The King of Neverland

I am wrestling with several different questions at once when we discuss Michael Jackson.

First, his parents: I have always found that piece deeply unsettling. Not because I think every adult who enjoys children’s company is dangerous, but because the boundary itself is so obvious.

If someone said, “My child is sleeping in the bed of a 35-year-old man who is not related to us,” most parents would immediately object.

If they added, “There have also been allegations involving other children,” the answer becomes even more straightforward.

The thing that complicates it is celebrity. Fame creates a kind of reality distortion field. People assume that someone so visible, so adored, so scrutinised could not possibly be doing something terrible. Or they convince themselves that they have special insight into the celebrity’s character.

Parents are not immune to wishful thinking. Sometimes they are most vulnerable to it.

Secondly, could Michael Jackson have been neurodivergent? Certainly possible.

Could he have genuinely viewed sleeping in a bed with children as innocent? Also possible.

But neither of those things answers the question of whether abuse occurred.

One thing that often gets lost is that intent, self-awareness, and harm are three separate variables.

A person can cause harm while believing they are loving.

A person can violate boundaries while feeling innocent.

A person can be emotionally frozen in childhood and still be responsible for adult actions*.

The reason I hesitate when people say, “He didn’t understand what he was doing,” is that there was evidence throughout his life that he repeatedly encountered objections from other adults. At some point, regardless of how unusual his inner world was, he knew that other people saw these relationships as inappropriate even if he did not.

That does not prove abuse.

But it does make “he simply did not know” harder to sustain.

We can observation him seeming frozen in childhood is one that many biographers and psychologists have made. Not as a diagnosis, but as a description.

The image I always get is not of a child: it is of an adult desperately trying to build a childhood around himself.

There is a difference.
Children want play.
Adults trying to recover a lost childhood often want to live inside a fantasy where the pain never happened.

Neverland feels less like a child’s creation than a traumatised adult’s attempt to construct an alternate universe.

A place where the Jackson family does not exist.
A place where rehearsals do not exist.
A place where Joe Jackson does not exist.
A place where he never had to become Michael Jackson, The King of Pop.

The tragedy is that when adults build those worlds, real children often get pulled into them.

And children are not equipped to carry an adult’s unfinished emotional business.

That is where my sympathy for Michael Jackson ends and my concern for the children begins.

My final point is the description of him almost often as a mythological character.

Not Michael.
The Moonwalker.
The Smooth Criminal.
Captain EO.
Peter Pan.
Friend of Princess Diana.
Friend of Elizabeth Taylor.
Owner of Neverland.

He accumulated identities the way other people collect souvenirs.

And underneath all of them, it often felt like nobody knew who Michael Jackson actually was.

Maybe not even Michael Jackson.

That is partly why separating art from artist feels so difficult with him. His art was not something he made after work and then went home from.

His art was his personality.

His fantasies, fears, loneliness, longing, and self-concept were woven into the music itself.

When you listen to “Man in the Mirror” or “Childhood” or “Will You Be There,” it is not like sitting g on a chair a carpenter made. You are listening to someone trying to explain himself through performance.

Which means the artist is embedded in the art.

That is why Michael Jackson remains fascinating rather than simple.

I can simultaneously believe he was an extraordinarily gifted artist, a profoundly damaged human being, someone who was failed by many adults, and someone who may have gone on to fail children himself.

Those ideas do not cancel each other out.

In fact, I think the discomfort comes from all of them being true at the same time.