Director Dan Reed’s upcoming documentary on HBO, Leaving Neverland, is leaving a lot of questions and anger regarding Michael Jackson as an iconic figure. In the past, Jackson had been accused of alleged sexual misconduct with Wade Robson and James Safechuck when they were boys. Although both had denied the claims in court at that time, in 2013 they sued the Jackson estate after realizing that what happened to them was not right.
“It’s a film about Wade Robson and James Safechuck, two little boys to whom this dreadful thing happened long ago. It’s the story of their coming to terms with that over two decades and the story of their families,” Reed said. “As far as including other eyewitnesses to that, there was no one else in the room, I don’t believe, when Wade was being molested by Michael or when James was having sex with Michael.”
A lot of Michael Jackson’s fans pointed out that this topic for the documentary was unfair as there was no way for Jackson to currently defend himself.
“The allegation’s directed against Michael himself and of course he’s no longer around to defend himself,” Reed said. “So we included the things he said while he was alive in defense of his behavior, during the 1993 and 2003-2005 investigations. He went on television and his lawyers made statements, and we include quite a lot of that stuff.”
Robson and Safechuck’s motives were called into question when they filed their respective lawsuits against Jackson in 2013, years after his death. Reed is aware of this, especially in such a sensitive discussion, but he points out the hours of thorough research he pulled off.
“[I] read a lot of the witness statements there and spoke to a lot of the investigators and I didn’t find anything that contradicted or cast any doubt whatsoever on Wade and James’s accounts,” he said.
Finding Neverland will surely be a documentary watched while under a microscope. It targets Michael Jackson’s legacy and will very much change history.
The two-part documentary will air sometime in early March on HBO.