In part 2 of our rebuttal, you'll hear some examples of bias, lack of context and misleading information in Think Twice that undermines their presumption of guilt. The focus of this episode is examining how Think Twice handles the evidence in the first two sex abuse cases against Michael Jackson.
What sort of fact checking process have they used to check the claims of the Chandler an Arvizo allegations? What sources are they citing? What sources are they leaving out? Who do they choose or not choose to interview?
Looking at what their reference pages leave out and looking at the people they selected to interview reveals the motive in Think Twice towards a predetermined narrative, versus a motive to finding the truth. We argue that because of what they left out, Think Twice can't cover these allegations with any degree of fairness.
Episode image from Michael Jackson Silhouette
Think Twice Episode 2: All Children, Except One, Grow Up
In this episode, Think Twice covers the Chandler Sex Abuse Allegations from 1993
The following sources I assert are necessary to examine and evaluate before making judgments about the 1993 Chandler Allegations:
In later court documents, Ray Chandler reveals that he moved in with Evan to start working on his book in August 1993, when the Chandler allegations went public. Here are those court documents.
Hughes was the legal secretary working for Chandler's lawyer, Barry Rothman, during the time of the Chandler scandal. She reports seeing Jordan Chandler alone in Rothman's office for hours before he ever went to the authorities.
7.Debbie Rowe's testimony about Jackson's March 1993 scalp surgery
Here is a link to the source page for Think Twice, which does not include any of the above sources.
Episodes 2-6 of this podcast detail the evidence in the Chandler Allegations, including information about the police bias and coercive interviews with kids who were friends with Michael Jackson.
Jackson's attorney Tom Mesereau explains that this book was a gift, (see page 2664 of transcript) and sent to Jackson by the publisher, Taschen, a German photographer who was planning to photograph the Jackson family.The prosecution includes this book as evidence because it includes some sexually explicit material, but it carries little weight because it is legal, has no children in it, is artistic, and a gift.
The article explains the testimony that revealed there was no DNA evidence in mattress/linens or anything at Neverland that matched the accuser's DNA.
Department of Justice Analysis on the behaviors of Child Molesters:
"Law enforcement investigations have verified that pedophiles almost always collect child pornography or child erotica. Collection is the key word here. It does not mean that pedophiles merely view pornography: they save it. It comes to represent their most
cherished sexual fantasies. They typically collect books, magazines, articles, newspapers, photographs, movies, etc. Better educated and more affluent pedophiles tend to have larger collections."
2005 Trial Transcripts which includes testimony from former Neverland employees against Michael Jackson, but none testify to seeing child pornography and said the raids were a surprise. It also includes testimony by Shawn O' Grady on March 17 2005, who testifies that the Taschen publisher was going to photograph the Jackson family, which explains why the book was gifted to Jackson.
This story is most logically fed by Evan Chandler. This same scene is in Evan Chandler's book, even though June chandler in her testimony refutes that she observed anything inappropriate in the limo.
The Chandlers' lawyer, Larry Feldman, gives a copy of Jordan's declaration to the Associated Press and then files it under seal. This aligns with Evan's strategy to get the story out as big as he could. It also contradicts his later excuse of "not wanting the publicity" when defending their choice to not participate in the criminal case to put Jackson in jail.
In Ray Chandler’s book, All That Glitters, Hard Copy reporter Diane Dimond is identified as Evan Chandler’s “closest ally”. [page 194].
Excerpt:
“I am advised that your officers have told frightened youngsters outrageous lies, such as, ‘We have nude photos of you’ in order to push them into making accusations against Mr. Jackson,” lawyer Bertram Fields wrote in an Oct. 28 letter to Police Chief Willie L. Williams. “There are, of course, no such photos of these youngsters, and they have no truthful accusations to make. But your officers appear ready to employ any device to generate potential evidence against Mr. Jackson.”
Tape of Corey Feldman’s police interrogation from December 1993
Released on Celebrity Justice in 2004 or 2005
In this interview , Feldman says Jackson was innocent, but tells police the names of 2 men who did molest him, who were later convicted of child molestation. Feldman will later say investigators were only interested in pressuring him to say something incriminating about Jackson.:
Yoshi (Levine) Whaley is the son of Jackson's assistant on the Bad Tour. Yoshi visited his mom on tour when he was about 11 in 1988, and spent some time hanging out with Jackson. In his deposition for Wade Robson's lawsuit, he says police came to his home in 1993 without his parents present and that police lied and tried to pressure him into saying something incriminating about Jackson. Levine defends Michael Jackson and says he never did anything to him.
When the police pressured him to “remember” wrongdoings by Jackson, he told them, “If I don’t remember, I don’t remember.”
Det. Neglia: "I realize how hard this is. I realize how painful it is to think of these things you tried so hard not to think about but you are doing fine. And you are also helping the kid that he is bothering now."Francia: What do you mean he’s bothering?Det. Bircham: He’s doing the same thing.Francia: Macaulay Culkin?Det. Neglia: Only he’s getting a lot more into it. Like your mother pulled you out of there. Macaulay’s mother is not going to pull him out of there. They are feeding him.Det. Birchim: He’s doing worse stuff.Det. Neglia: It’s much worse with him.”
They told Francia that Corey Feldman had drug problems because Jackson molested him:
Det. Neglia: He’s a junkie now, he gets arrested, he doesn’t act or anything. He gets high. He packs his nose with cocaine and he’s going to die by the time he is 22 years old.Jason Francia: How old is he?Det. Neglia: About 21. But that’s the kind of life he is living, and it’s got to do with being exposed to people like this, and having nobody to protect them and to take them out.Det. Birchim: Like you had your mom.Det. Neglia: Like your mom pulled you out, and you’re, you’re candid, and you’re (sic) honesty with us is going to help us. To pull the next kid out, it might even be too late for Macauly (sic) already. But these kids that he’s traveling with are on tour right now. Maybe we can pull them out of it… “
See page 4892 of Jason Francia's trial testimony for his 1993 statements about being around "too many people", when asked if he was ever touched inappropriately at Neverland, and his statements that he wasn't sure if Jackson even touched him inappropriately at all at the arcade.
"Nothing contaminates a forensic interview of a child as much as a bias that prompts someone to become a 'validator' on a mission to extract information necessary to successfully prosecute the accused. They ignore or reject all information that doesn’t fit in with their preconception of the case and focus the interview toward getting information to support charges against the accused. They ignore children’s exculpatory statements because their sole mission is confirm the allegations, not to elicit the child’s own statements."
"A common and severe problem for forensic interviewers is the danger of becoming jaded. Interviewers who become involved in these cases will, over time, build a set of prejudices based on their experiences. This causes them to project their past experiences into the contemporary interview. As well-intentioned as the individual interviewers may be, by filtering how they conduct a forensic interview based on their extensive past experience, they are likely to contaminate the present interview by confirmatory bias."
The guidelines emphasize the importance of open-ended questions, and the danger of closed-ended and suggestive questions.
Guidelines recommend avoiding leading and suggestive questioning, and to be careful of preconceived ideas going into the interview.
Slate article from 2020: The Police Lie. All the Time. Can Anything Stop Them?
“This tendency to lie pervades all police work, and it has the power to ruin lives. Law enforcement officers lie so frequently—in affidavits, on post-incident paperwork, on the witness stand—that officers have coined a word for it: testilying."
NYT article from 2018: ‘Testilying’ by Police: A Stubborn Problem
“In many instances, the motive for lying was readily apparent: to skirt constitutional restrictions against unreasonable searches and stops. In other cases, the falsehoods appear aimed at convicting people — who may or may not have committed a crime — with trumped-up evidence.”
"I actually knew Evan Chandler. I met him several times in the 1990s. I had lots of secret meetings with Evan Chandler, trying to get to the bottom of what was going on. I was pretty young, sort of green and wish I had my present level of expertise to be able to have applied back then. I have stories about that guy that I have never published."
"He was about as inconsistent as they come. He was so determined to get me on his side, I thought he was just a tad scary. If you read my book you sort of get how I felt -- feel -- about him. When [the book] came out he called me screaming at me for not just buying his story 100%. He actually threatened me, and I thought... okay, pal, now I know who you really are."
Letter between Jackson's PI Anthony Pellicano and Chandler's lawyer Barry Rothman, and transcript of audio tape, showing the Chandlers were negotiating for money before taking the allegations public, just as Evan Chandler explained clearly in his book, All That Glitters.
The Canadian Scam Against Jackson as revealed on Hard Copy. This false allegation covered by Dimond on Hard Copy garners skepticism for Dimond's claim that she couldn't imagine a kid making up such detailed allegations (in the case of Jordan Chandler).
This article reveals Rodney Allen's potential connection to Victor Gutierrez and Evan Chandler.
Neverland 5 lawsuit filed by disgruntled Neverland employees is found to be fraudulent
The judge leaves the bench in disgust. The plaintiffs were found to have stolen from Michael Jackson, sold stories to tabloids, hold employment grudges against Jackson, and, in the case of Adrian McManus, have a history of fraud.
Blanca Francia was paid $20,000 from Hard Copy
Mary Fisher's 1994 GQ article, "Was Michael Jackson Framed," which reports on Victor Gutierrez's outreach to Blanca Francia and his work to facilitate tabloid stories.
Former Neverland maid Blanca Francia's 2016 deposition for Wade Robson's lawsuit.
In this deposition, Francia says Pellicano called her and told her Michael Jackson loves her and doesn't want her to go to police. But she also said Pellicano never bullied her. She does say she was harassed by reporters, such as those from the New York Times, and that she was deceived by Hard Copy.
The MJ Cast Interview with former Neverland Chief of Fire & Security, Violet Booker Gaitan. Gaitan notes how the employees who sold stories to tabloids were disgruntled and looking for something more out of Michael Jackson. Gaitain was brought to Neverland because of her police training, and she immediately recognized the professionalism of the staff there. There were often former police officers working at Neverland who took pride in their work and in interviews have expressed offense at the suggestion that they would have ignored or overlooked anything suspicious regarding Jackson's interactions with kids. Gaitan is consistent with the majority of Jackson's staff who describe their positive experiences working at Neverland, and say Jackson was a kind and respectful boss--nothing like the scary, threatening descriptions by a few former employees who filed lawsuits and sold stories.
Diane Dimond never sought balance by doing in-depth interviews with the majority of Jackson's staff who not only believed in his innocence, but who could offer a wider context on why these disgruntled former employees might be motivated to lie about Jackson.
This late submission demonstrates that Sneddon did not want the description to get in the hands of Jackson's defense.
More analyses of whether or not there was a match
Michael Jackson's December 1993 video statement, in which he proclaims his innocence and asks the public to be cautious of the media stories.
PBS Frontline Special Tabloid Truth, which covers the media frenzy when the Chandler allegations came out in 1993. They demonstrate how the media, especially the tabloids, took any fragment of the truth and spun it to outdo the competition. They admittedly weren’t checking stories out.
Journalist Charles Thomson speaking on the Reason Bound Podcast. He explains why an innocent Jackson would want to avoid giving a deposition for the civil trial.
The Chandlers' lawyer files to obtain Jackson's financial records, part of their campaign to pressure Jackson into settling their civil case, rather than going to trial.
Arvizo Allegations 2005 Trial Transcripts
Recommended summary about the Arvizo Allegations on The Michael Jackson Allegations website. The content on the site is fully sourced.
Episodes 7-11 of our podcast also details the evidence in the Arvizo case.
Former federal prosecutor and Harvard law school graduate Neama rahmani speaks on the podcast LA Legal about the overwhelming lack of credibility of the accusers in the Arvizo case.
Sutton criticized the media’s handling of the trial. He wrote, "News organizations abandon the standards of ethical journalism wholesale for the sake of their commercial advantage. The way the cable news operations have elected to conduct their business threatens the integrity of the jury system itself.Nobody who does not sit through every day of every witness’s testimony in a trial really has an opinion about it worth hearing. [Even then, only those who consider that testimony with the ears of a juror mindful of their oath can speak with real authority]. Everything else is blather — entertaining blather, perhaps, but dangerous, too. If jurors who conscientiously fulfill their oath — as Jackson’s did — then are subjected to contempt and abuse for contradicting the self-interested sentiments of an electronic mob, then who among us is safe?"
Although there were no trial transcripts listed on their source page, the first source listed for the Arvizo Allegations episode in Think Twice is Diane Dimond's book, Be Careful Who You Love. This despite the fact that Dimond has shown herself to be biased and untrustworthy by paying sources, airing rumor as fact, and failing to honestly reconcile exculpatory evidence.
Veteran Associated Press Journalist Linda Deutch covered court cases for 50 years, and has won numerous journalism awards including the lifetime achievement award from the Washington Press Club. She attended the trial, and in this interview, she reflects on her experience. She says the case never should have been brought to trial--that the Arvizos set up Michael Jackson, and the allegations were another scam for the family. She notes how the media was out to get Jackson, and were biased to his guilt. Think Twice did not interview more reputable journalists like Deutch, or other journalists who believe in Jackson's innocence.
Reporter Aphrodite Jones wrote about the pressure from her superiors at Fox News to report with a guilty bias:
Journalist Roger Friedman observed that throughout the trial the press was biased its coverage. When a prosecution witness would testify to something salacious done by Jackson, such as security guard Ralph Chacon describing oral sex, the press would run outside and report it and miss the withering cross examination that devastated the witness’s credibility.
Instead of interviewing journalists who were taking the trial seriously, like Linda Deutch, Think Twice chose Slate reporter Seth Stevenson to narrate the media perspective in the Arivzo allegations. Stevenson admittedly was not taking the trial seriously and says he was putting out puff pieces to grab readers attention.
Recommended, well-sourced and thorough threads from the MJJ Repository in its rebuttal to the Think Twice podcast, especially about the misrepresentation of Jackson's PR tactics.