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The Mysterious Life & Death Of Michael Jackson · The conspiracy

0:00
Speaker 1: The coroner ruled it a homicide. The jury called it manslaughter,
0:04
Speaker 1: and his family called it murder. First of all, Michael
0:06
Speaker 1: told me that they were going to murder him. He
0:08
Speaker 1: was the most famous person alive, and he sold more
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Speaker 1: records than anyone in history, and he owned a catalog
0:15
Speaker 1: worth billions. And he spent his final years telling everyone
0:19
Speaker 1: around him that someone was going to kill him for it,
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Speaker 1: but nobody listened. And then in twenty twenty four, his
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Speaker 1: name resurfaced in the Epstein files and the whole world
0:29
Speaker 1: started asking questions again, but they were asking the wrong ones.
0:33
Speaker 1: This is the mysterious life and death of Michael Jackson. Grime, conspiracy, cults,
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Speaker 1: serial killers, and murder, all things that I love to consume,
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Speaker 1: and I know you do too. You sick, just in beautiful,
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Speaker 1: intellectually minded. For week today we are talking about one
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Speaker 1: of the most famous human beings ever and how he
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Speaker 1: came to be that famous and what happened because of it.
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Speaker 1: And there's a lot of things in here I had
0:59
Speaker 1: no idea about, especially with all the Epstein stuff coming out,
1:03
Speaker 1: and everything is going to be a jam packed video.
1:06
Speaker 1: So without further ado, let's Unbuckler seatbelts go mocked on
1:09
Speaker 1: the highway, slamm of the breaks and busters. This went
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Speaker 1: ship into this Michael Jackson Life and Death deep dive
1:14
Speaker 1: video together. So the story of Michael Jackson begins not
1:32
Speaker 1: with him, but with a place and with the people
1:35
Speaker 1: that place made. Gary, Indiana was a company town in
1:39
Speaker 1: the most literal sense, founded in nineteen oh six by
1:42
Speaker 1: the United States Steel Corporation and named for the chairman
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Speaker 1: of its board, Albert Henry Gary. The city existed to
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Speaker 1: feed the furnaces. Gary Works, stretching along the southern shore
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Speaker 1: of Lake Michigan, would grow into the largest steel mill
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Speaker 1: on Earth, and the jobs would draw tens of thousands
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Speaker 1: of family northward during the Great Migration, and by nineteen
2:03
Speaker 1: sixty the population would peak at around one hundred and
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Speaker 1: seventy eight thousand people. And the air in this place
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Speaker 1: just tasted like metal, and the work was dangerous, and
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Speaker 1: the pay was steady, and the neighborhoods were segregated, and
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Speaker 1: the churches were full on Sundays. And among those who
2:19
Speaker 1: came north was a man born into that migration's current,
2:23
Speaker 1: Joseph Walter Jackson, who arrived in the world on July
2:27
Speaker 1: twenty sixth, nineteen twenty eight in Fountain Hill, a small
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Speaker 1: community in Ashley County, Arkansas and deep in that flat
2:35
Speaker 1: cotton country of the Southeastern Delta, barely a mile from
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Speaker 1: the Louisiana line. And his father, Samuel Joseph Jackson, was
2:42
Speaker 1: a school teacher the locals would call Professor Jackson, and
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Speaker 1: his mother was Crystal Lee King, so the family carried
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Speaker 1: within it to the tangled bloodlines of the American South.
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Speaker 1: Joe's grandfather, Israel Nero Jackson, born in eighteen thirty eight,
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Speaker 1: had been enslaved, and his great grandfather, July Jack Gail,
3:02
Speaker 1: was said to have been a US Army scout who
3:05
Speaker 1: claimed Native American heritage, though the specifics of that claim,
3:08
Speaker 1: sometimes identified as Choctaw, are difficult to verify through surviving records.
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Speaker 1: So Joe moved to East Chicago, Indiana at eighteen, and
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Speaker 1: he was a physically imposing man with large hands and
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Speaker 1: a hard stare, and he found work in the way
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Speaker 1: other African American men in the region found work at
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Speaker 1: the mills, and he would become an overhead crane operator
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Speaker 1: at Inland Steel Company and later worked at American Foundries
3:33
Speaker 1: also in East Chicago and The hours working there were long,
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Speaker 1: and the labor was grinding, and somewhere in the repetition
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Speaker 1: of shifts and paychecks, Joe Jackson began to understand that
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Speaker 1: he wanted something else, something that made noise, that moved
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Speaker 1: a crowd that refused to be ordinary. And the woman
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Speaker 1: who would share that wanting and temperate with something quieter
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Speaker 1: and more enduring, had her own story of microin and survival.
4:01
Speaker 1: Katie B. Screws was born on May fourth, nineteen thirty
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Speaker 1: in Clayton, a town in Barbara County, Alabama, the same
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Speaker 1: red clay country that produced George Wallace, and at two
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Speaker 1: years old, she would contract polio and the disease would
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Speaker 1: leave her with a permanent limp and a slight drag
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Speaker 1: in her left leg that she would carry for the
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Speaker 1: rest of her life. And when she was four, the
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Speaker 1: family would move north to East Chicago, joining the same
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Speaker 1: stream of Southern African American families chasing the promise of
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Speaker 1: the Mills. But despite the polio, Katie, who would later
4:31
Speaker 1: go by Catherine, was deeply musical. She played piano, clarinet,
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Speaker 1: and the cello, and she sang, and she absorbed the
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Speaker 1: country gospel of her Alabama childhood, and the rhythms of Indiana,
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Speaker 1: and she would carry music inside her the way some
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Speaker 1: people carry prayer. So Joe and Catherine met in nineteen
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Speaker 1: forty seven in East Chicago, and she was seventeen at
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Speaker 1: the time, and he was already briefly married to a
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Speaker 1: woman named Isaphine Atkinson, though that marriage was very short lived.
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Speaker 1: So Joe and Catherine married on November fifth, nineteen forty nine,
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Speaker 1: and in January nineteen fifty they purchased a small house
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Speaker 1: at two three zero zero Jackson Street in Gary for
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Speaker 1: eighty five hundred dollars different times, I tell you what.
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Speaker 1: And the house was around six hundred and seventy two
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Speaker 1: square feet with two bedrooms one bathroom, and it sat
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Speaker 1: on a modest lot in a working class neighborhood on
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Speaker 1: the west side of Gary, close enough to the mill
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Speaker 1: that you could hear the machinery if the wind was right,
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Speaker 1: and into the house. Over the next sixteen years, Joe
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Speaker 1: and Katherine Jackson would bring ten children, a quantity of
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Speaker 1: human life that the square footage could barely contain, stacked
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Speaker 1: in bunk beds, sharing everything, privacy a concept that existed
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Speaker 1: only in theory. So in the early nineteen fifties, Joe
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Speaker 1: and his brother Luther formed a blues band called the Falcons,
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Speaker 1: sometimes known as Ford Falcons, and Joe played guitar and
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Speaker 1: Luther played saxophone, and they gigged around the region in
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Speaker 1: the networks of industrial cities south of Chicago that included Gary,
6:01
Speaker 1: eat Chicago, and Haymond, playing the kind of electric blues
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Speaker 1: that poured out of every duke, joint and house party
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Speaker 1: in those neighborhoods. And they were pretty decent. But the
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Speaker 1: Falcons would never land any record deal, and after a
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Speaker 1: few years the band dissolved and Joe put his guitar
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Speaker 1: in the closet, but he did not put away the ambition,
6:19
Speaker 1: as we know, and he folded it up and stored
6:22
Speaker 1: it somewhere deeper, in a place where it would eventually
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Speaker 1: be redirected with ferocious, sometimes brutal precision, And that was
6:31
Speaker 1: toward his children. Well. The children came in rapid succession,
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Speaker 1: and each one entered a household that was growing louder,
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Speaker 1: more crowded, and more volatile. A Marine Rolette or Rebby
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Speaker 1: was born first on May twenty ninth, nineteen fifty and
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Speaker 1: then Sigmund Esco or Jackie on May fourth, nineteen fifty one,
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Speaker 1: and then Torriano Adderel or Tito on October fifteenth, nineteen
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Speaker 1: fifty three, and then Jermaine on December eleventh, nineteen fifty four,
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Speaker 1: and then LaToya Yvonne on May twenty nine, ninth, nineteen
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Speaker 1: fifty six. Then Marlon David on March twelfth, nineteen fifty seven,
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Speaker 1: along with his twin brother Brandon, who drew a single
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Speaker 1: breath and died the next day. Unfortunately, on March thirteenth,
7:12
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven, and the death of Brandon was not
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Speaker 1: discussed in the Jackson household. It was absorbed into the
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Speaker 1: silence that families built around their worst losses, just a
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Speaker 1: ghost twin whose absence Marlin could carry quietly for decades.
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Speaker 1: And then on August twenty ninth, nineteen fifty eight, at
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Speaker 1: Saint Mary's Mercy Hospital in Gary, Michael Joseph Jackson was born,
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Speaker 1: and he was the eighth child, the seventh living technically,
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Speaker 1: and he had arrived in a house that was already
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Speaker 1: overflowing with children, with noise, with Joe's thwarted ambitions in
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Speaker 1: Catherine's quiet faith, and the ever present economic pressure of
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Speaker 1: a steel worker's wage stretched across a family that would
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Speaker 1: eventually number eleven and two more children would follow Stephen
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Speaker 1: Randall or Randy, on October twenty ninth, nineteen sixty one,
8:00
Speaker 1: and Janet Demta Joe on May sixteenth, nineteen sixty six.
8:04
Speaker 1: And in nineteen sixty three, Catherine would convert to the
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Speaker 1: Jehovah's Witness faith and was baptized, And the religion would
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Speaker 1: shape the Jackson household profoundly, with its door to door
8:14
Speaker 1: in vangelism and its prohibition on holidays and birthdays, its
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Speaker 1: apocalyptic worldview, its emphasis on spiritual discipline, and its emphasis
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Speaker 1: on spiritual discipline. And it was Catherine's faith, not Joe's,
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Speaker 1: and it would live inside Michael Jackson for the rest
8:30
Speaker 1: of his life, even as he struggled with it, even
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Speaker 1: as he left and returned to it, and even as
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Speaker 1: it complicated everything. Now Joe Jackson was, by virtually every account,
8:40
Speaker 1: including those of his children, a striked and sometimes physically
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Speaker 1: a bother, because he demanded obedience and he demanded excellence.
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Speaker 1: And when the guitar came back out of the closet,
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Speaker 1: this time not for Joe's own playing, but for his sons,
8:55
Speaker 1: the discipline that governed the household became something closer to
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Speaker 1: a regime. The guitar was forbidden, and that was the rule.
9:03
Speaker 1: Joe kept it in the bedroom closet, a cheap electric model,
9:07
Speaker 1: nothing special, but it was his, a relic of the
9:10
Speaker 1: Falcons and the dream that hadn't worked out, and the
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Speaker 1: children were not to touch it because Joe was at
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Speaker 1: the mill during the day and the children were not
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Speaker 1: supervised every minute, and Tito, the third born, the quiet one,
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Speaker 1: the one with the large hands like his father's, could
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Speaker 1: not stay away from it, and he would wait until
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Speaker 1: Joe left for his shift, then slide the closet door
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Speaker 1: open and take out the guitar carefully, the way you
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Speaker 1: would handle something you've been told to never handle. And
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Speaker 1: he would teach himself to play by ear, picking out
9:40
Speaker 1: the songs he heard on the radio, the Temptations, the
9:44
Speaker 1: Four Tops, the electric blues his father used to play
9:47
Speaker 1: in the clubs, and he was getting pretty good. And
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Speaker 1: then one day in nineteen sixty four, he broke a
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Speaker 1: string and the discovery could have gone badly because in
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Speaker 1: the Jackson household, dis obedience was met with a belt,
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Speaker 1: a switch, a cord, whatever was in the closet, But
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Speaker 1: something shifted in Joe when he heard Tito play. The
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Speaker 1: boy had talent, real talent. And Joe Jackson, the man
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Speaker 1: whose own band had never gotten a record deal, the
10:13
Speaker 1: crane operator, who went to work every day in a
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Speaker 1: city that was already beginning to die, recognized and his
10:18
Speaker 1: son stolen guitar playing the second chance he had been
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Speaker 1: waiting for. So he didn't punish Tito. He bought him
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Speaker 1: a guitar, and what followed was the formation of a
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Speaker 1: family band with the discipline of a military unit and
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Speaker 1: the ambition of a fortune five hundred company. And in
10:34
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four Joe organized the Jackson Brothers Tito on guitar,
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Speaker 1: Jackie and Jermaine on vocals, plus two neighborhood friends Raynard
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Speaker 1: Jones and Milford Height filling out the rhythm. And they
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Speaker 1: rehearsed in the living room of two three zero zero
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Speaker 1: Jackson Street, in that six hundred and seventy two square
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Speaker 1: foot house, where the walls were thin enough to hear
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Speaker 1: everything and the neighbors could hear them too, And Joe
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Speaker 1: ran rehearsals the way he ran everything, with absolute a
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Speaker 1: tha authority. Guy was a tyrant, and mistakes were not tolerated,
11:03
Speaker 1: and repetition was the method. Fear was the motivator, and
11:07
Speaker 1: by August nineteen sixty five, two more Jackson brothers had
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Speaker 1: joined the group, Marlon, who was eight and Michael, who
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Speaker 1: was only six years old, and the neighborhood friends would
11:16
Speaker 1: slowly be eased out because this was now all a
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Speaker 1: Jackson operation, And at a performance at Gary's Tino Totts Jamboree,
11:24
Speaker 1: a woman named Evelyn Lahi suggested the group needed a
11:27
Speaker 1: proper name, and someone accounts very on exactly who proposed
11:31
Speaker 1: the Jackson Five, and the name stuck, and Michael, at
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Speaker 1: six years old, was not yet the lead singer, though
11:38
Speaker 1: that role belonged to Jermaine, who had a smooth, reliable tenor,
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Speaker 1: and Michael sang backup and danced. But even in those
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Speaker 1: earliest performances talent shows at elementary schools, community centers, local
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Speaker 1: clubs where children probably shouldn't have been, something was visibly
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Speaker 1: different about the youngest performer on stage. He moved with
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Speaker 1: an intuition that couldn't be taught. He watched James Brown
12:02
Speaker 1: on television with the focus of a graduate student, absorbing
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Speaker 1: every spin, every split, every way. Brown used his body
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Speaker 1: to make the crowd lose its utter mind, and he
12:12
Speaker 1: studied Jackie Wilson, and he studied the Temptations choreography, and
12:16
Speaker 1: then he did it better than any child had a
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Speaker 1: rite to And in nineteen sixty six, the Jackson Five
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Speaker 1: won their first talent show at Theodore Roosevelt High School
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Speaker 1: in Gary, and it was the beginning of a streak,
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Speaker 1: and Joe entered them into every competition he could find,
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Speaker 1: driving them across Indiana. The family packed into a Volkswagen
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Speaker 1: van that barely held them all and they won, and
12:39
Speaker 1: they kept winning, and Joe booked them into rougher venues, bars,
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Speaker 1: strip clubs, places where a group of children performed between
12:46
Speaker 1: adult acts, and the audience threw money if they were good,
12:49
Speaker 1: and bottles if they weren't, just sketchy as places where
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Speaker 1: kids should not be. And Michael later described watching Striptea's
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Speaker 1: acts as a small child standing in the wings waiting
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Speaker 1: for the Jackson Five's turn, And he was now nine
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Speaker 1: years old, and by mid nineteen sixty seven a shift
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Speaker 1: had taken place within the group that everyone could hear
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Speaker 1: Michael's voice, still a child's voice, still high and clear,
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Speaker 1: had developed a quality that Germaine simply didn't possess. And
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Speaker 1: it wasn't just range or pitch, it was just emotion
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Speaker 1: and almost unsettling ability to inhabit a lyrics feeling and
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Speaker 1: project it outward with adult conviction. So Joe made a decision.
13:32
Speaker 1: Michael replaced Jermaine as lead singer Urchardmaine damn. So the
13:37
Speaker 1: group's center of gravity moved permanently to the youngest brother
13:41
Speaker 1: on stage, and on August thirteenth, nineteen sixty seven, they
13:44
Speaker 1: won Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the
13:47
Speaker 1: most famous proving ground of African American entertainment, on the
13:51
Speaker 1: stage where Ella Fitzgerald and James Brown and Stevie Wonder
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Speaker 1: had been discovered, where the audience was legendarily unforgiving and
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Speaker 1: the hook was not a metaphor. And at this point
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Speaker 1: Michael was eight years old, and the Apollo audience gave
14:06
Speaker 1: them a standing ovation. So the question of who discovered
14:09
Speaker 1: the Jackson five is one of the foundational myths of
14:13
Speaker 1: the Motown era, and like most myths, it obscures a
14:16
Speaker 1: messier truth. The official story is the one that Barry
14:19
Speaker 1: Gordy wanted told the one printed on the debut album cover,
14:23
Speaker 1: which was that Diana Ross discovered the Jackson Five. But
14:26
Speaker 1: it was just a marketing masterstroke, the biggest female star
14:30
Speaker 1: in black music presenting the next generation, a laying on
14:34
Speaker 1: of hands from Motown Royalty to Motown Future, and the
14:37
Speaker 1: first Jackson five album was titled Diana Ross Presents the
14:40
Speaker 1: Jackson Five, and Ross appeared at their early precedents, and
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Speaker 1: the implication was clear and very deliberate, and it was
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Speaker 1: also largely fiction, which at this point, I mean it
14:51
Speaker 1: started back then. You know, all this stuff like I
14:53
Speaker 1: went over Taylor Swift and how her whole life was manufactured.
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Speaker 1: It's interesting looking at the parallels and just I've only
15:00
Speaker 1: gone into two major artists now, but the parallels are crazy,
15:05
Speaker 1: how much they're manufactured and how much smoke and mirrors
15:07
Speaker 1: there are in the entertainment industry. But the true discoverer
15:11
Speaker 1: was Bobby Taylor, a singer and bandleader from Motown's second
15:14
Speaker 1: tier who fronted Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers. Because Taylor
15:18
Speaker 1: saw the Jackson five perform at the Regal Theater in Chicago,
15:21
Speaker 1: the South Side equivalent of the Apollo and was stunted,
15:25
Speaker 1: and he brought them to Motown's attention, arranged their audition,
15:29
Speaker 1: and produced their early recordings. And Gladys Knight also deserves
15:32
Speaker 1: a footnote in the Discovery narrative because she saw the
15:35
Speaker 1: Jackson Five at the Regal in nineteen sixty seven as well,
15:39
Speaker 1: and was so impressed that she sent a demo tape
15:41
Speaker 1: to Motown on their behalf, but the tape was rejected,
15:45
Speaker 1: and the irony is almost too good because one of
15:48
Speaker 1: Motown's biggest stars recommending a group that would become Motown's
15:52
Speaker 1: biggest act was being ignored. But the formal audition took
15:55
Speaker 1: place on July twenty third, nineteen sixty eight, at Hitsville, USA,
16:00
Speaker 1: Motown's legendary headquarters on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, the
16:04
Speaker 1: converted house with a hand painted sign that had produced
16:06
Speaker 1: more number one hits than any address in America, and
16:10
Speaker 1: the Jackson Brothers performed in the studio, and Barry Gordy,
16:13
Speaker 1: contrary to what some accounts have suggested, was not present
16:17
Speaker 1: for the audition, and he saw a tape of it later.
16:20
Speaker 1: For the Motown staff who were in the room that
16:23
Speaker 1: day knew immediately what they were looking at Michael, now
16:27
Speaker 1: nine years old, performed with a precision and emotional range
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Speaker 1: that was difficult to reconcile with his age, and he
16:33
Speaker 1: sang like a man who had been heartbroken. And he
16:36
Speaker 1: had never been on a date at this point, obviously
16:39
Speaker 1: because he's nine. And Motown signed the Jackson five and
16:43
Speaker 1: the machine began to turn so in mid August nineteen
16:46
Speaker 1: sixty nine, Joe moved the boys to California, and Catherine
16:49
Speaker 1: and the rest of the children didn't join until November.
16:52
Speaker 1: And for the Jackson brothers from Gary, Indiana, from the
16:55
Speaker 1: six hundred and seventy two square foot house on Jackson Street,
16:58
Speaker 1: from the steel smoke air in the winters and the
17:01
Speaker 1: talent shows at Theodore Roosevelt High, Los Angeles was another planet.
17:06
Speaker 1: The light was different, the air smelled like jasmine instead
17:09
Speaker 1: of sulfur, and the houses had swimming pools. And on
17:12
Speaker 1: October first, nineteen sixty nine, Michael, now eleven years old,
17:17
Speaker 1: moved temporarily into the Hollywood Hills home of Diana Ross,
17:21
Speaker 1: and he lived with her for about a month while
17:23
Speaker 1: the family's permanent arrangements were being finalized, and Ross became
17:27
Speaker 1: a kind of surgate older sister and glamorous mentor to Michael,
17:31
Speaker 1: and Michael absorbed her elegance, her poise, her understanding of
17:36
Speaker 1: how a star just occupied space, and he watched her
17:40
Speaker 1: the way he watched everything, just silently, totally storing it
17:44
Speaker 1: all for later use. And then Motown released the single,
17:48
Speaker 1: and the velocity of what happened next has no real
17:50
Speaker 1: parallel in the history of popular music, because on October seventh,
17:55
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, less than two months after the family
17:58
Speaker 1: arrived in California, Gotown released I Want You Back, the
18:02
Speaker 1: Jackson Five's debut single. The song was a masterpiece of
18:07
Speaker 1: pure pop construction, a balancing bassline, a staccato piano chords,
18:13
Speaker 1: a horn section that punched like a fist, and riding
18:16
Speaker 1: above all of it was the voice of an eleven
18:18
Speaker 1: year old boy singing about romantic heartbreak with conviction that
18:22
Speaker 1: made you forget he was eleven. Because the vocal performance
18:25
Speaker 1: was technically extraordinary, with the phrasing, the breath control, the
18:30
Speaker 1: way Michael bent notes and slid between registers. But what
18:34
Speaker 1: made it transcendent was something harder to name. There was
18:38
Speaker 1: joy in it, there was urgency, There was a child's voice,
18:42
Speaker 1: carrying an adults emotion within it, without any question, and
18:48
Speaker 1: the effect was just electrifying. And I Want You Back
18:51
Speaker 1: reached number one on the Billboard Hot one hundred on
18:54
Speaker 1: January thirty first, nineteen seventy, and Michael Jackson was eleven
18:58
Speaker 1: years old, making him the unguest artists to ever top
19:01
Speaker 1: the chart, and the record sold over two million copies
19:04
Speaker 1: in its first six weeks. And what followed was just unprecedented,
19:09
Speaker 1: when the Jackson Five became the first recording act in
19:11
Speaker 1: history to debut with four consecutive number one singles, not
19:16
Speaker 1: the first group, not the first family act, but the
19:19
Speaker 1: first act of any kind. And the streak unfolded with
19:22
Speaker 1: the mechanical precision of a motown hit factory operating at
19:26
Speaker 1: peak efficiency. And I Want You Back number one January
19:30
Speaker 1: thirty first, nineteen seventy, ABC number one, April twenty fifth,
19:34
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. The song knocked the Beatles let it be
19:38
Speaker 1: out of the top spot, which is crazy. It was
19:41
Speaker 1: just a symbolic passing of the generational torch that the
19:45
Speaker 1: music press seized upon with just utter glee. And then
19:49
Speaker 1: the Love You Save number one June twenty seventh, nineteen
19:53
Speaker 1: seventy and I'll Be There, which was number one October seventeenth,
19:57
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, And this one was a ballad, so the
20:00
Speaker 1: one that proved the Jackson Five were not merely a
20:02
Speaker 1: novelty act built on energy and choreography. I'll Be There
20:07
Speaker 1: was tender and restrained and just very sincere, and Michael
20:12
Speaker 1: sang it as though comforting someone through a crisis, and
20:16
Speaker 1: the performance was so emotionally mature that it unsettled people,
20:19
Speaker 1: even because where the hell did a child learned to
20:23
Speaker 1: just feel like that? How did a boy from a
20:25
Speaker 1: two bedroom house in Gary, Indiana develop the capacity to
20:29
Speaker 1: communicate grief and reassurance with the authority of someone who
20:33
Speaker 1: had already lived in a full life. And nobody had
20:36
Speaker 1: an answer, And the song became the Jackson Five's biggest
20:39
Speaker 1: selling single, moving over four million copies, four singles, four
20:44
Speaker 1: number ones. Nine months the group had arrived in California
20:47
Speaker 1: as unknowns and became by the end of nineteen seventy
20:51
Speaker 1: the biggest act in popular music. So the fame was crazy,
20:56
Speaker 1: and by nineteen seventy one, the Jackson Five had their
20:58
Speaker 1: own Saturday Mornington Jackson five with the five instead of
21:03
Speaker 1: the f which aired on ABC from nineteen seventy one
21:06
Speaker 1: to nineteen seventy two, rendering the brothers as animated characters
21:09
Speaker 1: and weekly adventures. And they were on lunchboxes and bedroom
21:13
Speaker 1: posters and magazine covers, and teenage girls screamed at their
21:18
Speaker 1: concerts that drew comparisons to Beatlemania, and the Jackson Five
21:23
Speaker 1: were selling arenas across the country, and at the center
21:26
Speaker 1: of every performance, drawing every eye, generating every gasp, was Michael.
21:32
Speaker 1: And that very year, the family purchased the Havenhurst Estate,
21:35
Speaker 1: a sprawling compound on a tree lined street in Encino
21:38
Speaker 1: in the San Fernando Valley, for approximately two hundred and
21:41
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars. And the Jackson Five had crossed this
21:44
Speaker 1: line in less than five years, and Michael at this
21:48
Speaker 1: point was twelve years old, and he was the most
21:51
Speaker 1: famous child in America by far, and the machine was
21:55
Speaker 1: just getting started, as Michael Jackson's solo recording career began
22:00
Speaker 1: while he was still a child inside of this machine.
22:03
Speaker 1: And in June nineteen seventy one, at twelve years old,
22:05
Speaker 1: he entered Motown Studio without his brothers for the first time,
22:09
Speaker 1: and his debut solo single, Got to Be There was
22:12
Speaker 1: released that October, a gentle yearning love song that proved
22:16
Speaker 1: his voice could carry a record on its own, and
22:19
Speaker 1: the following year, Ben, a ballad sung to a rat
22:22
Speaker 1: from the horror film of the same name, became his
22:25
Speaker 1: first number one pop solo single. And he was thirteen
22:29
Speaker 1: at that point, and he had a number one hit
22:31
Speaker 1: and a Saturday Morning cartoon at a family act that
22:34
Speaker 1: was still selling out arenas, and none of it was enough,
22:38
Speaker 1: not for Joe and not for Michael either, and increasingly
22:42
Speaker 1: not for the brothers who were growing restless under Motown's
22:46
Speaker 1: ironclad creative control. And the break came in nineteen seventy five, though,
22:51
Speaker 1: and the Jackson signed a contract with CBS Records Epic
22:54
Speaker 1: label in June, leaving Motown behind. And the reasons were
22:58
Speaker 1: partly financial, because Motown had been paying a royalty rate
23:02
Speaker 1: of two point seven percent, a figure that bordered on
23:05
Speaker 1: exploitative even by the standards of the era, while Epic
23:09
Speaker 1: offered dramatically more. But the daeper issue was creative freedom,
23:12
Speaker 1: and at Motown the Jackson Five recorded songs chosen for them,
23:16
Speaker 1: produced by staff producers with virtually no input into their
23:20
Speaker 1: own material, and Epic would promise them the right to
23:23
Speaker 1: write and produce, but there was a cost. Motown retained
23:27
Speaker 1: ownership of the name Jackson Five, forcing the group to
23:31
Speaker 1: rebrand as the Jacksons, and Jermaine, married to Barry Gordy's
23:35
Speaker 1: daughter Hazel, stayed behind at Motown, a choice that fractured
23:40
Speaker 1: something in the family they never fully healed from. So
23:43
Speaker 1: the moment Michael Jackson stopped being a former child star
23:46
Speaker 1: and became something unprecedented arrived through a movie musical nobody
23:50
Speaker 1: expected to matter, and in nineteen seventy seven, Jackson was
23:54
Speaker 1: cast as the Scarecrow in The Wiz, an all African
23:57
Speaker 1: American reimagining of The Wizard of Oz starring Diana Ross,
24:02
Speaker 1: and the film itself was a commercial disappointment actually, but
24:06
Speaker 1: on set, Jackson met Quincy Jones, legendary producer and arranger
24:10
Speaker 1: who was serving as the film's musical supervisor and producer. Now,
24:14
Speaker 1: Jones was fifty four, a veteran of Count Basie's orchestra
24:18
Speaker 1: and Frank Sinatra's recording sessions, a man who had worked
24:21
Speaker 1: at the highest levels of jazz, pop, film scoring, and
24:25
Speaker 1: R and B for three decades. A big deal, all right,
24:28
Speaker 1: and he heard something in the now nineteen year old
24:30
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson that went beyond talent, a perfectionism and obsessive
24:35
Speaker 1: work ethic, a willingness to be pushed, probably from his father,
24:41
Speaker 1: and Jackson asked Jones to produce his next solo album,
24:44
Speaker 1: and Jones agreed, so they recorded from December nineteen seventy
24:48
Speaker 1: eight through June nineteen seventy nine, and Off the Wall
24:51
Speaker 1: was released on August tenth, nineteen seventy nine, and it
24:55
Speaker 1: was a revelation. If you know anything about Michael Jackson.
24:58
Speaker 1: The future album just fused disco, funk, pop, and R
25:02
Speaker 1: and B into something seamlessly sophisticated, just adult music made
25:07
Speaker 1: by a twenty year old who sang with the authority
25:10
Speaker 1: of someone twice his age, just like when he was
25:12
Speaker 1: a kid. He just had this maturity about himself and
25:16
Speaker 1: his voice that was just unprecedented. And Don't Stop Till
25:19
Speaker 1: You Get Enough and rock It's hard not to sing
25:22
Speaker 1: these titles, So don't Stop Till You Get Enough and
25:25
Speaker 1: Rock with You both reached number one and the album
25:28
Speaker 1: sold over twenty million copies worldwide, and it won the
25:31
Speaker 1: Grammy for Best R and b vocal performance for males,
25:34
Speaker 1: but it did not win Album of the Year somehow,
25:37
Speaker 1: and that loss stung Michael Jackson in a way that
25:40
Speaker 1: people around him recognized as something more than disappointment. It
25:44
Speaker 1: was just fuel for him because he had made one
25:46
Speaker 1: of the best selling albums in history, and the Recording
25:49
Speaker 1: Academy had just looked past it. And he told people
25:52
Speaker 1: close to him that the next album would be so
25:55
Speaker 1: big they couldn't ignore it, and he meant it, and
25:58
Speaker 1: what he made next was the best selling album in
26:02
Speaker 1: the history of recorded music. Thriller was recorded between April
26:07
Speaker 1: fourteenth and November eighth of nineteen eighty two at Westlake
26:11
Speaker 1: Recording Studios in Los Angeles, with Wendsey Jones again producing,
26:15
Speaker 1: and the budget was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
26:18
Speaker 1: expensive for the era, but modest for what it became,
26:21
Speaker 1: and Jackson wrote four of the nine tracks, want to
26:24
Speaker 1: Be Starting Something, the Girl is Mine, Beat It, and
26:27
Speaker 1: Billy Gene just masterpieces, Just masterpieces of music. Oh my
26:32
Speaker 1: god Now. The album was released on November twenty ninth,
26:36
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, and the numbers that followed defied any
26:39
Speaker 1: simple comprehension because Thriller spent thirty seven non consecutive weeks
26:45
Speaker 1: at number one on the Billboard two hundred. It was
26:48
Speaker 1: the best selling album of nineteen eighty three. It was
26:51
Speaker 1: the best selling album of nineteen eighty four. In all,
26:55
Speaker 1: seven of its singles reached the top ten. Billy Jean
26:58
Speaker 1: held the number one spot for seven weeks, and beat It,
27:01
Speaker 1: which featured a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, who's
27:04
Speaker 1: one of my favorite guitarists ever, held it for three
27:07
Speaker 1: and estimated total sales have reached seventy million copies worldwide,
27:12
Speaker 1: a figure no other album has even approached. And I'm
27:15
Speaker 1: talking about one album specifically. Don't come in my comments
27:18
Speaker 1: and be like, oh, what about the Beatles or Taylor Swift. Now, okay,
27:22
Speaker 1: this is the top selling album of all time, all right,
27:25
Speaker 1: But the cultural machinery around Thriller was as a revolutionary
27:28
Speaker 1: as the music itself. And when MTV, still in its
27:32
Speaker 1: infancy and programming almost exclusively white rock, acts initially declined
27:36
Speaker 1: to air the Billy Jean video, and Cebee Records president
27:40
Speaker 1: Walter Yetnikoff reportedly threatened to pull all CBS content from
27:45
Speaker 1: the network. An MTV relented In the video, Jackson, in
27:49
Speaker 1: a pink shirt and white sequence socks, dancing under street
27:52
Speaker 1: lights on a sidewalk whose tiles illuminated beneath his feet
27:56
Speaker 1: became the network's most requested clip and effectively integrat MTV
28:01
Speaker 1: and The thirteen minute Thriller short film, directed by John
28:04
Speaker 1: Landis and budgeted between five hundred thousand, nine hundred thousand dollars,
28:08
Speaker 1: functioned less as a music video than a miniature horror movie.
28:12
Speaker 1: I remember the first time I watched it. My mind
28:15
Speaker 1: was blown, to say the least. But it was so
28:17
Speaker 1: elaborate that Michael Jackson, a practicing Jehovah's witness, troubled by
28:21
Speaker 1: the occult imagery, ordered the negatives destroyed before his attorney,
28:26
Speaker 1: John Bronca, convinced him to simply add a disclaimer, and
28:30
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine it became the first music
28:32
Speaker 1: video inducted into the National Film Registry, and on February
28:35
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, nineteen eighty four, Thriller won eight Grammy Awards,
28:39
Speaker 1: a record at the time. But the image that sealed
28:42
Speaker 1: Thriller's mythology in the public consciousness had come ten months
28:47
Speaker 1: earlier on a television stage. Because on May sixteenth, nineteen
28:50
Speaker 1: eighty three, NBC broadcast Motown twenty five, Yesterday, Today, and Forever,
28:55
Speaker 1: a reunion special celebrating Motown Records twenty fifth anniversary and approxim
29:00
Speaker 1: forty seven million people watch, which is a lot and
29:03
Speaker 1: Jackson performed Billy Jean and during the performance, in a
29:07
Speaker 1: moment that he had rehearsed privately for weeks after learning
29:10
Speaker 1: the move from a dancer named garn katspurg candidate in
29:14
Speaker 1: June nineteen eighty one, he executed the moonwalk for the
29:17
Speaker 1: first time on live television. Iconic and the other performers
29:22
Speaker 1: backstage watched the monitors in silence, and Fred Astaire called
29:26
Speaker 1: Jackson the next morning, and in a single fluid backward
29:30
Speaker 1: glide six seconds maybe seven, Michael Jackson passed from stardom
29:35
Speaker 1: into something that had no adequate name, and less than
29:39
Speaker 1: a year after the Motown twenty five performance, on January
29:42
Speaker 1: twenty seventh, to nineteen eighty four, Michael Jackson was filming
29:45
Speaker 1: a Pepsi commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles,
29:48
Speaker 1: and on the sixth take, pyrotechnics ignited too close to
29:52
Speaker 1: his head and his hair caught fire and he suffered
29:56
Speaker 1: second degree burns to his scalp and crew members rushed
29:59
Speaker 1: to extinguish the and Jackson was taken to hospital, where
30:02
Speaker 1: he was treated and released, and Pepsi settled the resulting claim,
30:06
Speaker 1: and Jackson donated one point five million dollars of the
30:09
Speaker 1: settlement to the Broughtman Medical Center, which renamed its Burn
30:12
Speaker 1: Center in his honor. Just Like So Sweet, and in
30:17
Speaker 1: his autopsy decades later would reveal that Jackson was almost
30:21
Speaker 1: completely bald beneath the wigs he wore for the rest
30:24
Speaker 1: of his life from that but the deeper wound was pharmaceutical.
30:29
Speaker 1: To manage the pain from the burn and subsequent reconstructive procedures,
30:33
Speaker 1: Jackson was prescribed opioid painkillers, and nearly every person close
30:38
Speaker 1: to him would later identify the Pepsi burn as the
30:40
Speaker 1: starting point of the prescription drug dependency that shadowed the
30:44
Speaker 1: rest of his life and ultimately contributed to his untimely death.
30:49
Speaker 1: But the third and final collaboration between Jackson and Quincy
30:52
Speaker 1: Jones was bad recorded from nineteen eighty five to nineteen
30:56
Speaker 1: eighty seven and released on August thirty first, nineteen eighty seven,
30:59
Speaker 1: and Michael Jackson wrote nine of the album's eleven tracks,
31:02
Speaker 1: a dramatic increase in creative control from Thriller, and the
31:06
Speaker 1: album sold two point two five million copies in its
31:09
Speaker 1: first week and generated a record five consecutive number one
31:12
Speaker 1: singles from a single album. And the title tracks music
31:15
Speaker 1: video was directed by Martin Scorsese and featured a young
31:19
Speaker 1: Wesley Snipes, and total sales exceeded thirty five million copies worldwide,
31:24
Speaker 1: and the Bad World Tour September twelfth, nineteen eighty seven
31:27
Speaker 1: through January twenty seventh, nineteen eighty nine, was one hundred
31:30
Speaker 1: and twenty three concerts across fifteen countries, grossing one hundred
31:33
Speaker 1: and twenty five million dollars, and Diana, Princess of Wales
31:38
Speaker 1: attended the July sixteenth, nineteen eighty eight show at the
31:41
Speaker 1: Wembley Stadium. And Bad was, by an objective measure, one
31:45
Speaker 1: of the most successful albums ever released, and it was
31:48
Speaker 1: also the first time Jackson encountered the peculiar burden of
31:52
Speaker 1: his own success because Bad was treated in certain critical
31:56
Speaker 1: quarters as a disappointment, not because it failed by any measure,
32:00
Speaker 1: but because it was not Thriller, Because nothing could be
32:04
Speaker 1: the standard he had set was inhuman and it would
32:07
Speaker 1: follow him like a shadow for the rest of his career.
32:10
Speaker 1: So in nineteen eighty five, between the triumph of Thriller
32:13
Speaker 1: and the recording of Bad, Michael Jackson made the business
32:16
Speaker 1: decision that would define his financial life and some believe
32:20
Speaker 1: his death. Paul McCartney, during their collaborations on The Girl
32:24
Speaker 1: as Mine and Say Say Say, had explained to Jackson
32:27
Speaker 1: how music publishing worked, that owning the rights to songs
32:31
Speaker 1: was where the real money lived, not performing or recording them,
32:34
Speaker 1: and Michael listened carefully, and when the ATV Music Publishing
32:38
Speaker 1: catalog came up for sale, a portfolio of roughly four
32:42
Speaker 1: thousand songs, including two hundred and fifty one compositions by
32:45
Speaker 1: John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Jackson pursued it aggressively, and
32:49
Speaker 1: the purchase closed on approximately August tenth, nineteen eighty five,
32:53
Speaker 1: for forty seven point five million dollars, and Michael Jackson
32:57
Speaker 1: now owned Yesterday, Hey Jude, and Let It Be and
33:01
Speaker 1: dozens of other songs that formed the bedrock of twentieth
33:05
Speaker 1: century popular music. And McCartney, who wanted the catalog himself,
33:09
Speaker 1: was reportedly furious and the friendship never recovered, and the
33:14
Speaker 1: catalog would appreciate enormously over the following decades, and in
33:18
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five, Michael Jackson merged his holdings with Sony
33:22
Speaker 1: Music's publishing division to create Sony ATV Music Publishing, a
33:26
Speaker 1: joint venture in which he retained a fifty percent stake,
33:29
Speaker 1: So by the time of his death that the catalog
33:32
Speaker 1: was valued at approximately one billion dollars, and by twenty sixteen,
33:37
Speaker 1: when Sony purchased the estate's share for seven hundred and
33:40
Speaker 1: fifty million dollars, estimates had climbed to four billion. So
33:44
Speaker 1: the catalog made Michael Jackson extraordinarily wealthy on paper. So
33:49
Speaker 1: it also made him a target, and he would spend
33:52
Speaker 1: the last years of his life telling people that someone
33:55
Speaker 1: was going to kill him for it. So after Bad
33:58
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones parted professionally and for Dangerous,
34:02
Speaker 1: released in nineteen ninety one, Jackson turned to Teddy Riley,
34:05
Speaker 1: the pioneer of New jack Swim, and the album's sound
34:08
Speaker 1: reflected the shift harder, more rhythmically aggressive, and more experimental,
34:14
Speaker 1: and it was Jackson's first album without Jones since Forever.
34:17
Speaker 1: Michael in nineteen seventy five, and it sold thirty two
34:20
Speaker 1: million copies worldwide. And on January thirty first, nineteen ninety three,
34:25
Speaker 1: Jackson headlined the halftime show at the super Bowl in Pasadena,
34:29
Speaker 1: and it was the first major music superstar to do so.
34:32
Speaker 1: And it's iconic. I mean, he's just like standing on
34:35
Speaker 1: stage and just the crowds screaming, and he's just sitting
34:37
Speaker 1: there just soaking it in. It's ah, It's the best
34:40
Speaker 1: super Bowl in my opinion, right next to Prince. And
34:42
Speaker 1: the performance was a spectacle of unprecedented scale, Like I said,
34:47
Speaker 1: when Jackson stood motionless on stage for ninety seconds while
34:51
Speaker 1: the crowd roared, then launched into a medley that included jam,
34:56
Speaker 1: Billy Jean and Heal the World. It was the first
34:58
Speaker 1: Super Bowl halftime where ratings increased between halves, a phenomenon
35:03
Speaker 1: that transformed the halftime show from a bathroom break afterthought
35:06
Speaker 1: into the premiere live performance slot in American entertainment and
35:11
Speaker 1: every halftime spectacle since Prince, Beyonce, Shakira, which are also
35:15
Speaker 1: amazing shows, exists in the template Jackson created that afternoon,
35:20
Speaker 1: and History, Past, Present, and Future Book one released in
35:24
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five was a double album, one disc of
35:27
Speaker 1: greatest hits, one of new material, and it contained you
35:31
Speaker 1: Are Not Alone, which became the first song in Billboard
35:34
Speaker 1: history to debut at number one on the Hot one hundred.
35:38
Speaker 1: And the History World tour that followed him from nineteen
35:40
Speaker 1: ninety six to nineteen ninety seven covered eighty two concerts
35:44
Speaker 1: across thirty five countries and grossed one hundred and sixty
35:46
Speaker 1: five million dollars, the highest grossing solo tour of the nineties.
35:51
Speaker 1: And by the mid nineties, Michael Jackson had sold more
35:53
Speaker 1: records than any solo artist in history, and he had
35:56
Speaker 1: invented the modern music video, and he had integrated empty,
36:00
Speaker 1: and he had transformed the Super Bowl halftime show. He
36:03
Speaker 1: owned the most valuable music publishing catalog on Earth, and
36:07
Speaker 1: he was, by virtually any metric, the most famous human
36:11
Speaker 1: being alive. And then everything began to fall apart because
36:16
Speaker 1: behind the stage lights and the record sales and the
36:19
Speaker 1: increasingly surreal scale of the fame, there was a person
36:24
Speaker 1: and that person was unwell in ways the public was
36:27
Speaker 1: only beginning to understand, and lonely in ways the public
36:32
Speaker 1: could not have imagined. And the health problems came first,
36:35
Speaker 1: and they came early. So in nineteen eighty three, going
36:39
Speaker 1: back a little bit in time, doctor Arnold Klein, a
36:42
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills dermatologist who would become one of the most
36:45
Speaker 1: consequential and controversial figures in Jackson's life, diagnosed him with
36:49
Speaker 1: discoid lupis arihythmatosis, an autoimmune condition affecting the skin, and
36:55
Speaker 1: three years later, in nineteen eighty six, Climb delivered a
36:58
Speaker 1: second diagnosis, vitlago, a condition in which the immune system
37:03
Speaker 1: attacks the melanocytes that produce skin pigment, creating irregular patches
37:08
Speaker 1: of depigmentation across the body. And for any person, vitelago
37:12
Speaker 1: is a difficult diagnosis, but for a black man who
37:16
Speaker 1: was the most photographed human being on the planet, a
37:20
Speaker 1: man whose changing appearance was already the subject of relentless
37:23
Speaker 1: tabloid speculation, it was catastrophic. And Jackson would not publicly
37:29
Speaker 1: disclose the videlago until February tenth, nineteen ninety three, in
37:33
Speaker 1: a live interview with Oprah Winfrey watched by ninety million people,
37:38
Speaker 1: and by then, years of tabloid cruelty had calcified a
37:42
Speaker 1: narrative that Jackson was bleaching his skin out of self
37:45
Speaker 1: hatred or racial confusion, but the truth was a medical
37:49
Speaker 1: condition he had not chosen and could not control, and
37:52
Speaker 1: his autopsy sixteen years later would confirm the diagnosis definitively,
37:57
Speaker 1: documenting focal depigmentation across five areas of his body. And
38:02
Speaker 1: then came the pepsi burn in January nineteen eighty four,
38:05
Speaker 1: which we talked about previously, and with it the opioid
38:08
Speaker 1: prescriptions that introduced Jackson to a pharmaceutical world he would
38:12
Speaker 1: never fully leave, and in nineteen ninety three, after the
38:15
Speaker 1: crisis that would engulf him that year, Elizabeth Taylor personally
38:19
Speaker 1: led an intervention and Jackson entered rehab at a facility
38:23
Speaker 1: in London and completed a twelve step program, and the
38:26
Speaker 1: dependency retreated, but did not disappear. It would return in
38:30
Speaker 1: different forms with different substances across different doctors for the
38:34
Speaker 1: rest of his life, and the most dangerous of those
38:36
Speaker 1: substances was propofol, a powerful intravenous anesthetic used in hospitals
38:42
Speaker 1: to induce unconsciousness for surgery, and Jackson began using propofol
38:46
Speaker 1: during the History World tour in nineteen ninety six to
38:49
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven, administered by anasthesiologists he hired to travel
38:55
Speaker 1: with him, and he used it to sleep for a
38:57
Speaker 1: man suffering from chronic and deability insomnia, a condition that
39:01
Speaker 1: worsened with every passing year. Propofal offered the only reliable
39:06
Speaker 1: path to unconsciousness, but it was not sleep in any
39:09
Speaker 1: medical sense. It suppressed rem cycles entirely, offering oblivion without rest,
39:16
Speaker 1: and an expert who testified in twenty thirteen estimated that
39:19
Speaker 1: Jackson may have gone sixty days without remsleep before his death,
39:24
Speaker 1: which is catastrophic. So his brain, by the end, was
39:29
Speaker 1: being deprived of the very thing sleep is supposed to provide.
39:33
Speaker 1: And if Jackson's health was quietly deteriorating through the nineteen
39:36
Speaker 1: eighties and nineteen nineties, his personal world was also taking
39:40
Speaker 1: shape in ways the public found endlessly fascinating and largely incomprehensible,
39:45
Speaker 1: because the friendships came first, and the most important of
39:48
Speaker 1: them was Elizabeth Taylor. They met in the mid nineteen eighties,
39:52
Speaker 1: likely at a Victoria Tour concert at Dodger Stadium in
39:55
Speaker 1: late nineteen eighty four, and the connection was immediate and deep.
39:59
Speaker 1: Two people who had been child stars who had grown
40:02
Speaker 1: up inside fame's distortion fields, who understood what it cost
40:06
Speaker 1: to be watched by millions before you understood who you
40:08
Speaker 1: even were. And Taylor became Jackson's fiercest defender and closest confidant,
40:13
Speaker 1: and on April twelfth, nineteen eighty nine, at the Sole
40:16
Speaker 1: Train Awards, she introduced him with the title that would
40:18
Speaker 1: follow him permanently, the King of Pop. And on October sixth,
40:22
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, Michael Jackson hosted her eighth wedding to
40:26
Speaker 1: Larry Fortenski at Neverland Ranch, and their friendship lasted over
40:31
Speaker 1: twenty five years until Taylor's death in twenty eleven, and
40:35
Speaker 1: she was, by many accounts, one of the very few
40:38
Speaker 1: people on earth who could speak to Michael Jackson honestly
40:41
Speaker 1: and be heard. And his meeting with Princess Diana was
40:44
Speaker 1: briefer but no less meaningful to him because on July sixteenth,
40:48
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty eight, like we said before, Diana attended his
40:51
Speaker 1: Bad World Tour show at Wembley Stadium, and Jackson had
40:55
Speaker 1: removed Dirty Diana from the set list out of concern
40:58
Speaker 1: that the title might embarrass her, and Diana learning of
41:02
Speaker 1: this reportedly requested that he perform it, and he did,
41:06
Speaker 1: and they met only that once in person backstage at Wembley.
41:10
Speaker 1: And when Diana was killed in a car crash on
41:12
Speaker 1: August thirty first, nineteen ninety seven, Jackson was so shaken
41:16
Speaker 1: that he postponed his scheduled performance in Austin, Belgium, moving
41:20
Speaker 1: it from August thirty first to September third. And if
41:24
Speaker 1: you want to know more about Diana's death, I will
41:27
Speaker 1: link that video that I covered her whole life and
41:30
Speaker 1: mysterious death down below. And in nineteen eighty eight, Jackson
41:33
Speaker 1: purchased the property that would become the physical manifestation of
41:37
Speaker 1: his inner world. Neverland Valley Ranch sat on approximately twenty
41:42
Speaker 1: seven hundred acres in the Santa Nas Valley near Los Olivos, California,
41:47
Speaker 1: with rolling golden hills studded with oak trees, an hour
41:51
Speaker 1: and a half northeast of Los Angeles, and the purchase
41:55
Speaker 1: price was somewhere between seventeen and nineteen and a half
41:59
Speaker 1: million dollars depending on the source. The main residence was
42:03
Speaker 1: roughly twelve thousand, six hundred square feet, but the house
42:06
Speaker 1: was almost beside the point because what Jackson built around
42:09
Speaker 1: it was something between a private theme park and a
42:12
Speaker 1: living fairy tale. A ferris wheel, a carousel, a miniature railroad,
42:17
Speaker 1: a zoo with giraffes and elephants and chimpanzees, a movie theater, gardens,
42:22
Speaker 1: just anything and everything you name it that you would
42:24
Speaker 1: have wanted to see as a kid. It was there.
42:26
Speaker 1: And he named it after the island in Peter Pan
42:29
Speaker 1: where children never grow up, and the symbolism was not subtle,
42:33
Speaker 1: as Jackson identified with Peter Pan openly and repeatedly throughout
42:37
Speaker 1: his life's he said to me that he's Peter Pan,
42:40
Speaker 1: you know. And I feel that way too, and I
42:42
Speaker 1: guess we have the same feel about life. Because he
42:45
Speaker 1: saw childhood as something sacred and something that had been
42:49
Speaker 1: stolen from him. The Neverland became Jackson's refuge, his creative workspace,
42:55
Speaker 1: and eventually the setting of the accusations that nearly destroyed him,
43:00
Speaker 1: because he would live there on and off for nearly
43:02
Speaker 1: two decades before the property became too painful to inhabit,
43:07
Speaker 1: and it would be sold in December of twenty twenty,
43:09
Speaker 1: more than eleven years after his death, for twenty two
43:13
Speaker 1: million dollars. Now the Romantic relationships were few, intense and brief,
43:19
Speaker 1: and Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley first cross paths as
43:23
Speaker 1: children backstage at a Las Vegas concert in approximately nineteen
43:27
Speaker 1: seventy four or nineteen seventy five, when she was about
43:30
Speaker 1: seven and he was about seventeen, and her father was
43:33
Speaker 1: Elvis Presley as we know, and his father was Joe Jackson.
43:38
Speaker 1: So they were, in a sense the only two people
43:40
Speaker 1: on earth who could fully understand each other's childhoods, and
43:43
Speaker 1: they would reconnect as adults in November nineteen ninety two,
43:46
Speaker 1: when Jackson was in the earliest stages of his personal
43:49
Speaker 1: crisis that would soon become public, and their conversations grew
43:53
Speaker 1: frequent and intimate, and on May twenty six, nineteen ninety four,
43:57
Speaker 1: twenty days after her divorce from musician Danny u Ugh
44:00
Speaker 1: was finalized, they married in a private ceremony in the
44:03
Speaker 1: Dominican Republic, and the world reacted with almost uniform disbelief.
44:08
Speaker 1: The tabloids treated the marriage as a publicity stunt, a
44:11
Speaker 1: strategic alliance between two famous names designed to rehabilitate Jackson's
44:16
Speaker 1: image during the fallout from the nineteen ninety three allegations,
44:19
Speaker 1: and on September eighth, nineteen ninety four, at the MTV
44:22
Speaker 1: Video Music Awards, Jackson and Pressley appeared on stage together
44:26
Speaker 1: and he leaned over and kissed her, and the audience
44:29
Speaker 1: didn't know whether to cheer or cringe, and it remains
44:32
Speaker 1: one of the most analyzed public kisses in entertainment history.
44:36
Speaker 1: But whatever the marriage was, and Presley would later insist
44:39
Speaker 1: incredibly and emotionally that it was real, it did not last.
44:44
Speaker 1: And they separated on December tenth, nineteen ninety five, and
44:47
Speaker 1: Pressley filed for divorce on January eighteenth, nineteen ninety six,
44:50
Speaker 1: and it was finalized on August twentieth, nineteen ninety six.
44:54
Speaker 1: And in all her later accounts of the relationship, Presley
44:57
Speaker 1: described Jackson as deeply loving but also deeply troubled, consumed
45:01
Speaker 1: by prescription drugs and surrounded by enablers she couldn't penetrate,
45:06
Speaker 1: and she told Oprah Winfrey in twenty ten that in
45:09
Speaker 1: one of their final conversations in two thousand and five,
45:12
Speaker 1: Jackson had told her that someone was going to kill
45:14
Speaker 1: him for his music catalog, and she confirmed he gave
45:18
Speaker 1: her specific names, and she declined to share them for
45:21
Speaker 1: whatever reason, and the second marriage was different in almost
45:25
Speaker 1: every way, as Debbie Rowe was a nurse in doctor
45:28
Speaker 1: Arnold Klein's dermatology office and she and Jackson had known
45:32
Speaker 1: each other for years through Klein's practice, and on November fourteenth,
45:36
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, lesson three months after the prosly divorce
45:39
Speaker 1: was finalized, Jackson and Roe married in Sydney, Australia, and
45:43
Speaker 1: she was six months pregnant, and their first child, Michael
45:46
Speaker 1: Joseph Jackson Junior, called Prince, was born on February thirteenth,
45:51
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven, and their second, Paris Michael Catherine Jackson,
45:55
Speaker 1: was born on April third, nineteen ninety eight, and the
45:58
Speaker 1: marriage appeared from outside and arguably from the inside, to
46:02
Speaker 1: be primarily an arrangement for producing children, and Roe would
46:06
Speaker 1: later describe the relationship in transactional terms, saying she had
46:10
Speaker 1: agreed to bear Jackson's children because she saw how much
46:13
Speaker 1: he wanted to be a father. But they would divorce
46:16
Speaker 1: in approximately April of two thousand, with Roe receiving an
46:19
Speaker 1: eight million dollar settlement and initially relinquishing custody and Jackson's
46:24
Speaker 1: third child, Prince Michael Jackson, the second originally called the
46:27
Speaker 1: Blanket later Biggie was born on February twenty first, two
46:31
Speaker 1: thousand and two, via surrogate, and the identity of the
46:35
Speaker 1: surrogate and the biological mother has never been publicly confirmed.
46:39
Speaker 1: And on November nineteenth, two thousand and two, Jackson committed
46:42
Speaker 1: the single most damaging public relations act of his career
46:47
Speaker 1: that didn't involve a courtroom. Standing on the balcony of
46:51
Speaker 1: his suite at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, he dangled
46:55
Speaker 1: the infant blanket over the railing four stories above the
46:59
Speaker 1: st while a crowd below screamed and cameras flashed, and
47:04
Speaker 1: the image circled the globe within hours, and Jackson later
47:08
Speaker 1: called it a terrible mistake, and obviously it was, but
47:13
Speaker 1: it was also a window into something the public was
47:16
Speaker 1: only beginning to reckon with that the most famous man
47:19
Speaker 1: in the world was not functioning normally, that his judgment
47:23
Speaker 1: was eroding, and that whatever private reality he inhibited was
47:27
Speaker 1: drifting further and further from the one the rest of
47:29
Speaker 1: the world shared. So by the early two thousands, Michael
47:33
Speaker 1: Jackson was a father of three, a two time divorcee,
47:36
Speaker 1: the owner of the most valuable music catalog in the world,
47:39
Speaker 1: and a man whose body was quietly failing, ravaged by vitelago,
47:44
Speaker 1: lupis surgical procedures, chronic insomnia, and a pharmaceutical dependency that
47:49
Speaker 1: no intervention had permanently resolved. And he was forty four
47:53
Speaker 1: years old, and he was still, by any measure, the
47:56
Speaker 1: most famous person alive, and the worst was yet to so.
48:00
Speaker 1: In May of nineteen ninety two, a woman named June
48:03
Speaker 1: Chandler and her thirteen year old son Jordan, were stranded
48:06
Speaker 1: on the side of the road in Los Angeles. Their
48:09
Speaker 1: car had broken down and they'd called rent a wreck
48:12
Speaker 1: for a replacement, and when had arrived, the employee who
48:15
Speaker 1: helped them recognize the name on the paperwork. One of
48:18
Speaker 1: their contacts was someone who worked with Michael Jackson, and
48:21
Speaker 1: throughout that thin thread of connection, June Chandler mentioned the
48:25
Speaker 1: encounter to the right person, who mentioned it to someone else,
48:29
Speaker 1: and within weeks the Chandler family had entered Michael Jackson's orbit.
48:33
Speaker 1: Jackson took to Jordan or Jordie as the family called him,
48:37
Speaker 1: with an intensity that was by then recognizable to people
48:42
Speaker 1: around him, and he had a pattern of forming deeply
48:45
Speaker 1: close relationships with children particularly boys around the age of
48:49
Speaker 1: twelve or thirteen, and he would call them constantly, invite
48:54
Speaker 1: them to Neverland, shower them and their families with gifts
48:58
Speaker 1: and access to his world. And he was generous to
49:01
Speaker 1: a degree that seemed almost compulsive. And to Jackson, these
49:05
Speaker 1: relationships were innocent, an attempt to experience the childhood he
49:10
Speaker 1: believed had been stolen from him, to live inside the
49:13
Speaker 1: uncomplicated joy of a child's companionship. But to observers they
49:17
Speaker 1: were at best unusual and at worst alarming, and the
49:22
Speaker 1: distance between those two interpretations would define the rest of
49:25
Speaker 1: Jackson's life. Jordan Chandler's father was Evan Chandler, a Beverly
49:30
Speaker 1: Hills dentist who also worked as a screenwriter, with a
49:33
Speaker 1: co writing credit on mel Brooks Robin Hood Men in Tights,
49:37
Speaker 1: and Evan was not part of the initial connection because
49:41
Speaker 1: June had primary custody and it was through her that
49:44
Speaker 1: Jackson and Jordan spent increasing amounts of time together. But
49:47
Speaker 1: Evan Chandler grew suspicious of the relationship, then angry, then
49:52
Speaker 1: something harder to categorize. So on July eighth, nineteen ninety three,
49:56
Speaker 1: Evan Chandler was recorded in a phone conversation, saying quote,
50:00
Speaker 1: if I go through with this, I win fake time.
50:02
Speaker 1: I will get everything I want and they will be
50:04
Speaker 1: told they will be the enjoyed forever. And the statement
50:06
Speaker 1: would become one of the most debated pieces of evidence
50:10
Speaker 1: in the case because to jackson defenders it was proof
50:13
Speaker 1: that the allegations were financially motivated from the start, a
50:17
Speaker 1: shakedown dressed as child protection, and to those who believed
50:22
Speaker 1: the accusations, it was a father's anguished calculation about the
50:25
Speaker 1: legal system's leverage, not evidence that the underlying claims were false.
50:30
Speaker 1: Both readings are sustainable, but neither are definitive, and on
50:35
Speaker 1: August seventeenth, nineteen ninety three, the allegations were formally reported
50:39
Speaker 1: to authorities and Jordan Chandler described acts of a s
50:43
Speaker 1: by Jackson, and the Los Angeles Police Department and the
50:46
Speaker 1: Department of Children and Family Services opened investigations, and the
50:50
Speaker 1: story detonated across the global media with a force that
50:53
Speaker 1: made every previous Jackson tabloid saga look point, and on
50:57
Speaker 1: December twentieth, nineteen ninety three, Jackson submitted a strip search,
51:01
Speaker 1: a body examination conducted by investigators seeking to determine whether
51:05
Speaker 1: Jordan Chandler's description of Jackson's anatomy matched reality, and Jackson
51:11
Speaker 1: described the experience as the most humiliating event of his life,
51:15
Speaker 1: and the results of the examination have been the subject
51:18
Speaker 1: of conflicting interpretations ever since, because Jackson's camp maintained the
51:23
Speaker 1: descriptions did not match and the prosecution's position was more ambiguous,
51:28
Speaker 1: and two grand juries were convened, and one in Los
51:31
Speaker 1: Angeles one in Santa Barbara. Over thirteen months, more than
51:35
Speaker 1: four hundred witnesses were interviewed, and neither grand jury returned
51:39
Speaker 1: an indictment, so without an indictment there could be no
51:42
Speaker 1: criminal trial, and on January twenty fifth, nineteen ninety four,
51:46
Speaker 1: a civil settlement was reached and the amount was approximately
51:49
Speaker 1: twenty three million dollars and Jackson's insurance carrier paid the
51:53
Speaker 1: claim and Jackson's legal team maintained, and Jackson himself would
51:58
Speaker 1: insist for the rest of his life that the settlement
52:00
Speaker 1: was not an admission of guilt, but a strategic decision
52:03
Speaker 1: to end a situation that was destroying him personally and professionally,
52:08
Speaker 1: at the recommendation of his attorneys and over his own
52:11
Speaker 1: objections and His critics argued that innocent men don't pay
52:16
Speaker 1: twenty three million dollars, and his defenders countered that innocent
52:20
Speaker 1: men who are the most famous person on earth and
52:23
Speaker 1: hamorrhaging millions of dollars per week in canceled deals and
52:25
Speaker 1: destroyed partnerships sometimes due and the settlement did not include
52:30
Speaker 1: a confidentiality clause preventing the Chandlers from cooperating with criminal authorities,
52:35
Speaker 1: and Jordan Chandler and his family chose not to pursue
52:38
Speaker 1: criminal charges, so the investigation was closed and Evan Chandler
52:43
Speaker 1: died by on November fifth, two thousand and nine, less
52:49
Speaker 1: than five months after Michael Jackson's death. That is a
52:55
Speaker 1: bit suspicious, a bit why would you do that? Seems
53:00
Speaker 1: he's like get out of guilt, But what do I know?
53:02
Speaker 1: And at that point he had been estranged from his
53:05
Speaker 1: son Jordan for years, and his death was reported quietly,
53:10
Speaker 1: a footnote in a larger story that had already moved on.
53:14
Speaker 1: So for nearly a decade after the settlement, Jackson lived
53:18
Speaker 1: under a cloud that never fully dissipated, and the allegations
53:21
Speaker 1: had not been proven. They had not been disproven either,
53:25
Speaker 1: and they existed in a permanent state of suspicion, following
53:29
Speaker 1: him into every room, coloring every interaction, inflecting every headline,
53:35
Speaker 1: and his record sales would decline, and his public image curdled,
53:39
Speaker 1: and the jokes became cruel and ubiquitous, and he retreated
53:44
Speaker 1: further into Neverland, further into isolation, and further into the
53:48
Speaker 1: company of children and the animals and amusement park rides
53:52
Speaker 1: that constituted his version of a normal life. And then
53:55
Speaker 1: in February of two thousand and three, a British journalist
53:58
Speaker 1: named Martin Basher aired a documentary called Living with Michael Jackson,
54:03
Speaker 1: and Basher had spent eight months with Jackson, gaining extraordinary
54:08
Speaker 1: access to his daily life at Neverland, and the documentary
54:11
Speaker 1: included a scene in which Jackson held hands with a
54:14
Speaker 1: thirteen year old boy named Gavin ur Viso, a child
54:17
Speaker 1: cancer patient Jackson had befriended in two thousand and said
54:21
Speaker 1: on camera, but is it really appropriate for a forty
54:24
Speaker 1: four year old man to share a bedroom with a
54:27
Speaker 1: child who is not related to him at all. That's
54:29
Speaker 1: a beautiful thing. That's not a worrying thing. Why shut
54:31
Speaker 1: it be worrying? And he meant it innocently, but unfortunately
54:36
Speaker 1: it did not land innocently, and the documentary was watched
54:40
Speaker 1: by an estimated fourteen point six million viewers in the
54:43
Speaker 1: UK in twenty two million in the US, and the
54:47
Speaker 1: reaction was immediate and devastating, and Gavin Arvizo's family subsequently
54:52
Speaker 1: alleged that Jackson had minted the boy. So on November eighteenth,
54:57
Speaker 1: two thousand and three, approximately seventy the Sheriff's deputies raided
55:02
Speaker 1: Neverland Ranch, and two days later, on November twentieth, Jackson
55:06
Speaker 1: turned himself into Santa Barbara County authorities and he was arrested, handcuffed, photographed,
55:12
Speaker 1: and released on three million dollars bail and the booking
55:15
Speaker 1: photo his expression, somewhere between defiance and association, was broadcast
55:20
Speaker 1: on every television screen in the world, and he later
55:24
Speaker 1: said the arrest was deliberately humiliating, that he was handcuffed
55:28
Speaker 1: so tightly his wrists bled, that he was locked in
55:31
Speaker 1: a restroom smeared with feces, and that the officers laughed,
55:35
Speaker 1: and Santa Barbara authorities denied the claims fully. The truth
55:39
Speaker 1: of what happened in those hours between surrender and release
55:42
Speaker 1: has never been independently established, but the charges were severe,
55:46
Speaker 1: and in December of two thousand and three, the initial
55:49
Speaker 1: indictment included seven counts of childhood, two counts of administering
55:54
Speaker 1: a intoxicating agent to a minor, and one count of conspiracy,
55:59
Speaker 1: but by April two thousand and four, the indictment had
56:01
Speaker 1: been restructured four counts of minor, four counts of intoxicating
56:05
Speaker 1: a miner with alcohol, and one count of attemptedtion, and
56:10
Speaker 1: one count of conspiracy and ten charges that would expand
56:13
Speaker 1: to fourteen at verdict when lesser included offenses were added,
56:17
Speaker 1: so if convicted on all counts, Jackson faced decades in prison.
56:22
Speaker 1: So the trial People Versus Jackson began with jury selection
56:26
Speaker 1: on January thirty first, two thousand and five, in Santa Maria, California,
56:31
Speaker 1: before Judge Rodney Melville, and opening arguments commenced on February
56:35
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, and the prosecution led by District Attorney Tom Snedden,
56:39
Speaker 1: who had investigated Jackson during the nineteen ninety three case
56:43
Speaker 1: as well, and whose pursuit of Jackson struck many observers
56:47
Speaker 1: as personal, and he presented its case over several months
56:51
Speaker 1: and approximately one hundred and forty witnesses were called and
56:55
Speaker 1: the defense dismantled the prosecution's case methodically with Gavin Arviso.
57:00
Speaker 1: Mother Janet was shown to have a history of making
57:03
Speaker 1: false claims, including welfare fraud and a prior false accusation
57:09
Speaker 1: of against a J. C. Penny security guard, and the
57:13
Speaker 1: timeline of the alleged this was problematic, and the prosecution
57:17
Speaker 1: claimed this use occurred after the Basher documentary aired, meaning
57:22
Speaker 1: Jackson had supposedly chosen to at the child immediately after
57:26
Speaker 1: the entire world had been put on alert about his
57:29
Speaker 1: relationships with children, and the family had continued to voluntarily
57:34
Speaker 1: visit Neverland and accept Jackson's hospitality throughout the period in question,
57:39
Speaker 1: which was odd and Macaulay Culkin, the former child star
57:43
Speaker 1: of Home Alone, who had been one of Jackson's closest
57:46
Speaker 1: childhood companions and who the prosecution hoped to establish as
57:50
Speaker 1: a prior victim, took the stand and testified unequivocally that
57:55
Speaker 1: he had never been by Jackson, and Wade Robson, in
57:59
Speaker 1: Australian choreographer who had known Jackson since childhood, also testified
58:04
Speaker 1: that he had never been used, but Robson would reverse
58:08
Speaker 1: his position in twenty thirteen, filing a civil claim alleging years,
58:13
Speaker 1: but on the witness stand in two thousand and five,
58:15
Speaker 1: under oath, he said it never happened. And on June thirteenth,
58:19
Speaker 1: two thousand and five, the jury returned its verdict not
58:22
Speaker 1: guilty on all fourteen counts, and it was unanimous. And
58:27
Speaker 1: Jackson was in the courtroom when the verdicts were read,
58:30
Speaker 1: and he showed little visible emotion, and outside the courthouse
58:34
Speaker 1: thousands of fans who had maintained a visual throughout the trial, erupted,
58:39
Speaker 1: and inside, according to people who were with him, Jackson
58:42
Speaker 1: was hollowed out and the acquittal was total. The vidication
58:46
Speaker 1: was complete, but it didn't matter. The trial had consumed
58:50
Speaker 1: nearly two years of his life, cost tens of millions
58:53
Speaker 1: of dollars, and left him physically and psychologically destroyed. And
58:57
Speaker 1: he had entered the courtroom weighing, by some account's less
59:00
Speaker 1: than one hundred and twenty pounds because he had been
59:03
Speaker 1: unable to eat, and he had been unable to sleep,
59:06
Speaker 1: or rather he had been unable to sleep without propofal,
59:09
Speaker 1: and the demands of daily court appearances had disrupted even
59:12
Speaker 1: that pharmaceutical oblivion. So after the verdict, Michael Jackson left
59:16
Speaker 1: the courthouse, left Santa Maria, and effectively left the United States,
59:21
Speaker 1: and he would spend most of the next two and
59:23
Speaker 1: a half years abroad in Bayron, in Ireland, in various
59:27
Speaker 1: rented properties scattered across the world, a man acquitted of
59:31
Speaker 1: everything and unable to return to normal life and neverland.
59:34
Speaker 1: The place he had built as a sanctuary had been
59:38
Speaker 1: raided and violated and publicized in every tabloid on earth,
59:42
Speaker 1: so he felt like he couldn't go back and he
59:44
Speaker 1: would never live there again. And the allegations from nineteen
59:47
Speaker 1: ninety three In two thousand and five, the settlement and
59:50
Speaker 1: the acquittal became the defining lens through which Michael Jackson
59:53
Speaker 1: would be viewed for the rest of his life and beyond.
59:56
Speaker 1: Not the music, not the dancing, not the record sales,
1:00:00
Speaker 1: the moonwalk, or the transformation of pop culture. The question,
1:00:04
Speaker 1: the unresolvable, unanswerable, permanent question that followed him out of
1:00:10
Speaker 1: the courtroom across the ocean into exile, and it was
1:00:13
Speaker 1: still following him three and a half years later, in
1:00:17
Speaker 1: the summer of two thousand and nine, when he agreed
1:00:19
Speaker 1: to perform fifty concerts in London and began rehearsing for
1:00:23
Speaker 1: a comeback. He would not survive, so after the acquittal,
1:00:27
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson did what any person might do if they
1:00:30
Speaker 1: had been publicly accused of the worst crimes imaginable, dragged
1:00:34
Speaker 1: through a five month trial broadcast to the world, and
1:00:37
Speaker 1: found not guilty on every count. He ran, and in
1:00:40
Speaker 1: June two thousand and five, Jackson left the United States
1:00:43
Speaker 1: for bay Rain, a small island kingdom in the Persian Gulf,
1:00:47
Speaker 1: the personal guest of Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad bin Aya
1:00:52
Speaker 1: al Khalifa, a son of the king that was a mouthful,
1:00:55
Speaker 1: and the Sikh provided Jackson with a residence, staff, security,
1:01:00
Speaker 1: and a loan of two point two million dollars to
1:01:02
Speaker 1: cover outstanding legal fees from the trial, and the arrangement
1:01:06
Speaker 1: was for a time a genuine refuge, and he stayed
1:01:09
Speaker 1: nearly a year from June two thousand and five to
1:01:12
Speaker 1: May two thousand and six, before the relationship with the
1:01:14
Speaker 1: Sheikh kind of soured, and Abdullah later sued Jackson for
1:01:18
Speaker 1: approximately four point seven million dollars, claiming Jackson had failed
1:01:22
Speaker 1: to honor commitments related to a planned album and autobiography,
1:01:27
Speaker 1: and after Bay Rain, Jackson drifted to Ireland for several months,
1:01:31
Speaker 1: then to various rented properties in the United States and Europe.
1:01:34
Speaker 1: But he was a man without a fixed address, without
1:01:36
Speaker 1: a clear plan, and without financial stability, and by this
1:01:40
Speaker 1: point Jackson's debt had reached approximately five hundred million dollars.
1:01:46
Speaker 1: That number is almost incomprehensible until you understand its architecture
1:01:52
Speaker 1: as decades of lavish spending on Neverland's upkeep, the zoo,
1:01:57
Speaker 1: the staff, the constant travel, the legal defense from two
1:02:01
Speaker 1: sets of allegations, the entourage, the mansions, the shopping all
1:02:05
Speaker 1: layered on top of hundreds of millions borrowed against his
1:02:08
Speaker 1: share of the Sony ATV catalog at punishing interest rates.
1:02:13
Speaker 1: He was one of the wealthiest people alive on paper
1:02:16
Speaker 1: and functionally insolvent in practice, and the catalog, worth billions
1:02:22
Speaker 1: was also his only lifeline, the collateral that kept the
1:02:26
Speaker 1: creditors at bay, and if the loans defaulted, he could
1:02:29
Speaker 1: lose everything. So it was into this desperation that the
1:02:32
Speaker 1: concert deal arrived, and in late two thousand and eight,
1:02:35
Speaker 1: a mysterious figure entered Jackson's life, or rather re entered it.
1:02:41
Speaker 1: And that was Tomey. Now Tomy, a man with a
1:02:44
Speaker 1: deliberately obscured background who represented himself variously as a doctor
1:02:50
Speaker 1: and orthopedic surgeon, a PhD in economics, and an ambassador
1:02:56
Speaker 1: at large for Senegal, none of which was true, had
1:03:00
Speaker 1: been introduced to Jackson through Germaine. Now Tomay, working as
1:03:04
Speaker 1: a consultant for Colony Capital, connected Jackson to Colonies chairman
1:03:09
Speaker 1: and Tom Barrick, who connected him to Philip and Schutz,
1:03:12
Speaker 1: the billionaire owner of AEG Live, the world's second largest
1:03:16
Speaker 1: concert promoter. A deal began to take shape, and on
1:03:20
Speaker 1: March fifth, two thousand and nine, and Jackson appeared at
1:03:23
Speaker 1: the O two Arena in London to make the announcement,
1:03:26
Speaker 1: and between three and seven thousand fans were waiting, and
1:03:29
Speaker 1: accounts vary, with AEG's own CEO, Randy Phillips testifying under
1:03:34
Speaker 1: oath to the lower number, and three hundred and fifty
1:03:37
Speaker 1: journalists had been credentialed and Jackson arrived nineteen minutes late.
1:03:42
Speaker 1: And when he finally took stage, he looked thin, he
1:03:46
Speaker 1: looked fragile, and he told the crowd this would be it,
1:03:49
Speaker 1: the final curtain call, This is it, and he said,
1:03:54
Speaker 1: this is really recording call and the name stuck and
1:04:02
Speaker 1: the concerts would be held at the O two Arena
1:04:05
Speaker 1: starting that July, and Jackson had agreed to ten shows.
1:04:10
Speaker 1: Within days, AEG expanded the commitment to fifty. Roughly seven
1:04:14
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand tickets were sold, generating approximately eighty
1:04:18
Speaker 1: five million dollars in revenue before a single note was performed,
1:04:22
Speaker 1: and AEG had advanced Jackson close to thirty million dollars
1:04:26
Speaker 1: in production costs, loans and living expenses, including one hundred
1:04:30
Speaker 1: thousand dollars per month for a mansion in Holmby Hills,
1:04:34
Speaker 1: and a fifteen million dollar line of credit. The financial
1:04:38
Speaker 1: exposure was enormous for both sides. For AEG, a successful
1:04:42
Speaker 1: run could generate hundreds of millions, and a global tour
1:04:46
Speaker 1: beyond London was projected at four hundred and fifty million
1:04:48
Speaker 1: dollars or more. And for Jackson, the concerts represented a
1:04:52
Speaker 1: path out of debt or if he couldn't perform total
1:04:56
Speaker 1: financial annihilation. Behind the scenes were going badly from the start.
1:05:02
Speaker 1: Randy Phillips, AEG CEO, sent an email before the March
1:05:06
Speaker 1: fifth announcement, describing Jackson as locked in his room drunk
1:05:11
Speaker 1: and despondent, and Phillips later testified that he had screamed
1:05:15
Speaker 1: at Jackson to get him out of the room and
1:05:17
Speaker 1: had slapped him on the butt to motivate him, and
1:05:20
Speaker 1: Phillips and Jackson's manager Frank and Delio, had to physically
1:05:24
Speaker 1: help dress him, and the man who walked on stage
1:05:27
Speaker 1: and told the world he was ready for his comeback
1:05:30
Speaker 1: had to be coerced into putting on his clothes, and
1:05:33
Speaker 1: the rehearsals began on the spring of two thousand and
1:05:35
Speaker 1: nine at the Staples Center and the Forum in Inglewood.
1:05:39
Speaker 1: And on good days, Jackson was brilliant. Dancers and musicians
1:05:43
Speaker 1: who worked with him during this period described flashes of
1:05:46
Speaker 1: the old magic moments where his movement and vocal power
1:05:50
Speaker 1: were fully intact, where you could see the greatest performer
1:05:53
Speaker 1: of his generations still living inside the increasingly fragile body.
1:05:58
Speaker 1: And on bad days he was incoherent, he was cold
1:06:02
Speaker 1: when the room was warm, he trembled, he couldn't remember
1:06:05
Speaker 1: choreography he had performed thousands of times, and he was
1:06:09
Speaker 1: losing weight constantly, and he was not sleeping. And on
1:06:13
Speaker 1: June nineteenth, two thousand and nine, six days before his death,
1:06:17
Speaker 1: the show's director, Kenny Ortega, sent an email to Randy
1:06:21
Speaker 1: Phillips with a subject line Trouble at the Front, and
1:06:24
Speaker 1: Ortega described finding Jackson quote unquote, lost and incoherent at rehearsal,
1:06:30
Speaker 1: cold to touch, trembling, unable to perform, and he had
1:06:34
Speaker 1: wrapped Jackson in blankets and tried to feed him. Quote
1:06:38
Speaker 1: there are strong signs of paranoia, anxiety, and obsessive like
1:06:41
Speaker 1: behavior unquote, Ortega would write, and quote, I think the
1:06:46
Speaker 1: very best thing we can do is get a top
1:06:48
Speaker 1: psychiatrist in to evaluate him asap unquote. So Alif Sank
1:06:53
Speaker 1: and associate producer on the show, was more blunt, saying,
1:06:57
Speaker 1: quote unquote, Michael is dying, she told colleagues, and quote unquote,
1:07:03
Speaker 1: he needs to be put in a hospital. And Phillips's response,
1:07:06
Speaker 1: shut or take it down, saying, quote, it is critical
1:07:10
Speaker 1: that neither you, me, or anyone become amateur psychiatrists or
1:07:14
Speaker 1: physicians unquote, he would write. And Phillips described Jackson's personal physician,
1:07:20
Speaker 1: a cardiologist named Conrad Murray, as quote unquote extremely successful
1:07:26
Speaker 1: and totally unbiased and ethical, and he instructed Ortega to
1:07:29
Speaker 1: defer to Murray's medical judgment so doctor Conrad Murray born
1:07:34
Speaker 1: February nineteenth, nineteen fifty three in Grenada, bored eligible but
1:07:38
Speaker 1: not board certified in cardiology, internal medicine certification lapsed and
1:07:44
Speaker 1: no training in anesthesiology, sleep medicine or pain management. Over
1:07:51
Speaker 1: four thousand dollars in court judgments. A two thousand and
1:07:54
Speaker 1: two bankruptcy defaulted on his one point sixty six million
1:07:59
Speaker 1: dollars more mortgage, child support aarreers for children by multiple women.
1:08:04
Speaker 1: A Las Vegas clinic facing eviction was about to treat
1:08:08
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson now. He had first met Michael Jackson in
1:08:11
Speaker 1: December of two thousand and six through Jackson's children, and
1:08:15
Speaker 1: by two thousand and nine, Jackson had requested that Murray
1:08:18
Speaker 1: serve as his personal physician for the London concerts, and
1:08:22
Speaker 1: AEG agreed to pay Murray one hundred and fifty thousand
1:08:25
Speaker 1: dollars per month, a salary Murray had negotiated down from
1:08:29
Speaker 1: his initial ask of five million dollars per year. He's
1:08:33
Speaker 1: not even qualified, and the contract contained a provision that
1:08:37
Speaker 1: gave AEG the power to terminate the agreement if concerts
1:08:40
Speaker 1: were postponed or canceled creating what experts would later describe
1:08:45
Speaker 1: as an egregious conflict of interest. The doctor's income depended
1:08:50
Speaker 1: on the patient performing very bad and already a unqualified,
1:08:56
Speaker 1: greedy bastard is now treating Michael Jackson. Is just a
1:09:01
Speaker 1: nightmare that is about two unfold but no background check
1:09:06
Speaker 1: was conducted. An unemployment expert later testified that a ten
1:09:10
Speaker 1: dollars search would have revealed Murray's financial desperation. And Murray
1:09:16
Speaker 1: was administering propofal to Jackson nightly in a bedroom, not
1:09:20
Speaker 1: a hospital, and he had no pulse exometer monitoring Jackson's
1:09:24
Speaker 1: oxygen levels, and he had no capnography equipment to measure
1:09:28
Speaker 1: excelled carbon dioxide either, and the oxygen tank in the
1:09:32
Speaker 1: room was empty, and the pulse exometer was still in
1:09:35
Speaker 1: its box, unopened. But he was putting a man under
1:09:39
Speaker 1: general anaesthesia every night, with no monitoring equipment and no
1:09:43
Speaker 1: emergency protocols in a rented mansion in Holmby Hills, so
1:09:47
Speaker 1: that the most famous entertainer in history could approximate something
1:09:51
Speaker 1: that resembled sleep, absolutely abhorrent. So on the evening of
1:09:57
Speaker 1: June twenty fourth, two thousand and nine, Michael Jacks arrived
1:10:00
Speaker 1: at the Staples Center for what would be his final rehearsal,
1:10:04
Speaker 1: and he got there around six thirty pm and worked
1:10:08
Speaker 1: until approximately twelve thirty a m. On June twenty fifth,
1:10:11
Speaker 1: and footage from that night later released as part of
1:10:14
Speaker 1: the This Is It documentary shows Jackson performing earth Song
1:10:19
Speaker 1: with full commitment, hitting his marks, directing the band. It
1:10:23
Speaker 1: was one of the good nights and those who saw
1:10:25
Speaker 1: him said he looked like Michael Jackson again. And his
1:10:29
Speaker 1: personal chef ky Chase prepared his dinner and Jackson eight
1:10:33
Speaker 1: then retired to his bedroom on the second floor of
1:10:36
Speaker 1: Homely Hills Mansion at one hundred North carol Wood Drive,
1:10:40
Speaker 1: and doctor Conrad Murphy was with him, and what happened
1:10:44
Speaker 1: in that bedroom over the next fourteen hours is known
1:10:47
Speaker 1: primarily through Murray's own account given to police, contested by prosecutors,
1:10:52
Speaker 1: and never subjected to cross examination because Murray chose not
1:10:56
Speaker 1: to testify at either his criminal trial or the AEG
1:11:00
Speaker 1: Wrongful death trial. And according to Murray, Jackson was agitated
1:11:05
Speaker 1: and unable to sleep, so Murray began administering a sequence
1:11:09
Speaker 1: of sedatives, escalating through the night as each one failed
1:11:13
Speaker 1: to produce unconsciousness, so at one thirty am, ten milligrams
1:11:17
Speaker 1: of diazepam or valium intravenously, and at two am two
1:11:21
Speaker 1: milligrams of laarazapam or adavan administered intravenously, and at three
1:11:27
Speaker 1: am two milligrams of medazlam or verst administered intravenously, and
1:11:33
Speaker 1: at five am two milligrams of laarazapam again, and at
1:11:37
Speaker 1: seven thirty am two miligrams of medazlam again, but none
1:11:42
Speaker 1: of it worked, and for six hours Murray pumped Jackson
1:11:47
Speaker 1: full of benzo diazepines and Jackson remained awake, his body
1:11:52
Speaker 1: so conditioned to sedation, so profoundly broken in its ability
1:11:57
Speaker 1: to achieve natural sleep that clinical doses of multiple tranquilizers
1:12:01
Speaker 1: could not bring him down. And according to Murray, Jackson
1:12:05
Speaker 1: begged for propofal throughout the night, and Murray claimed he resisted,
1:12:10
Speaker 1: and he claimed he was trying to wean Jackson off
1:12:13
Speaker 1: the drug, and at approximately ten forty am, Murray administered
1:12:18
Speaker 1: twenty five milligrams of propofol, a dose he described as small,
1:12:24
Speaker 1: diluted in a lighto kane drip, and by about ten
1:12:27
Speaker 1: fifty am, Jackson was unconscious and Murray said he then
1:12:31
Speaker 1: monitored Jackson for approximately ten minutes, and around eleven am
1:12:35
Speaker 1: he left the room for about two minutes, he claimed,
1:12:39
Speaker 1: and when he returned, Michael Jackson was not breathing. But
1:12:43
Speaker 1: the phone records tell a different story about those minutes,
1:12:46
Speaker 1: because beginning at eleven eighteen am, Murray made three phone calls,
1:12:51
Speaker 1: a thirty two minute call to his Las Vegas office,
1:12:55
Speaker 1: a three minute call to a patient, and an eleven
1:12:58
Speaker 1: minute call to a Houston college, so forty seven minutes
1:13:01
Speaker 1: on the phone during this time. By his account, his
1:13:05
Speaker 1: patient was unconscious under propofol with no monitoring equipment. And
1:13:09
Speaker 1: what happened between approximately eleven am and twelve seventeen pm,
1:13:13
Speaker 1: when bodyguard Alberto Alverez arrived at the bedroom and found
1:13:17
Speaker 1: Murray performing what appeared to be CPR on the bed,
1:13:20
Speaker 1: is a gap that has never been fully explained, and
1:13:24
Speaker 1: Alveraz later testified that when he entered the room, Murray
1:13:27
Speaker 1: was frantic, and according to Alvarez, Murray grabbed vials from
1:13:32
Speaker 1: a nightstand and ordered Alverez to put them in a bag,
1:13:35
Speaker 1: and Murray then had Alvera's remove in iv bay containing
1:13:38
Speaker 1: a milky white substance the color of propofol, and only
1:13:43
Speaker 1: after these items were concealed, Alveraz testified, did Murray direct
1:13:47
Speaker 1: him to call nine one one, And it should be
1:13:49
Speaker 1: noted that Alveras made no mention of the vile concealing
1:13:53
Speaker 1: in his first police interview on June twenty fifth. The
1:13:56
Speaker 1: account emerged on August thirty first, after Jackson's cause of
1:13:59
Speaker 1: death had been made public, and the nine one one
1:14:02
Speaker 1: call was placed at twelve twenty one pm, and Alveraz
1:14:05
Speaker 1: told the dispatcher that a fifty year old man he
1:14:08
Speaker 1: said fifty Jackson was in fact fifty, had stopped breathing.
1:14:13
Speaker 1: We have a government good that needs health and he's
1:14:16
Speaker 1: not breathing yet he's not breathing and we need to
1:14:18
Speaker 1: We're trying to pump him, but he's not. And the
1:14:22
Speaker 1: dispatcher asked if the patient was on a bed, and
1:14:24
Speaker 1: he was, and the dispatcher told them to move him
1:14:27
Speaker 1: to the floor for CPR, and this had not been done,
1:14:30
Speaker 1: and Murray had been performing chest compressions on a mattress,
1:14:35
Speaker 1: which he should know if he's a doctor, absorbs the
1:14:38
Speaker 1: force and renders CPR largely ineffective. Paramedics arrived at twelve
1:14:44
Speaker 1: twenty six pm, and they found Jackson on the bed
1:14:47
Speaker 1: and he had been moved to the floor briefly, then
1:14:50
Speaker 1: returned with an IV in his left leg, his body
1:14:54
Speaker 1: cool to the touch, and his pupils fixed and dilated
1:14:57
Speaker 1: in Paramedic Richard Senneff estimated based on Jackson's condition that
1:15:01
Speaker 1: at least twenty minutes had elapsed since cardiac arrest because
1:15:05
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson's extremities were beginning to turn blue, and Murray
1:15:08
Speaker 1: did not tell the paramedics that he had administered propofaal
1:15:12
Speaker 1: and he did not tell the emergency room doctors at
1:15:14
Speaker 1: UCLA Medical Center either, and he would never voluntarily disclose
1:15:19
Speaker 1: the probofall and the paramedics worked on Jackson at the
1:15:22
Speaker 1: house and then during transport, and the ambulance left the
1:15:26
Speaker 1: Carrollwood Mansion at one oh seven pm and arrived at
1:15:29
Speaker 1: UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center at approximately one fourteen pm.
1:15:33
Speaker 1: An emergency physician's continued resuscitation efforts for over an hour,
1:15:38
Speaker 1: and at two twenty six pm Pacific daylight time on
1:15:41
Speaker 1: June twenty fifth, two thousand and nine, Michael Joseph Jackson
1:15:46
Speaker 1: was pronounced dead. He was fifty years old, and at
1:15:49
Speaker 1: two forty four pm, eighteen minutes after the pronouncement, TMZ
1:15:53
Speaker 1: published the news, and the story broke not through a
1:15:57
Speaker 1: hospital statement or family announcement or a press conference, but
1:16:02
Speaker 1: through a celebrity gossip website, because that was the world
1:16:07
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson had lived and died in. And within minutes,
1:16:11
Speaker 1: the Internet buckled and Google servers registered such a massive
1:16:14
Speaker 1: spike in search traffic that the company's automated systems interpreted
1:16:18
Speaker 1: it as a distributed denial of service attack, and Twitter
1:16:22
Speaker 1: crashed and Wikipedia crashed, and fifteen percent of all Twitter
1:16:26
Speaker 1: posts in the hour that followed mention Michael Jackson, the
1:16:29
Speaker 1: servers couldn't hold the grief, and I like, I'm sure
1:16:34
Speaker 1: many remember this day and it is cemented in my brain.
1:16:38
Speaker 1: It is a what a horribly, horribly tragic day. So
1:16:43
Speaker 1: the Los Angeles County Coroner's autopsy, performed the following day,
1:16:47
Speaker 1: established the cause of death as acute propofol intoxication with
1:16:52
Speaker 1: a contributory benzo diazepine effect, meaning the propofol killed him,
1:16:57
Speaker 1: and the cascade of sedatives murray Head administered throughout the
1:17:00
Speaker 1: night made the lethal dose more lethal and the manner
1:17:03
Speaker 1: of death was ruled a homicide. The autopsy revealed a
1:17:07
Speaker 1: body that told the story of its occupant's life. Jackson
1:17:11
Speaker 1: stood five feet nine inches tall and weighed one hundred
1:17:14
Speaker 1: and thirty six pounds. His skin showed the depigmentation pattern
1:17:17
Speaker 1: of vitalago, confirming the diagnosis he had disclosed sixteen years
1:17:22
Speaker 1: earlier on Obrah's couch. The condition the tabloids had spent
1:17:25
Speaker 1: decades insisting was voluntary skin bleaching. His heart was healthy,
1:17:31
Speaker 1: his major organs were functional. There was no cancer, no
1:17:34
Speaker 1: terminal illness, no underlying condition that would have killed him.
1:17:38
Speaker 1: Without the propofol, Michael Jackson's body could have continued living.
1:17:43
Speaker 1: It was not the body that failed, It was the
1:17:46
Speaker 1: people around his body. So Conrad Murray was charged with
1:17:50
Speaker 1: involuntary manslaughter on February eighth, twenty ten, eight months after
1:17:55
Speaker 1: Jackson's death. Not murder, not even second to Graemer, which
1:18:00
Speaker 1: the LAPD detectives who investigated the case believed the evidence warranted.
1:18:05
Speaker 1: Led detectives Orlando Martinez, Dan Myers, and Scott Smith would
1:18:09
Speaker 1: later state in a twenty nineteen documentary called Killing Michael
1:18:13
Speaker 1: Jackson that they had pushed for a second degree murder charge,
1:18:16
Speaker 1: but the District Attorney's office opted for manslaughter when the
1:18:20
Speaker 1: trial lasted six weeks from September twenty seventh to November seventh,
1:18:24
Speaker 1: twenty eleven, and the prosecution's case was straightforward. Murray had
1:18:29
Speaker 1: administered a powerful surgical anesthetic in a home setting without
1:18:33
Speaker 1: appropriate monitoring equipment, had failed to call nine one one promptly,
1:18:36
Speaker 1: had attempted to conceal evidence, and had never disclosed the
1:18:40
Speaker 1: propofile to emergency medical personnel. And the defense argued that
1:18:44
Speaker 1: Jackson had self administered additional propofle when Murray left the room.
1:18:48
Speaker 1: A accidental overdose by a desperate addict, not criminal negligence
1:18:52
Speaker 1: by a doctor. Doctor, not a doctor at all, and
1:18:57
Speaker 1: Murray did not take the stand no November seven, twenty eleven,
1:19:01
Speaker 1: the jury found Conrad Murray guilty of involuntary manslaughter and
1:19:05
Speaker 1: he was sentenced on November twenty ninth to four years
1:19:09
Speaker 1: in county jail. Four years that was the maximum for
1:19:14
Speaker 1: the charge, and due to California's overcrowding provisions, he served
1:19:18
Speaker 1: approximately two years before being released on October twenty eighth,
1:19:22
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen, and he later published a memoir titled this
1:19:26
Speaker 1: is It, positioning himself as a scapegoat, and he never
1:19:30
Speaker 1: expressed remorse for Jackson's death, even though it was completely
1:19:34
Speaker 1: his fault. And then the second trial was civil. Catherine Jackson,
1:19:39
Speaker 1: Michael's mother, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against AEG Live,
1:19:44
Speaker 1: seeking between one point five and two billion dollars in damages,
1:19:49
Speaker 1: and the case Catherine Jackson versus AEG Live was the
1:19:52
Speaker 1: longer and in many ways more revealing proceeding, lasting five
1:19:56
Speaker 1: months with fifty eight witnesses, and the central question was
1:20:00
Speaker 1: whether AEG had hired, controlled, or supervised Murray and whether
1:20:05
Speaker 1: they bore responsibility for placing a financially desperate, unqualified doctor
1:20:10
Speaker 1: in charge of Jackson's care. And the evidence that emerged
1:20:13
Speaker 1: was damning in texture, if not in legal outcome, and
1:20:16
Speaker 1: AEG's own emails showed executives who knew Jackson was deteriorating
1:20:21
Speaker 1: and pushed forward anyway. And Paul Gongware, AEG's co CEO,
1:20:26
Speaker 1: had written of Murray, quote, we want to remind him
1:20:29
Speaker 1: that it is AEG, not Michael Jackson, who was paying
1:20:33
Speaker 1: his salary. We want him to understand what is expected
1:20:36
Speaker 1: of him. Unquote no background check had been conducted. The
1:20:40
Speaker 1: contract gave AEG termination power over Murray's compensation if shows
1:20:45
Speaker 1: were postponed, meaning the doctor's paycheck depended on his patient performing.
1:20:49
Speaker 1: As we said before in Kenny Ortega's Trouble at the Front,
1:20:53
Speaker 1: email describing Jackson as lost in incoherent six days before
1:20:57
Speaker 1: his death had been answered with Phillip's instructions to stop
1:21:00
Speaker 1: playing amateur doctor and defer to Murray and Prince Jackson.
1:21:04
Speaker 1: Michael's eldest son, fifteen years old at the time, testified
1:21:08
Speaker 1: that his father had told him in tears after phone
1:21:11
Speaker 1: calls with AEG executives, quote unquote, they're going to kill me.
1:21:15
Speaker 1: They're going to kill me, and he named Randy Phillips
1:21:18
Speaker 1: and Tomy and Tomy specifically. And on October TEWOD twenty thirteen,
1:21:23
Speaker 1: the jury delivered its verdict, and they found unanimously that
1:21:27
Speaker 1: AEG Live had indeed hired Conrad Murray. But they also
1:21:32
Speaker 1: found that Murray was not unfit or incompetent for the job,
1:21:36
Speaker 1: a conclusion that struck many observers as difficult to reconcile
1:21:41
Speaker 1: with the facts. Because the jury answered no to the
1:21:45
Speaker 1: competence question, AEG was found not liable, the case was over,
1:21:51
Speaker 1: and the jury foreman later told reporters, quote, had the
1:21:54
Speaker 1: question been was Murray ethical, it could have been a
1:21:57
Speaker 1: different outcome unquote, Just unbelievable in my opinion. And Catherine
1:22:04
Speaker 1: Jackson's appeal was rejected by the California Court of Appeals
1:22:07
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen, and after Jackson's death, Randy Phillips wrote
1:22:11
Speaker 1: in an email, quote, AEG will make a fortune for merchshales,
1:22:16
Speaker 1: ticket retention, the touring exhibition, and the film Slash DVD unquote,
1:22:22
Speaker 1: And unfortunately he was right. AEG recouped its losses and
1:22:26
Speaker 1: then some through merchandise through the forty to fifty percent
1:22:31
Speaker 1: of ticket holders who kept their tickets as souvenirs rather
1:22:34
Speaker 1: than requesting refunds, and through a ten percent stake in
1:22:38
Speaker 1: This Is It, the concert rehearsal documentary assembled from footage
1:22:42
Speaker 1: of Jackson's final rehearsals, and the film grossed two hundred
1:22:45
Speaker 1: and sixty seven million dollars worldwide, and it showed Michael
1:22:50
Speaker 1: Jackson dancing, singing, directing a live electric unmistakably brilliant, the
1:22:56
Speaker 1: last footage of the greatest performer whoever lived, packaged and
1:22:59
Speaker 1: so to the world by the company his son said
1:23:03
Speaker 1: was going to kill him. So the Los Angeles County
1:23:06
Speaker 1: Coroner ruled the manner of Michael Jackson's death as a
1:23:09
Speaker 1: homicide as we know, and Conrad Murray was convicted of
1:23:12
Speaker 1: involuntary manslaughter, a charge that led the LAPD detectives on
1:23:16
Speaker 1: the case believed should have been second degree murder. And
1:23:20
Speaker 1: the official cause was a cute propofile intoxication administered by
1:23:23
Speaker 1: a doctor who should have never been in that bedroom.
1:23:26
Speaker 1: So for the legal system, the story ends there. But
1:23:29
Speaker 1: for Jackson's family and for a substantial number of people
1:23:32
Speaker 1: who have examined the documented evidence, including myself, it does not.
1:23:38
Speaker 1: And Michael Jackson spent the last years of his life
1:23:40
Speaker 1: telling the people closest to him that he was going
1:23:43
Speaker 1: to be killed. And his son Prince, who testified under
1:23:46
Speaker 1: oath at the AEG trial in twenty thirteen, quote, after
1:23:50
Speaker 1: he got off the phone, he would cry, he would say,
1:23:52
Speaker 1: they're going to kill me. They're going to kill me, unquote,
1:23:55
Speaker 1: and he named specific people AG's Randy Phillips and his
1:23:58
Speaker 1: former manager Tomay Tom and he told Lisa Marie Presley
1:24:02
Speaker 1: during one of their final conversations in two thousand and
1:24:05
Speaker 1: five that someone was going to kill him for his
1:24:07
Speaker 1: music catalog, and she confirmed on Oprah in twenty ten
1:24:11
Speaker 1: that he gave her names, but as we said before,
1:24:14
Speaker 1: she declined to share them. And he told his sister LaToya, quote,
1:24:18
Speaker 1: I'm going to be murdered for my music publishing catalog
1:24:21
Speaker 1: and my estate. Unquote. You've been quoted as saying you
1:24:24
Speaker 1: believe it may have been murdered. You still think that, absolutely.
1:24:28
Speaker 1: You can never ever think differently. And he told his
1:24:31
Speaker 1: daughter Paris, who recalled in a twenty seventeen Rolling Stones
1:24:34
Speaker 1: interview quote he would drop hints about people out to
1:24:37
Speaker 1: get him, and at some point he was like, they're
1:24:40
Speaker 1: going to kill me one dayquote and handwritten notes attributed
1:24:44
Speaker 1: to Jackson, shared by a friend and published in twenty
1:24:47
Speaker 1: seventeen read quote, they are trying to murder me and
1:24:50
Speaker 1: the system wants to kill me for my catalog unquote.
1:24:54
Speaker 1: And his bodyguards, Bill Whitfield and Havan Beard wrote in
1:24:58
Speaker 1: their twenty fourteen memoir that Jackson's his primary security concern
1:25:01
Speaker 1: was not fans or strangers, but quote the people who
1:25:05
Speaker 1: were already in his life. He wanted us there so
1:25:08
Speaker 1: he could hide his movements from his own lawyers and
1:25:11
Speaker 1: managers unquote, and the identity of they shifted over time,
1:25:17
Speaker 1: and AEG executives Sony Tommy Mottola unnamed catalog seekers, the
1:25:22
Speaker 1: system and the warnings were consistent. And the question is
1:25:26
Speaker 1: what they mean, prophetic awareness of a genuine conspiracy or
1:25:31
Speaker 1: the escalating paranoia of a man whose brain was being
1:25:34
Speaker 1: ravaged by nightly propofol and regular demorole injections, substances known
1:25:40
Speaker 1: to exacerbate anxiety and disorder thinking. And the honest answer
1:25:44
Speaker 1: is that both could be true simultaneously. And what follows
1:25:48
Speaker 1: are the major theories presented, with the evidence that supports
1:25:51
Speaker 1: them and the evidence that complicates them. And I want
1:25:55
Speaker 1: to put a disclaimer that none of these have been proven,
1:25:57
Speaker 1: but also that none can be entirely dismissed. And the
1:26:01
Speaker 1: broadest and most legally tested theory holds that AEG Live
1:26:06
Speaker 1: knowingly pushed a deteriorating Jackson beyond his limits to protect
1:26:09
Speaker 1: a roughly thirty million dollar investment while hiring a financially
1:26:14
Speaker 1: desperate doctor they could control. The evidence is substantial because
1:26:18
Speaker 1: AEG expanded Jackson's commitment from ten shows to fifty within
1:26:23
Speaker 1: days of the announcement, despite handwritten notes attributed to Jackson
1:26:27
Speaker 1: reading quote only agreed to ten shows unquote, and their
1:26:30
Speaker 1: own CEO described Jackson as quote locked in his room,
1:26:34
Speaker 1: drunk and despondent quote before the press conference, and their
1:26:38
Speaker 1: co CEO wrote of Murray, quote, we want to remind
1:26:41
Speaker 1: him that it is AEG, not Michael Jackson, who is
1:26:44
Speaker 1: paying his salary unquote. And when Kenny Ortega warned six
1:26:47
Speaker 1: days before Jackson's death that the former was lost in
1:26:50
Speaker 1: incoherent and needed a psychiatrist, Randy Phillips told him to
1:26:53
Speaker 1: stop playing amateur doctor. No background check was conducted on Murray.
1:26:58
Speaker 1: The contract tied Murray's compensation to the concerts proceedings, and
1:27:02
Speaker 1: so on. We know this, We know all the information
1:27:04
Speaker 1: regarding the AEG theory. But after the trial, the jury,
1:27:09
Speaker 1: while unanimously finding that AEG had hired Murray, concluded he
1:27:13
Speaker 1: was not unfit or incompetent, and therefore AEG bore no liability.
1:27:18
Speaker 1: But the counter argument is real. A living Jackson, touring
1:27:22
Speaker 1: globally over three years, was projected to generate four hundred
1:27:25
Speaker 1: and fifty million dollars or more an AEG also dropped
1:27:29
Speaker 1: its own seventeen point five million dollars of insurance claim
1:27:33
Speaker 1: with Lloyd's of London in twenty twelve. Not exactly the
1:27:37
Speaker 1: behavior of a company that planned a death for profit.
1:27:41
Speaker 1: I personally think, and you guys can sound off all
1:27:44
Speaker 1: of what you think in the comments, but I feel
1:27:46
Speaker 1: like it was in their interest to have Michael actually
1:27:49
Speaker 1: do those concerts. Did they use him horrifically and did
1:27:53
Speaker 1: that lead to his death? Absolutely, but I don't think
1:27:56
Speaker 1: that was planned. But they were absolutely a giant part
1:28:00
Speaker 1: of him passing away. And next there is the catalog theory.
1:28:05
Speaker 1: And this is the theory Jackson himself most explicitly articulated
1:28:09
Speaker 1: because his fifty percent stake in the Sony ATV catalog,
1:28:13
Speaker 1: purchased in nineteen eighty five for forty seven point five
1:28:16
Speaker 1: million dollars worth approximately one billion dollars by two thousand
1:28:20
Speaker 1: and nine and four billion dollars by twenty sixteen, made
1:28:23
Speaker 1: him one of the most valuable targets in the entertainment industry,
1:28:27
Speaker 1: and he had publicly declared war on Sony in July
1:28:30
Speaker 1: two thousand and two, calling CEO Tommy Mattula a racist
1:28:34
Speaker 1: and very very Devilish at L. Sharpton's National Action Network
1:28:39
Speaker 1: in Harlem, and he accused Sony of sabotaging his album
1:28:42
Speaker 1: Invincible to force a catalog sale. And by two thousand
1:28:46
Speaker 1: and nine, Jackson had borrowed between two hundred and seventy
1:28:49
Speaker 1: and three hundred and eighty million dollars against his catalog
1:28:52
Speaker 1: share held by Fortress Investment Group at sixteen point eight
1:28:56
Speaker 1: percent annual interest, because a default could trigger a forced sale,
1:29:00
Speaker 1: and Sony held a first right of refusal, so what
1:29:03
Speaker 1: happened after his death is the theory's most powerful exhibit.
1:29:08
Speaker 1: So in twenty sixteen, Sony bought the estates fifty percent
1:29:11
Speaker 1: of Sony ATV for seven hundred and fifty million dollars,
1:29:16
Speaker 1: and in twenty eighteen, Sony paid two hundred and eighty
1:29:19
Speaker 1: seven point five million for the estate's share of EMI
1:29:25
Speaker 1: Music Publishing, And in twenty twenty four, Sony purchased fifty
1:29:28
Speaker 1: percent of Jackson's Nijacques Music catalog for over six hundred
1:29:33
Speaker 1: million dollars. Total payments from Sony to the estate now
1:29:37
Speaker 1: exceed two billion dollars, So Sony owns the catalog. Jackson
1:29:43
Speaker 1: swore he would never sell that's the basis of all
1:29:46
Speaker 1: of this, So that doesn't look good. Looks like they
1:29:51
Speaker 1: were constantly waiting to prey upon this sale. But the
1:29:55
Speaker 1: counter argument would be that Sony could have acquired the
1:29:59
Speaker 1: CA catalog through legal financial pressure, and Jackson's mounting dead
1:30:04
Speaker 1: had a forced sale plausible without violence, and no law
1:30:08
Speaker 1: enforcement investigation found evidence of a catalog motivated conspiracy, and
1:30:13
Speaker 1: Murray's conviction established propofil negligence, not corporate assassination. Now, a
1:30:19
Speaker 1: narrower version of the conspiracy asks not whether Jackson was
1:30:23
Speaker 1: murdered by a corporation or a cabal, but whether Murray
1:30:27
Speaker 1: was specifically selected or allowed to remain because his financial
1:30:32
Speaker 1: desperation made him controllable and his lack of qualifications made
1:30:36
Speaker 1: Jackson's death inevitable. Now, to go over Murray again, he
1:30:41
Speaker 1: owed over one million dollars. He had defaulted on a
1:30:44
Speaker 1: one point sixty six million dollar mortgage, and he had
1:30:47
Speaker 1: six hundred thousand dollars in court judgments, and he had
1:30:50
Speaker 1: seventy one thousand dollars in student loans, child support for
1:30:53
Speaker 1: children by six or seven women, and a two thousand
1:30:56
Speaker 1: and two bankruptcy, and his Las Vegas clinic was being evicted,
1:31:01
Speaker 1: and he initially asked, as we know, AEG for five
1:31:04
Speaker 1: million dollars per year before accepting one hundred and fifty
1:31:07
Speaker 1: thousand dollars per month. An LAPD detective Orlando Martinez testified
1:31:12
Speaker 1: that Murray's financial situation was a major incentive to break
1:31:16
Speaker 1: the rules and his qualifications were grossly inadequate for what
1:31:20
Speaker 1: he was doing. Not board certified in cardiology, internal medicine certification,
1:31:25
Speaker 1: lapsed to no training in anesthesiology or sleep medicine, suspended
1:31:29
Speaker 1: from the hospitals three times, and he administered propofol nightly
1:31:33
Speaker 1: in a bedroom with no pulse oxometer, no capnography, and
1:31:36
Speaker 1: an empty oxygen tank. And the timeline on June twenty
1:31:39
Speaker 1: fifth raises its own questions forty seven minutes of phone
1:31:43
Speaker 1: calls while his patient lay unconscious, a gap of over
1:31:47
Speaker 1: an hour before nine to one one was called, and
1:31:49
Speaker 1: bodyguard testimony about concealing vials before summoning help. Murray never
1:31:54
Speaker 1: told paramedics or emergency physicians that he had administered propofile,
1:31:58
Speaker 1: and Paris Jackson was to saying quote absolutely because it's
1:32:03
Speaker 1: obvious all arrows point to that unquote and to use
1:32:07
Speaker 1: air quotes around the word doctor when discussing Murray, which yeah,
1:32:13
Speaker 1: and the LAPD detectives who built the case believed the
1:32:15
Speaker 1: evidence warranted a second degree murder charge, but as murdering
1:32:19
Speaker 1: for all the other theories, there's the counter argument, and
1:32:22
Speaker 1: that is that Murray, the idiot that he is panicked,
1:32:27
Speaker 1: had a chaotic response that looked more like incompetence than execution,
1:32:31
Speaker 1: and if he had been hired to kill, the execution
1:32:34
Speaker 1: would presumably have been more professional. And Jackson actively sought
1:32:39
Speaker 1: probofal multiple doctors before Murray had refused his requests. So
1:32:46
Speaker 1: I don't know. I would love to know what you
1:32:48
Speaker 1: guys think down below. And the next one is that
1:32:50
Speaker 1: Jackson was approximately five hundred million dollars in debt at
1:32:54
Speaker 1: the time of his death, and his estate has since
1:32:57
Speaker 1: generated roughly three point five billion dollars. And Joe Jackson
1:33:02
Speaker 1: said it publicly, saying quote, he's worth more dead than
1:33:05
Speaker 1: he was alive, unquote, and the IRS argued the same
1:33:10
Speaker 1: point during tax proceedings, and Forbes named Jackson the top
1:33:14
Speaker 1: earning dead celebrity in nearly every year since two thousand
1:33:17
Speaker 1: and nine, peaking at eight hundred and twenty five million
1:33:20
Speaker 1: dollars in twenty sixteen, and This Is It documentary grows
1:33:24
Speaker 1: two hundred and sixty seven million dollars, and the curt
1:33:27
Speaker 1: To Sleat residency generated over one hundred and sixty million,
1:33:30
Speaker 1: and the Broadway musical grows approximately three hundred million dollars,
1:33:34
Speaker 1: and the estate cleared all five hundred million dollars in
1:33:38
Speaker 1: debt and is currently valued at two to two point
1:33:41
Speaker 1: five billion dollars. And the counter argument is just timing,
1:33:45
Speaker 1: because this success was not foreseeable in two thousand and nine,
1:33:50
Speaker 1: and a living Jackson completing a three year global tour
1:33:53
Speaker 1: was the most immediately profitable scenario for everyone involved. And
1:33:57
Speaker 1: the worth more dead than alive observation is retrospective, powerful
1:34:03
Speaker 1: as rhetoric, but weak as evidence of any premeditation. And
1:34:07
Speaker 1: then there's doctor Arnold Klein now doctor Arnold Klein, Jackson's
1:34:11
Speaker 1: longtime Beverly Hills dermatologists administered over two hundred demoral injections
1:34:16
Speaker 1: across decades, with records kept under the alias Omar Arnold,
1:34:21
Speaker 1: and in the four months before Jackson's death, the doses
1:34:24
Speaker 1: escalated dramatically three hundred and seventy five milligrams in three
1:34:27
Speaker 1: hours on April twenty second, two thousand and nine, and
1:34:30
Speaker 1: nine hundred milligrams over three days in May, and his
1:34:34
Speaker 1: last appointment was June twenty second, three days before death,
1:34:38
Speaker 1: and when he received one hundred milligrams. A typical anxiety
1:34:41
Speaker 1: dose is fifty milligrams. Just so you know, Murray's defense
1:34:45
Speaker 1: argued the chain explicitly that Klein's demarol created dependency, withdrawal
1:34:51
Speaker 1: caused insomnia, Insomnia drove propofol use, and propofal killed him,
1:34:57
Speaker 1: and Demarol's short half life meant none appeared in the autopsy,
1:35:02
Speaker 1: but withdrawal symptoms from the June twenty second injection would
1:35:06
Speaker 1: have been active on June twenty fifth. So Klein was
1:35:09
Speaker 1: investigated by the DEA and the California Medical Board but
1:35:12
Speaker 1: never charged, and he filed for bankruptcy in twenty eleven
1:35:16
Speaker 1: and died in twenty fifteen at the age of seventy.
1:35:19
Speaker 1: And the mainstream interpretation is that Klein was an enabler
1:35:23
Speaker 1: in a system of medical exploitation, not a conspirator, but
1:35:27
Speaker 1: a link in the chain that killed Michael Jackson. Nonetheless,
1:35:31
Speaker 1: and now the most enigmatic figure in Jackson's final years,
1:35:34
Speaker 1: was his manager, Tom a man who represented himself as
1:35:38
Speaker 1: a Lebanese doctor, orthopedic surgeon, PhD in economics and ambassador
1:35:43
Speaker 1: at large for Senegal, but under cross examination at an
1:35:47
Speaker 1: IRS tax trial, he admitted he had never attended medical
1:35:51
Speaker 1: school and did not fold a PhD. And the Senegalese
1:35:54
Speaker 1: embassy confirmed he was not their ambassador. So Tomy entered
1:35:58
Speaker 1: Jackson's life in late two thousand and six seven through
1:36:00
Speaker 1: Jermaine Jackson, working as a consultant for Colony Capital at
1:36:04
Speaker 1: twenty thousand dollars per month, and he connected Jackson to
1:36:07
Speaker 1: colonies Tom Barrick, who connected him to AEG's Philip and Schutz,
1:36:12
Speaker 1: and Tomay negotiated that this is it deal and his
1:36:15
Speaker 1: financial arrangements were extraordinarily favorable. A thirty five thousand dollars
1:36:20
Speaker 1: monthly management fee, fifteen percent commission on all Jackson's earnings,
1:36:24
Speaker 1: which is crazy, and one hundred thousand dollars per month
1:36:28
Speaker 1: as a concert producer, and a two point three million
1:36:32
Speaker 1: dollars finder's fee for a Neverland loan and ten percent
1:36:36
Speaker 1: of any future Neverland sale. But Jackson fired Tomy on
1:36:40
Speaker 1: May fifth, two thousand and nine, seven weeks before his death,
1:36:44
Speaker 1: and Tomy reportedly responded with rage, threatening to bring death
1:36:49
Speaker 1: and destruction on Michael Jackson. But despite being fired, Tomy
1:36:53
Speaker 1: denied his termination, continued identifying himself as Jackson's manager, and
1:36:59
Speaker 1: on the day of Jackson's death, spoke as his representative
1:37:03
Speaker 1: at UCLA Medical Center. Just a scum of the earth,
1:37:07
Speaker 1: piece of shit, and a taped conversation from September two
1:37:10
Speaker 1: thousand and eight captures Jackson's own unease, saying, quote, this
1:37:14
Speaker 1: guy has ways about him. There's a divide between me
1:37:18
Speaker 1: and my representatives, and I don't talk to my lawyer,
1:37:21
Speaker 1: my accountant unquote. And Prince Jackson named Tomy by name
1:37:26
Speaker 1: in his sworn testimony and in the estate later sued
1:37:29
Speaker 1: tome for financial exploitation, and the case settled in twenty
1:37:33
Speaker 1: nineteen for three million dollars. And the counter argument is
1:37:37
Speaker 1: basically that Tomey was not at that mansion on June
1:37:40
Speaker 1: twenty fifth, and there is no actual tangible evidence that
1:37:44
Speaker 1: connects him to the propofile administration, and a lawsuit alleged
1:37:48
Speaker 1: financial exploitation not necessarily murder. And beyond the major theories
1:37:54
Speaker 1: lie smaller, less substantiated claims. Five of the Jackson siblings
1:37:58
Speaker 1: alleged in twenty two twelve that his July seventh, two
1:38:01
Speaker 1: thousand and two will was forged, claiming he was in
1:38:05
Speaker 1: New York City at an L. Sharpton event on the
1:38:08
Speaker 1: date it was supposedly signed in Los Angeles, and the
1:38:11
Speaker 1: legal challenges were rejected by every court that heard them
1:38:15
Speaker 1: and from LA Supreme Court through the California Supreme Court.
1:38:18
Speaker 1: Jackson's entertainment attorney, Peter Lopez, was found dead from a
1:38:22
Speaker 1: gunshot wound on April thirtieth, twenty ten, less than a
1:38:26
Speaker 1: year after Jackson's death ruled and apparent you know What
1:38:31
Speaker 1: and conspiracy theorists noted a cluster of connected deaths in
1:38:34
Speaker 1: the months after Jackson's Evan Chandler had died by you
1:38:39
Speaker 1: know What in November of two thousand and nine, and
1:38:42
Speaker 1: Bruce Ayers, a former Klein employee, in December of two
1:38:45
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, and Lopez and Canadian journalist Ian Halperin
1:38:50
Speaker 1: predicted in December of two thousand and eight, six months
1:38:53
Speaker 1: before the death, that Jackson had six months to live,
1:38:57
Speaker 1: and his conclusion was quote greed killed Michael Jackson unquote,
1:39:01
Speaker 1: but no court and no law enforcement investigation and no
1:39:05
Speaker 1: credible journalistic inquiry has established that Michael Jackson was deliberately
1:39:10
Speaker 1: murdered as part of the conspiracy, and the official cause
1:39:13
Speaker 1: of death is acute propofile intoxication due to criminally negligent
1:39:18
Speaker 1: care by a doctor who was convicted and served two years,
1:39:21
Speaker 1: which is garbage in my opinion, and a five months
1:39:24
Speaker 1: civil trial found aeg not liable. Yet the documented record
1:39:28
Speaker 1: provides substantial material for those who believe the story is incomplete.
1:39:33
Speaker 1: And Jackson repeatedly warned he would be killed, naming specific
1:39:37
Speaker 1: individuals in his son's sworn testimony, but the coroner ruled
1:39:40
Speaker 1: the manner of death a homicide, and Catherine Jackson would
1:39:44
Speaker 1: say in twenty eleven quote, if such evidence ever comes
1:39:47
Speaker 1: to my attention, I will be the first to bring
1:39:49
Speaker 1: those facts to light. But the evidence still has not arrived.
1:39:54
Speaker 1: But the questions have not gone away. And on July
1:39:56
Speaker 1: seven of twenty nine, twelve days after his death, Michael
1:40:00
Speaker 1: Jackson was memorialized at the Staple Center in Los Angeles,
1:40:03
Speaker 1: and seventeen thousand, five hundred tickets were distributed by lottery
1:40:07
Speaker 1: from a pool of over a million applicants and an
1:40:10
Speaker 1: estimated two point five billion people watch globally, though that
1:40:14
Speaker 1: figure is essentially unverifiable, and Stevie Wonder performed, and Mariah
1:40:19
Speaker 1: Carey performed. An usher approached the open casket and broke down,
1:40:23
Speaker 1: and Jennifer Hudson saying will you be there? And Smokey
1:40:26
Speaker 1: Robinson read from the Bible, and Brooke Shields, one of
1:40:29
Speaker 1: Jackson's closest friends, described the boy she had known since
1:40:33
Speaker 1: they were both teenagers. Two of the most famous children
1:40:36
Speaker 1: in the world finding refuge in each other's company. And
1:40:40
Speaker 1: Barry Gordy, the man who had signed the Jackson five
1:40:42
Speaker 1: four decades earlier, called him the greatest entertainer that ever lived.
1:40:46
Speaker 1: And Reverend Al Sharpton addressed Jackson's three children directly, what
1:40:51
Speaker 1: nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what your
1:40:55
Speaker 1: daddy had to deal with In the moment that silence,
1:40:57
Speaker 1: the arena came at the end with Paris Jackson, eleven
1:41:01
Speaker 1: years old, stepped to the microphone. Ever since I was born,
1:41:05
Speaker 1: daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine.
1:41:09
Speaker 1: And I just wanted to say I love him so much,
1:41:13
Speaker 1: and she could not finish, so Janet Jackson held her
1:41:16
Speaker 1: and Michael Jackson would then be buried on September third,
1:41:18
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California,
1:41:23
Speaker 1: interred in the hay Terrace section of the Great Mausoleum,
1:41:27
Speaker 1: so he would forever be remembered as the greatest performer
1:41:32
Speaker 1: whoever lived. But those questions are still being asked to
1:41:35
Speaker 1: this day, mostly in why did he actually die? Because
1:41:39
Speaker 1: it's hard to even accept what came to be. And
1:41:43
Speaker 1: for a while it seemed like the story might end there,
1:41:46
Speaker 1: with the gold casket, the tearful daughter, the billion dollar
1:41:50
Speaker 1: estates slowly paying off a dead man's debts. The world
1:41:54
Speaker 1: moved on the way it always does. Jokes faded, and
1:41:57
Speaker 1: the music came back on the radio, and the conspiracy
1:42:00
Speaker 1: theories settled into the corners of the Internet, where conspiracy
1:42:03
Speaker 1: theories live. So it seemed Michael Jackson finally was being
1:42:07
Speaker 1: allowed to rest until a decade later, So a decade
1:42:12
Speaker 1: after Jackson's death, the allegations would return. On January twenty fifth,
1:42:17
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, the documentary Leaving Neverland premiered at a Sundance
1:42:22
Speaker 1: Film Festival. Directed by Dan Reid, and the four hour
1:42:25
Speaker 1: film featured two men Wade Robson and James Safechuck describing
1:42:31
Speaker 1: in graphic detail what they said were years of us
1:42:34
Speaker 1: by Jackson during their childhoods. And Robson was the same
1:42:38
Speaker 1: choreographer who had testified under oath at Jackson's two thousand
1:42:42
Speaker 1: and five criminal trial that he had never been aged,
1:42:46
Speaker 1: and he reversed his position in twenty thirteen, filing a
1:42:50
Speaker 1: civil claim against the estate, and safe Chuck filed a
1:42:54
Speaker 1: similar claim, And the documentary was devastating in its impact,
1:42:58
Speaker 1: and it won a Primetime Emmy Award, and radio stations
1:43:02
Speaker 1: pulled Jackson's music from rotation and The Simpsons removed an
1:43:06
Speaker 1: episode featuring his voice, and statues were taken down, and
1:43:09
Speaker 1: a cultural reassessment was swift and severe, and the Jackson
1:43:13
Speaker 1: estate responded with one hundred million dollar lawsuit against HBO,
1:43:18
Speaker 1: bledging the network had violated a non disparagement clause from
1:43:21
Speaker 1: a nineteen ninety two concert film agreement, and the legal
1:43:24
Speaker 1: battle over the Robson and safe Chuck claims continues, and
1:43:28
Speaker 1: a trial is actually scheduled for November twenty twenty six.
1:43:32
Speaker 1: In the estate has denied all allegations and has pointed
1:43:35
Speaker 1: to Robson's prior sworn testimony, inconsistencies in the accuser's timelines,
1:43:40
Speaker 1: and the two thousand and five juries, unanimous acquittal, and
1:43:43
Speaker 1: the documentary did not settle the question that has followed
1:43:47
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson since nineteen ninety three. It just deepened it.
1:43:51
Speaker 1: And then, just as the world thought it had heard
1:43:53
Speaker 1: everything there was to hear about Michael Jackson, just as
1:43:57
Speaker 1: the debate between defenders and accusers had cal's into two
1:44:01
Speaker 1: immovable camps, a dead man's filing cabinet blew the conversation
1:44:05
Speaker 1: wide open again. And in January twenty twenty four, and
1:44:09
Speaker 1: again in December of twenty twenty five, and again in
1:44:12
Speaker 1: January of twenty twenty six, the US Department of Justice
1:44:16
Speaker 1: released millions of pages of documents, images, and videos related
1:44:20
Speaker 1: to Jeffrey Epstein, whom I have spoken about at length
1:44:24
Speaker 1: on this channel, and Michael Jackson's name appeared in the files.
1:44:29
Speaker 1: And for a man who had spent the last sixteen
1:44:32
Speaker 1: years of his life under suspicion involving children, and who
1:44:35
Speaker 1: had been fully acquitted, the mere appearance of his name
1:44:39
Speaker 1: in Epstein records detonated across social media with predictable ferocity
1:44:43
Speaker 1: and minimal context, and the actual content of the files
1:44:47
Speaker 1: tells a narrow story, and the key testimony comes from
1:44:52
Speaker 1: Joanna Joeberg and Epstein victim, who stated in a twenty
1:44:56
Speaker 1: sixteen deposition that she met Michael Jackson at Epstein's house
1:45:00
Speaker 1: in Palm Beach, and when lawyers asked whether she had
1:45:03
Speaker 1: given Michael Jackson a massage, standard questioning since massages were
1:45:08
Speaker 1: a known euphemism in Epstein's operation, joe Berg's answer was unequivocal.
1:45:14
Speaker 1: I did not, and no allegation of inappropriate conduct by
1:45:18
Speaker 1: Jackson appears anywhere in the files. No victim has accused
1:45:22
Speaker 1: him of anything, and on December nineteenth, twenty twenty five,
1:45:26
Speaker 1: the DOJ released over three hundred thousand pages of documents,
1:45:30
Speaker 1: including previously unseen photographs, and two images involved Jackson. The
1:45:36
Speaker 1: first showed him posing with Epstein at the Palm Beach
1:45:39
Speaker 1: house and Jackson in a suit and dark sunglasses and
1:45:42
Speaker 1: Epstein casually dressed standing in front of a painting, and
1:45:45
Speaker 1: the second showed Jackson with Bill Clinton and Diana Ross
1:45:49
Speaker 1: with children's faces redacted, and that photo was taken at
1:45:52
Speaker 1: a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at the Apollo Theater in
1:45:56
Speaker 1: Harlem on April twenty fourth, two thousand and two. There
1:46:00
Speaker 1: was no record that Epstein was present at that event,
1:46:03
Speaker 1: and the image was simply found among Epstein's possessions, and
1:46:07
Speaker 1: White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson was subsequently called
1:46:11
Speaker 1: out for inserving the Apollo photo into social media posts,
1:46:14
Speaker 1: implying it depicted the trio with Epstein's victims, the children
1:46:19
Speaker 1: in the photo or Michael Jackson and Diana Ross's own children.
1:46:23
Speaker 1: And Matt Fides, Jackson's bodyguard for approximately a decade, provided
1:46:27
Speaker 1: immediate contexts for the Epstein photo, and he stated it
1:46:31
Speaker 1: was taken in two thousand and three during a week
1:46:33
Speaker 1: of house hunting in Palm Beach and Jackson was considering
1:46:36
Speaker 1: a move to be closer to his friend Barry Gibb,
1:46:38
Speaker 1: with whom he was recording daily and Epstein's residence was
1:46:42
Speaker 1: one of roughly thirty properties they toured with a real
1:46:45
Speaker 1: estate agent, and the encounter lasted no more than half
1:46:48
Speaker 1: a minute. A polite greeting at a photograph. Quote we
1:46:52
Speaker 1: never even knew who Epstein was unquote fights rides end
1:46:55
Speaker 1: quote he was not famous then unquote connection to James Meski,
1:47:00
Speaker 1: a real estate figure arranging property viewings for Jackson, whose
1:47:03
Speaker 1: attorney had a link to Epstein's circle, and CBS News
1:47:07
Speaker 1: and other outlets noted that Epstein routinely collected photographs with
1:47:10
Speaker 1: celebrities to project social legitimacy, because we know he was
1:47:14
Speaker 1: a monster piece of shit who just needed to look
1:47:18
Speaker 1: famous all the time. But Michael Jackson's name does not
1:47:22
Speaker 1: appear in Epstein's contact book at all, and it does
1:47:25
Speaker 1: not appear in the flight logs of Epstein's private planes either,
1:47:29
Speaker 1: And there are no emails, letters, phone records, financial transactions,
1:47:32
Speaker 1: or any evidence of further contact between the two beyond
1:47:35
Speaker 1: that single house viewing encounter for half a minute. And
1:47:39
Speaker 1: as of February twenty twenty six, apart from Epstein himself,
1:47:42
Speaker 1: Glane Maxwell, and Jean lu Burnell, no individual has been
1:47:46
Speaker 1: charged with a crime connected to the Epstein files, as
1:47:49
Speaker 1: we know if you have watched this channel, and hundreds
1:47:51
Speaker 1: of public figures appear in the documents without any allegation
1:47:54
Speaker 1: of wrongdoing, but for Michael Jackson, the Epstein files are
1:47:58
Speaker 1: ultimately notable for or what they do not contain. But
1:48:02
Speaker 1: the damage was already done, not by the files themselves,
1:48:06
Speaker 1: but by the headlines that outran them, So another cycle
1:48:10
Speaker 1: of suspicion and another wave of context, arriving too late
1:48:13
Speaker 1: to catch the accusation. And it's the story of Michael
1:48:16
Speaker 1: Jackson's entire afterlife. The truth never moves as fast as
1:48:21
Speaker 1: the rumor, and yet somehow neither does the music. Because
1:48:25
Speaker 1: underneath all of it, the trials, the conspiracies, the files,
1:48:29
Speaker 1: the documentaries, the arguments that will outlive everyone reading this,
1:48:33
Speaker 1: there is still the work, and the work refuses to disappear.
1:48:37
Speaker 1: Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August twenty ninth, nineteen
1:48:41
Speaker 1: fifty eight, in a six hundred and seventy two square
1:48:44
Speaker 1: foot house in Gary, Indiana. He died on June twenty fifth,
1:48:47
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, in a rented mansion in Los Angeles,
1:48:50
Speaker 1: at the age of fifty and between those two points
1:48:54
Speaker 1: he became the most famous person on the planet and
1:48:56
Speaker 1: one of the most complicated figures the American century ever produced.
1:49:00
Speaker 1: And the arguments about what he was it was done
1:49:03
Speaker 1: to him show no signs of ending. But the music,
1:49:06
Speaker 1: at least is settled, and it is as close to
1:49:10
Speaker 1: permanent as anything human beings have made. And that is
1:49:14
Speaker 1: that for Michael Jackson. This was a long one. You
1:49:18
Speaker 1: guys have asked me to deep dive into multiple figures
1:49:22
Speaker 1: like Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana and Michael Jackson. If
1:49:25
Speaker 1: you have anybody else you want me to deep dive into,
1:49:28
Speaker 1: let me know down below. I always read the comments,
1:49:32
Speaker 1: and until then I will see your beautiful face all right. Bye,