The second part of Leaving Neverland aired on HBO Monday night, which chronicled Wade Robson and James Safechuck’s plight in defending Michael Jackson in court after he allegedly abused them for years.
While part 1 focused on how the King Of Pop allegedly manipulated and groomed the boys into having sexual relationships with him, part 2 looked at how the alleged abuse followed each boy well into adulthood, and offered an explanation as to why both testified that they were not abused before changing their story.
The Jackson family, meanwhile, is still adamant that every child molestation accusation made in Leaving Neverland is completely false — and severely impacting MJ’s children Blanket Jackson, Prince Jackson, and Paris Jackson.
Video: Oprah Winfrey Interviews Michael Jackson’s Accusers
In an interview last week, Jackie Jackson revealed that the allegations made by Robson and Safechuck are “devastating” to the three siblings, telling E! News:
“They can’t believe it, because they know Wade. They can’t believe what is going on… They are going through some troubling times. It’s painful for them.”
But not nearly as painful as what Robson and Safechuck say they went through all those years ago.
Take a look at the most shocking moments from part 2 of Leaving Neverland (below).
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By 1993, Robson said he was still occasionally sleeping over at Neverland Ranch, but not by himself anymore. He remembered seeing Jordan Chandler, who was the first to accuse Jackson of molestation in 1993, go into the bathroom alone with the superstar multiple times.
When police first knocked on his door and asked him if Jackson touched him, Robson remembered saying “no” without giving it a second thought, explaining:
“Without flinching, without batting an eyelash, my answer was no, no way. Absolutely not. ‘Did he ever touch you here? Did he ever show you pornography?’ All of those sorts of questions. Over and over again, without flinching, my answer was no, absolutely not, never.”
This stubborn defense, Robson added, had been ingrained in him since his relationship with Jackson first started. He recalled:
“Soon as the cop started asking me these questions, the first thing that came to mind for me was everything Michael started saying to me when I was seven. If anyone ever found out that we were doing any of these sorts of things, these sexual things, that he and I would go to jail for the rest of our lives. It was terrifying.”
Admitting that he was “excited by the idea of being able to defend” and “save” his alleged abuser, Robson said of testifying in that first 1993 trial:
“I knew it was true, but I couldn’t let myself go there. It was just like Jordie was the enemy. Michael told me that I had to lie, and that’s what I did. I lied.”
Safechuck, on the other hand, had to be coached by Jackson’s lawyers before testifying. He recalled:
“I went in to meet his lawyers for like a rehearsal. They did like a mock interview, kind of roleplaying the policeman or lawyer.”
All the coaching apparently made it very easy for the child to lie his way through the trial. Safechuck remembered:
“I remember going in there and being very robotic. I mean, like I said, I had rehearsed it so much that it was just going through the motions. They asked and I said no, of course. Just like part of my job, to do that for Michael.”
Safechuck’s mother remembered learning of the allegations and asking Jackson:
“I said to Michael, why is this boy doing this to you? He said, oh it’s not him, it’s his father, his father wants money. I asked if he was angry with the boy, he said no, I’m not angry with him, and I thought what a good man. What a good man Michael is! He’s not even mad at the child!”
Robson’s mother felt the same way, explaining:
“Because we were so close with Michael, obviously I wanted to believe that [he was innocent], but more than anything I believed my son. I believed that he would have told me that something had happened.”
The fact that the 1993 case was settled out of court for millions of dollars supported Robson’s mother’s beliefs that Jackson was the victim. She remembered:
“That to me proves that all it was about all along was money. How much money would make it OK for your child to be abused? 10 million? 20 million? Oh, maybe. I said, to me, no amount of money would make that OK. If I thought that he had touched my son, I would not stop ’til he was behind bars.”
The fact that the Safechucks received a lavish gift from Jackson right around the time of the 1993 trial certainly didn’t make him look like a bad guy. Safechuck’s mother recalled:
“We wanted to buy another house, and Michael gave us a loan at a very low percentage rate. My husband had already had a deposition. We were on Michael’s camp. My son also for Michael, and after that was all said and done is when Michael forgave the debt. Michael said no, I don’t want you to pay me anymore, it’s a gift. So he did buy us a house. ‘It’s just coincidental, he wasn’t buying us off,’ but the timing’s right there. Just sounds bad. Yeah.”
The gifts continued for Safechuck well into his teen years. He remembered:
“He gave me a car when I turned 16. He was very much into filmmaking and I was doing my filmmaking classes. Michael tells you you don’t need school, nobody who ever did anything good goes to school… ‘You don’t need it, all you need is me.’ He very much said you’re going to be like a little Spielberg. Michael would fund these short films and I made those all throughout high school… He talked to my parents, because I was in some of the advanced classes, and he said you don’t need math, so he convinced my parents to pull me out of the classes so I don’t have to worry about studying and just focus on filmmaking. He would tell them, don’t’ worry, I’ll be there. He was very much making you depend on him, like don’t go get an education, I’ll take care of it. And when he went away, just kind of derailed, and I was pretty lost.”
Robson recalled his last alleged sexual experience with Jackson that he claims ended with him secretly disposing his bloodied underwear. He recalled:
“Michael was preparing for his History world tour. I was brought by Michael’s driver to the dance studio where Michael was rehearsing for me to able to watch rehearsal a little bit and hang out, and that night, he took me back with Michael back to the hotel. So I’m 14 a this point, and I’ve had a major growth spurt. I’m probably 5’11, so the same or taller than Michael. Just a whole different physical vibe. And at some point in the night, we slipped back into the routine, the same sort of sexual stuff, and I don’t remember how exactly it evolved, how it moved to this next stage, but what ended up happening is Michael tried to penetrate me in my anus with his penis. Trying for a while, and I guess was able to a bit, but it was really painful, and too painful for me, so he stopped. I don’t remember us like talking about it or anything like that, or acting like anything particularly different had happened, I think after it wasn’t working, after it was too painful for me, we kind of went back to our regular sexual routine. The next morning, Michael had like a recording session to prepare for… he handed me some new camera that he had gotten that I could play with.”
He continued:
“[The next day I was] dropped off by his driver at my condo in Hollywood, and that afternoon, my mother receives a phone call from Michael’s personal secretary that Michael wants to see Wade right away. I think I was picked up again by Michael’s driver and brought to the dance studio where he was back in rehearsals. Right away he just went right into it, he was super nervous and said, what did you do with your underwear from last night? I said I don’t know, I took them off and showered and put new ones on. He said you gotta go home and find them, and I don’t know if there’s any… there might be some blood on them. If there is you gotta get rid of them. Got back in the car and he drove me back to the condo, and luckily, not luckily, I guess my mother hadn’t found them, hadn’t tried to clean them yet. I found the underwear and there was some drops of blood on the inside. My blood. I grabbed them, stuffed them in my pocket, down into the garage, and threw them in the bin. That was the last sexual experience that I remember with Michael.”
Both Robson and Safechuck had settled down with girlfriends by the time more allegations surfaced in 2003 — but living with the secrets of their childhood weighed on both very heavily. Robson explained:
“Secrets will eat you up. It sucks life out of you. Just deteriorates you from the inside, like a part of you is dead. It kind of took everything I had to function during the day, to let other people see me as a functioning person. It took a lot of effort to keep it together. And then I would go home and be a wreck, and I’m sure it was hard on my wife.”
He remembered the toll it took on him as he became a young adult:
“I couldn’t sleep. I would just have panic attacks about things that shouldn’t give me panic attacks, and one of the weird things is not liking yourself and not knowing why. I didn’t know why I had these problems or felt these ways. Constant anxiety and depression and not knowing why you’re like that. When I was in my early 20s I did a lot of substances to help deal with it. At the time I didn’t know that that’s what I was doing. But then when I got off the substances and there was nothing to mask it was when I really noticed that I was anxious all the time.”
When more allegations against Jackson went public in 2005 after being accused of molestation by then 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo, Safechuck was once again called to testify on the singer’s behalf — but this time he didn’t want to. He remembered:
“Michael called, and I hadn’t talked to him in a really long time. I had known about the trial, so I saw the pattern from before happen again. He called my parents and tried to convince them to testify for him and get involved. My dad was very much back to let’s protect Michael… At some point I worked up the courage to tell Michael that I don’t want to testify, I remember silence on the phone for a while. He said you know, I understand, it’s really hard, and it’s tough to go through this with all the media and everything. But we can’t let them do this to us. We can’t let them take us down. Us, us, us.”
The pressure to protect Jackson was so great, Safechuck says it’s what finally made him crack and tell someone the truth:
“I was kind of breaking, like having a nervous breakdown. I didn’t want to be involved, so I told my mom then that he wasn’t a good person, and that I don’t want them involved. So that was tough. I couldn’t talk about it. I just said enough to not get them involved. And she never pushed.”
Safechuck’s mother recalled:
“Jimmy was over and he said to me, Michael’s an evil man. And I said OK, I stood up, and I hugged him, and do you want to go get help… he was so afraid that I would tell somebody, super scared, like nervous breakdown scared. It was a begging sort of, you can’t tell anybody. I felt that I had f**ked up so much the first time, that I wasn’t the mother that I should have been guarding him, he’s coming to me with this truth that’s killing him right now. I wasn’t going to tell anybody. I could be there for him now.”
When he told Jackson he wasn’t willing to testify, Safechuck claims it was the last time the superstar spoke to him, remembering:
“He got really angry at me, he threatened me… he threatened me with his lawyers and said that I had perjured myself years ago and he has the best lawyers in the world and they were gonna get me. I just said I don’t want any part of it, you’ll hear nothing from me. I was just trying to calm him down to get him off the phone. The last time I talked to him was near the end of the trial, and he tried again… he wanted me to testify. He went into a spiel about I’m sorry I haven’t been there for you for directing and all that stuff, let’s do something. I know I haven’t been there, and I cut the conversation short and I said just don’t call again, and I hung up. And that’s the last time I spoke to him.”
Robson explained that he still wasn’t speaking up at the time of the 2005 trial because he wasn’t as strong as he needed to be to face the truth. He recalled:
“The idea of this truth coming out and [his wife] Amanda knowing about it and my family knowing about it and everybody in the entertainment business in my career knowing about it…was just a ridiculous idea that was never going to happen in my mind. In my mind, my whole life would be over. If I questioned Michael’s perspective that he was telling me about Gavin, then I felt like I would break. Like I couldn’t be strong, as strong as I needed to be.”
The Robsons tried to stay out of the 2005 trial until they were subpoenaed. Robson admitted his complicated feelings for Jackson affected how he viewed both trials:
“I can’t imagine if I was Gavin or if I was Jordie at that time, no justice being served and not being believed by so many people. For Gavin, I wish I was at a place where I could tell the truth and be a comrade with him, stopping Michael and stopping a lot of other kids from being abused. I just wasn’t ready, I wasn’t able, when was 11 and when I was 22, and I remember feeling happy for sure that he was acquitted, that he wasn’t going to jail. I didn’t believe or understand that the sexual stuff that happened between Michael and I was abuse. I didn’t feel like I was hurt by it, that it was anything bad that happened to me. At that point, it was… I loved Michael, Michael loved me, this was something that happened between us, that’s it. I still had absolutely no understanding that I was affected, or any feeling that I was affected negatively.”
When Jackson died in 2009, Safechuck’s mother said she “danced” with joy, remembering:
“Oh thank god, he can’t hurt anymore children. Those were my thoughts, and I danced. I was so happy he died.”
Robson, meanwhile, still had secrets buried inside him — and his career suffered because of it. After getting his dream job to direct a feature film, Robson said he had to drop out of the project, revealing:
“The more success I gained, the less fun it became. It was just more about pressure… I found a therapist trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. I went through the story of my life, and I went through the story of my life with Michael, but just the good parts, just the creative inspiration, the work, the friends, all that stuff… I was saying I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what I want, left from right, all I know is [Amanda] and [his son] Koa, that’s all that makes any sense to me.”
As his son became the age he was when he got abused, things changed for Robson:
“I start to have these images of the kind of sexual stuff that happened between Michael and I, happening to Koa, and Michael doing to Koa what he did to me. And my immediate emotional reaction to having those images is just this rage, and disgust, and violent feeling. Like I would kill anyone who did anything like that to Koa. What I started thinking was how can I have such clear feelings, negative horrible feelings about the idea of that sexual stuff happening to Koa, but when I think about Michael and I and all that sexual stuff going on, I don’t feel anything. That’s probably kind of weird. Then I start thinking if I’m going to go into therapy, and try and really get to the bottom of what is going on with me, I probably have to talk about the sexual stuff that went on. I go in for a session with Dr. Shaw, all the stuff about all the allegations and Michael Jackson molesting kids and all that stuff, it happened to me.”
Then, after his brother’s wife had a dream that Robson told them about being abused, Robson confessed everything to his family.
His mother was especially shocked, as she recalled:
“For five months after that, [his wife] Amanda wouldn’t allow me into their home. Wade and I would meet so I could see Koa. We’d have to meet in a park. I was so hurt. I’d always had such a great relationship with Amanda and all my family… this was the hardest thing for me to deal with. And I thought, she blamed me.”
She continued:
“I had one job, I had one child, and I f**ked up. I had all these months of loving my life with Michael… all those wonderful memories it was all based on the suffering of my son. My son had to suffer for me to have this life. My son is messed up today because of it, and I’m messed up today because of it…”
In 2013, Robson decided to go public with his own allegations in a lawsuit. He explained:
“I had to defend the lie for so many years. I didn’t want to do that anymore. I was just trying to declare this whole new life for myself based on the truth… If speaking that truth, other survivors of child sexual abuse at the hands of anybody could help in any way shape or form by me coming forward and speaking it, I wanted to be able to do that. I wanted to be able to speak the truth as loud as I had to speak the lie for so long.”
Wow.
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[Image via WENN.]