He was a little kid from Brisbane. Seven years old. He could dance like nobody else his age, and when he won a Michael Jackson dance contest in Australia, the cameras couldn’t get enough of him. Michael Jackson couldn’t get enough of him either. Within a few years, Wade Robson’s mother had moved the family to Los Angeles at Jackson’s encouragement. The boy was in Jackson’s orbit — in his home, in his studio, in his bed, by his own later admission, dozens of times. In 1993, when the first allegations hit, ten-year-old Wade went on television and said Michael Jackson had never done anything wrong. In 2005, Wade Robson — now a grown man, a successful choreographer, someone who had built an entire career on the talent Jackson helped nurture — sat in a witness chair and told a jury, under oath, that nothing happened. He was composed. He was convincing. He helped acquit the most famous defendant in America.
And then, four years after Michael Jackson was put in the ground, Wade Robson filed a lawsuit claiming that every word he’d spoken under oath was a lie. That Jackson had sexually abused him for years beginning when he was seven. That he had been too shattered, too conditioned, too broken by the experience to even recognize it as abuse until his mind and body finally gave out.
This is part four of our series. And this is the episode that asks you to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time — because the evidence supports both, and the truth might live in the tension between them.
James Safechuck’s entry into Jackson’s world happened through a Pepsi commercial. He was ten years old when he appeared alongside Jackson in the ad. After it aired, according to Safechuck, Jackson began pursuing a relationship with the boy and his family — phone calls, visits, vacations, gifts. Safechuck says Jackson gave him the jacket from the Thriller video. He says Jackson flew his family to Neverland, to concerts, to international destinations. And he says the abuse began during a trip to Hawaii, when Jackson asked the boy to sleep in his bed. According to Safechuck, what followed was years of escalating sexual contact that Jackson framed as love. Safechuck alleges Jackson held a mock wedding ceremony with him. Gave him a ring. Told him their relationship was romantic. And then, according to Safechuck, Jackson replaced him — moved on to younger boys as Safechuck entered puberty. Safechuck says he defended Jackson during the 1993 investigation, as a child, because he genuinely believed what Jackson told him: that their relationship was special, and that speaking about it would destroy them both.
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This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.
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