In her 2019 essay Lost Boy, the Pulitzer-winning writer Margo Jefferson considered Michael Jackson’s legacy in the wake of Dan Reed’s Leaving Neverland, the HBO/Channel 4 exposé that starkly and devastatingly laid out the testimonies of two men who alleged that they had been sexually abused as children by the singer. “We’ve long seen how charming and generous [Jackson] could be,” opined Jefferson. “Now we’ve also seen how calculating, selfish and gripped by demons he was.”
Leaving Neverland remains the most effective résumé of that apparent duality, and of how – in the case of Wade Robson and James Safechuck – their memories of the singer’s dream-like ranch would take on an infernal quality. Michael Jackson: The Trial isn’t as stylised nor as groundbreaking – many of the people here have been telling their stories for decades, be it in books, podcasts, blogs or otherwise. Yet where Channel 4’s latest series triumphs is in collating these accounts from both sides, and letting you decide what is more plausible, as well as spotlighting details that can’t easily be explained away. And, of course, there are the tapes: recordings of Jackson from 2000 and 2001, many of which have never been heard before. They’re not definitive proof of any wrongdoing, but they’re certainly alarming. In one clip, Jackson declares: “If you told me right now … ‘Michael, you could never see another child’ … I would kill myself.”
