Spot on. He was arguably the wealthiest musician/entertainer of his time and I do think that the large majority of people who sued/accused him of something were just doing so in an attempt to get money from Jackson or influence over him. Like his housekeeper who said Michael would ‘shower with her son’, got paid $20,000 to go on some talk show to say this, and then later in court her son was like “no that never happened” lol.

I would argue that the constant jokes, assumptions, etc about him is what really drove him to his excessive plastic surgery/seclusion/etc. Like the fact that he had to let the prosecution in one case examine/photograph his penis and then let said investigators ask some child in a courtroom ‘can you describe Mr. Jackson’s penis’?? Yeah at that point I’m just gonna stay on my ranch and ride the train I built.

He used his extreme wealth to do kid shit, which is usually sus… Unless you’re emotional stuck in that age.

I don’t even think he was ‘emotionally stuck’ at a young age. I think that was just all he ever really knew from before he was famous and could connect with as ‘real’. You grow up around a bunch of yes-men and your abusive father, you spend your teens/early adulthood doing stuff that was mature and it is successful & people like it - but suddenly you’re 35 and you realize you’ve never been grocery shopping by yourself & when you do want to do this, you have to rent out an entire grocery store and pay a few people to pretend to be shopping there because otherwise you’d be swarmed by screaming fans/pre-teens/etc. You can’t go to a movie theater or play because, same thing. Why not just build one in your mansion? But watching movies alone/with your paid housekeeping staff sucks and god forbid you ask your manager or some celebrity acquaintance because then it’ll be in the tabloids. Oh, but your maid has a kid who sometimes is over at the house while she’s busy & he doesn’t treat you any differently than he would some other person - why not just see if he wants to watch Terminator with you?

Just a very sad life to think about, especially given how - like you say, if he’d had some sort of support network or group of real friends, his later life may have turned out a lot differently.

Just one of those things where, when someone says “nah man MJ definitely was a predator” I’m always like ‘I mean, I guess maybe. I didn’t know the man and he’s been dead almost 20 years at this point; but did you get that from one of the shitty documentaries that has a financial stake in attempting to take him down??’.

I don’t think there’s a celebrity living today who will ever match his genuine philanthropy/activism. People talk about Princess Diana during the HIV/AID crisis, but they always forget Michael Jackson publicly asking Bill Clinton at his inauguration to actually do something after Ryan White’s death. Bro was beloved around the world because he’d come into cities to perform and would leave having donated millions to local hospitals & visiting terminal patients there just so they could have a good memory. I think if he were alive today, he would absolutely be on one of the flotillas with Greta and would have probably released two whole albums at this point about how Israel needs to stop with 100% of the profits going to Gaza.

He def endangered his infant hanging him over that balcony though.

yes but who amongst us wouldn’t also maybe have done something like that in the spur of the moment…people always act like he was danging the baby by its leg but he had a pretty good underarm grip on it imo and it was only literally a second…i can’t defend it but i can understand it lmao