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Whether you believe Michael Jackson’s two accusers or not, there’s no denying the Leaving Neverland film is incredibly one-sided.

Not a single person other than Wade Robson, James Safechuck and their families was interviewed, while the Michael Jackson Estate was not even given a right of reply to the claims. This violates all norms and ethics in filmmaking and journalism.

More crucially, director Dan Reed decided not to include a whole host of other important information about the accusers’ past and their behaviour to offer balance.

Why? Because it would have discredited them.

In a court trial, the entire purpose is to get to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Journalism is no different. It’s all about fact-finding. Yet Dan Reed made no attempt to scrutinise and investigate whether the allegations are indeed true, he just took them at face value and recorded them.

In the aftermath of its premiere, the documentary was then embraced by the mainstream media across the world, and the allegations within it were essentially reported as fact.

Viewers of the documentary are essentially the jury – but Leaving Neverland only gives them the prosecution side.

If these accusations had come to court while Jackson was alive, he would have been able to offer a defence.

(Image: Amanda Edwards/Getty Images)

The chances are, given that at least some of the claims have been proven, with evidence, to be untrue, Jackson would have been acquitted in a criminal trial for a second time.

In a trial the prosecution would have the burden of proof; the obligation to produce the evidence that would prove Safechuck and Robson’s claims are true.

In the UK, juries are told that they should only convict if they are “sure” of the defendant’s guilt.

In terms of evidence, Robson and Safechuck’s claims are based purely on their own oral testimony. There is no other evidence.

That means the jury would have to be certain of Michael Jackson’s guilt based on that testimony alone.

But if you are a trier of fact and sitting on the jury, and you hear that both alleged victims have provably lied under oath and under penalty of perjury in at least part of that testimony, how can you then be “sure” that everything else is true?

(Image: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

If all of the evidence comes in the form of oral testimony based on memory, and some of it is demonstrably false, the validity of that testimony in its entirety must be called into question.

Witness impeachment, in the law of evidence of the United States, is the process of calling into question the credibility of an individual testifying in a trial.

In any trial, Jackson’s defence would impeach the plaintiffs by introducing prior statements that are inconsistent with current testimony.

In this case, they would include statements given previously by Robson and Safechuck under penalty of perjury in depositions and at a trial.

Both Robson and Safechuck testified under oath in 1993 that Jackson had never abused them, while Robson also went on to testify at Jackson’s 2005 trial, again denying that anything ever happened.

Robson never wavered in the face of withering cross-examination from one of California’s toughest prosecutors.

(Image: George Rose/Getty Images)

In the documentary, Wade Robson also described how he and his 10-year-old sister stayed in Jackson’s bedroom the first two nights they were ever at Neverland in January 1990.

Wade then claimed that his family left to go to the Grand Canyon, while he stayed behind with Jackson alone at Neverland for the next five days. Wade said it was then when he was first abused by Jackson, going into graphic detail about what had allegedly happened over the course of several nights.

But I discovered that his mother, Joy Robson, testified under oath in a deposition in 1993/1994 in relation to the Jordan Chandler case, and again in a deposition in 2016, that Wade had actually gone with them on that trip to the Grand Canyon, before the entire family returned to Neverland for the second time the following weekend.

In 1993, she also revealed that the first time Wade stayed alone with Jackson at the ranch without her was actually that year.

When testifying in defence of Jackson in 2005, Wade also testified that the only time he had been at Neverland without his mother was sometime in 1993.

Robson and Safechuck, like Jackson’s previous two accusers, also have a great financial motive. In 2013, both decided to sue Jackson’s Estate for hundreds of millions of dollars.

(Image: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

During court proceedings for this case, Robson tried to get around a deadline for suing Jackson’s Estate.

Under US law, a person has 60 days from the date they are aware of the existence of a deceased person’s Estate to file a claim against it.

Robson claimed he ‘realised’ he was abused in May 2012, but didn’t file his lawsuit until a year later, so he missed the deadline by about 10 months.

In order to get around this, Robson claimed under oath in court that he wasn’t even aware of the Estate’s existence prior to March 4, 2013.

But Robson had in fact met with John Branca, one of the Estate’s executors, in 2011 in his failed effort to solicit work with the Estate on a Michael Jackson-themed Cirque du Soleil show.

The judge in the case found that Robson had lied about his knowledge of the Estate’s existence in his sworn declaration.

Current testimony would also be called into question.

For example, James Safechuck claims in his sworn declaration that he was abused from 1988 until 1992, when he was 14. Safechuck said the abuse stopped at age 14 because that was when he reached puberty.

In Leaving Neverland, Safechuck describes in vivid detail that Jackson abused him in an upstairs room at Neverland’s main train station “every day” they were together at the ranch during that time period, up until 1992.

But construction permits which I sourced recently show that the train station build wasn’t approved until September 1993. Construction began shortly after, and the building didn’t open until the first part of 1994, when Safechuck was 16 and had reached the height of an adult.

In addition, Safechuck says in his sworn declaration that after 1992, he only visited Neverland in "late 1995 or early 1996", by which time he was 18.

An aerial image of Neverland, taken by press photographer Steven Starr on August 25, 1993 and licensed by Getty Images, also shows that building work on the train station had not even started. Starr this week confirmed to me that the picture was taken on that date.

So any abuse in the train station cannot have happened until Safechuck was on the cusp of adulthood.

These are just some of the many inconsistent statements and declarations that have been made by the pair, even though they had several years to iron out any potential flaws in their stories.

Of course, we cannot categorically rule out that Robson and Safechuck are telling the truth about some of their testimony.

But the bottom line is this; if you are a juror and you are trying Michael Jackson in this case, you would be told that Robson and Safechuck have provided inconsistent statements or lied under oath when giving evidence.

You’d then have to ask yourself, can I really be “sure” that I can believe the rest?

Mike Smallcombe is a Cornwall Live reporter and author of the book 'Making Michael: Inside the Career of Michael Jackson'.