Jackson: Are we mourning a monster?

“Shed no tears for this twisted sicko,” said Linda Stasi in The New York Post. In Michael Jackson—whose glowing tributes swamped the airwaves these past two weeks—the world has lost an admittedly talented entertainer, but also “a disgustingly depraved man” who spent his later years dogged by persistent and credible allegations of pedophilia. Jackson beat criminal child-abuse charges in 2005, of course, but not before the world heard testimony from several young boys, backed up by former Jackson employees, that he liked to ply his young sleepover-buddies with wine in soda cans, showed them pornographic magazines, and offered to teach them how to masturbate. Artists are often, if not usually, plagued by personal demons, said John Niven in the London Independent. But the sexual abuse of children is unforgivable, and should rule out the kind of posthumous love being showered on Michael Jackson.

Generally, there’s no smoke without fire, said Ian Halperin in the London Daily Mail, but that changes when your bank balance nears the $1 billion mark. I spent six years researching an unauthorized biography of this “reclusive oddball,” and found that while Jackson was certainly gay, his sexual preference was for young but adult men—two of whom, a waiter and an aspiring actor, I interviewed. The charges of pedophilia, I came to believe, were cooked up by greedy parents who wanted to capitalize on his obsession with children. “Let me be clear: No childhood trauma would excuse molestation,’’ said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. But there was a tragic ring of truth in Jackson’s claim that he liked the company of children so much because he had been denied a childhood of his own.

Maybe so, said Bob Herbert in The New York Times, but there was also a ring of truth to the insistence of his young “friends’’ that Jackson had molested them. He paid one such boy’s family a reported $25 million to go away, and the details of what Jackson allegedly did with the boy “would make your hair stand on end.’’ In the end, Jackson—and the adulation lavished on him—served as the ultimate symbol of the “extreme immaturity and grotesque irresponsibility” of modern American culture. We rack up debts we cannot pay, indulge our whims and grandiose self-conceptions, and behind the walls of our own private Neverlands, ignore troubling evidence that our idols are false. “We don’t want to know.’’

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