When I was in my early 20s and could lay some modest claims to coolness, I had a DJ friend who agonised about whether he should still play Michael Jackson remixes in his sets.
This was back when the child sexual abuse rumours about the pop star had morphed into allegations, which later became out-of-court settlements with his accusers, and eventually led to criminal charges, which culminated in a 2005 trial and Jackson’s acquittal by a jury. Jackson always maintained his innocence, as do the administrators of his lucrative estate.
But despite the best efforts of the Jackson public relations team, and what looked very much like an attempt at attention-diversion marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, the allegations cast a lasting pall.
The Jackson image was not helped by his disfiguring plastic surgery and the terrible own-goal interviews he did with Martin Bashir in the early noughties, in which he said blithely that he had slept in a bed with “many children” because “what’s wrong with sharing a love”?
During a legal battle over taxation on his estate, the judge noted that at the time of his death aged 50 in 2019, Jackson had not made any money from endorsements since about 1993. His poor reputation had engulfed his music.
After much earnest discussion, my DJ friend decided it would be OK if he played Jackson’s pre-alleged-child-sex abuse era hits, at least until things shook out, and we knew where we stood on all that. Stick to the delightful poppy genius of the Jackson Five. You can’t go wrong.
A new biopic of Jackson, titled Michael, (which follows the enormous success of the Michael Jackson stage show, MJ the Musical), seems to have taken a similar approach. The biopic, starring Jackson’s own nephew, Jaafar Jackson, was sanctioned by the Jackson estate – his executors are among the producers of the movie. (I have no plans to watch it.)
It focuses on the singer’s brutalised childhood, and his triumph over paternal abuse to become a pop star so famous and wealthy that he could indulge in the types of behaviour that make the tech-bro billionaires of 2026 appear psychologically healthy by comparison. Such as bringing his tuxedo’ed chimp, Bubbles, as his plus-one to the wedding of his lawyer.
According to the Financial Times, this same lawyer, John Branca, who is one of the Jackson estate’s executors and a producer on Michael, considered making a documentary as a riposte to Leaving Neverland, the 2019 documentary featuring in-depth interviews with two of Jackson’s accusers, now grown men.
The compelling film detailed what the New York Times called “a stomach-churning grooming process corroborated by [the accusers’] families, their diaries, investigators and other documents”.
Ultimately, the Jackson estate eschewed documentary as the best form for a clap-back, and decided to go with a biopic as a way of shoring up Jackson’s legacy. And, it goes without saying, to fortify the value of the Jackson estate’s intellectual property.
The FT noted that after Leaving Neverland was released, advertisers in the United States stopped using Jackson’s music – closing down one of the biggest revenue streams for the estate. And the estate was in trouble at the time of Jackson’s death, so much so that his lawyers took up a neighbouring suite in the hospital in Los Angeles where the singer was taken after his fatal overdose to war-game the next steps.
The pop star had left behind huge debts (in the realm of half a billion US dollars), but also intellectual property of immense value. His executors have been remarkably successful – in the year after Jackson’s death, his estate is estimated to have earned $US1 billion ($1.39 billion). And the monetisation continues.
The original version of Michael did reportedly cover the child sex abuse allegations, and disparaged the credibility of one of Jackson’s accusers, Jordan Chandler. But that draft script violated the terms of Jackson’s legal settlement with Chandler, and had to be scrapped.
This must have presented quite a technical conundrum for the scriptwriters and their story arc. The editors were called in, and the whole business of the allegations was cut. Instead, the film ends in 1988, during the Bad tour.
Perhaps this reworking of the script and the ensuing delay was fortuitous. There has never been a better time to release a whitewashing hagiography about a pop star who was both a genius and an alleged serial paedophile, and just not mention the paedophilia bit.
In the United States in 2026, Mammon is king. The new generation of the mega-rich see philanthropy as a con. Last year Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, told podcaster Joe Rogan that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy”, and the US President has used the trappings of office to hoist himself up to billionaire status. Woke is dead, and #metoo is a late-2010s relic.
It really seems to be a bring-out-your-dead moment for all who have sexual-conduct skeletons in their overstuffed closets.
The Epstein files have finally been blown off the news agenda by the war in Iran. Even the disgraced comedian Russell Brand has had a go at rehabilitating himself. Last year Brand was the subject of a #metoo-style investigation The Times and Channel 4 in Britain, which led to him being charged with alleged sex crimes – including rape and sexual assault – against multiple women. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
This week he was interviewed by US television journalist Megyn Kelly, telling her that while he may have had sex with a 16-year-old when he was 30, it was consensual. He admitted his behaviour was “exploitative” and “selfish” but characterised it as “awful but lawful”.
Much of the horror surrounding the Epstein files centres on how embedded the late paedophile was among the establishment. We wondered how this could happen, and how such powerful people could get away with enabling or blind-eyeing the abuse of scores of girls and women. But this seems the norm, not the exception.
So often the abuse of women and children seems to have happened in plain sight, or something near it, sometimes even with the implicit approval of us, the public. Epstein’s child sex abuse convictions were known, but the rich and powerful continued to bask in his largesse.
Jackson made no secret of his intimacy with boys. He literally paraded them on red carpets. And now he is having the red carpet rolled out for him, posthumously, all over again.
Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.
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