Leaving Neverland, the two-part HBO documentary that debuted on March 3, details the accusations levied by Wade Robson and James Safechuck—two men who say they were molested by Jackson when they were children. The film is aesthetically deliberative in its tight camera shots and long pauses, which allow Robson and Safechuck to fill the space themselves, thereby minimizing Jackson. There are no experts present in the film to contextualize what the effects of long-term child molestation are. In the four hours of Leaving Neverland, audiences are granted a front-row seat to the alleged abuse, as it is explained in painstaking and alarming detail. On-screen, Robson and Safechuck, now 36 and 41, respectively, are visibly navigating how to confront and heal from their trauma. As a viewer, I was heartbroken for them. (Jackson denied the accusations throughout his life, and his family maintains his innocence. The Jackson estate is suing HBO for violating a non-disparagement agreement.)


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The work of the postmortem exposé is often corrective in nature. It challenges prevailing assumptions about a person and asks viewers to reconsider their own memories of events. Nostalgia’s grip, though, can blur patterns of alleged predatory abuse in plain sight. It seems difficult to translate, in 2019, the magnitude of Jackson’s popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. For many, the entertainer’s death in 2009 marked an end to the era of the mega pop star, whose global celebrity garnered unparalleled, fevered fandom. Media back then were smaller and more limited, far from the fractured universes of today, in which each fan’s relationship with her celebrity of choice is siloed, intimate, cultish. (Instagram and Twitter can provide a false sense of singular closeness to a star.) But Jackson’s popularity was universal—and fans were swept up in rapturous grief when he died. News of his passing broke the internet, and an estimated 1 billion people, myself included, watched the funeral. Many live-tweeted it, trading memories of favorite performances and moments.

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By the time he died, Jackson’s legion of fans already knew the narrative of his road to superstardom, made possible in part by sacrificing his youth, enduring extreme loneliness, and being subjected to emotional and physical abuse by his father. In a public address in 2001, Jackson told an Oxford University audience, “The cheery 5-year-old who belted out ‘Rockin’ Robin’ and ‘Ben’ to adoring crowds was not indicative of the boy behind the smile.” He continued, “What I really wanted was a dad. I wanted a father who showed me love. And my father never did that.” Jackson was so effective at communicating the roots of his own grief that it was easy for some people to discount the allegations of abuse against him.