I feel horrible about not trying to stop it with people that I knew had problems. And there’s nothing I can do to take it back. And if someone was hurt by it, saying I’m sorry isn’t enough. Netflix tried to bring Michael Jackson’s name back into the same dark conversation, but Debbie Rowe’s words make that version harder to accept so easily.
She had been close enough to see the side of Michael that cameras, tabloids, and documentaries often ignored. And when she was asked about him, she did not describe the monster image people tried to sell. She described someone who was judged through suspicion before people even looked at the facts.
That is why her statements matter here, because before Netflix could rebuild the same old narrative, Debbie had already challenged the way people were trained to see Michael. I should have tried harder. [snorts] I should have tried to stop it. I should have done more. I should have done something.
And I didn’t. Debbie Rowe directly challenged the way people judged Michael Jackson’s friendships with young boys. The interviewer tried to push the conversation towards suspicion, but Debbie refused to follow that framing. She said she personally never saw anything wrong or inappropriate. That matters because she was not giving some vague celebrity defense.
She was saying people judged Michael through an idea that was already planted in their minds, not through what she actually saw. In her view, the public had already decided what they wanted Michael to be, and that is why normal behavior was turned into something dark. Now, throughout his career, he’s surrounded himself with young boys as friends, right? Yeah, boys hang out with other boys.
Did you ever advise him against it because it might not look good to the rest of the world. I’m not his mother. Mhm. I didn’t see anything inappropriate about it at all. Okay. How would people view it if it was me? Or you? Well, I You all of a sudden it’s inappropriate? You can You can’t do that? Well, if I I’m confused as to where people have come up with the decision, a blanket statement that it is inappropriate.
It’s because they have preconceived ideas that are absolutely incorrect. Mhm. Period. Then Debbie goes even further. She directly denies that Michael would ever hurt children and says his real instinct was to help them. This is one of the strongest moments because she speaks with complete confidence.
She does not sound like someone trying to protect a celebrity’s brand. She sounds tired of repeating something obvious to people who never wanted to listen. To her, Michael was not dangerous to children. He was someone who wanted to make their lives less painful, especially when they were sick, lonely, or struggling.
That detail changes the whole feeling of the conversation because Debbie is not only saying she never saw anything inappropriate. She is explaining what she believed Michael’s heart really was. You’re comfortable with him being around your children all the time despite those rumors. He’s their father. Yes. But you don’t think He is not a file.
that he would do anything to any of them. Absolutely not. Not to his children or to anyone else’s children. Okay. Except help them. If they needed it. Mhm. If he could do something to make their life better, to make something less painful, to [snorts] make life a little bit more tolerable, Mhm.
even for a minute, he would do that. Mhm. But he wouldn’t do anything to hurt a child. And it I’m tired of hearing it. Because you can only take the lies for so long. And I’ve reached my limit. And that’s why I’m doing this. I’m tired of the lies. I’m tired of the bull That is why Debbie’s role in the 2005 trial became so important.
Prosecutors likely expected her to help damage Michael because she had a personal history with him and knew parts of his private life. From the outside, she looked like someone who could be used against him. She had been close to him, had children with him, and had no reason to defend him if she truly wanted to hurt him.
But once she took the stand, the story did not go the way the prosecution wanted. Instead of becoming a weapon against Michael, her testimony backfired. Just a little over 300 miles west of here, more witnesses are set to take the stand in the Michael Jackson trial today. And this morning, prosecutors are reeling after a second day of testimony from Jackson’s ex-wife, Debbie Debbie Rowe.
She was called to help their case, but as NBC’s Mike Taibbi reports, that strategy may have backfired. What made Debbie’s testimony even more damaging for the prosecution was that she did not just avoid attacking Michael. She defended him and shifted attention toward the people around him and the accuser’s family.
She said her positive comments about Michael were not scripted. She also described people around Michael as opportunists chasing his money. Suddenly, the focus was not only on accusations against Michael, but also on the motives of people close to the situation. In fact, she expanded her testimony that her glowing interview about her ex-husband 2 years ago was not rehearsed or scripted in any way and talked not about a conspiracy led by Jackson against his accuser’s family, but by the inner circle around Jackson aimed directly at the singer’s money. They’re
opportunistic vultures, all of them, she said, adding that the current accuser’s family was also after Jackson’s millions. The prosecutors quickly ended their morning’s examination of her after only 11 minutes. And Debbie’s importance did not end with the 2005 trial. After Michael’s death, she also testified about his medical history, pain, doctors, and substance use.
Her testimony painted a painful picture of a man who had been dealing with serious health problems for years, not someone whose final struggle came out of nowhere. She connected his pain treatment back to the Pepsi burn accident and described doctors giving him strong medication while competing for influence around him.
That matters because it shows Michael as someone surrounded by people who were supposed to help him, but may have failed to protect him. Frankly, it was sad, Piers, the story that she told, and that was of competing doctors trying to give Michael Jackson as much pain medication as they could, uh, and trying to one-up each other.
During the time period after he was recovering from that 1984 Pepsi commercial debacle where he burned his head all the way through the rest of his life. She also testified that she saw in Munich, Germany, during the 1997 Victory Tour, Michael Jackson getting Propofol in a hotel room, saying it looked like a surgical suite, getting it just for sleep, two consecutive nights or two separate nights during that tour.
And she talked about his use and how low he got during this period. It all comes back to these doctors that she says were taking advantage of him. Another testimony about Michael’s sleep treatments makes that concern even clearer. Debbie says she stayed with him during those treatments because she wanted to make sure he woke up.
That one detail is chilling because it shows people close to Michael already feared something could go wrong long before the final tragedy. This was not just about a celebrity using medication. This was about a man desperate for sleep turning to doctors for help while people around him worried that the treatment itself could become dangerous.
Mr. Jackson would seek the help of doctors to to get some sleep? Not until we became friends. Okay. And when you became friends, did you then come to have that understanding? Yes. Did he ever discuss it with you? Only when I was there. Okay. And on those occasions, would he say to you, “Hi, I’ve got to get some sleep.
Do you come with me while I get some sleep at the doctor’s office?” Sometimes. And do those include the three times outside of the states that we discussed? I insisted on that. Why did you insist on that? [snorts] I wanted to make sure he woke up. So, you insisted on being present cuz you wanted to make sure he woke up? Yes.
This is where Netflix’s framing starts to look weak. The documentary acts like the public is still being asked to decide Michael’s guilt, even though the real trial already ended years ago. Critics argue that instead of giving the full picture, Netflix brings the audience back into the emotion of old accusations and makes the case feel unfinished again.
That is the problem. It is not just telling a story, it is reopening a verdict the courtroom had already reached. And when a documentary does that, it has a responsibility to be extremely careful. Yeah, Netflix is now trying to get in on the Michael Jackson business as well with a new documentary called Michael Jackson: The Verdict.
I want to play just a small clip of the trailer to show you why myself and other fans are nervous about it. It was our opinion that they began to come up with these allegations to get a payday. Testimony keeps on coming. Culkin called the allegations absolutely ridiculous. Guilty or innocent, we decide.
Uh, he’s innocent. Like, he won the case. They didn’t win. He wasn’t proven guilty. There’s no you decide here. Why are they trying to rewrite history yet again to smear Michael Jackson, to make it more slanderous? This right here proves to you this is not going to be an accurate documentary. It’s there to get rage bait.
And I urge all you Michael Jackson supporters and all you just regular people popcorn playing with do not go watch this documentary. Don’t take the rage bait. Don’t engage. Don’t watch it to fact check it. Just ignore it especially in its first week of release. Let’s show Netflix we want actual documentaries, real information, the truth, not salacious hit jobs like this.
The court record makes the story harder to sell as simple. Netflix may present one version of Michael, but once the trial evidence and defense side are brought back in, the picture becomes much more complicated. That is what supporters keep pointing out. A documentary can guide the audience towards suspicion, but it cannot erase the fact that a jury heard far more than a viewer sees in a short film.
A documentary feels powerful because it is emotional, edited, and direct, but a trial works differently. Witnesses are cross-examined, evidence is challenged, claims are tested from both sides. So, when Netflix presents the case in a way that feels emotionally final, critics argue that it skips the harder part of the story.
Why the legal result did not match the public suspicion. They covered the entire 2005 trial. And even though Michael won the case, the documentary paints the picture that Michael was a monster who got away with abusing children. But then, I went and found the real court documents. The testimonies that they chose to leave out.
See, the story that Netflix tells you isn’t quite what it seems. Even the family at the center of the whole case, the Arvizos, in the documentary, they’re the victims. The broke family, the sick kid, the superstar who took advantage of them. But that’s not the family I found in the court records. What they don’t tell you is this family is probably the worst nightmare for celebrity.
And this is a scam that they’ve been running for years before they met Michael. Tom Mesereau’s comments make that criticism even stronger. As Michael’s defense attorney, he directly questions why Netflix would reopen a case Michael already won. He reminds people that this was not an undecided situation.
A jury heard months of testimony and cleared Michael on every count. Mesereau’s point is simple. A short documentary cannot fairly replace what the jury saw in court. And if Netflix is going to bring back the most serious accusations, then it also has a responsibility to show the weaknesses, contradictions, and defense evidence that shaped the verdict.
This clip is strong because Mesereau is not speaking as a random supporter. He was inside the trial. He knew the evidence, the witnesses, the pressure, and the problem in the prosecution’s case. This is a very joyous time for supporters and lovers of Michael Jackson. The biopic is setting all kinds of records.
His memorabilia is selling all over the world. His music is streaming all over the world. Even his book Moonwalk is is flying off the shelves. I mean, this is a great time to be a supporter and lover of Michael Jackson. So, why do we need a biopic in the mid- Excuse me, not a biopic. Why do we need a documentary in the middle of this that goes back 21 years in a case where he was completely exonerated? The jury deliberated for 8 days.
They had seen almost 5 months of testimony. They had been in trial 5 days a week during those 5 months. They deliberated 8 days and they came back with not guilty on every felony count and every misdemeanor count. 14 times they said not guilty. Well, that’s what it is. The the media, I’m not including everybody, the media [clears throat] tends to want to glorify salacious allegations.
They don’t like to spend time on the counter argument. So, the media and this documentary spends time on very dramatic, disturbing, salacious allegations and doesn’t do justice to the problems with the prosecution’s witnesses and the prosecution’s case. For example, there’s no mention of Chris Tucker, who was our last witness, the famous comedian and actor.
He testified as our last witness. He said that he knew this family, he had experience with them, he had concerns about them, and he told Michael to be careful. And he described the accuser as cunning. The Martin Bashir angle makes the whole thing even more questionable. Netflix leans on a voice connected to one of the most damaging media moments in Michael’s life, but the full history around that coverage does not get the same weight.
That matters because if a documentary uses old media figures to shape the story, it should also show why those figures were controversial in the first place. Bashir’s interview was not just another media appearance. It became one of the biggest turning points in how the public looked at Michael.
A single interview helped create images and moments that followed him for years. So, if Netflix brings that world back into the conversation, it cannot act like the old media coverage was clean, neutral, or harmless. So, Netflix brings him back in, sits him down, and lets him walk you through how he met Michael and earned his trust.
They frame him as a credible, respected journalist who finally got the story. Except Netflix leaves out one pretty important detail about Martin Bashir. The documentary mentions that Bashir interviewed Princess Diana in 1995, and it’s a big reason why Michael trusted him. Over 20 million people watched it, and it’s the thing that made his career.
But in 2021, an investigation by the BBC figured out how he actually got the interview. He faked bank statements. He had a designer mock up fake documents to make it look like people close to Diana were being paid to spy on her. And he used those fakes to win over her brother and get himself in the door.
So, that’s the man whose documentary launched the whole case. Basically, Bashir was a snake in the grass. It’s the same play that he ran on Diana. What makes this part hit harder is Bashir’s own later comment. Even he acknowledged that Michael was never convicted and said he personally saw no wrongdoing.
That does not fit neatly into the darker version people kept selling. It adds another crack in the simple narrative because one of the very people tied to Michael’s media downfall later admitted the case was not the clear-cut story many wanted it to be. The public often remembers Bashir as part of the machine that damaged Michael’s image.
So when even that same figure gives a statement that does not support the darkest assumption, it complicates the story. It shows how different the public version became from what some people actually saw up close. But the truth is that uh he was never convicted of any crime. I never saw any wrongdoing myself.
And whilst his lifestyle may have been a bit unorthodox, Unorthodox, I’ll accept that. It is weird, fans. You got to accept that from time to time. I don’t believe it was criminal. And uh I think the world has now lost the greatest entertainer it’s probably ever known. So why are we constantly kicking this man while he’s down? I am so sick of this narrative.
And clearly, the the people are as well. They have spoken. They don’t want to watch Michael Jackson keep getting kicked. They want to celebrate the man and then all that he actually the good that he did. They don’t want to just believe a few money chasers. Another important piece is the claim that the media ignored information about Michael’s girlfriends because it did not fit the version of him they wanted to sell.
This supports the lies angle because someone close to the story says the media already knew parts of Michael’s private life that challenged their narrative but chose not to focus on them. That is a serious point. If information makes Michael look more human or more normal but gets buried because it does not match the darker image, then the public is not seeing the full picture.
It is only seeing the parts that support the story people already want to believe. That is how a person becomes trapped inside a public character. Michael was not allowed to be complicated. I don’t know why they don’t I don’t think anyone believes it. I remember the New York Post called me or the New York Times once and after that hit piece 2019 documentary Living Neverland.
And they called me on the phone. I don’t normally talk to media cuz they always twist things. And they said, “Matt, what do you think of documentary?” I said, “These guys are lying. You guys followed us everywhere with your cameras and paparazzi. You did not leave us alone. You know the girlfriends.
” And I named the girlfriends and how to find them because yeah, we know about her, we know about this one, but it goes against the narrative. So, we’re not interested. We want something juicy. That won’t sell newspapers. I just put the phone down on them. That’s what we were dealing with all the time. This is where the one-sided memory of Michael becomes obvious.
The damaging version reached millions, while Michael’s own response did not travel with the same force. That is how public opinion gets shaped. People do not always remember the full record. They remember the version that was repeated louder, promoted harder, and packaged in the most dramatic way.
And once that happens, even a denial can sound weak because the accusation has already become the headline. Michael could respond, explain, and defend himself, but the public had already been trained to watch him with suspicion. That is why supporters argue the media did not just report on Michael. It shaped the way people were supposed to react to him.
Unfortunately, Living with Michael Jackson got like 100 million viewers, whereas the positive documentary where he had his cameras where Bashir would say “Neverland’s a real bad place, you know, this is real bad for you.” You know, and uh so forth. And the real cameras were so Martin Bashir saying, “This is so great how you’ve made this for for the young children and to help the Heal the Heal the World Foundation and Make-A-Wish Foundation.
” I said, “It’s It brings tears to my eyes, Michael.” But unfortunately, it didn’t get the viewership like the initial documentary did. And Michael never really recovered from that. And that was just devastating for him. Then comes one of the most serious claims about how the footage was shaped.
Bashir is accused of encouraging the same visuals that later made Michael look suspicious. That changes the way the audience sees the material because footage does not always explain itself. A moment can look innocent in one setting, then become damaging when it is edited, repeated, and placed inside a darker story.
Viewers often think video is proof by itself, but video can be guided. The questions asked before a moment, the direction given off camera, the music, the edit, and the narration can all change how people understand what they are seeing. So, if the footage was influenced in a way that later hurt Michael, then the audience has to question what they were really watching.
I I don’t know if you remember the bit where he’s holding Gavin Arvizo’s hands who went on to accuse him of child and he lent on Michael’s shoulder. Michael would never allow someone to do that, but the person who is there, I can’t name them at the moment cuz they’re involved. You’re going to know exactly who I’m talking about.
They’re involved with legal action where they’re they’re suing the estate for money. But, this person told me Martin Bashir said to Michael, “Why don’t you hold his hand? No one thinks you’re foul, especially if you’re holding his hand on international TV. This is going to be huge, Michael. This is your chance to show them that you you just didn’t want to have children.
” Then he’ll say, “Gavin, put your head on Michael’s shoulder. This showed the world how nice and Michael’s got nothing to to prove to anyone cuz no people are just going to go and hold a child’s hand and have them lay on their shoulder, are they? And talk about sleeping in the bed. But, Bashir, this guy tells me who’s told relay back instructed him to do this and it’s on camera.
But, there you go. Public is starting to realize now, I think. This is where the Netflix criticism becomes clearest. The documentary treats the case like it is still waiting for a final answer, but legally, Michael already faced that trial. Critics argue that a documentary should not make a dead man look guilty without giving viewers the full record, especially when he is no longer here to respond.
The issue is not that people are discussing Michael. The issue is when the discussion starts to feel like a second trial after the first one already ended. That is why Debbie Rowe’s words, the trial record, Mesereau’s response, and the Bashir contradictions all matter in the same conversation. They do not just defend Michael emotionally.
They show why the story is more complicated than the version Netflix wants the audience to sit with. We focus on the evidence. And the reality check is Michael is innocent. There’s no you decide, Netflix. There’s no you decide. They already did decide. Michael won. He’s innocent. Everyone’s innocent till proven guilty.
We got to stop with this culture of documentaries that are attempting to make people look guilty based on what? Hearsay? No, we need evidence, and you don’t have any. I know you don’t because if you did, he’d be he would have been put in jail. If you want more videos like this, hit like, subscribe, and share your thoughts in the comments.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
