Fans who share this disbelief have joined in this effort through online protests and websites with names like The Michael Jackson Innocent Project. Robson, who worked within Jackson's orbit for years after his alleged molestation ceased, is facing particularly harsh questioning. Members of Jackson's family are disputing Robson's and Safechuck's veracity. Since it aired, a small legion of people invested in preserving Jackson's legend have responded to this threat in various ways. Leaving Neverland did something else too: It challenged the status of an icon, the kind of star whose relics, manifesting as earworms or visual memory flashes, people carry around with them at all times. And so it raised in viewers that desire to repair - but not politically or in some other organized public way. Focusing on Wade Robson and James Safechuck and a few family members almost reluctantly saying what allegedly happened between them and Jackson, in quiet tones and vivid detail, Leaving Neverland implicated viewers as witnesses. Leaving Neverland did away with the frameworks that usually structure public airings of hidden truths, including even the conventions of documentary filmmaking, and collapsed the distance between the most indiscriminate disclosure - broadcasting - and the most intimate - whispering a confidence. It opened director Dan Reed to accusations of bias and incomplete reporting but made this the definitive documentary of 2019, the one most reflective of a time when the private realm is mutating from a sinecure to be preserved into a launching pad for public confrontations. The documentary mirrors those moments of facing the worst within a family or a circle of friends. Leaving Neverland, the HBO special that aired in March and shared the stories of two alleged sexual abuse victims of Michael Jackson, marks another point in the history of negotiating what society considers unspeakable. In the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, Safechuck says that Jackson sexually abused him as a child. Michael Jackson and James Safechuck in 1988. One of its effects, as it has established a new framework for considering sexual assault, however, has been to establish a number of public versions of "before" in "after." When the alleged violator is famous, and the disclosures are not privileged but mediated, millions may become secret sharers in this confusing time-space continuum. The #MeToo movement came into existence partly to alleviate the pressure of negotiating the paradox in secret. This experience of inhabiting a psychic space that's forever altered, but in many ways the same, is usually a private one. Forever changed but still familiar and even longed for. The time before becomes a mess that needs to be cleaned up, rearranged, but it's also still a home, a place you know. Intimate violence casts everything that existed before it into disarray but doesn't erase it. Survivor: It means "one who lives beyond" but also "one who lives in addition to." The same is true for witnesses. There is a before and an after, and it can be hard, nearly impossible, to make sense of the relationship between those two. Whatever the path its reverberations take, the most striking thing about such a revelation's impact is the way it divides your life without erasing any part of it. It'll be the most difficult thing you've ever done, and you'll never be sure if you've done enough. Your job, then, is simply to bear witness, to be still and strong in the moment of disclosure. Or the named violator isn't around to be punished or confronted or even properly exposed. The person who told you something you never wanted to hear can't do more, at least now, than say it. Or the pain never heals, but at least the wound is touching air. There's more shock, more pain and, eventually, some kind of healing. You start looking for a therapist, or a lawyer. Maybe there is a route to take, and together, you and your loved one start to explore it. What happens after such an encounter depends on so many factors. So you say to your hurting loved one, Let's go to the cops. The panicked feeling that overtakes a person when something feels broken is countered by a core urge: to fix things. But I guarantee, since I've been there, that you also immediately started thinking about what you should do. Saying something you might have wished, for one selfish moment, hadn't been said.Īnd how did you respond? You listened. The teller was likely someone close to you. Has anyone ever told you a secret that, in an instant, changed everything? It usually happens in a very private place - at the kitchen table, maybe, or in the close confines of a car.
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