A fifth person has now come forward to join the sexual abuse case against the estate of the late Michael Jackson, charging that when he was a child he was abused by Jackson, The Daily Beast’s Diane Dimond reports in an exclusive:
The star of a 1987 Pepsi ad featuring Michael Jackson has joined a suit against the singer’s estate, alleging that Jackson sexually abused him for years.
And then there were five. The Daily Beast has learned that another man has stepped forward to accuse Michael Jackson of sexually victimizing him.
The latest sexual assault complaint, filed in court last Friday, remains sealed, but two sources close to the case revealed that the man involved is James Safechuck, who appeared in a Pepsi ad featuring Jackson in 1987 and proceeded to have a close association with the singer for several years. Safechuck was mentioned as a potential abuse victim by employees of Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in court documents filed ahead of the star’s 2005 criminal trial, but he always denied that Jackson had molested him. Now, the sources said, Safechuck’s complaint claims that Jackson groomed him and molested him for several years beginning when he was 10 years old.
Safechuck added his name to a suit originally filed by Wade Robson in May 2013. Robson, an Australian who is now 31, testified in Jackson’s defense at the singer’s 2005 trial, where the pop icon was found not guilty of child molestation and other charges. But later, Robson changed his mind. Last year, he alleged in a civil suit against Jackson’s estate that the singer had forced him to perform sex acts. Both Robson, who was once a top Hollywood choreographer, and Safechuck, 36, are represented by the L.A. law firm of Gradstein & Marzano. Partners in that firm declined to comment on their latest filing.“It’s the same type of sex abuse claim as Wade’s,” a source close to Safechuck said. “Only with a different set of facts … and dates. According to the source, Safechuck alleges that he “was molested from the age of 10 to about 14 or 15.”
Asked why Safechuck, now a married computer programmer with two young children living in Southern California, would come forward with an allegation after all these years, one source said he was motivated by Robson’s very public announcement last year that he had come to the realization that Jackson was a, “child molester and pedophile.”
Dimond broke the story about the 1993 allegations:
In late 1993, after I broke the original story that a young boy named Jordie Chandler had accused Jackson of molesting him, La Toya Jackson held a news conference in Tel Aviv and said she could no longer be a “silent collaborator” to her brother’s “crimes against innocent children.”
“This has been going on since 1981,” she said into the camera, “And it’s not just one child.” Later, La Toya would claim she made that statement under threat of violence from her abusive husband, Jack Gordon.
In 1994, La Toya also told the TV interviewer Geraldo Rivera a story of how she and her mother once found a cancelled check she said Michael had written for $1 million, made payable to the father of one of Michael’s most frequent boy pals. She did not name the child.
“The father, supposedly, is a garbage collector,” La Toya said. Jimmy Safechuck’s father was—and still is—employed in the rubbish disposal business. —Howard Weitzman, an attorney for the Jackson Estate, has called Robson’s lawsuit a money-grab, “transparent … outrageous and sad.”
There’s a lot more more, so go to The Daily Beast link to read the rest.
This case has special interest to me. I do lots of shows for kids and schools in my nonblogging incarnation. Months before the 1993 allegations of sexual abuse surfaced about Jackson I was doing assemblies at a private school near L.A. The PTA person and I got into talking about the film and music industry. When Jackson’s name came up, she told me her husband was in the music industry and that “it was known” that Jackson was attracted to minor boys and was inappropriate with them. I heard something similar in another form from someone else a few months later in LA.
This made me more skeptical of Jackson’s proclamation of innocence and the view that he had been unfairly accused — even though I never had any confirmation of the allegations others made to me.
I suspect we’ll get the real answer to this lingering question in coming years, as this lawsuit goes to court (or is settled) and a host of new books come out written even further away from the 90s and 2009 death. The more the years pass, the more tidbits supporting or undermining the allegations about Jackson.
Meanwhile, big bucks will continued to be made off of him. A new, eagerly awaited Michael Jackson album is coming out today.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.