Free Michael Jackson!

(This article was originally published in The New Vision in November, 2003, or something)
By Ernest Bazanye

Michael Jackson is guilty of a lot of things. There's plenty of evidence to immediately convict him of being weird, having an out-of-control ego, and putting out a lousy album last year. But loathe him as much as you will, you cannot call him guilty of the charges recently brought against him.The week has been buzzing with news that a 12-year-old boy has accused MJ of sexual assault. Police, who have long been suspicious of him because of his habit of hanging out with droves of pre-teens, finally had reason to act. They raided his home, the theme park called Neverland, and issued a warrant.

Everyone seems to be eager to get MJ. The man hasn't even been taken to court yet, but already you call him a child molester. On what evidence? With cases of this sort, the facts are hidden from public scrutiny, so how can we judge the man? If any facts are available (though for some reason, the public, so quick to judge, has been so slow to actually read the -- admittedly long--article) they can be found in an investigative article written by Mary A Fischer in GQ of October 1994, when Michael was first accused. Concerned that, amidst all of the hullabaloo surrounding the case, the public never actually heard Michael's defense, Fischer set out to scan for clues. Though what she found doesn't prove that MJ did not molest that child, it makes you wonder if he did. Every where she looked Fischer was bumping into crooked lawyers, extortionists, faked evidence, and crucially, a banned hypnotic drug.

Among her findings: The boy never exhibited any of the clinically recognised signs of molestation - withdrawal, personality change, or any antipathy at all towards Jackson. Not until his father took him into a dentist's chair and had the drug sodium amytal administered to him instead of the usual anaesthetic. " 'It's a psychiatric medication that cannot be relied on to produce fact,'" Fischer quotes a psychiatrist as saying. "People are very suggestible under it. People will say things under sodium Amytal that are blatantly untrue."

Moreover, the father, the lawyer on the case, and some of the investigators he hired, have blemished professional records--the father and the lawyer had both been disciplined for unethical behaviour in their profession.

The rest of the exhaustive article is brimming with extortion maneuvers, rule bending, dishonesty and deceit. And that is the accusers. As for the accused, the police and the courts spent millions of dollars, questioned close to 200 witnesses and found nothing they could use to book him. In the end, desperate to make the investigation go away, a distraught Jackson just paid off his accusers ("Settlement", they called it) proving that accusing MJ of molesting your son can be quite lucrative.

The article is freely available on several websites on the net (just key the words "Michael Jackson framed Mary Fischer" into your search engine). I know it's fun to pelt stones at the freak, but civilised society still respects the presumption of innocence.

Actually, I can just link you, since this is a blog. Click.