Michael Jackson Dies at 50

>I say its still an open question.

For me, personally, it remains an open question.

I just don't think he discouraged people from thinking he was guilty by paying off his accusers.

People who consider his guilt to be a closed matter are, in a way, honoring his choice not to clear his name.

If a bunch of 10 years olds were left unsupervised, and one of them had alcohol and dirty magazines, that kid might try to make the other kids like him better by sharing the stuff. So if Michael couldn't easily relate to people on an adult level, he might simply have done what any other 10 year old would do in that situation. I know from having been a kid myself that not every situation where kids get ahold of porn or alcohol leads to some kind of circle-jerk thing. It's quite plausible to me that things that adults imagine Jackson doing wouldn't actually have occurred to him to do.

OTOH, his over-all capacity to accomplish things that required an adult level of reasoning suggests that, other aspects of maturity aside, he ought to have been able to understand what was explained to him about his legal options and what the consequences would be in terms of what people would and would not be able to say about him given each of the options.

That is: he CHOSE to remain a likely suspect of child sexual abuse.

<Oh please. If they really wanted to heal their son an show him that he is safe and cared for then they would make sure the person who hurt him was sent to jail. They could have easily sued after that but they knew that even if they did the amount that they would likely get would be less than $20,000,000 and they were greedy. They wanted money more than they wanted justice and the chance to protect future victims.>

Suing would require that the victim confront his abuser. Would you want your children to go through that? The sad fact is that more than half of all pedophiles go free simply because the child would crack under the stress of testifying.

billdunlap.wordpress.com/2008/...enial/

This should give you a little better idea about what I am talking about.

<What gag orders? I've heard jurors speak on the case>


<www.people.com/people/art...89,00.html>

Apparently the grand jury found enough evidence to prosecute.

<One flash of such beauty is worth all the speeches of just about any preacher, professor and politician now up and running their mouths. >

Amen to that!

<There are plenty of people who made decent amounts of money who can afford health care. McMahon admitted that he lived beyond his means. No one who makes multimillions has an excuse that the medical system costs too much.>

The McMahon story is still the best argument for single payer health care I have ever heard. That and the dozen other millionaires I have known or worked for who had lost everything when they or a loved one got sick.

as for MJ's weirdness - who really cares?

<< the problem is who gives them status and importance above the genuine issues of the day >

We do.

<< why did we see more of paris hilton than wounded and dead coming back from iraq? >>

Because La Hilton has a (very good) publicist and you aren't allowed to tell stories and run footage about the latter. One may quibble as to the reasons for this seeming ban, but the fact of it is plain.

<< why is so much attention on the relationships of "celebrities' >>

Eyeballs and wallets. The media has commodified attention and colonized brains to the point where little else matters among people dumb enough to bother with mainstream news anymore.

To actually BLAME people like Carson, McMahon and Hilton for this is about the most trivial and most chickenshit response imaginable. He should start by asking his readers why they bother with them rather than shoveling another load of feelgood proggy bullshit on the fire.

<<I try not to think about his life in Bahrain>>

yeah, no doubt. <shudders>

RIP

I am confuzzed. Why are you posting links for Stevie Wonder songs on Michael Jackson's rest in peace thread? I mean, I absolutely LOVE lil' Stevie Wonder, but it seems rather out of place to post his music here. Are you saying that there is only room for one black musical king? MJ was king of pop. SW is a totally different story altogether...maybe king of Motown for the past 4 decades? Or, are you somehow insinuating that these 2 musicians are interchangeable? I don't get it. Care to explain?

-K

>Or evidence of extortion.

Paying extortionists may not be amicable, but that doesn't complicity need not be amicable to be complicity.

Why should it cost 20 million dollars to keep someone from slandering one?

Wouldn't it make more sense to spend half as much suing them for slander?

<Or evidence of extortion. >

The thing about extortion is that neither side wants their side of it publicized. That's why it's called hush money.

"Or evidence of extortion. "

To extort from someone requires that they have damning evidence against them.

....nice post.

I hope he rests in peace too...
His music will live on.....

<Hmm so if there were parents who felt he was actually guilty of molesting their child then they probably should have done everything they could to keep him away from children rather than just take money and run and let him continue having access to other children. >

If we lived in a perfect world, you would be absolutely right. Were I 20 years younger and still hadn't had the idealism beaten out of me, I would be standing beside you saying the very same things. The hell of it is is that you are not wrong. Yewni, you are 100% right. The problem is that it is the rest of the world that is fucked up. These days I live my life by the old Rolling Stones Song. "You can't always get what you want, but just some times you get what you need."

Have you ever stopped to wonder just why the Catholic Church got away with hiding pedophiles for over 30 years? I know men and women my age who had been molested by priests. They went to their parents and got punished for telling lies about the good fathers. Those people hit the wall of denial. People have a bad habit of believing what they want to believe despite the evidence.

I can assume from your silence that you have never had to report child sexual abuse to the police. Here is something that I speak from experience. Once you try you will never want to do it again. The police do not want to bother with it. Child abuse is bad enough to prosecute. Child sexual abuse is going to be a nightmare that they do not want to bother with. You have heard of rape victims being harassed by the police? It's twice as bad for the parents of sexual abuse victims. Every once in a while you are going to find a cooperative police department. They are rare.

<I don't know if Michael Jackson is guilty or not but I know those parents either extorted money from him and/or pimped their own child for money and I find that much more disturbing. I also find it disturbing that other parents continued to leave their boys with him unattended. The parents are the real criminals in this situation.>

You are being a little too judgmental here. Generally wealthy pedophiles pay the parents off in installments. That keeps everything low key and private. My wife knew one woman whose mother kept giving her to her uncle, and in return for getting access to his neice, the uncle gave his sister hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is more of the norm as pedophiles tend to stay out of the spotlight.

So, just for the sake of argument, a parent manages to stick to her guns and presses charges against a pedophile. There are two kinds of cases that defense attorneys love; rape cases and child sexual assault cases. The facts are that defense attorneys don't get to win all that much. I remember that one defense attorney tell me that he had a fantastic win rate; one out of twenty. Rape cases are won by the defense two out of three times. Child sexual abuse cases are won four out of five times. The wealthier the pedophile, the better the attorney he can afford. Pedophiles tend to choose their victims carefully. It's no fun if the victim's family fights back. As a general rule, the victim's families get an over worked public prosecutor and the prosecutor is going to want to deal. It does not look good on his job record to have his ass kicked by the defense attorney. So there is going to be a lot of pressure for the parent to accept a plea bargain, and precious little sympathy if she insists on going to court. Chances are, the pedophile is going to walk if it goes to court. A common defense tactic is to refuse plea bargains until the prosecution tosses the case.

Now every once in a blue moon, a parent comes along with a case so solid that she can get herself a private attorney. A really good trial attorney charges anywhere between $150-$300 an hour for pretrial work and even more once he steps into the court room. So that attorney is going to want to be paid. When the opposing attorney comes with an offer of 20 million to drop the case, the parent's attorney is going to tell her to take it or drop the case. If the parent was to come to me for advice I would tell her to take the money, because it is the only justice that her family is likely to get.

<Even if he is innocent of the molestation MJ was clearly a sad and broken person who never had the opportunity to have a life without chaos. As a mother I would never leave my child alone with someone so broken even if I didn't suspect molestation at all. And I honestly feel he is better off having passed on and I do hope he rests in peace.>

If Jackson was not a pedophile, I will apologize to him when we meet at the pearly gates. Until then I will go with my experience and with the fact that the L. A. County sheriff's department felt they had a solid enough case to prosecute. As a mother, you have a hell of a lot more common sense than most parents I could mention. Still, let's say for the sake of argument, let's say a pedophile gets through your radar. This is what I would say to you:

"Yewni, it is not your fault. It was the fault of the perpetrator and I can't stand seeing you blame yourself. You got to get yourself together for the sake of your kid. Now, finish your tea and I'll go to the police with you. I've been through this before with other parents and I'll stand by you as I stood by them. We're probably going to get our asses kicked but it's our duty to try. So get your game face on and let's give as good as we get."

i highly recommend reading this 1994 GQ article, "Did Michael Do It?": www.buttonmonkey.com/misc/ma...her.html

personally, i'm pretty certain that he was a victim of extortion, and that he was NOT a child molester.

and i have to say it, lynch mob mentality of people like "Igor" makes me sick.