this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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Definitely not the impression I got from everything I've read. The whole sleeping in the same bed with kids, keeping books with naked pictures of children, showing porn to kids (perhaps the most common method predators use to try to groom children), and the whole thing with setting up an alarm around his bedroom.
Keep in mind that a lot of the information I've seen was from a Wordpress blog bent on defending Jackson in any and every way possible, and yet I still think the case they make is not really convincing. The author speculates about what "true grooming" looks like, and why MJ's actions supposedly don't fit their personal expectations of grooming. They also try to justify him keeping those books with pictures of naked kids as if that was a normal thing to do.
Maybe if it was just one of these things it could still be justified as MJ just being weird. But it's all off these things, a clear pattern of behavior and accusations for which the simplest explanation is that MJ was indeed a predator. What I can say is that if these accusations were directed at some random dude down the road I definitely wouldn't want my kids going near him.
From the source you listed (because I have heard of the magazines but didn't look much into it ag the time) the author posits that the two books that had pictures of children were a gift from a fan, and the second he includes an inscription from Jackson discussing the joy of youth he's seeing in the images and that he's sad he didn't have that kind of childhood. Which, weird, but not damning to me.
But I couldn't find a credible source for the "showing children pornography" portion you mentioned, do you have anything for that? My impression so far has been 'weird dude, if I knew him I still probably wouldn't let my kids sleep over but I wouldn't let my kid sleep over ANY adult's house, especially not a celebrity'.
It's from one of the kid's testimony in the first link (it starts with "Now, when you first saw the suitcase, where was it in that room."), where he talks about how Michael showed him and his brother some porn mags. The first time he was hanging out with MJ while he was putting on makeup, and MJ picked up a suitcase with the porn mags and showed the kid one of the pictures. In the second occasion the kid can't recall if he or his brother brought up the suitcase or if MJ did, but he says that they were all looking at the magazines together for "30 minutes to an hour".
Regarding the books specifically, it's one of those elements that on their own could be interpreted as just MJ being kinda weird. We know the first book was a gift given the fan's inscription, and it's fairly reasonable to assume that the second one was a gift too. As the blog post points out the third book wasn't brought up in court and wasn't with the other two books, but it's still reasonable to assume that it belonged to MJ. To me the way the blog author tries to "soften" the book definitely points to some bias in their part:
If we squint a bit we could just chalk these up to MJ possibly being a nudist or being a bit weird. I certainly think it's odd that he had books with pictures of nude children in them, and even liked one of them enough to inscribe his own message in it, but if only the books were brought up in court I certainly wouldn't think that's enough evidence to convict someone. But given the whole context and other elements of the accusations I'm not willing to give MJ that much benefit of the doubt.