r/LeavingNeverlandHBO

This is the episode description:

"MAURY POVICH <40m> (vgq)
Two of the security guards - Leroy Thomas and Fred Hammond, saying what they knew and saw that got them fired. Katherine Jackson on the phone arguing with them and saying they are bad to say these untrue things about her son. Raul Velasco, another security guard that was fired at the same time as the five, saying that he never saw anything and that these ones are making it up. Joe Jackson on the phone saying the guards are liars, Majestic Magnificent supporting Michael and arguing with the security guards. LaToya on the phone being controversial, then Katherine getting very mad with LaToya and what she says.Tatiana Thumbtzen saying she had an affair with Michael that lasted over a year and no way is he into little boys."

If anyone has seen this I'm curious to know what was said? Thanks!

i don't agree with the writer's statements in the first paragraph but i find the rest of the article a thoughtful critique of how audiences are responding to MJ compared to other people who have been "cancelled".

Published 02 July 2026 9:00am BST

Perhaps it’s just that some people are just too big to cancel. Or perhaps it is that many prefer to indulge in fantasy. We are in a post-truth era, after all, when realistic footage of celebrities has been created by AI and facts about biology – what is a male, what is a female – are up for grabs.

It is possible to believe in the delusion that Michael Jackson didn’t really abuse young boys, that he was innocent and his accusers were simply money-grabbing monsters. It is possible – that is, if we really think there is nothing wrong with a grown man, at the very least, openly admitting he likes to share beds with young boys who aren’t his children.
Either way, it is no surprise to learn that the film Michael, co-produced by the late singer’s estate and which stars his nephew Jaafar Jackson, has overtaken Oppenheimerto become the highest-grossing biopic of all time, taking £739m at the box office and counting.


The film, which covers the singer’s life up until 1988 and skirts over child abuse allegations, was derided as a whitewash by critics and attacked by the singer’s own daughter Paris, who said of the project: “There’s a lot of inaccuracy, and there’s a lot of just full-blown lies.”

But it has the music. And perhaps that is enough. Jackson’s influence on popular culture cannot be overstated. There was his precocious talent in the Motown era, while for those of us who grew up in the 80s, attempting to recreate his dances in our bedrooms and trying to dress in his style, there will never be anyone who could top him.

Without his music, his dancing, and the way he transformed music videos, the charts would look very different today. It is no surprise that, even before the film came out, his music was once again growing in popularity. And since the release of Michael, he has become the most-played artist in the UK on YouTube, while Billie Jean, one of his biggest hits, is currently the most-played song on Spotify worldwide.


Michael died in 2009 reviled and (relatively) penniless. He had everything riding on the “comeback” tour – the stress of which may have contributed to the overdose that killed him. But since he died his estate, now properly managed, with his eccentric true image largely buried, his popularity has only grown. This is despite a spate of documentaries – most impactfully 2019’s Leaving Neverland – fleshing out the stories about the depths of depravity he had gone to by grooming and abusing young boys whose families trusted him.


As a showbusiness journalist who chronicled his life increasingly spiralling out of control in the late 1990s and Noughties, I was always aware of both his – at best eccentricities – and the obsessive nature of his fandom who, long before social media made every other person a troll, would regularly send death threats every time we dared write something negative about the star.

His horrifying addiction to plastic surgery showed that this was someone who was mentally unwell. And to add to the complexity of this story, he and his family revealed how he’d been abused by his father.

He wasn’t the only child star we watched lurching from disaster to disaster. There was a lot of sympathy when he said he wanted to revert to childhood, even calling his home “Neverland” and insisting that he simply preferred the company of children because he was like a child. But he was a man.

Because he was so big, everything was magnified, including his weirdness and increasingly those willing to justify it.


I remember clearly the 2003 Martin Bashir interview in which he openly revealed he shared beds with young boys who were not his children, as if this was a normal thing to do. He held the hand of cancer survivor Gavin Arvizo – then 13 – and asked: “Why can’t you share your bed? The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone.”

The court case which followed the interview, in which Jackson was accused of molesting a child called Gavin, was shocking in its detail.
But even then, it felt like he was too big to cancel. I still remember the shock and the strange relief while reporting on his acquittal, even though I felt he was probably guilty of at least some of the behaviour he’d been accused of. He was my childhood hero, and like billions of others around the globe I didn’t want to believe the depths of his depravity. I didn’t want to have to cut his music out of my life.
It is worth saying that both within his lifetime and following it, Michael was never found guilty of sex abuse. But then neither was Jimmy Savile.


I feel conflicted that, thanks to this new wave of popularity, my children are discovering music which gave me so much joy. And also saddened that this music can only ever be tainted.
I know there are many now claiming the allegations against Michael were racist, that this was all about the establishment or even – for those who have fully gone down the conspiracy hole – somehow the work of the “Epstein class”. But I go back to this: how can it ever be normal for a man to share a bed with someone else’s child?

Work has already started on a second film, covering the second half of Jackson’s life, and it will be harder to avoid some of the scandals which ruined his reputation. I worry that this may see this now enormous project go from simply a whitewash to one that openly attacks his accusers by painting Michael as their victim.
Can we separate the art from the artist? The answer now is clear: yes we can, if we work hard enough. But more difficult still is the question of how much we are willing to exonerate the artist simply because we love their art.

https://archive.is/20260702161620/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/02/why-is-michael-jackson-uncancellable-king-of-pop-film/

Other than the obvious, another sick part of his children obsession was even the ‘innocent’ way he described his love for them.

Look at clips of Mr.Rogers, another adult man famous for his self-professed love of children. Listen to the way he speaks about them and describes them. They are individuals to him. They are humans with autonomy and inner-worlds. They aren’t separate entities from adults, but what an adult is before all the lessons of life make sense to them.

MJ describes children like one describes animals or even worse, how one describes food. They are all ‘innocent’. They all ‘refresh’ and revitalise him in the same way. They are a monolith that all do the same thing for him no matter who they are. A faceless resource for his consumption. His compulsion for covering his walls with random images of them is a microcosm of this. Like someone who really likes cars.

Everyone make copies if you can. We cannot let the Jackson estate bury this documentary. If they didn’t think it was a threat then they wouldn’t bother trying to take it down.

They’re afraid.

They know that people will see the emotion from Wade and James and know in their hearts that those men are telling the truth.

Edit: it’s definitely available on the mobile app.