CONTENT WARNING: This story refers to child sexual abuse and mental health issues. Local support agencies are listed below.
James Safechuck was befriended by his idol Michael Jackson – and, he says, repeatedly sexually abused by him. Now, he is taking to court those in the star’s entourage who, he believes, failed to protect him.
James Safechuck was 10 years old and “really into jewellery at the time” when, he says, Michael Jackson – then aged 30 and the most popular and powerful musician in history – bought him a ring. The tiny gold band, set with a row of diamonds, was, Safechuck says, a “wedding ring”, used in a mock ceremony that took place in Jackson’s bedroom in which they made “vows” to one another.
Over the next few years, the collection of gifts from Jackson grew. “He would reward me with jewellery for doing sexual acts to him,” Safechuck says. And those sexual acts occurred regularly. “It would happen every day. It sounds sick, but it was like when you are first dating someone – you do a lot of it.”
Across 30 years, multiple lawsuits, two dramatic trials and an undisclosed number of settlements – with strict non-disclosure clauses ordering silence – while Jackson may have been acquitted of sexual abuse charges in 2005, his reputation regarding relationships with children remains, at the very least, problematic.
And while the King of Pop may have been dead for more than 15 years, his legacy will soon be in the dock again. In November 2026, Safechuck, who first filed a civil lawsuit against Jackson in 2014, will finally take the stand alongside fellow accuser Wade Robson. Both men, now aged 47 and 42, allege that Jackson groomed, seduced and sexually abused them as children – Safechuck from the age of 10 and Robson from the age of seven.
“People might see this as some sensationalised trial,” Safechuck says. “But this is my childhood. I was sexually abused. I was raped. I’m fighting for my younger self.”
With their alleged abuser long dead, Safechuck and Robson must go up against his powerful and wealthy estate. This is represented by two companies: MJJ Productions Inc and MJJ Ventures Inc. The men’s case rests on the allegation that their interactions with the star – at his Neverland ranch, where they were regular visitors; at Jackson’s Los Angeles apartment, known as “the Hideout”; at hotels, recording studios and in trailers on sets – were all arranged by Jackson’s staff, who were fully aware of the abuse the accusers say they suffered, yet did nothing to protect the children involved or to warn or alert their parents. The corporation, the men allege, facilitated their abuse and the corporation should be held liable.
So far, despite more than 10 years of court hearings, not one piece of evidence has yet been presented; legal wranglings have been limited to whether or not such corporations can hold any responsibility to protect children.
“We’ve been fighting for a decade just to get to the starting line,” Safechuck says, “just to have the opportunity to seek justice. Because the mechanisms just aren’t there for survivors.”
But after years of appeals, delays and vigorous pushback from the estate, in November next year extensive and detailed allegations of years of systematic abuse by Jackson – fresh allegations that have never been publicly heard before – will be delivered in open court. “There’s a lot to be told,” Safechuck says.
I first met Safechuck – and Robson – six years ago at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where the controversial documentary Leaving Neverland premiered in January 2019. It was the first time any of their explosive allegations – told in explicit detail across four hours of film – had been aired in public. The audience, reeling from the candid and dramatic revelations, responded with a five-minute standing ovation.
“I couldn’t quite process that we were getting so much support,” Safechuck says today at the home in LA he shares with his wife, Laura, and their three children, aged 14, 11 and 6. “If history was any indicator, then we [as accusers of Jackson] were going to get attacked, so I’d mentally prepared for that.
“There’s also the childhood brainwashing by your abuser,” he adds. “That you’re the bad one, that it’s all your fault, and the idea that if it gets out, your life is going to be over. So it was unexpected, to say the least, that people were being kind.” “People” included Oprah Winfrey, who welcomed Safechuck and Robson onto her famous sofa.
But both men, along with the film’s British director, Dan Reed, and their families, were subjected to abuse – including rape and death threats – online and offline in the wake of the film’s release. “The Jackson fanbase is coordinated, vicious and persistent,” Safechuck says. I ask if he put any safeguards in place. “Yeah, therapy,” he says, wryly.
One positive, however, was that the film prompted other survivors of childhood sexual abuse to contact him. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll meet other survivors and be able to talk to them,’ but that’s what has happened. And that bond, that community, has been such an unexpected blessing.”
For a few months following Leaving Neverland, Jackson’s reputation appeared irreparably ruined, with many former fans struggling to reconcile their image of their idol with the accusations of paedophilia. But views were split, with others backing the estate’s claims that Safechuck and Robson were simply after money.
Five further accusers also approached the Jackson estate to allege that the singer had acted inappropriately with them as children. The year after Leaving Neverland came out, it has recently emerged, the estate quietly struck a deal worth US$16.5 million, under which all five agreed instead to defend Jackson’s reputation. The settlement deal, signed in January 2020, was presented as a purchase of the accusers’ life rights and a consulting agreement, with each of the five to receive $3.3m over six years. The deal also included a clause that neither party should disclose its existence to any third party.
“We survived Leaving Neverland but I’m not sure we could have with those additional allegations,” John Branca, a longtime Jackson aide and manager of the estate, said last year. His lawyers told him, “You have no choice. If these people come forward and make these allegations, then Michael is over, his legacy is over, the business is done,” he said.
The estate – whose main beneficiaries are Jackson’s three children, Prince, 28, Paris, 26, and Bigi, 23, his mother and charities – has amassed more than $3 billion since the singer’s death thanks to the sale of his music catalogue, a lucrative Broadway musical and Cirque du Soleil shows. It hoped further allegations of abuse would be quashed and the late star’s legacy finally secured with a big-budget biopic, originally slated for release this April and trumpeted by Branca as “the largest-grossing, most acclaimed biopic in the history of Hollywood”.
But the release of the film, tentatively titled Michael, has been dramatically delayed as some key scenes need to be reshot. The deleted footage reportedly concerns the film’s depiction of Jordan Chandler – who, at 13, was the first person to publicly accuse Jackson of sexual abuse, in 1993 – and his family as gold-diggers, and to have featured a showdown between the Chandlers and Jackson’s legal team.
The terms of the $20m out-of-court settlement that the Chandler family received from Jackson in 1994, along with an understanding that neither party would ever discuss the deal, reportedly included a clause that the Chandlers would not be depicted in any future film. A little over 18 months before a trial the Jackson estate has done all it can to have dismissed, it is publicly on the back foot.
Safechuck was raised in Los Angeles where he did some occasional acting and at 8 years old was cast in a Pepsi commercial with Jackson. The singer, he says, then began a sustained and sophisticated campaign of grooming, not only of Safechuck but of his entire family. “It was one giant seduction,” he says.
The family regularly hosted Jackson for dinner at their suburban LA home and also allowed their son to share a bed with the singer, often while they slept in the next room. In Leaving Neverland, Safechuck’s mother, Steph, makes no attempt to absolve herself of enabling the alleged abuse. “I f***ed up. I failed to protect him,” she says. Since the film aired, she too has been subjected to vicious abuse from Jackson fans. “The more time goes by – and the more parenting experience I get myself – the more I understand the sacrifice that she made by putting herself out there to be the villain and just taking all that blame,” Safechuck says.
The film also features Safechuck taking a mental tour of the now notorious Neverland ranch – through the “castle”, the cinema, the model train station, the tepees, the swimming pool. “We would have sex there,” he says, evenly, of each location. “It would happen every day.”
What did it feel like to have such graphic and intimate experiences suddenly become so public on film? “The sexual acts are shocking to many people, but I lived through them; they are just part of my life,” Safechuck reflects. “It’s everything around them – the power, the manipulation – that I find the most horrifying.” But, he adds, “It took a little while to get used to having it out there and to get over this fear of everyone knowing.”
‘I think a part of me died. You are dead inside’
The abuse tailed off as Safechuck reached his teens, when he was, he says, “replaced” by younger boys. But Jackson maintained ties, buying him a car on his 16th birthday and offering help with his early career in film-making and music (these days he works in tech). He testified for Jackson against Chandler in 1993, but when, in 2005, he got the call asking him to testify in a second trial brought by Gavin Arvizo, he was 27 and had grown apart from Jackson. The singer grew angry, Safechuck says, and threatened to expose him for perjury in the 1993 case.
Long after his close relationship with Jackson ended, the alleged abuse affected him deeply, Safechuck says. “I think a part of me died. You are dead inside. You go numb – you don’t learn how to process events, good or bad. The self-hatred was really intense, but you don’t know why you hate yourself. I know now that it’s because instead of hating Michael, I hated myself.”
In his twenties, while playing in a band, he used drugs – cocaine, marijuana, opioid painkillers – which gave temporary relief from the feelings of shame and self-loathing. He got a “day job” in tech and cleaned up his lifestyle accordingly. “When the drugs went away, though, then the pain started. I was hit with everything that had been masked and I was really struggling. You don’t know why you’re in so much pain; you don’t connect the abuse to the pain that you’re in at the moment.”
In 2010, his wife gave birth to their son. “Michael made you feel like you did it, that it was all your idea,” he says. “Then you look at your own kid and for the first time you really realise, what? That just makes no sense.” He suffered a breakdown as he attempted to process events that he’d denied to himself for years.
I ask whether he thinks any of this – processing the alleged abuse, filing the case, making the films – would seem possible were Jackson still alive.
“That’s so hard to answer. If you asked me that at different times, I might give you different answers,” he says. “But what was probably more impactful than him being alive or dead was Wade coming out.”
In 2013, Wade Robson went public with his – powerfully similar – story, speaking on the US television show Today. “That’s what opened the floodgates for me.”
‘Some anger has developed’
At one point in our conversation in 2019 I used the word “forced” in relation to the sexual acts that both men allege took place between them and Jackson. Safechuck gently corrected me.
“I wouldn’t call it forcing,” he said. “It was a loving relationship. That’s the hard part for people to wrap their heads around and why there’s so much shame involved. There was real physical pleasure, but wrapped up in a deeply unhealthy and inappropriate relationship.”
Today, he says, his thinking has evolved. “Through talking with other survivors and continuing with therapy, my understanding of the abuse and what has happened has matured,” he says. “When the movie came out there was still this bond and connection with Michael – you still have a connection to your abuser and there’s still love, there’s still fondness. I still felt guilty talking about it. I was still tethered.
“Over the years I have a better understanding of just the horribleness of what he did, how brutal it was, and some anger has developed.”
He thinks that’s down to a lot of things. “It’s the connections you make. It’s finally speaking – putting words to what happened, putting words to your emotions. It’s facing your fears.
“And seeing my kids become the age I was when I was abused allows me to have more of an outside perspective,” he says. “I can see the insidiousness of what he did.”
The back and forth of the legal battles has been “gruelling”, Safechuck says. In 2017 his case was dismissed, prompting a slip back into depression and heavy drinking. “That was so difficult – a really rough patch,” he says. In 2020 the case was revived, after a change in Californian law extended the statute of limitations, granting those who allege childhood sexual abuse more time to file lawsuits, only to be dismissed again in 2021, with a judge ruling that Jackson’s corporations had no legal obligation to protect Safechuck, Robson or other children. But in August 2023, an appeal court judge overturned that decision, allowing both Safechuck and Robson to finally take their cases to trial.
“Although Leaving Neverland in a way vindicated them on screen, they still haven’t been vindicated in the courts,” says Dan Reed, who has now made a follow-up film, Leaving Neverland 2: Surviving Michael Jackson, documenting Safechuck and Robson’s lengthy court battles and airing in the UK later this month.
So lengthy, in fact, that their former lawyer, Vince Finaldi, has retired. Their new lawyer, John Carpenter, is confident: “I only take on cases I think I can win.”
After so many years spent fighting the legal system already, I wonder what justice would look like now for Safechuck. He rubs his closely cropped hair. “Justice is in the fight,” he says eventually. “Justice is having the agency to fight for yourself. Knowing I did everything I could and speaking as loud as I can.
“I’m not in control of the outcome,” he says. “So that part you have to let go as much as possible. The justice is in the fight itself.”
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London
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