They know that people who have never experienced abuse won’t understand how kids can love their tormentors and wish to protect them. They know full well that a lot of people watching Leaving Neverland will reflexively disbelieve them because their new testimony contradicts what came before (and because they each unsuccessfully sued Jackson’s estate in the years after his death). Years ago, Robson testified in court and Safechuck publicly supported the singer, both countering other protégés who’d accused Jackson of crimes. As these now-adult men speak of what they saw and did in in the late 1980s and early ’90s - the era when they say Jackson groomed them - they talk slowly and softly, doubling back to add details or amend descriptions. Safechuck and Robson were children when Jackson “discovered” them - Robson in Brisbane, Australia, where the boy had been performing with a kids’ dance troupe Safechuck in Los Angeles, on the set of a beloved Pepsi ad about a small boy exploring Jackson’s backstage dressing room and doting on his gloves and hat. Mutual masturbation oral sex penetration regular exposure to orgies and porn emotional abuse characterized as special attention: Jackson is accused of all this and more. We never see the acts that James Safechuck and Wade Robson say they endured as minors while visiting Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and Century City apartment, but these are described in such detail that viewers may be seized by a new impulse: to look away from what they’re hearing. It’s about two sexual-abuse survivors telling their stories with unprecedented frankness, illuminating not just the sickness of a legend, but the pervasiveness of a crime that exists at every level of society, and that hides behind abuser-friendly notions of despoilment and shame. It will draw viewers by listing the alleged misdeeds of a pop icon - one who was arguably bigger than the rest, even Bill Cosby - and perhaps inspire many of them to view him through a darker lens, but it is ultimately not about Jackson. The documentary, which airs on Sunday and Monday night, feels like a conversation-realigning milestone. Leaving Neverland arrives on HBO two years after the first wave of #MeToo allegations, which exposed an array of outrages and crimes by men (and a handful of women) in power. It’s a radically empathetic film about the resonating impact of sexual abuse, as well as the personal and social forces that conspire to keep people from talking about it in public. The result is no mere account of a celebrity scandal, nor is it content to be a portrait of a disturbed musical genius who survived his own abusive childhood (at the hands of his father and manager, Joe Jackson). Dan Reed’s two-part, four-hour documentary Leaving Neverland, in which former protégés of Michael Jackson describe years of molestation, scars the mind with words.
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