Michael Jackson’s life showed us the journey from abused to abuser | Hadley Freeman
Jimmy Savile. Harvey Weinstein. R Kelly. Kevin Spacey. We are not exactly short these days of celebrities accused of exploiting their fame to mask predatory behaviour. Yet the Michael Jackson case is different. And that’s not just because he is, still, so passionately defended by some – including, most recently, Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross – while he also, simultaneously, did so little to mask his predatoriness.
In his lifetime, he talked happily about sharing his bed with little boys, and was rarely photographed more than six feet away from one, even after he was publicly accused – four times – of child sexual abuse (by Jordy Chandler, Gavin). But with every other high-profile story of child abuse, the adult predator is presented solely as just that: an adult predator, a fully formed, inexplicable monster.
