Carrie Fisher defended Michael Jackson in her memoirs

It has been eight years and a week or two since Michael Jackson passed away in a rented mansion in Los Angeles, and twelve years since he was acquitted on all counts by a jury after a trial so that bizarre the prosecutor himself was seen at one point with his head in his hands as one of his witnesses perjured herself.

The very idea that he was living in a rented mansion at the end expresses the absurdity of Jackson’s life. His residences are legendary locations: the Jackson’s Hayvenhurst mansion in Encino is set to become a tourist attraction and of course there is Neverland, the 3000 acre ranch whose zoo and carnival rides have not seen life in years. Also there is the Jackson’s original home in Gary, Indiana, which is a destination for devoted fans. A quick look over what folks have to say on Trip Advisor about their visit will remind you that there most certainly are two Americas.

While never found guilty of a crime, Jackson’s pariah status is the reason he never had a home after the 2005 trial. To this day people stop by one of the posters of him in our record shop and make a “Wacko Jacko” joke. As life-long fans we’re insulted. As human beings we’re appalled by the ability of the media to crucify public figures without consequence. And we’re tempted to ask how much they really know about the people who made the allegations, or the people who propagated the rumors and innuendos which have so widely been proven to not only false bust shockingly self-serving. We wish the people making jokes would read this 2011 essay by Charles Thomson about the media’s shocking bias against Jackson in coverage of the trial.

If only people would recognize how transparent the motives of the Arviso family were, or how unethical television ‘journalists’ like Diane Dimond used the case to benefit their own careers, often making entirely unverified claims under the unscrupulous umbrella of ‘un-named sources.’ Anyways, we agree with Thomson’s argument that the media’s treatment of Jackson was “shameful.”

People seem unwilling to listen when you point out that the Arviso family had already filed a questionable lawsuit against J.C. Penny after the mother and children were caught shoplifting. Or that she had spoken with an attorney about suing Michael Jackson before her family had even met the pop star.

Instead they’ll be quick to point to the 1993 claims against Jackson as evidence of a pattern, but that earlier case was also fraught with suspicious motives. The father of that accuser, Evan Chandler, was ostensibly a dentist but also acted as a drug dealer to celebrities, as described in the late Carrie Fisher’s 2011 memoir, Shockaholic. Fisher, who admits having unnecessary dental work “just for the morphine,” described about how Chandler seemed to be scheming to put Jackson in a compromising position and was using his son as bait. “This was the time I knew I had to find another dentist,” she wrote. “No drug can hide the feeling of one’s skin crawling.”

The most unsettling aspect of this case is a recorded telephone conversation between Chandler and his ex-wife’s new husband, in which he describes how he will win the case against Jackson. It took place on June 8, but Chandler later claimed he learned about the alleged abuse on June 16.

In her book, Fisher defended Jackson:

I never thought that Michael’s whole thing with kids was sexual. Never. As in Neverland. Granted, it was miles from appropriate, but just because it wasn’t normal doesn’t mean that it had to be perverse. Those aren’t the only two choices for what can happen between an adult and an un-related child hanging out together.

Anyway, another year has passed and things will remain the same. Sony will make millions of an artist they could hardly recognize when he struggled, and people will stop in the record shop and make “Wacko Jacko” jokes.