Other Michael Jackson dies of a "cardiac arrest"

You seemed generally glad he'd died - That's what I meant by 'celebrated' I was just suffering a mental block and couldn't decide the best way to put it. Still can't actually.

Neither am I an expert on the cases, but the fact that he wasn't found guilty by a jury speaks volumes, to me. For all legal purposes he was innocent. I'd have thought a court of law would be good enough for the rest of us, too.

The fact that he was pretty much running on financially empty (check the many sales of his assets) for quite some time suggests that he couldn't have viably 'bought off' an entire jury and/or court. It'd most certainly have been found out by now, if he had, and no evidence for that has surfaced. Jury did their job, honestly.

Of course the prosecutors are going to say their evidence is water tight - It'd be a pretty shoddy prosecution team if they said anything to the contrary

 

Yeah, years of physical and mental abuse by your father has a tendancy to do that, you know.

Because of the abuse he suffered during his childhood, his mental age had regressed to that of a child as a coping mechanism, mentally providing him the childhood he never had when he was younger.

He didn't have a "bizarre fascination with children". As I said earlier, mentally he was still very much a child himself.

The difference being Glitter was actually convicted and is registered as a sex offender.

Jacko was not proven guilty


Right, that's it. I've had enough of people slagging off Jacko. This is supposed to be a thread for people to post condolences, not a "Hey, let's rake over old coals" thread.

Can we please get back on topic and let this thread be about people remembering him for what he contributed to music.

 

QFT.

 

I'm talking about the 2005 _trial_. the 1994 allegations were just that - allegations. it never got to court.

 

Never met him, never followed his life, except what was on the news occasionally (ahem).

You've gotta admit though, an 80's night at a club isn't complete without "Don't Stop" or "Billy Jean" - Genius.

Edit: Also, think how his children must be feeling. Though they are all named Michael Jackson (even the girl - wtf!)

 

Sorry, that's me forgetting you're allowed to get away with anything when you've been abused. I must've missed that one.

My foster cousin's Mother murdered his Father in front of him when he was 4, he was very adversely affected by it, 25 years later he pulled a knife on someone (did not use it) and is now in a mental institution secure unit. Should we forgive him because of what he witnessed?

No, it's not, the thread titles is: Michael Jackson dies of a "cardiac arrest" - start a condolences thread if you want one.

 

..because of a 22 million dollar out of court settlement.

OJ Simpson was cleared of his wife's murder. Is the mass consensus that the jury were right in that one too?

 

He didn't get away with anything because there was nothing to get away with.

Did you even follow the Arvizo trial? It was a bloody shambles for the prosecution. It was clear right from the start that Janet Arvizo had rehearsed her kids into making these allegations in an attempt to extort money from Jacko.

The defense team didn't even have to try that hard to tear apart the prosecution's case, it was that flimsy.

Yes, he was not by any definition of the word 'normal' to most of the rest of society, but then I believe that 'normal' in social terms is an artificially created concept. The 'social norm' is just what most people in any given area would consider acceptable behaviour. Different countries, or even states within those countries can have radically different ideas of what the 'social norm' is, but what is socially normal to one place might be seen as bizarre and unusual somewhere else.

This goes as deep as the individual level.

I know that because I have an autistic spectrum disorder, I sometimes exhibit behaviour that some people would identify as 'not normal'. However, to me that behaviour is perfectly normal.

Everybody has some aspect of their personality that they will see as perfectly normal, but that others will look at and go "that's bloody wierd". It's called being an individual and there's not really a lot anyone can do about it.

OK, it might be your opinion that Jacko was a kiddie fiddler and that's all it is, your opinion. You have no hard evidence to substantiate that opinion, but you're trying to put it forward as cold, hard fact.

I on the other hand, can produce plenty of evidence to prove that both sets of accusations were made by greedy, money grubbing families who had no problem dragging a very misunderstood celebrity through the mud in order to get a huge payout. In the case of Evan Chandler, he succeeded, in the case of Janet Arviso, she failed and quite spectacularly at that.

He's dead now, he was never convicted of any child molestation charges, so can we please stop dragging his name through the mud?

 

I agree. I'm really sad about this. The guy was abused as a child, AND was 'managed' by his strict father who forced the kids to perform like a bunch of clubbed seals, and he wasn't allowed to be a child. Nobody here, abused or not, can claim to have experienced anything like MJ childhood. What's worse is that as soon as he became an adult, he became an even bigger star, in fact probably as big as it gets. He was in the wacky world of showbiz his entire life so I'm not surprised if he was a bit strange. The world and the music business was just so different back then. Music is dead now in comparison, so even current big stars like Beyonce or whoever won't have experienced the kind of fame and mania that surrounded MJ his entire life.

It's so sad to me because it's another existence similar to with Elvis, where they didn't get a chance to get a break from it all. They build up in to these mega stars and then they end up playing the role of the character they became, and I wonder if they ever had the chance to switch off and be normal - or if they were ever even given the opportunity to see what normality is. They will have been constantly surrounded by people asking them if they were ok and needed anything and if they ever wanted to just pop out somewhere, his 'people' would have to rush around and plan a military style operation. People criticise them for becoming a bit strange, but I suspect that if any 'normal' person was subjected to that kind of life for their entire lives, they would end up weird too or worse. They were not just prisoners in their own home, but prisoners in their own entire lives.

I feel really sorry for the guy. Such great people, driven to such tragic endings. Elvis on the loo, and MJ physically falling to pieces at only 50, mired by debt and paparazzi fuelled lies and speculation. There are others too of course, Cobain and so on, but with the likes of MJ it wasn't just a few years of fame in their adulthood, it was his entire life. Literally from a young child all the way through the rest of his life. It's so sad.

RIP Jacko.

I think some people just desperately want to bash him down somehow, no matter how illogical they have to be. They want to say, "I think he did it, bast*rd", but at the same time they can't be bothered actually reading or looking at anything.

I also never even found it too strange or hard to understand. Imagine a bunch of scallywag people seeing him living in his massive mansion ranch with countless tens of millions of dollars.... Someone tries to get a few fast bucks from him with one of these false claims and the media jump all over it and everyone starts speculating about his character, so then someone else thinks, "Hmm I could have a go of that too..." Think about it, what have those scumbags got to lose? Nothing. What has MJ got to lose? Everything. So of course they are going to try.

It's so sad when you think about it, that the average person would actually hold ANY regard for what the mass media tells them about stuff like this. If you think these paparazzi fuelled gossip newspapers and magazines have ANY basis in reality, then you are an extremely naive person. They literally would make up ANYTHING no matter how ludicrous, if they think it will make them a fast buck. In fact wasn't it The Sun who once showed a picture of a UFO spotted on the moon? People are so quick to forget things like this. It says a lot about the average person.

Yes those people must be so angry at him, for dying.

 

For god's sake, i'm not talking about the trial where he was found not-guilty, i suspect it was probably a copycat attempt at getting money from him.

However, a 22 million dollar settlement is a lot, lot different.

How many times have you seen an out of court settlement where the people who have settled weren't guilty?

I've never put anything forward as cold hard fact, i'm just genuinely shocked that in 1993/4, he paid a child and his family 22 million dollars to not continue with charges against him, and hardly anyone seems to be even mildly concerned about it.

Show me the evidence that says he was going to be found not guilty in that trial. Let's face it, you know no better than me, or anyone else for that matter, whether he did something to that child or not, I'm simply making the point that an out of court settlement suggests that there was something wrong there. By stopping it going to trial, he wasn't proved guilty, but he also wasn't proved not-guilty in my opinion.

And that's all it is, my opinion, i don't believe i've stated otherwise.

 

Q.F.T.

Pretty much sums up my feelings exactly.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._J._Simpson_murder_case

My point being, he had enough money to walk away free for 14 years from the 1994 murder trial even when there was massive amounts of evidence.
If that was the UK, he would have been jailed then, but american justice & lawers eventually found him 'liable for the deaths of' instead of plain bloody murder. It took them that long.
'liable for damages for the wrongfull death of' means you get to walk free for 14 years then do a small stretch in a cushy jail cell for a few more. Bollocks

 

speaking from personal experience, my father seriously considered settling with a tenant who sued him on false pretences. in the end he made the decision to fight it, and spent far more money in court than on a settlement purely defending a principle. Funny thing was that the tenant's case got blown out of court on the first day. So, the concept of an innocent party settling to protect himself both from financial ruin and the ridiculous amount of stress it causes (this case on my dad and the resulting fallout on our family lasted nearly three years) is not an alien concept to me.

 

Fair enough, I concede your point there, but I still find it suspicious.

I'm sure i'm not an irrational person, I just don't see why people can't even accept there was a possibility he did these things. It seems alien to me.

 

Wtf? It happens all the time...

When you add up how much that would have been costing him per day, to put an end to it all for just 22m was probably the best advice given by all of his financial advisers.

 

The man was and always will be a legend in my eyes, Yes there have been issues in his life and im not denying that he could possibly have abused children. But he was never been found guilty of any of the claims, An out of court settlement doesnt automatically mean he was guilty yes it looks odd, but we dont know and probably never will know the truth about what happened. People will remember him in different ways some good some bad.

Mine will always be the thriller video simply awesome. RIP

 

Thank you.

 

Having watched the Bashir doc from 2002/3, there's no doubt that Jackson was living in a seriously, seriously weird world, and one where it's clear, I think, that what to most people are the boundaries between normal adult-child behaviour were crossed regularly. Whether or not he committed any crime is up for debate, and of course, he was never found guilty in the courts. Did he bear responsibility for this? Yes. Did the people around him? Yes, they did - as a previous poster has pointed out, the Arvizos were not exactly what most people would consider normal. And then there's all his managers, assistants, lawyers, record company people etc...

Read a bit about his background and it's clear that he basically never, ever lived in the world 99% the rest of us do. From very early on, he was surrounded by very weird and often unpleasant people, and of course, almost limitless money and fame. It's no wonder that he wasn't exactly normal.

Of course, the problem is that his life and his music weren't neatly separate. Look at the lyrics to Man In the Mirror, Wanna Be Starting Something - you couldn't write that kind of stuff if you were a grounded, well rounded stable person. But, the music. It's hard to believe that anyone could dislike the 80s stuff - Billie Jean, Beat it, Thriller, Wanna Be Starting Something are amazing, amazing songs that will be listened to as long as people listen to pop music.

As for his death... well, to be honest, I feel that "Michael Jackson" died a long long time ago. What was left was a body, a name, a brand, a celebrity circus...

 

Great summary, best post I have seen so far about MJ, nice emotive picture to end on.

 

I KNEW he wouldn't make the comeback. For one reason or another.

QFT. Personally I've never been a great fan of Jackson's music, but sure it's always a shame when such a great star goes down so bad...