworn testimony reveals that Hard Copy paid her $20,000, and had Dimond checked out the woman's claims, she would have found them to be false. Under deposition by a Jackson attorney, Francia admitted she had never actually see Jackson shower with anyone nor had she seen him naked with boys in his Jacuzzi. They always had their swimming trunks on, she acknowledged.

    The coverage, says Michael Levine, a Jackson press representative, "followed a proctologist's view of the world. Hard Copy was loathsome. The vicious and vile treatment of this man in the media was for selfish reasons. [Even] if you have never bought a Michael Jackson record in your life, you should be very concerned. Society is built on very few pillars. One of them is truth. When you abandon that, it's a slippery slope."

    The investigation of Jackson, which by October 1993 would grow to involve at least twelve detectives from Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties, was instigated in part by the perceptions of one psychiatrist, Mathis Abrams, who had no particular expertise in child sexual abuse. Abrams, the DCS caseworker's report noted, "feels the child is telling the truth." In an era of widespread and often false claims of child molestation, police and prosecutors have come to give great weight to the testimony of psychiatrists, therapists and social workers.

    Police seized Jackson's telephone books during the raid on his residences in August and questioned close to thirty children and their families. Some, such as Brett Barnes and Wade Robson, said they had shared Jackson's bed, but like all the others, they gave the same response -- Jackson had done nothing wrong. "The evidence was very good for us," says an attorney who worked on Jackson's defense. "The other side had nothing but a big mouth."

    Despite the scant evidence supporting their belief that Jackson was guilty, the police stepped up their efforts. Two officers flew to the Philippines to try to nail down the Quindoys' "hand in the pants" story, but apparently decided it lacked credibility. The police also employed aggressive investigative techniques -- including allegedly telling lies -- to push the children into making accusations against Jackson. According to several parents who complained to Bert Fields, officers told them unequivocally that their children had been molested, even though the children denied to their parents that anything bad had happened. The police, Fields complained in a letter to Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams, "have also frightened youngsters with outrageous lies, such as 'We have nude photos of you.' There are, of course, no such photos." One officer, Federico Sicard, told attorney Michael Freeman that he had lied to the children he'd interviewed and told them that he himself had been molested as a child, says Freeman. Sicard did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.

    All along, June Chandler Schwartz rejected the charges Chandler was making against Jackson -- until a meeting with police in late August 1993. Officers Sicard and Rosibel Ferrufino made a statement that began to change her mind. "[The officers] admitted they only had one boy," says Freeman, who attended the meeting, "but they said, 'We're convinced Michael Jackson molested this boy because he fits the classic profile of a pedophile perfectly.' "

    "There's no such thing as a classic profile. They made a completely foolish and illogical error," says Dr. Ralph Underwager, a Minneapolis psychiatrist who has treated pedophiles and victims of incest since 1953. Jackson, he believes, "got nailed" because of "misconceptions like these that have been allowed to parade as fact in an era of hysteria." In truth, as a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study shows, many child-abuse allegations -- 48 percent of those filed in 1990 -- proved to be unfounded.

    "It was just a matter of time before someone like Jackson became a target," says Phillip Resnick. "He's rich, bizarre, hangs around with kids and there is a fragility to him. The atmosphere is such that an accusation must mean it happened."



    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


    The seeds of settlement were already being sown as the police investigation continued in both counties through the fall of 1993. And a behind-the-scenes battle among Jackson's lawyers for control of the case, which would ultimately alter the course the defense would take, had begun.

    By then, June Chandler Schwartz and Dave Schwartz had united with Evan Chandler against Jackson. The boy's mother, say several sources, feared what Chandler and Rothman might do if she didn't side with them. She worried that they would try to advance a charge against her of parental neglect for allowing her son to have sleepovers with Jackson. Her attorney, Michael Freeman, in turn, resigned in disgust, saying later that "the whole thing was such a mess. I felt uncomfortable with Evan. He isn't a genuine person, and I sensed he wasn't playing things straight."

    Over the months, lawyers for both sides were retained, demoted and ousted as they feuded over the best strategy to take. Rothman ceased being Chandler's lawyer in late August, when the Jackson camp filed extortion charges against the two. Both then hired high-priced criminal defense attorneys to represent them.. (Rothman retained Robert Shapiro, now O.J. Simpson's chief lawyer.) According to the diary kept by Rothman's former colleague, on August 26, before the extortion charges were filed, Chandler was heard to say "It's my ass that's on the line and in danger of going to prison." The investigation into the extortion charges was superficial because, says a source, "the police never took it that seriously. But a whole lot more could have been done." For example, as they had done with Jackson, the police could have sought warrants to search the homes and offices of Rothman and Chandler. And when both men, through their attorneys, declined to be interviewed by police, a grand jury could have been convened.

    In mid-September, Larry Feldman, a civil attorney who'd served as head of the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Association, began representing Chandler's son and immediately took control of the situation. He filed a $30 million civil lawsuit against Jackson, which would prove to be the beginning of the end.

    Once news of the suit spread, the wolves began lining up at the door. According to a member of Jackson's legal team, "Feldman got dozens of letters from all kinds of people saying they'd been molested by Jackson. They went through all of them trying to find somebody, and they found zero."

    With the possibility of criminal charges against Jackson now looming, Bert Fields brought in Howard Weitzman, a well-known criminal-defense lawyer with a string of high-profile clients -- including John DeLorean, whose trail he won, and Kim Basinger, whose Boxing Helena contract dispute he lost. (Also, for a short time this June, Weitzman was O.J. Simpson's attorney.) Some predicted a problem between the two lawyers early on. There wasn't room for two strong attorneys used to running their own show.

    From the day Weitzman joined Jackson's defense team, "he was talking settlement," says Bonnie Ezkenazi, an attorney who worked for the defense. With Fields and Pellicano still in control of Jackson's defense, they adopted an aggressive strategy. They believed staunchly in Jackson's innocence and vowed to fight the charges in court. Pellicano began gathering evidence to use in the trial, which was scheduled for March 21, 1994. "They had a very weak case," says Fields. "We wanted to fight. Michael wanted to fight and go through a trial. We felt we could win."

    Dissension within the Jackson camp accelerated on November 12, after Jackson's publicist announced at a press conference that the singer was canceling the remainder of his world tour to go into a drug-rehabilitation program to treat his addiction to painkillers. Fields later told reporters that Jackson was "barely able to function adequately on an intellectual level." Others in Jackson's camp felt it was a mistake to portray the singer as incompetent. "It was important," Fields says, "to tell the truth. [Larry] Feldman and the press took the position that Michael was trying to hide and that it was all a scam. But it wasn't."

    On November 23, the friction peaked. Based on information he says he got from Weitzman, Fields told a courtroom full of reporters that a criminal indictment against Jackson seemed imminent. Fields had a reason for making the statement: He was trying to delay the boy's civil suit by establishing that there was an impending criminal case that should be tried first. Outside the courtroom, reporters asked why Fields had made the announcement, to which Weitzman replied essentially that Fields "misspoke himself." The comment infuriated Fields, "because it wasn't true," he says. "It was just an outrage. I was very upset with Howard." Fields sent a letter of resignation to Jackson the following week.

    "There was this vast group of people all wanting to do a different thing, and it was like moving through molasses to get a decision," says Fields. "It was a nightmare, and I wanted to get the hell out of it." Pellicano, who had received his share of flak for his aggressive manner, resigned at the same time.

    With Fields and Pellicano gone, Weitzman brought in Johnnie Cochran Jr., a well-known civil attorney who is now helping defend O.J. Simpson. And John Branca, whom Fields had replaced as Jackson's general counsel in 1990, was back on board. In late 1993, as DAs in both Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties convened grand juries to assess whether criminal charges should be filed against Jackson, the defense strategy changed course and talk of settling the civil case began in earnest, even though his new team also believed in Jackson's innocence.

    Why would Jackson's side agree to settle out of court, given his claims of innocence and the questionable evidence against him? His attorneys apparently decided there were many factors that argued against taking the case to civil court. Among them was the fact that Jackson's emotional fragility would be tested by the oppressive media coverage that would likely plague the singer day after day during a trial that could last as long as six months. Politics and racial issues had also seeped into legal proceedings -- particularly in Los Angeles, which was still recovering from the Rodney King ordeal -- and the defense feared that a court of law could not be counted on to deliver justice. Then, too, there was the jury mix to consider. As one attorney says, "They figured that Hispanics might resent [Jackson] for his money, blacks might resent him for trying to be white, and whites would have trouble getting around the molestation issue." In Resnick's opinion, "The hysteria is so great and the stigma [of child molestation] is so strong, there is no defense against it."

    Jackson's lawyers also worried about what might happen if a criminal trial followed, particularly in Santa Barbara, which is a largely white, conservative, middle-to-upper-class community. Any way the defense looked at it, a civil trial seemed too big a gamble. By meeting the terms of a civil settlement, sources say, the lawyers figured they could forestall a criminal trial through a tacit understanding that Chandler would agree to make his son unavailable to testify.

    Others close to the case say the decision to settle also probably had to do with another factor -- the lawyers' reputations. "Can you imagine what would happen to an attorney who lost the Michael Jackson case?" says Anthony Pellicano. "There's no way for all three lawyers to come out winners unless they settle. The only person who lost is Michael Jackson." But Jackson, says Branca, "changed his mind about [taking the case to trial] when he returned to this country. He hadn't seen the massive coverage and how hostile it was. He just wanted the whole thing to go away."

    On the other side, relationships among members of the boy's family had become bitter. During a meeting in Larry Feldman's office in late 1993, Chandler, a source says, "completely lost it and beat up Dave [Schwartz]." Schwartz, having separated from June by this time, was getting pushed out of making decisions that affected his stepson, and he resented Chandler for taking the boy and not returning him.

    "Dave got mad and told Evan this was all about extortion, anyway, at which point Evan stood up, walked over and started hitting Dave," a second source says.



    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


    To anyone who lived in Los Angeles in January 1994, there were two main topics of discussion -- the earthquake and the Jackson settlement. On January 25, Jackson agreed to pay the boy an undisclosed sum. The day before, Jackson's attorneys had withdrawn the extortion charges against Chandler and Rothman.

    The actual amount of the settlement has never been revealed, although speculation has placed the sum around $20 million. One source says Chandler and June Chandler Schwartz received up to $2 million each, while attorney Feldman might have gotten up to 25 percent in contingency fees. The rest of the money is being held in trust for the boy and will be paid out under the supervision of a court-appointed trustee.

    "Remember, this case was always about money," Pellicano says, "and Evan Chandler wound up getting what he wanted." Since Chandler still has custody of his son, sources contend that logically this means the father has access to any money his son gets.

    By late May 1994, Chandler finally appeared to be out of dentistry. He'd closed down his Beverly Hills office, citing ongoing harassment from Jackson supporters. Under the terms of the settlement, Chandler is apparently prohibited from writing about the affair, but his brother, Ray Charmatz, was reportedly trying to get a book deal.

    In what may turn out to be the never-ending case, this past August, both Barry Rothman and Dave Schwartz (two principal players left out of the settlement) filed civil suits against Jackson. Schwartz maintains that the singer broke up his family. Rothman's lawsuit claims defamation and slander on the part of Jackson, as well as his original defense team -- Fields, Pellicano and Weitzman -- for the allegations of extortion. "The charge of [extortion]," says Rothman attorney Aitken, "is totally untrue. Mr. Rothman has been held up for public ridicule, was the subject of a criminal investigation and suffered loss of income." (Presumably, some of Rothman's lost income is the hefty fee he would have received had he been able to continue as Chandler's attorney through the settlement phase.)

    As for Michael Jackson, "he is getting on with his life," says publicist Michael Levine. Now married, Jackson also recently recorded three new songs for a greatest-hits album and completed a new music video called "History."

    And what became of the massive investigation of Jackson? After millions of dollars were spent by prosecutors and police departments in two jurisdictions, and after two grand juries questioned close to 200 witnesses, including 30 children who knew Jackson, not a single corroborating witness could be found. (In June 1994, still determined to find even one corroborating witness, three prosecutors and two police detectives flew to Australia to again question Wade Robson, the boy who had acknowledged that he'd slept in the same bed with Jackson. Once again, the boy said that nothing bad had happened.)

    The sole allegations leveled against Jackson, then, remain those made by one youth, and only after the boy had been give a potent hypnotic drug, leaving him susceptible to the power of suggestion.

    "I found the case suspicious," says Dr. Underwager, the Minneapolis psychiatrist, "precisely because the only evidence came from one boy. That would be highly unlikely. Actual pedophiles have an average of 240 victims in their lifetime. It's a progressive disorder. They're never satisfied."

    Given the slim evidence against Jackson, it seems unlikely he would have been found guilty had the case gone to trial. But in the court of public opinion, there are no restrictions. People are free to speculate as they wish, and Jackson's eccentricity leaves him vulnerable to the likelihood that the public has assumed the worst about him.

    So is it possible that Jackson committed no crime -- that he is what he has always purported to be, a protector and not a molester of children? Attorney Michael Freeman thinks so: "It's my feeling that Jackson did nothing wrong and these people [Chandler and Rothman] saw an opportunity and programmed it. I believe it was all about money."

    To some observers, the Michael Jackson story illustrates the dangerous power of accusation, against which there is often no defense -- particularly when the accusations involve child sexual abuse. To others, something else is clear now -- that police and prosecutors spent millions of dollars to create a case whose foundation never existed.



    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


    JUDGE DISMISSES CASE AGAINST MICHAEL JACKSON

    North American News Report

    DATE: July 21, 1995 18:06 E.T.

    LOS ANGELES (Reuter) - A judge Friday threw out a a lawsuit against Michael Jackson by five of his former security guards who said they were fired for knowing too much about nighttime visits with young boys.

    After a three-day trial, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Richard Neal dismissed the case on the grounds that all the guards had signed releases providing for severance pay when they left Jackson.

    ''Michael Jackson is thankful for the court's ruling,'' Jackson's attorney Howard Weitzman said in a statement.

    ''He has consistently maintained that he has not engaged in wrongful conduct with any minors. The stories told by these guards on various tabloid shows, for which they were paid, were false.'' The security guards had brought the case against Jackson in 1993, alleging they were spied on and harassed by a private investigator hired by the pop superstar to impede the investigation into charges he sexually molested young boys.

    At the time, Jackson was being sued by a 13-year-old boy who charged the singer had molested him, and was also under criminal investigation. Jackson denied the allegations of the boy, whose family later settled the lawsuit for millions of dollars, and prosecutors decided not to pursue the charges.

    The security guards had alleged they had firsthand knowledge of Jackson's personal life, and had witnessed him fondling young boys and keeping them in his bedroom for days at a time.

    They also alleged Jackson attempted to discredit potential witnesses and destroy incriminating evidence, at one point instructing one guard to retrieve a photo of a naked boy left in the singer's bathroom.

    Jackson maintained that the dismissal of the guards was related to a decision to hire an independent security firm rather than employ guards on an individual basis.



    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


    JUDGE DISMISSES GUARDS' CASE AGAINST MICHAEL JACKSON

    The Associated Press

    Date: July 22, 1995

    A lawsuit by four ex-guards who claim Michael Jackson fired them because they knew about his alleged trysts was thrown out of court on Friday.

    The men sued in 1993 despite the fact they had signed a release after they were fired in which they promised not to.

    They claimed the release was invalid because they signed it under duress, but Superior Court Judge Richard C. Neal dismissed the case.

    The guards' lawyer, Charles T. Mathews, said he would appeal.

    ''If we'd been able to get to a jury, I'm quite confident they'd find the charges we alleged were true,'' Mathews said. Jackson's lawyer disagreed.

    ''Michael has said from day one he never did anything inappropriate with any minors,'' Howard Weitzman said. ''This was (the guards') way of getting their 15 minutes in the limelight.''

    Jackson settled a sex abuse lawsuit filed by a 13-year-old boy in 1994, reportedly for as much as $15 million. No charges were filed. Jackson denied wrongdoing and called the boy's claim an extortion attempt.

     
  • BATTLE ROYALE 2002-12-25 00:27:54
    2000, Japan. Starring Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto, Masanobu Ando, Kou Shibasaki, Chiaki Kuriyama, Takeshi Kitano. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku.

    Review by Keith Allison

    There's an old saying, or at least I think it's old. Maybe it's not that old. Hell, maybe it's not even actually saying. Anyway, someone somewhere and at some point said "Only in America." And for a lot of things, I suppose it's true. However, there is the flip side of that coin, "Never in America," and that's where the Japanese hit Battle Royale falls. It is a movie that, for a number of reasons, would never be made in America and, in fact, will probably never even be distributed in America except on hard-to-find videos.

    The primary cause for the shock and outrage directed toward the movie from us Yanks is simple enough: violence. To sum it up in a nutshell, this is a movie about recent middle school graduates who are rounded up and transported to a remote island where they are forced to hunt one another down for the amusement of adults. The film pulls no punches in depicting the brutality of adults toward children as well as from one child to another. This simply will not fly in the United States. The recent glut of tragic school shootings has left America somewhat shell-shocked and hesitant when it comes to dealing with the topic of teen violence.

    We're happy to simply gloss over it -- perhaps the biggest tragedy of all to come from these horrible events. We blame the media, blame video games, blame extreme music. Basically, we blame everything except poor parenting, a complete lack of discipline practices, and a social set-up that encourages the alienation and persecution of any student who is different, smart, or in any way quirky and deviant from the rigid status quo. While we went on and on about violence video games and movies, we completely failed to address the obvious roots of the problem because it required us to point the finger squarely at ourselves. That's something we've never been very good at doing.

    I would not sit here and try to tell anyone that violent entertainment does not trigger violent behavior in certain people. It's obvious that it does, just as The Holy Bible has triggered extreme violence in masses of people throughout the centuries. The question we should be asking is not why we have these violent movies or video games. The question is simply why are people today so monumentally stupid that they can't grasp something as basic as the difference between real and make-believe?



    I grew up watching screwy movies, stuff far more twisted and violent than these kids ever saw. Horror, kungfu, crime, by the age of twelve I'd seen more shockingly violent fare than most people do their entire lives. I watched pro wrestling, listened to heavy metal and angry punk rock. And you know what? Not once did I ever entertain the thought of walking into a classroom and offing the kids who fucked with me in school -- and believe me, as a punk rocker growing up in a rural Kentucky town during the mid 1980s, I got fucked with plenty. Not once did I ever think it was okay to piledrive my younger sister or try to fly by jumping out of a tree. Not once did I ever think anything I sw in a movie wa anything other than just what it was: an image in a movie. Not real life. Not how you are supposed to behave.

    I'm not particularly smart, but I'm also not a complete idiot. Even a simpleton should be able to comprehend the simple concept of what you see in a movie not being an example of what you do in real life. So what is it then, what is it we're doing differently, that is causing kids and adults both to behave like brainless twits who cannot conceive of the fact that you should not drop a flying elbow off the couch onto a two year old child?

    A big part of the problem is what I think of as new-age parenting. We live in a society that is so terrified of punishing a kid for being a rotten, spoiled asshole than we've ended up with a whole population of rotten, spiled assholes. Parents who attempt to discipline their children are chastised and live in constant fear of some bleeding heart guidance counselor from school turning them in for child abuse. Likewise, teachers are shackled, forced to operate with bound hands and attempt to instruct children who have basically been allowed to run wild and develop not the faintest sense of responsibility or consideration for others. To make matters worse, teachers who dare to flunk a student who deserves to be flunked are punished either for making the child feel bad about themselves or for making the school lose face by having failing students. As a result, we have a population that is now not only meaner and completely devoid of any sense of responsibility regarding their own actions, we also have a population that is just plain dumb as toast.

    Unable to understand that their actions have consequences, and too stupid to realize that what they see in movies and video games is not real, we end up with students who lack any sort of coping skills, who freak out and can't think of anything to do other than respond with violence and screaming. And as adults, rather than analyze our failure as elders, we simply blame the movies, even though countless other people saw the same movie and didn't interpret it as an okay to gun down classmates or co-workers.

    In this environment, it's no wonder people would be gun-shy about a film like Battle Royale. It requires an audience to understand the difference between reality and fantasy. It requires the audience to think about why the violence on screen is occuring, to analyze the actions of the people on screen, to think about why they have been driven to do what they are doing. It requires a basic understanding of satire and social commentary. None of these are things the average American youth has been taught how to do by either parents or school. Given our stunted emotional state in America, I have no doubt that a movie like Battle Royale would indeed result in violent behavior among some of the more astoundingly moronic kids who managed to see it. Given this admission, although I'm not a fan of censorship, I'm ultimately happy that the film may not see the light of day in the United States. The fewer idiots who have it as an excuse for their own misanthropic hatred, the better off the rets of us will be. besides, it's not like it's been banned -- it simply hasn't found a domestic distributors. Even with that limitation, it's not as if the movie is difficult to find.



    Anyway, it's impossible to discuss the film without discussing, at least in some cursory manner, the plague of youth violence. I'm not equipped for a full-on debate over the topic, but it had to be mentioned. It's also worth mentioning the difference between school violence in America and school violence in Japan. Although not nearly as violent as America, nor as well armed, Japan still has its fair share of youth trouble, and they are the impetus for much of the action in this graphic but well-made film.

    While American schools seem set up to reward mediocrity and encourage the dim-witted to beat down and prey upon the smart and unusual, Japanese schools are dog-eat-dog in the opposite direction. The pressure to get high marks, be an ace student, and get into a top college is intense, and much of the violence that occurs doe so as a result of this pressure. AT no point is this more absurdly obvious in Battle Royale than in a scene where a bloodied student, crazed by the situation in which he and his classmates have found themselves, charges toward his friends with guns blazing, screaming, "I will win this game and get into a good college!"

    Things begin on a troubling note, with a frantic newscaster scrambling to get shots of the "winner" of some game, a smiling, blood-covered young girl. The movie continues innocently enough, as a senior class prepares for their final day of middle school. Everyone's thinking about their future, and the happiness is only slightly marred by the attempted stabbing of one of the senior teachers, played with biting wit by Takeshi Kitano.

    While on a bus ride, the graduating class is gassed. When they wake up, they are in a dingy classroom on some remote island. Takeshi Kitano is present, along with a group of trigger-happy guards, to fill them in on what's happening. They have been chosen at random to compete in a game. The goal of the game is simple: kill all your classmates and avoid being killed yourself. The last one standing is the winner. If more than two students are left at the end of the game, everyone dies. If you refuse to play or attempt to escape, a lock around your neck will detonate and blow your jugular all to hell.



    The students find this impossible to believe, but a switchblade to the head of a protesting young girl quickly convinces them that this is serious. A couple more students mowed down by machine gun fire, and one demonstration of the blood-spraying effectiveness of the exploding necklaces later, and everyone falls into line.

    What struck me immediately about this film is that none of the deaths are lightweight. Even though the students who are killed straight away have had no more than a minute or so of screen time, their deaths affect the viewer. Part of it is the simple shock of what you're seeing. Outside of fetish porn, you don't expect to see a teacher fling a knife into a young girl's head. These aren't especially bad kids as far as we know; they're simply paying the price. The result is that each death, despite being sensationally gory, is also amazingly important and somewhat depressing. At the same time, each death is totally senseless. There is no reason, within the plot of the film, for the killing. No purpose is served, and that senselessness is the primary source of power, ironically enough.

    The students are forced to watch a cheery orientation video in which the basic rules of the game are relayed to them by a perky spokeswoman. They're then released into the wild. Some immediately form coalitions, while others immediately become paranoid. A few simply go insane with fear. The killing starts the minute they get out the door, although a number of the students are more interested in finding a way to beat the game than they are in killing one another. There must be a way to disarm or remove the collars. There must be a way to survive the game without playing it.

    But it's hard to think rationally when other students are lunging at you with a variety of weapons. Each student is given a weapon at random. Some turn out to be crossbows, stun guns, rifles, or machetes. Others are pot lids, binoculars, and similar completely useless items. As the bodies pile up and students form bonds and establish plans and strongholds, the adults provide play-by-play body counts and updates. Once again, the movie succeeds in making not a single death gratuitous. Each one is slightly heart-wrenching, and as the action progresses, you get sucked into rooting louder and louder for them to find a solution to this deadly puzzle. At no point did any of the violence and killing strike me as cool or slick. It's bloody, and it's upsetting, just as it should be.



    That's the true triumph of the movie, and the big element that your average dolt would miss. The violence in the movie is certainly not glorious, and the call for an end to violence, for people to learn to cope with life without resorting to bloodshed, rings clear in every frame of the film. Of course, no matter how loud the message may be, plenty of people simply aren't interested in listening and would instead rather just look at all the cool blood.

    The action focuses primarily on a young couple, Noriko and Nanahara, and a guy named Kawada who vows to help them get off the island and stay alive. It's no easy task, of course, what with the the students who have embraced the violence all too quickly and the constant threat of betrayal. When Nanahara is separated from the group and wind sup recovering from wounds in a lighthouse occupied by a force of girls, he's witness to all hell breaking lose when suspicion gets the better of them.

    Meanwhile, another group of students set up a headquarters, complete with a generator and laptop computer one of them had in his backpack. Their hope is to get help from outside or find a way to disarm the necklaces. One of them, the son of a 1960s activist, figures the best way to really play the game is by taking the fight directly to the adults who are controlling things.

    The movie keeps you off-balance by proving to you that anyone could die at any moment, even the people who seem like they're set up to make it. Additionally, it messes with expectations by doing things like staging an encounter in the woods between Norika and Nanahara and Takeshi Kitano during which he treats them with warm-hearted kindness. It's obvious at that point that there's even more to the game than we first suspected, and that it may be more than a simple case of adults being fed up with their self-centered offspring.

    Meanwhile, the guy with the computer successfully link sup with a hacker group and downloads a virus into the control room's computers. Before they can take advantage of the collapse of defenses however, they are set upon by one of the few students. In the end, it comes down to only three, the same three who have been working together since the beginning: Nanahara, Noriko, and Kawada. With time running out before the collars self-detonate, the tension mounts. Will they stick together, find a last-ditch solution, die together, or turn on each other?



    Despite the sensationalism surrounding the film, there's no denying it's power. It's a stunner, that's for sure, and not just because you'll sit there amazed at just how far the movie is willing to go in order to get its point across. While he may not be the director, it's obvious that the peculiar humanist twist Takeshi Kitano brings to his films was brought here as well. Amid the non-stop carnage and mayhem, there is an overwhelming sense of sadness and hope. The final stinger -- I don't know if you can call it a joke -- punctuates the proceedings in the most classic of Kitano ways.

    There is no one in the world as adept at using violence to create such striking anti-violence messages as Takeshi Kitano. As far as I'm concerned, he's the most gifted film maker working today. And as I said, even though he's not sitting in the director's chair here, his influence is certainly prevalent. A film about school kids forced to hunt one another down is ripe for the tendency toward exploitation, but while it certainly isn't afraid to get its hand's dirty, it never sinks to the level of lesser films. It never undermines its own message, something that marred films like Men Behind The Sun, who undercut their own power by revelling and wallowing in the depravity they depicted. That movie, while effective, also felt too exploitive, too interested in depicting grotesque deaths while not interested enough in creating any sense of character.

    Battle Royale does wonders in establishing personalities for the characters in a very short amount of time, and that adds strength to the story. While undeniably gory, the death in the film takes a back seat to the struggle, and there is no point in the film that the violence ever seems fun, sensible, or in any way appealing. A lesser film, once again, would have simply relished each murder while forgetting that each death needs a meaning, needs to pack a punch that will further turn off the viewer to violence and make them hope, against all odds, that the kids who rely on peaceful cooperation will pull off the seemingly impossible.

    That said, it's a movie that would be totally misunderstood by the vast majority of American film goers (I'm not well acquainted with the movie goers of other countries, so I can't comment on them), adult and juvenile. Dismissed as poorly wrought melodramatic exploitation, tasteless insanity, or a really cool movie about kids killing each other, I really don't see a lot of people appreciating the effectiveness of the film. Chalk it up to culture gap, a lack of desire to see movies as anything beyond what exists on the very surface, what have you. Ultimately, it's not my job to give you your opinion, and we all have our own reasons for liking and not liking a particular movie.

    Personally, I find the melodrama touching in much the same way it was pulled off in John Woo films like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Bullet in the Head. All three are frightfully melodramatic, but it's composed so well that you can't help but be sucked into it if you give it half a chance. But just like John Woo films, a lot of people will simply not be interested by the melodrama (or realize the fact that we are, as a species, way more melodramatic than even the most overblown of movies) or will walk away from it snickering. So be it. I have no vested interested in getting people to like a movie.



    Unlike a John Woo film, however, the violence on display here is never poetic or beautiful. It's just gory and mean and depressing. It's a movie that makes you hate violence, that makes you want to just see the insanity end. Or at least, that's what it did to me. Admittedly, I went into the movie already abhorring guns and real-life violence, so I didn't take much convincing. It's not that I'm a pacifist -- I'll freely agree with the notion that there's are times when physical and violent confrontation are the corners we've painted ourselves into. It's simply that I think we've devolved to the point where violence is our first and only solution for even the most petty events. People killing each other because they got angry at a bad umpire call during a tee-ball game? This is not the behavior of a rational species. Violence should always, in my opinion, be the final resort, not the initial response. See? I grew up watching violent films, even watched Battle Royale, and I have yet to want to go out and murder people.

    Director Kinji Fukasaku spent most of his career making some of the better yakuza films, with some sci-fi and ninja fare thrown in for good measure. At somewhere right around seventy years old, he's a rather shocking figure to have made such a shocking film. But then, Takeshi Kitano ain't no teenager, either. Together, the two of them, along with writer Kenta Fukasaku have done an admirable job in adapting the best-selling but highly controversial original novel by Koushun Takami into film. While some changes had to made (obviously the book is able to get into the heads of the characters in much greater detail) or simply were made (the movie is set merely in the near future, while the book is set in an alternate timeline when Japan did not lose World War Two and never had to repent for its brutal imperialist advances), they still manage to catch the essence of what is a very complex subject wrapped in what appears at first to be a very simple film. The screenplay is actually as much a better-armed reworking of Golding's Lord of the Flies as it is an adaptation of the Battle Royale novel, with a little MOst Dangerous Game thrown in for good measure.

    It makes me wonder how people react to a book like Lord of the Flies these days, which is one of the original and most powerful explorations of children turning savage on one another. I've always felt that Lord of the Flies and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness are two of the absolute best novels for teaching young people to analyze and understand literature. Both books have a ton of messages in them, and very few of them are that hard for the average student, or even a sharp middle schooler, to grasp. But then, I don't even know if they teach literary criticism in schools anymore. From what I've seen, they barely even teach the kids how to read, let alone understand what it is the words are attempting to say to them. I think Battle Royale is bloodier but no less savage or intense than Lord of the Flies, but because it's using guns instead of pointy sticks, and because it's a movie instead of a book, it's going to get a lot more attention. I'm willing to bet if you relayed to the sensation-hungry mass media the story of Lord of the Flies without telling them what it was you were actually telling them, they would vomit out all sorts of indignant reports about this vile and violent story corrupting our children and forcing them to kill one another and break each other's glasses, how this twisted sick tale has children of no older than eleven or twelve marching around spewing vulgarities like "Sucks to your ass-mar."

    There are plenty of other reasons to go bonkers over this movie. The acting is fine. Granted, the young cast mostly has to scream, cry, and die, but each one is believable and no one falls flat. They seem like actual school kids. Takeshi Kitano is, of course, gold. He plays pretty much the same deadpan but emotionally deep character he's known for in his own films, and he brings a twisted sense of very black humor to the violent proceedings. Scenes of him and a guard fighting over cookies in the control room as they continuously update the body count are a treat.

    Aside from the acting and message, the film boasts a ton of action, all of it bloody and well-paced. An action film with a message would still be a crummy movie if it was boring and poorly executed, but Battle Royale injects the events with a sense of tense hyper-activity. There is no moment in the film when anyone is safe, when anyone can rest and relax. There is no point, even during the melodramatics, when you can let down your guard and take a breath, because there's always a very good chance that someone with a machete is about to pop up over the hill. While the action is not "well choreographed" in the same sense that action in Hong Kong is staged (after all, these are just kids, not hitmen well-trained in various gymnastic maneuvers to make their action flashier), it is brutal, bloody, and pulled off with a tremendous amount of energy.

    But no movie is perfect. Battle Royale possesses a few problems that, while easy to ignore in my opinion, are still worth mentioning. For one, it's not clear exactly why the battle is allowed to take place. There is mention of an act passed by the Diet (Japanese congress), but it seems that such an act would not be passed even in extreme times without lots of controversy and constant protest, especially since it seems the battle itself actually does very little to curb teen violence. Since the kids are chosen at random, good ones get lumped in with the bad, and so there is no sense of it being a punishment or type of retribution for aggressive behavior. Why, after all, would you not be rotten if being good had just as much chance of landing you in the game? The news report at the beginning serves to further confuse the matter a little,as it would make it seem like the battle was a nationally televised event, yet once there, none of the kids seem to know what it is.



    Another weakness of the script is that at times it becomes unclear exactly what it wants from the future. Obviously, a country that is willing to sacrifice its young in the name of stability, is roundly criticized (shades of the intense pressure put on young people to succeed in business and academics). Likewise, a world where children are simply allowed to run rampant with no discipline and no sense of responsibility is equally dangerous. It seems, ultimately, that movie simply calls for a little bit of common sense and understanding. In a way, it may seem like a slightly anti-climatic wish, but it's certainly sane. What we see in the film is what we seem unwilling to see in society: that we're destroying ourselves.

    I know every generation thinks theirs is the worst, that they are the ones living in the end times and witnessing the fall of the empire, so on and so forth. I'm not naive enough to be that self-centered in the face of so much suffering throughout the history of humanity. But as far as things today go, you gotta admit, regardless of how hard those who lived through the Dark Ages had it, we could use a lot of improving. It seems amazingly simple. I mean, if we all just stopped being such assholes all the time that would go a long way, but people seem to cling to their hatred of their fellow man (especially while driving) with dogged tenacity. And as long as we're insulating ourselves from and denying the causes of so many of our woes, as long as we're unwilling at every turn to accept any of the blame for the state of things, there's not much hope that the world is going to improve.

    So perhaps the final message of Battle Royale is this: as adults, we've shouldered the younger generation with a hideous burden. We've completely failed to prepare them for life. We've completely failed to teach them responsibility, respect for others, or respect for themselves. We've failed to steer them away from self-indulgence and self-destruction. We've shouldered them with our guilt, our incompetence we remain unwilling to accept. We've decided the world is too much trouble for us, and we've left it to them to solve all the problems, while at the same time leaving them emotionally and mentally stunted because we're not brave enough to accept responsibility for ourselves. It's always someone else's fault, something else's fault.

    And then we blame them. We blame them for being assholes when all they're doing is what they've been taught. We blame them for being out of control when we never made any attempt to teach them restraint. We blame them for our own bitterness, hatred, and buried sense of failure. We've stopped having children as a way of "feeling immortal" or simply because we want to love them, and we've started having children so we can have scapegoats and victims readily available.

    In the end, a movie is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out. You take out of Battle Royale what you bring into it, and no one can be forced to find meaning in something that has no meaning to them. To be honest, I didn't expect to find the movie as powerful as I did. I expected to react to it no differently than I did to other noble but flawed attempts at using violence to criticize violence. Instead of drawing from the Cannibal Holocaust well, however, the film has much more in common with the work of Sam Peckinpah or even A Clockwork Orange, though I would not put it on the same level as that film. It took me off-guard, and maybe that augmented my reaction somewhat. It was certainly a pleasing revelation. Maybe I'm simply hungry for a movie that addresses what I feel is one of the fundamental great denials destabilizing our society; the self-same problem which probably makes it best that this movie isn't going to be gobbled up by teens across America. They should see it, of course, but the question remains if they're even capable of understanding it, or if it'll just be more gore and fun for 'em. Is there reason out there for hope?
     
  • Poseur or Punk? 2002-12-14 06:36:22
    http://www.geocities.com/canadas_cutechick/rant.html
    http://www.recroommagazine.com/articles/avril.htm

    Read these articles and i must say it totally contradicts the stuff she (Avril Lavigne) writes about herself (was i naive to believe all of that ?)on her website....maybe the talent of Michelle Branch excites me too much that i hoped she'd be an equal...

    Avril's songs are good but are they manufactured? Did she write those lyrics? Can she play the guitar ? Did she sell herself to the record company or issit the other way round? Is this part of a scam?? Is this her way of creating news for heself and that anti-publicity is the best publicity ?

    All i can say is, i reserve judgement on her ability until i see a video of her doing the stuff she says she can do.



     
  • Once again ...awesome album : LET GO by Avril Lavigne 2002-12-14 05:14:03 Its the best i've heard since Garbage Ver 2 and i can't stop drooling over the song "Anything But Ordinary" and how scenes from Perfect Blue match to every single lyric in the song ( with Mima doing voiceovers on certain parts of the song as part of her concert)

    ===================

    Sometimes I get so weird
    I even freak myself out
    I laugh myself to sleep
    It's my lullaby
    Sometimes I drive so fast
    Just to feel the danger
    I wanna scream
    It makes me feel alive

    Is it enough to love?
    Is it enough to breathe?
    Somebody rip my heart out
    And leave me here to bleed
    Is it enough to die?
    Somebody save my life
    I'd rather be anything but ordinary please

    To walk within the lines
    Would make my life so boring
    I want to know that I
    Have been to the extreme
    So knock me off my feet
    Come on now give it to me
    Anything to make me feel alive

    Is it enough to love?
    Is it enough to breathe?
    Somebody rip my heart out
    And leave me here to bleed
    Is it enough to die?
    Somebody save my life
    I'd rather be anything but ordinary please
    I'd rather be anything but ordinary please.

    Let down your defences
    Use no common sense
    If you look you will see
    that this world is a beautiful
    accident turbulent suculent
    opulent permanent, no way
    I wanna taste it
    Don't wanna waste it away

    Sometimes I get so weird
    I even freak myself out
    I laugh my self to sleep
    It's my lullaby

    Is it enough?
    Is it enough?
    Is it enough to breathe?
    Somebody rip my heart out
    And leave me here to bleed
    Is it enough to die?
    Somebody save my life
    I'd rather be anything but ordinary please

    Is it enough?
    Is it enough to die?
    Somebody save my life
    I'd rather be anything but ordinary please
    I'd rather be anything but ordinary please.
    =================================
     
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