Sean Ramis (2:28)

He told me if they ever found

Matt Bellamy (2:30)

out what we were doing, he and

Sean Ramis (2:33)

I would go to jail for the rest of our lives.

Steve Knopper (2:38)

Secrets will eat you up.

Sean Ramis (2:40)

You feel so alone. I want to be able to speak

Steve Knopper (2:44)

the truth

Sean Ramis (2:47)

as loud as I had to speak the lie for so long.

Matt Bellamy (2:50)

That was devastating for the Michael Jackson estate, which had been pretty successful over the previous decade in rehabilitating Michael's image to the point where they were able to do a Broadway show.

Thumbtack Representative (3:05)

It is now one of the hottest tickets on Broadway and the musical just earned, get this, 10 Tony nominations and

Matt Bellamy (3:13)

a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. All right, Michael Jackson won by Cirque du Soleil performs 10 shows a week at the Mandalay Resort and Casino. And the music was still popular around the world. This documentary comes out and radio stations started pulling the songs and outrage over the conduct, alleged conduct, was pretty widespread. So they decided that it was time for a movie. And Graham King, the producer of Bohemian Rhapsody, was very interested in doing a Michael Jackson movie and he signed on to produce this and they started on their way.

Sean Ramis (3:52)

So using the germ of this movie is explicitly a counter narrative to the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, which sort of tarnishes Michael Jackson's image around the world.

Matt Bellamy (4:02)

From the estate's perspective, 100% that's what they wanted out of this project. But what's interesting about the original plan for the movie is that it explicitly took on the allegations against him and in many ways, according to the original script, shot those allegations down.

Sean Ramis (4:23)

So I imagine you're one of the few people who saw a version of this movie that isn't the most popular movie in the world right now. What exactly was in this script and how does it differ from the movie that people are seeing right now?

Matt Bellamy (4:41)

So the original script by John Logan opens with Michael Jackson at Neverland and there are police sirens outside and they are there for him. And then it goes back into his whole rise to fame and how he got here. And the third act of the movie, the last 45 minutes or so, are Michael's life at Neverland and how he became increasingly detached from reality and surrounded by children. But then the accusers come for him and the family of Jordan Chandler, the 13 year old boy who ultimately made allegations against Jackson. They are portrayed as out to exploit money for him. And Michael is 100% presented as the victim of these allegations. There's a strip search scene where the cops come to Neverland and conduct a strip search on him and he's crying. It's really tough to read in the script. And at the end of the movie or at the end of the script, there's a conversation that Michael has with his mother about how it all ended up here. And it's really, it's kind of a sad moment about how he became this misunderstood figure in the culture that's not in the ultimate movie. None of that is in the movie. It stops at 1988, the bad tour. And the reason for that is the legal stuff.

Sean Ramis (6:23)

Not only does it stop at the Bad Tour, but it starts at the Bad Tour. Instead of starting in his Neverland estate and being a flashback into how did he get into all this trouble. It starts with him about to take the stage at this triumphant moment in his career in the late 80s. And it's funny hearing you describe the movie that you read about in this script. It seems to make a lot more sense having seen the final product because they keep trying to set up that Michael Jackson is gonna have this big split with his family and that it's gonna be a lot harder for him when he's on his own. Keep trying to set up his relationship with kids. Cause he's constantly caring for sick kids and giving kids gifts and hanging out with kids at toy stores. But it never really goes anywhere. What we end up with in the final product is a weird sort of slight counter narrative that seems to set up Michael as some sort of secular saint who just loved children and wanted to care for sick people and walk around his neighborhood with animals. It just seems kind of bizarre.

Matt Bellamy (7:30)

It makes a lot more sense when you know that in the original script that was ultimately weaponized against him in the eyes of the script. And others would argue that there was other nefarious reasons for why he was so close to children. But that was 100% part of the message of the original script, right?

Sean Ramis (7:49)

You're describing a movie that had something to say whether or not people agree with it or not. It had something to say which that Michael Jackson was misunderstood and was innocent. Instead, we're left with a movie that has nothing to say. Tell me about the legal trouble that helped us end up with this movie.

Matt Bellamy (8:07)

So after all of that was shot, all of the original script was shot, the estate discovered that in the 90s, there was a settlement with the family of Jordan Chandler that precluded either the estate or the family from dramatizing the events of the relationship between them. And the somewhat ironic part is that obviously that agreement was to prevent the family from selling their story for a movie or something like that. But then 30 years later, it comes back to haunt the Jackson estate when they are trying to make a movie of their version of those occurrences. So once the lawyers discovered this, they alerted the producer, they alerted the studio, and all hell broke loose. They basically said, we can't release this movie. So they decided to take the script, cut it up and do it as two movies. The first movie would be devoid of anything having to do with the allegations. It would just be about his rise to fame. It would be an arc where the main tension is with Michael and his father, which was in the original script that was there, but it wasn't the main storyline. Michael escaping his father was not the main storyline. And then if the movie is successful, which it now is, they plan to do a second movie that will engage more clearly with those allegations.

Sean Ramis (9:43)

I'm glad you brought up a second movie, because I think the most interesting thing or the most surprising thing that happened in this entire movie was at the very end when three words appear on screen and his story continues. So is this gonna be the first musical biopic that gets a sequel?

Matt Bellamy (10:04)

Has there been another one? I don't believe there has. But obviously, once you know what the original plan was, it makes a lot more sense that they would cut it off and try to make two movies. And the demand seems to be there.

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (10:20)

That is what I want the world to feel. Magic.

Matt Bellamy (10:26)

And the world showed up for the

Podcast Host/Announcer (10:28)

Michael magic, raking in $97 million domestically and 217 million worldwide.

Matt Bellamy (10:34)

That is demand for a sequel. So it makes sense they would do it. Now. It's gonna be a huge challenge because they've got two issues. And I just talked about this with the head of Lionsgate, the studio on the town. Some of the things that were in the script that you read and reported on obviously cannot be included. But continuing to get a deeper understand of who Michael was, I think there are any number of ways the filmmakers will be able to pull that off. Basically, the challenges are they can't dramatize Jordi, Chandler. So that's out. Those allegations are out. And also, there's a second issue here. The fans and the general public have now shown that they are interested in a Michael Jackson movie that doesn't bring up the bad stuff. That is really just a celebration of the music and his personal narrative. Now, if they go there and make the darker and more controversial movie that engages with the allegations, do the fans actually want that? Is that going to be successful? I don't know the answer to that.

Sean Ramis (11:49)

The movie's obviously a huge success now, but, you know, leading up to its release and even since it's been released, there's a ton of people obviously criticizing the movie for having nothing to say for sidestepping the allegations. How have the filmmakers responded to those critiques? Is it just, oh, we're gonna work on a sequel. Don't worry.

Matt Bellamy (12:07)

About it. Well, Antoine Fuqua, the director, did an interview with the New Yorker in which he was very respectful of the allegations, but also said sort of questioned some of the double standards that go on out there. You know, people, there were some, there were some ugly parts of Elvis Presley's background that were not in that film, and nobody questioned that. And it was interesting to see him come out and say that the marketing for this movie has really focused on the music and the performance and kind of sidestepped the uglier stuff. And I think that that's all by design. They decided that they did not want to engage, which makes it even more interesting on the second movie because you sort of have to engage or else you're really going to get criticized.

Sean Ramis (13:05)

As you heard earlier, you can hear more about Michael on the Town with Matthew Bellamy, how we should be thinking about what didn't make it into the MOV in a minute on Today Explained. Support for the show today comes from Chime Banking can sometimes feel like you're paying someone else just to hold on to your money. With all of the overdraft fees, minimum balance requirements and monthly fees, it often doesn't seem worth it. Chime says that they're different and that they are changing the way people bank. Chime isn't just another banking app. They can unlock smarter banking for everyday people. Chime provides products like MyPay, which can give you access to up to $500 of your paycheck anytime you can forget overdraft fees, minimum balance fees and monthly fees. Chime turns everyday spending into real rewards and progress. They say you can earn up to 3% APY on your savings, nearly eight times more than what traditional banks offer. Chime says they're not just smarter banking, they're the most rewarding way to bank. You can join the millions who are already banking fee free today. It just takes a few minutes to sign up. Head to chime.comexplained that is chime.comexplained Chime

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Podcast Host/Announcer (16:22)

Support for texplained comes from Found if you're a small business owner, you may know that wrestling with your finances can get messy. A bank account here quickly. Books. They are taxes and invoicing apps. Before you know it, you're buried in expensive tools, behind on books, unsure where your business really stands. But that's where Found comes in. Says Found. Found says they can help eliminate your finance clutter, giving you one platform that handles banking bookkeeping, Invoices, taxes. That means no more paying for multiple subscriptions or dealing with clunky apps. Found says you can send invoices for free and pay your contractors everything. All from one app. You can take back control of your business. Today you can open a Found account for free at found.com that's f O-U-N-D.com found is a financial technology company. It is not a bank. Guys. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. You can join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their finances with foundation.

Steve Knopper (17:24)

If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself today. Explained my Name is Steve Knopper. I am author of MJ the Genius of Michael Jackson, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times and Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Sean Ramis (17:43)

For people who maybe weren't around in the 80s and 90s, like I think both of us were, how big did Michael get?

Steve Knopper (17:50)

It's really difficult to sort of imagine in today's fragmented media and entertainment world just how gigantic Michael was. He was overwhelming. I mean, Quincy Jones, who is the producer of Thriller and Off the Wall, when they made the Thriller album, his goal was to get people to buy many, many copies per household of the album. And that's what happened. And it wound up selling. I think the latest number I saw over time is 70 million albums sold.

Sean Ramis (18:19)

And that's just like an impossibility in 2026, right?

Steve Knopper (18:23)

Yeah, absolutely. Because, well, first of all, there's not really. Albums do not sell to that magnitude anymore because everybody's streaming everything. And in today's world, because of the Internet and because of streaming and downloading and all the other stuff that's happened, there's communities of people for every artist. So BTS is huge, smooth like butter, but they're only huge in a fragment of the market. Taylor Swift is even huger.

Podcast Host/Announcer (18:49)

It's me.

Steve Knopper (18:50)

But even so, she's not even close to what Michael Jackson was in the 80s.

Sean Ramis (18:58)

And even before we get to the 90s and the allegations this man wasn't eccentric, people could tell Michael was different, right?

Steve Knopper (19:07)

Yeah. I mean, for a lot of reasons. He said all the time, throughout his life and many others have made this point that he had an incredibly unique childhood.

Sean Ramis (19:18)

Ladies and gentlemen, would you greet the Jackson 5?

Steve Knopper (19:24)

You know, by the time he was seven or eight years old, he was a major star. He was on Motown, you know, they were gigantic. They were BTs in their day. And he was very, very young to have experienced that. And he talked all the time. He repeated this detail about how he'd be in a recording studio and I'd

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (19:44)

record for hours and hours.

Steve Knopper (19:45)

He'd be staring longingly at these kids playing across the street at a playground.

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (19:51)

They'd be rooting and making noise and I would cry.

Steve Knopper (19:54)

And he was stuck in this recording studio doing all this work at a very young age.

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (19:57)

It make me sad that I would have to go and work instead.

Steve Knopper (20:06)

And so as he grew up, he kind of like, had to figure out why he was different. And he started to yearn for a childhood. And this made him, even as an. A young man in his Late teens and early 20s, kind of yearned for friendships with children.

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (20:24)

I mean, people wonder why I always have children around, because I find the thing that I never had through them.

Steve Knopper (20:32)

That was his version of how this played out.

Sean Ramis (20:34)

And then it all takes quite an ugly turn. I feel like I can still remember when it happened, and Michael Jackson was gonna be on all the news channels one night, and then it was so weird to watch this guy who you thought was literally the coolest human being on Earth, having to talk about being, like, strip searched by the police.

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (20:55)

It was the most humiliating ordeal of my life. One that no person should ever have to suffer.

Steve Knopper (21:03)

Right, right. I mean, that unfolded in a very complicated way in the early 90s where there was a boy who was 13 who accused him of sexual abuse, basically.

Matt Bellamy (21:17)

The entertainer's life has become a tornado of rumors and accusations since a teenage boy said Jackson sexually molested him.

Steve Knopper (21:24)

Michael Jackson denied it, vehemently said it never happened. And then the Santa Barbara county sheriff in California kind of picked up on these charges and moved forward with some kind of prosecution case.

Matt Bellamy (21:37)

An arrest warrant for Mr. Jackson has been issued on multiple counts of child molestation.

Steve Knopper (21:43)

But before anything could happen with the courts, the boy and his family settled with Michael Jackson. And so that never went to court. There was never any record of what did or did not happen. And the whole thing kind of registered as in the media, certainly as a settlement.

Sean Ramis (22:01)

Of course, it wasn't the last set of accusations.

Steve Knopper (22:04)

No, that's right. There have been other people, other boys generally, who came forward and made allegations. But the whole thing kind of advanced in the early 2000s. And that story began when Michael kind of infamously went on a British television network and spoke to a journalist named Martin Bashir in this documentary about how he commonly slept in a bed with children who were not his own or not part of his family.

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (22:37)

I have slept in the bed with many children. I sleep in the bed with all of them. When Macaulay cooking were little, Kieran Culkin would sleep on this side. Macaulay Cuck is on this side. His sister's in there. We're all just jamming the bed, and we wake up like dawn and go in the hot air balloon.

Steve Knopper (22:53)

He talked about it as if this was no big deal. It happens all the time. It's healthy. And people were outraged. Another related thing that happened in that video was that there was a young boy and his family interviewed as part of that documentary, basically agreeing and supporting what Michael Jackson had said.

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (23:12)

The most loving thing to do is to share Your bed with someone, you

Steve Knopper (23:15)

know, you really think that?

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (23:16)

Yeah, of course. You're taking the position that you use every single night that you go into you sleep and you're sharing it with another.

Steve Knopper (23:26)

But when the documentary came out and got all this negative attention from Michael Jackson, the boy and his family switched their stories. And then they started accusing Michael Jackson of child sexual abuse, just as the previous boy had done in the early 90s. The prosecution picked up the case and Michael Jackson went on trial in 2005 for child sexual abuse.

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (23:52)

We love to be a Michael Jackson fan. We love to be a chorus of

Podcast Host/Announcer (23:57)

collective voices cheering for Michael Jackson innocent and railing against the press.

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (24:04)

I think the press is trying to make this a freak show.

Steve Knopper (24:07)

And eventually, after a long period and quite an extended media circus at the courthouse, Michael Jackson was found not guilty by a jury.

Matt Bellamy (24:16)

We, the jury in the above entitled case, find the defendant not guilty of

Sean Ramis (24:20)

a lewd act upon a minor child

Matt Bellamy (24:22)

as charged in count five of the indictment dated June 10, 2005 for person number 80.

Steve Knopper (24:33)

After he passed in 2009, it seemed like there was. And my book came out during this period, but it seemed like there was sort of a rush to lionize Michael Jackson again and people seemed comfortable sort of saying, well, he was found not guilty by a court in 2005, so we can kind of restart experiencing his music with joy and no guilt again, as perhaps we weren't able to before. And that period lasted for a few years and there, you know, there are a lot of tributes paid to him and that sort of thing after this tragedy of his passing at just 50 years old. And then in 2019, this documentary on HBO came out called Leaving Neverland.

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (25:14)

Hello, Wade, Today is your birthday, so congratulations, I love you, goodbye.

Steve Knopper (25:23)

And what that is about is two now grown men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who had been friends with Michael in an earlier period when they were boys. Robson actually testified at Michael Jackson's trial in 2005, defending him and saying no child sexual abuse had ever happened. But this documentary that came out in 2019 was four hours long and both men detailed these very traumatized memories of what the King of Pop had allegedly done to them.

Sean Ramis (26:01)

I think it's worth asking here that Michael Jackson was never found guilty of abusing children in a court of law. Has there ever been any smoking gun, definitive proof that he did this stuff?

Steve Knopper (26:18)

No. No. All of these charges against him are in the category of accusation. And some people listening to this might say what a naive person is saying that, but it's factually true. You know, it's. It's. He was found not guilty in a court in 2005. The Leaving Neverland allegations are as vivid and believable as they may seem. They're just that they're allegations.

Matt Bellamy (26:42)

And.

Steve Knopper (26:43)

And then there's these more recent charges that are just coming up in court with this family who knew Michael, and those have yet to be adjudicated. And then the original charges that we Talked about in 1993, those were settled. And I've had many arguments with friends over beers about, does a settlement imply guilt? You can make a great argument for yes, and you can make a great argument for no. But in the end, to answer your question, no, there's never been any definitive proof.

Sean Ramis (27:17)

Chris Rock weighed in on Michael Jackson when he was still alive. Another kid.

Matt Bellamy (27:21)

I'm fucking done. I'm done with Michael. I'm done.

Sean Ramis (27:24)

I was a fan my whole life.

Matt Bellamy (27:26)

I am fucking done.

Sean Ramis (27:27)

I'm handing him my glove, okay? Dave Chappelle weighs in on him and this documentary. Once he's dead and the doc comes

Matt Bellamy (27:36)

out, I don't think he did it. But you know what?

Michael Jackson (voice clips) (27:40)

Even if he did do it, you know what I mean? You know what I mean?

Steve Knopper (27:51)

I mean, it's Michael Jackson.

Sean Ramis (27:55)

Do you think some part of this is people saying, you know, whatever he did is done. He's dead. And I still love this music, and I'm ready to move on and just enjoy this movie. I don't want to characterize it as not caring anymore, but maybe there's nothing I can do. This man also was incredible. Let me go celebrate that.

Steve Knopper (28:20)

Yeah. I mean, I think now we're getting into the territory of the validity of judge the art, not the artist, you know, and as you know, you know, as everyone knows, there are many, many, many examples of artists who have done terrible, horrific things, and yet we still like their work. James Brown, who was well known to have abused his spouses and other women that he was with. Do we not listen to James Brown? I'm working on a book right now about funk music and the history of funk music. Obviously, he plays a crucial role in that development. I can't ignore that. You know, you have to emphasize it. And I run into frustration about that, too, because I don't want to keep glorifying this guy. I mean, Afrika Bambaata just died, and he was a pioneer of hip hop. And it's not quite as well known, but he was accused of child sexual abuse as well. And there's some evidence that suggests that he did it. I can't. I'm not going to say whether he did or didn't. He was a pioneer of hip hop. Without him, hip hop doesn't progress and doesn't become what it became. And so if you're writing the biography of him, you kind of have to acknowledge the good and the bad.

Sean Ramis (29:36)

Steve Knopper wrote a Michael Jackson biography that was published in 2015. I asked him if he'd keep the same title if it were published today.

Steve Knopper (29:43)

Oh, good question. M.J. the genius of Michael Jackson? Probably not.

Sean Ramis (29:49)

I'm Sean Ramis from Avishai Artsy produced our show today. Jolie Meyers edited. David Tadashore mixed Gabriel Donatov checked the facts for today, explained SA.