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Upon learning about Wade’s secret life and the extent to which he was still sifting through the wrack of his ruined childhood as a man in his 30s, Joy confesses: “He told me that he felt no emotion for me.” And their good cheer gets wearisome, if not chilling, as Leaving Neverland runs on Joy Robson in particular can’t stop punctuating her self-effacing cracks with smiles. Yet they are also presented as willing victims, if not accessories. Mothers Stephanie Safechuck and Joy Robson project the sincerity of parents who might otherwise worry about leaving their kids alone at the park jungle gym for fear of guys like Michael Jackson. In the film, the confidence with which the Robsons and Safechucks evade the conflation of stoking their kids’ ambition and reveling in their access to privilege is striking. (Safechuck’s mother recalls letting her son spend time alone with Jackson after the singer’s stylist described him as “like a 9-year-old little boy.”) Safechuck claims that Jackson began abusing him in the late ’80s after Jackson met the 10-year-old Safechuck.Īlong with its central pair of stories, Leaving Neverland contains material for another documentary about the credulity of parents. Jackson could justify these heinous acts of which he is accused, Leaving Neverland suggests, because he also regarded himself as a child.
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The Michael Jackson of director Dan Reed’s two-part, four-hour HBO documentary, which airs this weekend, is a child-man for whom luxe hotel suites, the infamous Neverland Ranch estate in Santa Barbara, California, and first-class plane tickets weren’t enjoyable in themselves they served as enticements to lure in children and their parents, while Jackson schemed to bed his favorite boys. According to alleged victims Wade Robson and James Safechuck, the pop icon would at first awe his young victims, relax them, and finally make them comfortable enough for him to lay a hand on their thighs and invite them into bed to perform sexual acts. In Leaving Neverland, Michael Jackson comes off like a grinning hunter baiting a trap.