Leaving Neverland is a four-hour documentary available on HBO GO and HBO NOW about two men’s allegations that Michael Jackson sexually abused them as children. Considering that I would normally watch a documentary about anything and occasionally go to the theater and pay for it, staying at home to watch it was a no brainer even if the topic is an uncomfortable and unthinkable one, but I think that it is must see viewing.
Leaving Neverland serves several functions. Just like watching episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has had an overall beneficial effect on society for increasing knowledge about sexually based crimes, I feel as if this documentary goes through a detailed process of how a pedophile grooms a family and a child before the abuse begins, what abuse looks like on the outside and can feel like for the victim and how long it takes before a victim even has an epiphany and is ready to confront the past. A huge factor is whether or not the abuser still plays an important role in the victim’s life once he or she becomes an adult. I think that every one with children or who are responsible for their safety should watch this documentary because we are used to images of sudden, violent abuse, not the early psychological abuse signs that a long-term abuser will use so a child will think it is a consensual relationship, and the family will enthusiastically give the abuser time and opportunity to continue abusing the child.
Leaving Neverland also centers two heterosexual men as victims of sexual violence, which is an unfortunate necessary image needed in the media in order to help victims seek healing and for those around them to provide positive support instead of further abuse. I’m not an expert, but as an outside observer, male victims are usually believed before female victims. Anecdotal evidence is that it took rooms full of women for anyone to believe that Bill Cosby was a serial rapist and one male accuser before Kevin Spacey had to even face charges. In spite of it, gender norms are so deformed that while sexual violence is extremely harmful for all people and changes the natural course of any survivor’s life, men face an additional identity crisis and stigma because of homophobia and misogyny that women already have to face regardless of whether or not women have to endure sexual violence. Women already know the script, but men are suddenly seen and treated as women because they are victims through no fault of their own, and they’re just not accustomed to dealing with that additional societal trauma. Society characterizes being a victim as something endemic to being a woman so when a man is a victim, people start using homophobic slurs rooted in ridicule for men that have feminine characteristics, which is ridiculous, but is what happens. For the record, there is nothing wrong with any man that shows feminine characteristics regardless of his sexual orientation, but gender norms punish men for displaying those characteristics. These men are shown as husbands and fathers, who are also in incredible pain and struggling with what happened to them. These depictions increase the opportunity for men to explore a complete emotional spectrum without having to question their identity.
Leaving Neverland also has a prurient factor because of the people involved. I’m not even into looking at celebrities as entertainment, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t curious about what it is like to know Michael Jackson as a regular human being. While I was not familiar with Jimmy Safechuck (he was the kid in a Pwpsi commercial) before this documentary, I am familiar with Wade Robson as one of my favorite choreographers when I used to watch So You Think You Can Dance, and I never really gave much thought to his life outside of his work. Even though the focus of this documentary is sexual abuse, it is also an exhaustive celebrity biography of an entire life and how the music industry works while it is on the road. The entire world is so alien and unimaginable, especially for a superstar like Jackson, that just learning about how it works is fascinating. Kids kind of have no business even living on the outskirts of this world it is so inherently unstable with its possibility of instant gratification, unrealistic lifestyles, the inability to separate work from life and disproportionate reward for success that anything subsequent, even without the abuse, is going to feel as if he or she is plummeting to earth.
It will add an hour to your viewing experience, but I also watched Oprah Winfrey Presents: After Neverland. Oprah interviews Robson, Safechuck and the director of Leaving Neverland, Dan Reed to examines the effect that the documentary had on them after it aired. Other audience members, including some well-known faces, discuss their experiences as survivors of sexual abuse. I could be mistaken, but I vaguely remember that Oprah interviewed Jackson soon after the LAPD charged him, and he vehemently denied the charges so I would not be surprised if this segment was her way of apologizing for contributing to the protection and façade of an alleged abuser.
If you don’t believe that Jackson is abuser, you probably won’t want to spend four to five hours of your life watching Leaving Neverland then the Oprah segment, but I would still challenge you to do so not in order to sway your opinion, but to engage in an exercise in which you substitute an ordinary name in the place of Jackson so you can still take something away from this experience and learn warning signs. If Robson and Safechuck are lying (I don’t believe that they are), then they worked really hard and probably based their act (they’re not professional actors, but dancers, singers and performers) on actual abuse victims’ stories. It would still behoove you to learn something in order to protect yourself and others if you should see the warning signs in the future.
I learned quite a few things from Leaving Neverland. I did not realize that specifically men don’t realize that they were victims until they have children and see how a child acts when the child is the same age as they were when the abuse started. It is as if there is an epiphany that they never consented and were manipulated. These abused children have similar feelings as first wives who get dumped for a younger model, but the abuser stems the rage by trying to substitute attention with some other positive, but nonsexual reward. Also long term child sexual abusers may stop short of crossing sexual boundaries once the child expresses discomfort. The minute that Safechuck is against anal sex, Jackson backs off. Success is based on the pretext of the pleasure of a forbidden relationship that must face odds, but once pleasure is out of the equation, it resembles our traditional view of child sexual abuse with the stranger grabbing and violently raping a kid, and a smart long term child sexual abuser shuns that image completely.
Leaving Neverland is a must see documentary, but obviously I wish that it wasn’t. It provides a necessary look at a child sexual abuse outside of the violent long term depictions that we’re accustomed to seeing after the priest sexual abuse stories broke. We need a complete picture of all the ways that abuse presents so we can be vigilant.