Ep. 97 | The Mysterious Life & Death of Michael Jackson

This episode is on the mysterious life and death, of the one, the only, Michael Jackson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  The coroner ruled it a homicide. The jury called it manslaughter, and his family called it murder.

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  First of all, Michael told me that they were going to murder him.

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  He was the most famous person alive. And he sold more records than anyone in history. And he owned a catalog worth billions. And he spent his final years telling everyone around him that someone was going to kill him for it. But nobody listened. And then, in 2024, his name resurfaced in the Epstein files. And the whole world started asking questions again. But they were asking the wrong ones. This is the mysterious life and death of Michael Jackson. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder. All things that I love to consume, and I know you do, too. You seek just a beautiful, intellectually-minded furry.

• 1:20Speaker 03

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• 1:47Speaker 01

  Today, we are talking about one of the most famous human beings ever. And how he came to be that famous, and what happened because of it. And there's a lot of things in here I had no idea about, especially with all the Epstein stuff coming out and everything. It is going to be a jam-packed video. So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go Mach 5 down the highway, slam all the brakes, and bust through this windshield into this Michael Jackson life and death deep dive video together.

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  So the story of Michael Jackson begins not with him, but with a place, and with the people that place made. Gary, Indiana was a company town in the most literal sense. Founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation and named for the chairman of its board, Albert Henry Gary. The city existed to feed the furnaces. Gary Works, stretching along the southern shore of Lake Michigan, would grow into the largest steel mill on earth. And the jobs would draw tens of thousands of families northward during the Great Migration. And by 1960, the population would peak at around 178,000 people. And the air in this place just tasted like metal.

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  And the work was dangerous, and the pay was steady, and the neighborhoods were segregated, and the churches were full on Sundays. And among those who came north was a man born into that migration’s current, Joseph Walter Jackson, who arrived in the world on July 26, 1928, in Fountain Hill, a small community in Ashley County, Arkansas, and deep in that flat cotton country of the southeastern delta, barely a mile from the Louisiana line. And his father, Samuel Joseph Jackson, was a schoolteacher the locals would call Professor Jackson. And his mother was Crystal Lee King. So the family carried within it the tangled bloodlines of the American South.

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  Joe’s grandfather, Israel Nero Jackson, born in 1838, had been enslaved. And his great-grandfather, July Jack Gale, was said to have been a US Army Scout who claimed Native American heritage, though the specifics of that claim, sometimes identified as Choctaw, are difficult to verify through surviving records. So Joe moved to East Chicago, Indiana, at 18. And he was a physically imposing man with large hands and a hard stare. And he found work in the way other African-American men in the region found work, at the mills. And he would become an overhead crane operator at Inland Steel Company and later worked at American Steel. And foundries, also in East Chicago.

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  And the hours working there were long and the labor was grinding. And somewhere in the repetition of shifts and paychecks, Joe Jackson began to understand that he wanted something else, something that made noise, that moved a crowd, that refused to be ordinary. And the woman who would share that wanting and temper it with something quieter and more enduring, had her own story of migration and survival. Katie B. Scroose was born on May 4th, 1930, in Clayton, a town in Barber County, Alabama, the same red clay country that produced George Wallace. And at two years old, she would contract polio, and the disease would leave her with a permanent limp and a slight drag in her left leg that she would carry for the rest

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  of her life. And when she was four, the family would move north to East Chicago, joining the same stream of Southern African-American families chasing the promise of the mills. But despite the polio, Katie, who would later go by Catherine, was deeply musical. She played piano, clarinet, and the cello, and she sang. And she absorbed the country gospel of her Alabama childhood and the rhythms of Indiana, and she would carry music inside her the way some people carry prayer. So Joe and Catherine met in 1947 in East Chicago, and she was 17 at the time, and he was already briefly married to a woman named Isaphine Atkinson, though that marriage was very short-lived.

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  So Joe and Catherine married on November 5th, 1949, and in January 1950, they purchased a small house at 2300 Jackson Street in Gary for $8,500. Different times, I tell you what. And the house was around 672 square feet with two bedrooms, one bathroom, and it sat on a modest lot in a working-class neighborhood, on the west side of Gary, close enough to the mill that you could hear the machinery if the wind was right. And into the house, over the next 16 years, Joe and Catherine Jackson would bring 10 children, a quantity of human life that the square footage could barely contain, stacked in bunk beds, sharing everything, privacy, a concept that existed only Only in theory.

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  So in the early 1950s, Joe and his brother Luther formed a blues band called The Falcons, sometimes known as Ford Falcons. And Joe played guitar and Luther played saxophone. And they gigged around the region in the networks of industrial cities south of Chicago that included Gary, East Chicago, and Haymond, playing the kind of electric blues that poured out of every juke joint and house party in those neighborhoods. And they were pretty decent, but the Falcons would never land any record deal. And after a few years, the band dissolved and Joe put his guitar in the closet. But he did not put away the ambition, as we know. And he folded it up and stored it somewhere deeper, in a place where it would eventually

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  be redirected with ferocious, sometimes brutal, precision. And that was toward his children. Now, the children came in rapid succession, and each one entered a household that was growing louder, more crowded, and more volatile. Now, Marine Rylett, or Rebby, was born first on May 29, 1950, and then Sigmund Esco, or Jackie, on May 4, 1951, and then Toriano Adaril, or Tito, on October 15, 1953, and then Jermaine on December 11, 1954, and then Latoya Yvonne on May 29, 1956, then Marlon David on March 12, 1957, along with his twin brother, Brandon, who drew a single breath

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  and died the next day, unfortunately, on March 13, 1957. And the death of Brandon was not discussed in the Jackson household. It was absorbed into the silence that families built around their worst losses, just a ghost twin whose absence Marlon could carry quietly for decades. And then, on August 29, 1958, at St. Mary's Mercy Hospital in Gary, Michael Joseph Jackson was born. And he was the eighth child, the seventh living, technically. And he had arrived in a house that was already overflowing with children, with noise, with Joe's thwarted ambitions and Catherine's quiet faith, and the ever-present economic pressure of a steelworker's wage stretched across a family

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  That would eventually number 11, and two more children would follow Stephen Randall, or Randy, on October 29, 1961, and Janet Demita-Joe on May 16, 1966. And in 1963, Catherine would convert to the Jehovah's Witness faith and was baptized. And the religion would shape the Jackson household profoundly with its door-to-door evangelism and its prohibition on holidays and birthdays, its apocalyptic worldview, its emphasis on spiritual discipline, and its emphasis on spiritual discipline. And it was Catherine's faith, not Joe's, and it would live inside Michael Jackson for the rest of his life, even as he struggled with it, even as he left and returned to

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  it, and even as it complicated everything. Now, Joe Jackson was, by virtually every account, including those of his children, a strict and sometimes physically abusive father, because he demanded obedience and he demanded excellence. And when the guitar came back out of the closet, this time not for Joe's own playing, but for his son's. The discipline that governed the household became something closer to a regime. Now, the guitar was forbidden, and that was the rule. Joe kept it in the bedroom closet, a cheap electric model, nothing special, but it was his, a relic of the Falcons and the dream that hadn't worked out. And the children were not to touch it, because Joe was at the mill during the day and the children were not supervised every minute.

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  And Tito, the third born, the quiet one, the one with the large hands like his father's, could not stay away from it. And he would wait until Joe left for his shift, then slide the closet door open and take out the guitar carefully, the way you would handle something you've been told to never handle. And he would teach himself to play by ear, picking out the songs he heard on the radio: The Temptations, The Four Tops, the electric blues his father used to play in the clubs. And he was getting pretty good. And then, one day in 1964, he broke a string. And the discovery could have gone badly, because in the Jackson household disobedience was met with a belt, a switch, or a cord, whatever was in the closet. But something shifted in Joe when he heard Tito play.

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  The boy had talent, real talent. And Joe Jackson, the man whose own band had never gotten a record deal, the crane operator who went to work every day in a city that was already beginning to die, recognized in his son's stolen guitar playing the second chance he had been waiting for. So, he didn't punish Tito, he bought him a guitar. And what followed was the formation of a family band with the discipline of a military unit and the ambition of a Fortune 500 company. And in 1964, Joe organized the Jackson Brothers, Tito on guitar, Jackie and Jermaine on vocals, plus two neighborhood friends, Raynard Jones and Milford Height, filling out the rhythm. And they rehearsed in the living room of 2300 Jackson Street

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  in that 672 square foot house where the walls were thin enough to hear everything and the neighbors could hear them too. And Joe ran rehearsals the way he ran everything, with absolute authority. Guy was a tyrant. And mistakes were not tolerated, and repetition was the method. Fear was the motivator. And by August 1965, two more Jackson Brothers had joined the group. Marlin, who was eight, and Michael, who was only six years old. And the neighborhood friends would slowly be eased out, because this was now all a Jackson operation. And at a performance at Gary's Tino Tots Jamboree, a woman named Evelyn Lahai suggested the group needed a proper name. And someone, accounts vary on exactly who, proposed the Jackson Five, and the name stuck.

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  And Michael, at six years old, was not yet the lead singer, though. That role belonged to Jermaine, who had a smooth, reliable tenor. And Michael sang backup and danced. But even in those earliest performances, talent shows at elementary schools, community centers, local clubs where children probably shouldn't have been, something was visibly different about the youngest performer on stage. He moved with an intuition that couldn't be taught. He watched James Brown on television with the focus of a graduate student, absorbing every spin, every split, every way Brown used his body to make the crowd lose its utter mind. And he studied Jackie Wilson, and he studied the Temptations choreography,

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  and then he did it better than any child had a right to. And in 1966, the Jackson Five won their first talent show at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Gary, and it was the beginning of a streak. And Joe entered them into every competition he could find, driving them across Indiana, the family packed into a Volkswagen van that barely held them all. And they won, and they kept winning. And Joe booked them into rougher venues, bars, strip clubs, places where a group of children performed between adult acts, and the audience threw money if they were good and bottles if they weren't. Just sketchy as fuck places where kids should not be. And Michael later described watching Strip Tease's acts as a "small child, standing

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  in the wings, waiting for the Jackson Five's turn." And he was now nine years old. And by mid-1967, a shift had taken place within the group that everyone could hear Michael's voice. Still a child's voice, still high and clear, had developed a quality that Jermaine simply didn't possess. And it wasn't just range or pitch, it was just emotion, an almost unsettling ability to inhabit a lyric's feeling and project it outward with adult conviction. So Joe made a decision. Michael replaced Jermaine as lead singer, or Jermaine "Damn." So the group's center of gravity moved permanently to the youngest brother onstage.

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  And on August 13th, 1967, they won amateur night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the most famous proving ground of African-American entertainment, and the stage where Ella Fitzgerald and James Brown and Stevie Wonder had been discovered, where the audience was legendarily unforgiving and the hook was not a metaphor. And at this point, Michael was eight years old, and the Apollo audience gave them a standing ovation. So the question of who discovered the Jackson Five is one of the foundational myths of the Motown era, and like most myths, it obscures a messier truth. The official story is the one that Barry Gordy wanted told, the one printed on the debut. album cover, which was that Diana Ross discovered the Jackson 5.

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  But it was just a marketing masterstroke. The biggest female star in black music presenting the next generation, a laying on of hands from Motown royalty to Motown future. And the first Jackson 5 album was titled Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5. And Ross appeared at their early press events and the implication was clear and very deliberate. And it was also largely fiction, which at this point, I mean, it started back then, you know? All this stuff like I went over Taylor Swift and how her whole life was manufactured. It's interesting looking at the, the parallels and just, I've only gone into two major artists now, but the parallels are, are crazy how much they're manufactured and how much smoke and mirrors there are in the entertainment industry.

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  But the true discoverer was Bobby Taylor, a singer and bandleader from Motown's second tier who fronted Bobby Taylor and the Vancouver's. Because Taylor saw the Jackson 5 perform at the Regal Theater in Chicago, the South Side equivalent of the Apollo, and was stunned. And he brought them to Motown's attention, arranged their audition and produced their early recordings. And Gladys Knight also deserves a footnote in the discovery narrative because she saw the Jackson 5 at the Regal in 1967 as well. And was so impressed that she sent a demo tape to Motown on their behalf, but the tape was rejected. And the irony is almost too good because one of Motown's biggest stars recommending a group that would become Motown's biggest act was being ignored.

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  But the formal audition took place on July 23rd, 1968 at Hitsville USA. Motown's legendary headquarters on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. The converted house with a hand painted sign that had produced more number one hits than any address in America. And the Jackson Brothers performed in the studio and Barry Gordy, contrary to what some accounts have suggested, was not present for the audition. And he saw a tape of it later, but the Motown staff who were in the room that day knew immediately what they were looking at. Michael, now nine years old, performed with a precision and emotional range that was difficult to reconcile with. His age and he sang like a man who had been heartbroken and he had never been on

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  a date at this point, obviously because he's nine. And Motown signed the Jackson Five and the machine began to turn. So in mid-August 1969, Joe moved the boys to California and Catherine and the rest of the children didn't join until November. And for the Jackson Brothers from Gary, Indiana, from the 672 square foot house on Jackson Street, from the steel smoke air and the frozen winters and the talent shows at Theodore Roosevelt High, Los Angeles was another planet. The light was different, the air smelled like jasmine instead of sulfur and the houses had swimming pools. And on October 1st, 1969, Michael, now 11 years old, moved temporarily into the Hollywood Hills home of Diana Ross.

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  And he lived with her for about a month while the family's permanent arrangements were being finalized. And Ross became a kind of surrogate older sister and glamorous mentor to Michael. And Michael absorbed her elegance, her poise, her understanding of how a star just occupied space. And he watched her the way he watched everything, just silently, totally storing it all for later use. And then Motown released the single. And the velocity of what happened next has no real parallel in the history of popular music. Because on October 7th, 1969, less than two months after the family arrived in California, Motown released "I Want You Back," the Jackson Five's debut single.

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  And the song was a masterpiece of pure pop construction. A bouncing bassline, a staccato piano chords, a horn section that punched like a fist and riding above all of it was the voice of an 11-year-old boy singing about romantic heartbreak with conviction that made you forget he was 11. Because the vocal performance was technically extraordinary with the phrasing, the breath control, the way Michael bent notes and slid between registers. But what made it transcendent was something harder to name. There was joy in it, there was urgency, there was a child's voice carrying an adult's emotion within it without any question and the effect was

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  just electrifying and I Want You Back reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on January 31st 1970 and Michael Jackson was 11 years old making him the youngest artist to ever top the chart and the record sold over 2 million copies in its first six weeks and what followed was just unprecedented and the Jackson 5 became the first recording act in history to debut with four consecutive number one singles not the first group not the first family act but the first act of any kind and the streak unfolded with the mechanical precision of a Motown hit Factory operating at peak efficiency and I Want You

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  Back number one January 31st 1970 ABC number one April 25th 1970 the song knocked the Beatles Let It Be out of the top spot which is crazy it was just a symbolic passing of the generational torch that the music press seized upon with just utter glee and then the Love You Save number one June 27th 1970 and I'll Be There which was number one October 17th 1970 and this one was a ballad the one that proved the Jackson 5 were not merely a novelty act built on energy and choreography I'll Be There was tender and restrained and

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  just very sincere and Michael sang it as though comforting someone through a crisis and the performance was so emotionally mature that it unsettled people even because where the hell did a child learn to just feel like that how did a boy from a two-bedroom house in Gary Indiana develop the capacity to communicate grief and reassurance with the authority of someone who had already lived in a full life and nobody had an answer and the song became the Jackson 5's biggest selling single moving over 4 million copies four singles four number ones nine months the group had arrived in California as unknowns and became by the end of 1970 the biggest act in Popular music.

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  So the fame was crazy. And by 1971, the Jackson Five had their own Saturday morning cartoon, Jackson Five, with the, with the five instead of the F, which aired on ABC from 1971 to 1972, rendering the brothers as animated characters in Weekly Adventures. And they were on lunchboxes and bedroom posters and magazine covers. And teenage girls screamed at their concerts that drew comparisons to Beatlemania. And the Jackson Five were selling arenas across the country. And at the center of every performance, drawing every eye, generating every gasp, was Michael. And that very year, the family purchased the Havenhurst Estate, a sprawling compound on the Treeline Street in Encino

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  in the San Fernando Valley for approximately $250,000. And the Jackson Five had crossed this line in less than five years. And Michael, at this point, was 12 years old. And he was the most famous child in America by far. And the machine was just getting started. His Michael Jackson solo recording career began while he was still a child inside of this machine. And in June 1971, at 12 years old, he entered Motown's studio without his brothers for the first time. And his debut solo single, "Got to Be There," was released that October, a gentle, yearning love song that proved his voice could carry a record on its own. And the following year, "Ben," a ballad sung to a rat

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  from the horror film of the same name, became his first number-one pop solo single. And he was 13 at that point. And he had a number-one hit and a Saturday morning cartoon and a family act that was still selling out arenas. And none of it was enough. Not for Joe, and not for Michael either. And increasingly, not for the brothers, who were growing restless under Motown's ironclad creative control. And the break came in 1975, though. And the Jacksons signed a contract with CBS Records Epic Label in June, leaving Motown behind. And the reasons were partly financial, because Motown had been paying a royalty ...rate of 2.7%, a figure that bordered on exploitative even by the standards of the

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  era, while Epic offered dramatically more. But the deeper issue was creative freedom. And at Motown, the Jackson 5 recorded songs chosen for them, produced by staff producers with virtually no input into their own material. And Epic would promise them the right to write and produce. But there was a cost. Motown retained ownership of the name Jackson 5, forcing the group to rebrand as The Jacksons. And Jermaine, married to Barry Gordy's daughter Hazel, stayed behind at Motown. A choice that fractured something in the family they never fully healed from. So the moment Michael Jackson stopped being a former child star and became something unprecedented arrived through a movie musical nobody expected to matter.

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  And in 1977, Jackson was cast as the Scarecrow in The Wiz, an all African-American reimagining of The Wizard of Oz starring Diana Ross. And the film itself was a commercial disappointment, actually. But on set, Jackson met Quincy Jones, legendary producer and arranger, who was serving as the film's musical supervisor and producer. Now Jones was 54, a veteran of Count Basie's orchestra and Frank Sinatra's recording sessions, a man who had worked at the highest levels of jazz, pop, film, scoring, and R&B for three decades. A big deal, alright? And he heard something in the now 19-year-old Michael Jackson that went beyond talent.

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  A perfectionism, an obsessive work ethic, a willingness to be pushed, probably from his father. And Jackson asked Jones to produce his next solo album, and Jones agreed. So they recorded from December 1978 through June 1979, and Off the Wall was released on August 10, 1979. And it was a revelation, if you know anything about Michael Jackson. The future album just fused disco, funk, pop, and R&B into something seamlessly sophisticated. Just adult music made by a 20-year-old who sang with the authority of someone twice his age, just like- Like when he was a kid, he just had this maturity about himself and his voice that was

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  just unprecedented. And "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" and "Rock," it's hard not to sing these titles. So "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" and "Rock With You" both reached number one. And the album sold over 20 million copies worldwide and it won the Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance for Males. But it did not win Album of the Year somehow. And that loss stung Michael Jackson in a way that people around him recognized as something more than disappointment. It was just fuel for him because he had made one of the best-selling albums in history and the Recording Academy had just looked past it. And he told people close to him that the next album would be so big they couldn't ignore it and he meant it. And what he made next was the best-selling

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  album in the history of recorded music. "Thriller" was recorded between April 14th and November 8th of 1982 at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles with Wency Jones again producing. And the budget was $750,000, expensive for the era but modest for what it became. And Jackson wrote four of the nine tracks, "Wanna Be Startin' Something," "The Girl Is Mine," "Beat It," and "Billie Jean." Just masterpieces, just masterpieces of music. Oh my God. And the album was released on November 29th, 1982. And the numbers that followed defied any simple comprehension because

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  "Thriller" spent 37 non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200. It was the best-selling album of 1983. It was the best-selling album of 1984. And all seven of its singles reached the top 10. "Billie Jean" held the number one spot for seven weeks and "Beat It," which featured a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, who's one of my favorite guitarists ever, held it for three. And estimated total sales have reached 70 million copies worldwide, a figure no other album has even approached. And I'm talking about one album specifically. Don't come into my comments and mean like, "Oh, what about The Beatles or Taylor Swift?" No, okay? This is the top-selling album of Up Time, alright?

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  But the cultural machinery around Thriller was as revolutionary as the music itself. And when MTV, still in its infancy and programming almost exclusively white rock acts, initially declined to air the Billie Jean video, and CB Records president Walter Yetnikoff reportedly threatened to pull all CBS content from the network, and MTV relented. And the video, Jackson in a pink shirt and white sequined socks, dancing under streetlights on a sidewalk whose tiles illuminated beneath his feet, became the network's most requested clip and effectively integrated MTV. And the 13-minute thriller short film directed by John Landis and budgeted between $500,000 and $900,000,

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  functioned less as a music video than a miniature horror movie. I remember the first time I watched it, my mind was blown, to say the least. But it was so elaborate that Michael Jackson, a practicing Jehovah's Witness troubled by the occult imagery, ordered the negatives destroyed before his attorney, John Bronka, convinced him to simply add a disclaimer. And in 2009, it became the first music video inducted into the National Film Registry. And on February 28th, 1984, Thriller won eight Grammy Awards, a record at the time. But the image that sealed Thriller's mythology in the public consciousness had come 10 months earlier on a television stage.

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  Because on May 16th, 1983, NBC broadcast Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever, a reunion special celebrating Motown Records' 25th anniversary. And approximately 47 million people watched, which is a lot! And Jackson performed Billie Jean, and during the performance, in a moment that he had rehearsed privately for weeks, after learning the move from a dancer named Degarin Catspur Candidate in June 1981, he executed "The Moonwalk" for the first time on live television. Iconic! And the other performers backstage watched the monitors in silence. And Fred Astaire called Jackson the next morning, and in a single fluid backward glide, six seconds, maybe-

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  Michael Jackson passed from stardom into something that had no adequate name. And less than a year after the Motown 25 performance on January 27, 1984, Michael Jackson was filming a Pepsi commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. And on the sixth take, pyrotechnics ignited too close to his head and his hair caught fire, and he suffered second-degree burns to his scalp. And crew members rushed to extinguish the flames and Jackson was taken to hospital, where he was treated and released. And Pepsi settled the resulting claim and Jackson donated $1.5 million of the settlement to the Brantman Medical Center, which renamed its burn center in his honor.

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  Just like so sweet. And in his autopsy decades later, would reveal that Jackson was almost completely bald beneath the wigs he wore for the rest of his life from that. But the deeper wound was pharmaceutical. To manage the pain from the burn and subsequent reconstructive procedures, Jackson was prescribed opioid painkillers. And nearly every person close to him would later identify the Pepsi burn as the starting point of the prescription drug dependency that shadowed the rest of his life and ultimately contributed to his untimely death. But the third and final collaboration between Jackson and Quincy Jones was "Bad", recorded from 1985 to 1987 and released on August 31, 1987.

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  And Michael Jackson wrote nine of the album's 11 tracks, a dramatic increase in creative control from Thriller. And the album sold 2.25 million copies in its first week and generated a record five consecutive number-one singles from a single album. And the title track's music video was directed by Martin Scorsese and featured a young Wesley Snipes. And total sales exceeded 35 million copies worldwide. And the "Bad" World Tour, September 12, 1987 through January 27, 1989, was 123 concerts across 15 countries, grossing $125 million. And Diana, Princess of Wales, attended the July 16, 1988 show at the Wembley Stadium.

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  And Bad was, by an objective measure, one of the most successful albums ever released. And it was also the first time Jackson encountered the peculiar burden of his own success. Because Bad was treated, in certain critical quarters, as a disappointment, not because it failed by any measure, but because it was not thriller. Because nothing could be. The standard he had set was inhuman, and it would follow him like a shadow for the rest of his career. So in 1985, between the triumph of Thriller and the recording of Bad, Michael Jackson made the business decision that would define his financial life, and, some believe, his death.

• 33:21Speaker 00

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• 33:51Speaker 01

  Paul McCartney, during their collaborations on "The Girl Is Mine" and "Say, Say, Say", had explained to Jackson how music publishing worked. That owning the rights to songs was where the real money lived, not performing or recording them. And Michael listened carefully. And when the ATV Music Publishing catalog came up for sale, a portfolio of roughly 4,000 songs, including 251 compositions by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Jackson pursued it aggressively. And the purchase closed on approximately August 10, 1985, for $47.5 million. And Michael Jackson now owned "Yesterday," "Hey Jude," "Let It Be," and dozens of other

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  songs that formed the bedrock of 20th century popular music. And McCartney, who wanted the catalog himself, was reportedly furious. The friendship never recovered. And the catalog would appreciate enormously over the following decades. And in 1995, Michael Jackson merged his holdings with Sony. Musics Publishing Division to create Sony ATV Music Publishing, a joint venture in which he retained a 50% stake. So by the time of his death, the catalog was valued at approximately $1 billion. And by 2016, when Sony purchased the estate's share for $750 million, estimates had climbed to $4 billion.

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  So the catalog made Michael Jackson extraordinarily wealthy on paper. So it also made him a target. And he would spend the last years of his life telling people that someone was going to kill him for it. So after "Bad," Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones parted ways professionally. And for "Dangerous," released in 1991, Jackson turned to Teddy Riley, the pioneer of new Jack Swim, and the album's sound reflected the shift. Harder, more rhythmically aggressive, and more experimental. And it was Jackson's first album without Jones since "Forever Michael" in 1975. And it sold 32 million copies worldwide. And on January 31, 1993, Jackson headlined the halftime show at the Super Bowl in Pasadena.

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  And it was the first major music superstar to do so. And it's iconic. I mean, he's just like standing on stage and just the crowd screaming and he's just sitting there just soaking it in. It's ah! It's the best Super Bowl, in my opinion, right next to Prince. And the performance was a spectacle of unprecedented scale. Like I said, when Jackson stood motionless onstage for 90 seconds while the crowd roared, then launched into a medley that included "Jam," "Billie Jean," and "Heal the World," it was the first Super Bowl halftime where ratings increased between halves. A phenomenon that transformed the halftime show from a bathroom break afterthought into the premier live performance slot in American entertainment.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  And every halftime spectacle since, Prince, Beyoncé, Shakira, which are also amazing shows, exists in the template Jackson created that afternoon. And "History: Past, Present, and Future," Book One, released in 1995, was a double album. One disc of greatest hits, one of new material. And it contained "You Are Not..." ...alone, which became the first song in Billboard history to debut at number one on the Hot 100. And the History World Tour that followed him from 1996 to 1997, covered 82 concerts across 35 countries and grossed $165 million, the highest grossing solo tour of the 90s. And by the mid 90s, Michael Jackson had sold more records than any solo artist in history.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  And he had invented the modern music video, and he had integrated MTV, and he had transformed the Super Bowl halftime show, he owned the most valuable music publishing catalog on Earth, and he was by virtually any metric the most famous human being alive. And then, everything began to fall apart. Because behind the stage lights, and the record sales, and the increasingly surreal scale of the fame, there was a person. And that person was unwell in ways the public was only beginning to understand, and lonely in ways the public could not have imagined. And the health problems came first, and they came early. So in 1983, going back a little bit in time, Dr.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Arnold Klein, a Beverly Hills dermatologist, who would become one of the most consequential and controversial figures in Jackson's life, diagnosed him with discoid lupus erythematosis, an autoimmune condition affecting the skin. And three years later, in 1986, Klein delivered a second diagnosis, vitiligo, a condition in which the immune system attacks the melanocytes that produce skin pigment, creating irregular patches of depigmentation across the body. And for any person, vitiligo is a difficult diagnosis. But for a black man who was the most photographed human being on the planet, a man whose changing

• 38:51Speaker 01

  appearance was already the subject of relentless tabloid speculation, it was catastrophic. And Jackson would not publicly disclose the vitiligo until February 10, 1993, in a live interview with Oprah Winfrey, watched by 90 million people. And by then, years of tabloid cruelty had calcified a That Jackson was bleaching his skin out of self hatred or racial confusion. But the truth was a medical condition he had not chosen and could not control. And his autopsy sixteen years later would confirm the diagnosis definitively, documenting focal depigmentation across five areas of his body.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  And then came the Pepsi burn in January nineteen eighty four, which we talked about previously. And with it, the opioid prescriptions that introduced Jackson to a pharmaceutical world he would never fully leave. And in nineteen ninety three, after the crisis that would engulf him that year, Elizabeth Taylor personally led an intervention. And Jackson entered rehab at a facility in London and completed a twelve step program. And the dependency retreated, but did not disappear. It would return in different forms with different substances across different doctors for the rest of his life. And the most dangerous of those substances was propofol, a powerful intravenous anesthetic used in hospitals to induce unconsciousness for surgery.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  And Jackson began using propofol during the history world tour nineteen ninety six to nineteen ninety seven. Administered by anesthesiologists, he hired to travel with him and he used it to sleep. For a man suffering from chronic and debilitating insomnia, a condition that worsened with every passing year, propofol offered the only reliable path to unconsciousness. But it was not sleep in any medical sense. It suppressed REM cycles entirely, offering oblivion without rest. And an expert who testified in twenty thirteen estimated that Jackson may have gone sixty days without REM sleep before his death, which is catastrophic.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  So his brain by the end was being deprived of the very thing sleep is supposed to provide. And if Jackson's health was quietly deteriorating through the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, his personal world was also taking shape in ways the public found endlessly fascinating and largely incomprehensible. Because the friendships came first, and the most important of them was Elizabeth Taylor. They met in the mid nineteen eighties. likely at a Victoria tour concert at Dodger Stadium in late 1984. And the connection was immediate and deep. Two people who had been child stars, who had grown up inside fame's distortion fields, who understood what it costs to be watched by millions before you understood who you even were.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  And Taylor became Jackson's fiercest defender and closest confidant. And on April 12th, 1989, at the Soul Train Awards, she introduced him with a title that would follow him permanently, "The King of Pop." And on October 6th, 1991, Michael Jackson hosted her eighth wedding to Larry Fortenski at Neverland Ranch. And their friendship lasted over 25 years until Taylor's death in 2011. And she was, by many accounts, one of the very few people on earth who could speak to Michael Jackson honestly and be heard. And his meeting with Princess Diana was briefer, but no less meaningful to him. Because on July 16th, 1988, like we said before, Diana attended his Bad World Tour show at Wembley Stadium.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  And Jackson had removed Dirty Diana from the setlist out of concern that the title might embarrass her. And Diana, learning of this, reportedly requested that he perform it, and he did. And they met only that once, in person backstage at Wembley. And when Diana was killed in a car crash on August 31st, 1997, Jackson was so shaken that he postponed his scheduled performance in Austin, Belgium, moving it from August 31st to September 3rd. And if you want to know more about Diana's death, I will link that video that I covered her whole life and mysterious death down below. And in 1988, Jackson purchased the property that would become the physical manifestation of his inner world.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Neverland Valley Ranch sat on approximately 2,700 acres in the Santa Ina's Valley, near Los Olivos, California, with rolling golden hills studded with oak trees an hour and a half northeast of Los Angeles. And the purchase price was somewhere between 17 and 19 and a half million dollars, depending on the source. The main residence was roughly 12,600 square feet, but the house was almost beside the point because what Jackson built around it was something between a private theme park and a living fairy tale. A Ferris wheel, a carousel, a miniature railroad, a zoo with giraffes and elephants and chimpanzees, a movie theater, gardens, just anything and everything you name it

• 43:54Speaker 01

  that you would have wanted to see as a kid, it was there. And he named it after the island in Peter Pan where children never grow up. And the symbolism was not subtle because Jackson identified with Peter Pan openly and repeatedly throughout his life.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  He said to me that he's Peter Pan, you know, and I feel that way too. And I guess we have the same feel about life.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Because he saw childhood as something sacred and something that had been stolen from him. And Neverland became Jackson's refuge, his creative workspace, and eventually the setting of the accusations that nearly destroyed him because he would live there on and off for nearly two decades before the property became too painful to inhabit. And it would be sold in December of 2020, more than 11 years after his death, for $22 million. Now, the romantic relationships were few, intense, and brief. And Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley first crossed paths as children backstage at a

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Las Vegas concert in approximately 1974 or 1975, when she was about seven and he was about seventeen. And her father was Elvis Presley, as we know, and his father was Joe Jackson. So they were, in a sense, the only two people on earth who could fully understand each other's childhoods. And they would reconnect as adults in November, 1992, when Jackson was in the earliest stages of his personal crisis that would soon become public. And their conversations grew frequent and intimate. And on May 26, 1994, 20 days after her divorce from musician Danny Q was finalized, they married in a private ceremony in the Dominican Republic. And the world reacted with almost uniform disbelief.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And the tabloids treated the marriage as a publicity stunt, a Strategic alliance between two famous names designed to rehabilitate Jackson's image during the fallout from the 1993 allegations. And on September 8th, 1994, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Jackson and Presley appeared onstage together, and he leaned over and kissed her. And the audience didn't know whether to cheer or cringe. And it remains one of the most analyzed public kisses in entertainment history. But whatever the marriage was, and Presley would later insist credibly and emotionally that it was real, it did not last. And they separated on December 10th, 1995. And Presley filed for divorce on January 18th, 1996, and it was finalized on August 20th,

• 46:23Speaker 01

  1996. And in all her later accounts of the relationship, Presley described Jackson as deeply loving, but also deeply troubled. Consumed by prescription drugs and surrounded by enablers, she couldn't penetrate. And she told Oprah Winfrey in 2010 that in one of their final conversations in 2005, Jackson had told her that someone was going to kill him for his music catalog. And she confirmed he gave her specific names, and she declined to share them for whatever reason. And the second marriage was different in almost every way, because Debbie Rowe was a nurse in Dr. Arnold Klein's dermatology office. And she and Jackson had known each other for years through Klein's practice.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  And on November 14th, 1996, less than three months after the Presley divorce was finalized, Jackson and Rowe married in Sydney, Australia. And she was six months pregnant, and their first child, Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., called Prince, was born on February 13th, 1997. And their second, Paris Michael Catherine Jackson, was born on April 3rd, 1998. And the marriage appeared from outside and arguably from the inside to be primarily an arrangement for producing children. And Rowe would later describe the relationship in transactional terms, saying she had agreed to bear Jackson's children because she saw how much he wanted to be a father. But they would divorce in approximately April of 2000 with Rowe receiving an $8 million

• 47:50Speaker 01

  settlement and initially- relinquishing custody and Jackson's third child Prince Michael Jackson the second originally called Blanket later Biggie was born on February 21st 2002 via surrogate and the identity of the surrogate and the biological mother has never been publicly confirmed and on November 19th 2002 Jackson committed the single most damaging public relations act of his career that didn't involve a courtroom standing on the balcony of his suite at the hotel Adlon in Berlin he dangled the infant blanket over the railing four stories above the street while a crowd below screamed and cameras flashed and the

• 48:34Speaker 01

  image circled the globe within hours and Jackson later called it a terrible mistake and obviously it was but it was also a window into something the public was only beginning to reckon with that the most famous man in the world was not functioning normally that his judgment was eroding and that whatever private reality he inhibited was drifting further and further from the one the rest of the world shared so by the early 2000s Michael Jackson was a father of three a two-time divorcee the owner of the most valuable music catalog in the world and a man whose body was quietly failing ravaged by vitiligo

• 49:14Speaker 01

  lupus surgical procedures chronic insomnia and a pharmaceutical dependency that no intervention had permanently resolved and he was 44 years old and he was still by any measure the most famous person alive and the worst was yet to come so in May of 1992 a woman named June Chandler and her 13-year-old son Jordan were stranded on the side of the road in Los Angeles and their car had broken down and they'd called rent a wreck for a replacement and when it arrived the employee who helped them recognized a name on the paperwork one of their contacts was someone who worked with Michael Jackson and throughout that thin thread of connection June Chandler mentioned the encounter to the right person

• 49:57Speaker 01

  who mentioned it to someone else and within weeks the Chandler family had entered Michael Jackson's orbit. Now, Jackson took to Jordan, or Jordy, as the family called him, with an intensity that was by then recognizable to people around him. And he had a pattern of forming deeply close relationships with children, particularly boys around the age of 12 or 13. And he would call them constantly, invite them to Neverland, shower them and their families with gifts and access to his world. And he was generous to a degree that seemed almost compulsive. And to Jackson, these relationships were innocent, an attempt to experience the childhood he believed had been stolen from him,

• 50:42Speaker 01

  to live inside the uncomplicated joy of a child's companionship. But to observers, they were at best unusual and at worst alarming. And the distance between those two interpretations would define the rest of Jackson's life. Now, Jordan Chandler's father was Evan Chandler, a Beverly Hills dentist who also worked as a screenwriter with a co-writing credit on Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights. And Evan was not part of the initial connection, because June had primary custody, and it was through her that Jackson and Jordan spent increasing amounts of time together. But Evan Chandler grew suspicious of the relationship, then angry, then something harder to categorize.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  So on July 8, 1993, Evan Chandler was recorded in a phone conversation, saying, quote,

• 51:30Speaker 05

  If I go through with this, I win big time. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  And the statement would become one of the most debated pieces of evidence in the case. Because to Jackson defenders, it was proof that the allegations were financially motivated from the start, a shakedown dressed as child protection. And to those who believed the accusations, it was a father's anguished calculation about the legal system's leverage, not evidence that the underlying claims were false. Both readings are sustainable, but neither are definitive. And on August 17, 1993, the allegations were formally reported to authorities, and Jordan Chandler described- described acts of SA by Jackson and the Los Angeles Police Department and the Department of Children and Family Services opened investigations.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  And the story detonated across the global media with a force that made every previous Jackson tabloid saga look quaint. And on December 20th, 1993, Jackson submitted a strip search, a body examination conducted by investigators seeking to determine whether Jordan Chandler's description of Jackson's anatomy matched reality. And Jackson described the experience as the most humiliating event of his life. And the results of the examination have been the subject of conflicting interpretations ever since. Because Jackson's camp maintained the descriptions did not match and the prosecution's position was more ambiguous. And two grand juries were convened and one in Los Angeles, one in Santa Barbara.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Over 13 months, more than 400 witnesses were interviewed and neither grand jury returned an indictment. So without an indictment, there could be no criminal trial. And on January 25th, 1994, a civil settlement was reached. And the amount was approximately $23 million. And Jackson's insurance carrier paid the claim. And Jackson's legal team maintained, and Jackson himself would insist for the rest of his life, that the settlement was not an admission of guilt, but a strategic decision to end a situation that was destroying him personally and professionally at the recommendation of his attorneys and over his own objections. And his critics argued that innocent men don't pay $23 million.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  And his defenders countered that innocent men, who are the most famous person on earth and hemorrhaging millions of dollars per week and canceled deals and destroyed partnerships, sometimes do. And the settlement did not include a confidentiality clause preventing the Chancellors from cooperating with criminal authorities. And Jordan Chandler and his family chose not to pursue criminal charges. So the investigation was closed. And Evan Chandler died by you-know-what on November 5th, 2009, less than five months after Michael Jackson's death.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  That is a bit suspicious, a bit, "Why would you do that? Seems like you're out of guilt, but what do I know?" And at that point, he had been estranged from his son, Jordan, for years. And his death was reported quietly, a footnote in a larger story that had already moved on. So for nearly a decade after the settlement, Jackson lived under a cloud that never fully dissipated. And the allegations had not been proven, they had not been disproven either. And they existed in a permanent state of suspicion, following him into every room, coloring every interaction, inflecting every headline. And his record sales would decline and his public image curdled.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  And the jokes became cruel and ubiquitous. And he retreated further into Neverland, further into isolation and further into the company of children and the animals and amusement park rides that constituted his version of a normal life. And then in February of 2003, a British journalist named Martin Bashir aired a documentary called "Living with Michael Jackson." And Bashir had spent eight months with Jackson, gaining extraordinary access to his daily life at Neverland. And the documentary included a scene in which Jackson held hands with a 13-year-old boy named Gavin, Arvizo, a child cancer patient Jackson had befriended in 2000, and said on camera-

• 55:52Speaker 06

  But is it really appropriate for a 44-year-old man to share a bedroom with a child who is not related to him at all?

• 55:59Speaker 04

  That's a beautiful thing.

• 56:00Speaker 06

  That's not a worrying thing?

• 56:01Speaker 04

  Why should it be worrying?

• 56:03Speaker 01

  And he meant it innocently, but unfortunately, it did not land innocently. And the documentary was watched by an estimated 14.6 million viewers in the UK and 22 million in the US. And the reaction was immediate and devastating. And Gavin, Arvizo's family subsequently alleged that Jackson had molested the boy. So on November 18th, 2003, approximately 70 sheriff's deputies raided Neverland Ranch.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  And two days later, on November 20th, Jackson turned himself in to Santa Barbara County authorities, and he was arrested, handcuffed, photographed, and released on $3 million bail. And the booking photo, his expression, "somewhere between defiance and dissociation", was broadcast on every television screen of the world. And he later said the arrest was deliberately humiliating, that he was handcuffed so tightly his wrists bled that he was locked in a restroom smeared with feces, and that the officers laughed. And Santa Barbara authorities denied the claims fully. The truth of what happened in those hours between surrender and release has never been independently established. But the charges were severe. In December of 2003,

• 57:19Speaker 01

  the initial indictment included seven counts of child molestation, two counts of administering an intoxicating agent to a minor, and one count of conspiracy. But by April 2004, the indictment had been restructured. Four counts of molesting a minor, four counts of intoxicating a minor with alcohol, and one count of attempted molestation, and one count of conspiracy. And 10 charges that would expand to 14 at verdict when lesser included offenses were added. So if convicted on all counts, Jackson faced decades in prison. So the trial, People vs. Jackson, began with jury selection on January 31st, 2005, in Santa Maria, California, before Judge Rodney Melville.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  And opening arguments commenced on February 28th, and the prosecution, led by District Attorney Tom Sneddon, who had investigated Jackson during the 1993 case as well, and whose pursuit of Jackson struck many observers as "personal", and he presented its case over several months. And approximately 140 witnesses were called, and the defense dismantled the prosecution's case methodically. With Gavin Arvizo's mother, Janet, was shown to have a history of making false claims, including welfare fraud and a prior false accusation of SA against a JCPenney security guard. And the timeline- of the alleged abuse was problematic.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  And the prosecution claimed this abuse occurred after the Bashir documentary aired, meaning Jackson had supposedly chosen to abuse a child immediately after the entire world had been put on alert about his relationships with children. And the family had continued to voluntarily visit Neverland and accept Jackson's hospitality throughout the period in question, which was odd. And Macaulay Culkin, the former child star of Home Alone, who had been one of Jackson's closest childhood companions and who the prosecution hoped to establish as a prior victim, took the stand and testified unequivocally that he had never been abused by Jackson.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  And Wade Robson, an Australian choreographer who had known Jackson since childhood, also testified that he had never been abused. But Robson would reverse his position in 2013, filing a civil claim alleging years of abuse. But on the witness stand in 2005, under oath, he said it never happened. And on June 13th, 2005, the jury returned its verdict, not guilty, on all 14 counts, and it was unanimous. And Jackson was in the courtroom when the verdicts were read, and he showed little visible emotion. And outside the courthouse, thousands of fans who had maintained a visual throughout the trial erupted. And inside, according to people who were with him, Jackson was hollowed out.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  And the acquittal was total, the vindication was complete, but it didn't matter. The trial had consumed nearly two years of his life, cost tens of millions of dollars, and left him physically and psychologically destroyed. And he had entered the courtroom weighing, by some accounts, less than 120 pounds because he had been unable to eat, and he had been unable to sleep, or rather, he had been unable to sleep without propofol, and the demands of daily court appearances had disrupted even that pharmaceutical oblivion. So after the verdict, Michael Jackson left the courthouse, left Santa Maria, and effectively left the United States. And he would spend most of the next two and a half

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Years abroad, in Bayran, in Ireland, in various rented properties scattered across the world, a man acquitted of everything and unable to return to normal life. And Neverland, the place he had built as a sanctuary, had been raided and violated and publicized in every tabloid on earth. So he felt like he couldn't go back and he would never live there again. And the allegations from 1993 and 2005, the settlement and the acquittal, became the defining lens through which Michael Jackson would be viewed for the rest of his life and beyond. Not the music, not the dancing, not the record sales or the moonwalk, or the transformation

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  of pop culture, the question, the unresolvable, unanswerable, permanent question that followed him out of the courtroom, across the ocean, into exile, and it was still following him three and a half years later, in the summer of 2009, when he agreed to perform 50 concerts in London and began rehearsing for a comeback. He would not survive. So after the acquittal, Michael Jackson did what any person might do if they had been publicly accused of the worst crimes imaginable, dragged through a five-month trial broadcast to the world and found not guilty on every count. He ran. And in June 2005, Jackson left the United States for Bahrain, a small island kingdom in the Persian Gulf.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  The personal guest of Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad bin Aya al-Khalifa, a son of the king. That was a mouthful. And the sheikh provided Jackson with a residence, staff, security, and a loan of $2.2 million to cover outstanding legal fees from the trial. And the arrangement was, for a time, a genuine refuge, and he stayed nearly a year from June 2005 to May 2006, before the relationship with the sheikh kind of soured. And Abdullah later sued Jackson for approximately $4.7 million, claiming Jackson had failed to honor commitments related to a planned album and autobiography. And after Bahrain, Jackson drifted to Ireland for several months, then to various rented

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  properties in the United States and Europe, but he was a man without a fixed address, without a clear plan and without financial stability. And by this point, Jackson's debt had reached approximately $500 million. That number is almost incomprehensible until you understand its architecture. There's decades of lavish spending on Neverland's upkeep, the zoo, the staff, the constant travel, the legal defense costs from two sets of allegations, the entourage, the mansions, the shopping, all layered on top of hundreds of millions borrowed against his share of the Sony ATV catalog at punishing interest rates. He was one of the wealthiest people alive on paper,

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  and functionally insolvent in practice. And the catalog, worth billions, was also his only lifeline, the collateral that kept the creditors at bay. And if the loans defaulted, he could lose everything. So it was into this desperation that the concert deal arrived. And in late 2008, a mysterious figure entered Jackson's life, or rather, re-entered it. And that was Tome. Now Tome, a man with a deliberately obscured background who represented himself variously as a doctor and orthopedic surgeon, a PhD in economics, and an ambassador at large for Senegal,

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  none of which was true, had been introduced to Jackson through Jermaine. Now Tome, working as a consultant for Colony Capital, connected Jackson to Colony's chairman. And Tom Baric, who connected him to Philip Anschutz, the billionaire owner of AEG Live, the world's second-largest concert promoter. A deal began to take shape. And on March 5, 2009, Jackson appeared at the O2 Arena in London to make the announcement. And between 3,000 and 7,000 fans were waiting, and accounts vary, with AEG's own CEO, Randy Phillips, testifying under oath to the lower number. And 350 journalists had been credentialed,

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  and Jackson arrived 90 minutes late. And when he finally took stage, he looked thin, he looked fragile, and he told the crowd, "This would be it, the final curtain call. This is it." And he said,

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  And the name stuck, and the concerts would be held at the O2 Arena starting that July, and Jackson had agreed to 10 shows. Within days, AEG expanded the commitment to 50. Roughly 750,000 tickets were sold, generating approximately $85 million in revenue before a single note was performed. And AEG had advanced Jackson close to $30 million in production costs, loans, and living expenses, including $100,000 per month for a mansion in Holmby Hills and a $15 million line of credit. The financial exposure was enormous

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  for both sides. For AEG, a successful run could generate hundreds of millions, and a global tour beyond London was projected at $450 million or more. And for Jackson, the concerts represented a path out of debt, or, if he couldn't perform, total financial annihilation. Behind the scenes, things were going badly from the start. Randy Phillips, AEG's CEO, sent an email before the March 5 announcement, describing Jackson as "locked in his room drunk and despondent." And Phillips later testified that he had screamed at Jackson to get him out of the room and had slapped him on the butt to motivate him. And Phillips

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  and Jackson's manager, Frank Delio, had to physically help dress him. The man who walked onstage and told the world he was ready for his comeback had to be coerced into putting on his clothes. The rehearsals began in the spring of 2009 at the Staples Center and the Forum in Inglewood. And on good days, Jackson was brilliant. Dancers and musicians who worked with him during this period described "flashes of the old magic," moments where his movement and vocal power were fully intact, where you could see the greatest performer of his generation still living inside the increasingly fragile body. And on bad days, he was incoherent. He was cold when the room was warm. He trembled. He couldn't remember

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Choreography, he had performed thousands of times and he was losing weight constantly. And he was not sleeping. And on June 19th, 2009, six days before his death, the show's director Kenny Ortega, sent an email to Randy Phillips with the subject line, "Trouble at the Front." And Ortega described finding Jackson, quote unquote, "lost and incoherent at rehearsal, cold to touch, trembling, unable to perform." And he had wrapped Jackson in blankets and tried to feed him. Quote, "There are strong signs of paranoia, anxiety, and obsessive-like behavior," Unquote, Ortega would write. And quote, "I think the very best thing we can do is get a top psychiatrist in to evaluate

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  him ASAP," Unquote. So Aleef Sankey, an associate producer on the show, was more blunt, saying, quote unquote, "Michael is dying," she told colleagues. And quote unquote, "He needs to be put in a hospital." And Phillips' response shut Ortega down, saying, quote, "It is critical that neither you, me, or anyone become amateur psychiatrists or physicians," Unquote, he would write. And Phillips described Jackson's personal physician, a cardiologist named Conrad Murray, as quote unquote, "extremely successful and totally unbiased and ethical." And he instructed Ortega to defer to Murray's medical judgment.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  So Dr. Conrad Murray, born February 19th, 1953, in Granada, board-eligible but not board-certified in cardiology, internal medicine certification lapsed, and no training in anesthesiology, sleep medicine, or pain management, over $4,000 in court judgments, a 2002 bankruptcy, defaulted on his $1.66 million mortgage, child support areas for children by multiple women, a Las Vegas clinic facing eviction, was about to treat Michael Jackson. Now, he had first met Michael Jackson in December of 2006 through Jackson's children. And by 2002-

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  2009, Jackson had requested that Murray serve as his personal physician for the London concerts. And AEG agreed to pay Murray $150,000 per month, a salary Murray had negotiated down from his initial ask of $5 million per year. He's not even qualified! And the contract contained a provision that gave AEG the power to terminate the agreement if concerts were postponed or canceled, creating what experts would later describe as an egregious conflict of interest. The doctor's income depended on the patient performing. Very bad, and already a unqualified greedy bastard is now treating Michael Jackson.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  It's just a nightmare that is about to unfold. But no background check was conducted. An unemployment expert later testified that a $10 search would have revealed Murray's financial desperation, and Murray was administering propofol to Jackson nightly in a bedroom, not a hospital, and he had no pulse exometer monitoring Jackson's oxygen levels, and he had no capnography equipment to measure exhaled carbon dioxide either, and the oxygen tank in the room was empty, and the pulse exometer was still in its box unopened. But he was putting a man under general anesthesia every night with no monitoring equipment and

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  no emergency protocols in a rented mansion in Holby Hills so that the most famous entertainer in history could approximate something that resembled sleep. Absolutely abhorrent.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

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• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Build a lifelong appreciation for learning. Unlock your child's full potential today at wiseant.com. That's W Y Z A N T dot com and use code PODCAST15 for $15 off your first lesson. So on the evening of June 24th, 2009, Michael Jackson arrived at the Staples Center for what would be his final rehearsal. And he got there around 6:30 PM and worked until approximately 12:30 AM on June 25th. And footage from that night later released as part of the This Is It documentary shows Jackson performing Earth Song with full commitment, hitting his marks, directing the band. It was one of the good nights.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  And those who saw him said he looked like Michael Jackson again. And his personal chef, Kai Chase, prepared his dinner and Jackson ate, then retired to his bedroom on the second floor of Homie Hills Mansion at 100 North Carrollwood Drive. And Dr. Conrad Murphy was with him. And what happened in that bedroom over the next 14 hours is known primarily through Murray's own account, given to police, contested by prosecutors, and never subjected to cross-examination because Murray chose not to testify at either his criminal trial or the AEG wrongful death trial. And according to Murray, Jackson was agitated and unable to sleep.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  So Murray began administering a sequence of sedatives escalating through the night as each one failed to produce unconsciousness. So at 1:30 AM, 10mg of Diazepam or Valium intravenously. And at 2 AM, 2mg of Lorazepam or Ativan administered intravenously. And at 3 AM, 2mg of Midazolam or VERST administered intravenously. And at 5 AM, 2mg of Lorazepam again. And at 7:30 AM, 2mg of Midazolam again. But none of it worked. And for six hours, Murray pumped Jackson full of benzodiazepines and Jackson remained awake. His body so-

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  conditioned to sedation so profoundly broken in its ability to achieve natural sleep that clinical doses of multiple tranquilizers could not bring him down. And according to Murray, Jackson begged for propofol throughout the night, and Murray claimed he resisted. And he claimed he was trying to wean Jackson off the drug. And at approximately 10:40 a.m., Murray administered 25mg of propofol, a dose he described as "small," diluted in a lidocaine drip. And by about 10:50 a.m., Jackson was unconscious. And Murray said he then monitored Jackson for approximately 10 minutes.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  And around 11 a.m., he left the room for about 2 minutes, he claimed. And when he returned, Michael Jackson was not breathing. But the phone records tell a different story about those minutes. Because beginning at 11:18 a.m., Murray made 3 phone calls: a 32-minute call to his Las Vegas office, a 3-minute call to a patient, and an 11-minute call to a Houston colleague. So 47 minutes on the phone during this time. By his account, his patient was unconscious under propofol with no monitoring equipment. And what happened between approximately 11 a.m. and 12:17 p.m., when bodyguard Alberto

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Alvarez arrived at the bedroom and found Murray performing what appeared to be CPR on the bed, is a gap that has never been fully explained. And Alvarez later testified that when he entered the room, Murray was frantic. And according to Alvarez, Murray grabbed vials from a nightstand and ordered Alvarez to put them in a bag. And Murray then had Alvarez remove an IV bag containing a milky-white substance, the color of propofol. And only after these items were concealed, Alvarez testified, did Murray direct him to call 911. And it should be noted that Alvarez made no mention of the vial concealing in his first police interview on June 25.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  The account emerged on August 31 after Jackson's cause of death had been made public. And the 911 call was placed at 12:21 p.m., and Alvarez told the dispatcher that a 50-year-old man, he said 50, Jackson was in fact 50, had stopped breathing.

• 1:16:13Speaker 05

  We have a gentleman here that needs help, and he's not breathing yet. He's not breathing, and we need to, we're trying to pump him, but he's not, he's not breathing.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  And the dispatcher asked if the patient was on a bed, and he was, and the dispatcher told them to move him to the floor for CPR, and this had not been done, and Murray had been performing chest compressions on a mattress, which, he should know if he's a doctor, absorbs the force and renders CPR largely ineffective. And paramedics arrived at 12:26 PM, and they found Jackson on the bed, and he had been moved to the floor briefly, then returned, with an IV in his left leg, his body cooled to the touch and his pupils fixed and dilated. And paramedic Richard Senniff estimated, based on Jackson's condition, that at least 20 minutes had elapsed since cardiac arrest, because Michael Jackson's extremities were

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  beginning to turn blue, and Murray did not tell the paramedics that he had administered propofol, and he did not tell the emergency room doctors at UCLA Medical Center either, and he would never voluntarily disclose the propofol. And the paramedics worked on Jackson at the house and then during transport, and the ambulance left the Carrollwood Mansion at 1:07 PM and arrived at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center at approximately 1:14 PM. And emergency physicians continued resuscitation efforts for over an hour, and at 2:26 PM Pacific Daylight Time on June 25, 2009, Michael Joseph Jackson was pronounced dead. He was 50 years old.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  And at 2:44 PM, 18 minutes after the pronouncement, TMZ published the news, and the story broke not through a hospital statement, or a family announcement, or a press conference, but through a celebrity gossip website, because that was the world Michael Jackson had lived and died in. And within minutes, the internet buckled, and Google servers registered such a massive spike in search traffic that the company's automated systems interpreted it as a "distributed denial of service" attack, and Twitter crashed, and Wikipedia crashed, and 15% of all Twitter posts in the hour that followed mentioned Michael Jackson. The servers couldn't hold the grudge.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  And I, like I'm sure many, remember this day and it is cemented in my brain. It is, what a, what a horribly, horribly tragic day. So the Los Angeles County Coroner's autopsy performed the following day established the cause of death as acute propofol intoxication with a contributory benzodiazepine effect, meaning the propofol killed him and the cascade of sedatives Murray had administered throughout the night made the lethal dose more lethal. And the manner of death was ruled a homicide. The autopsy revealed a body that told the story of its occupants' life. Jackson stood five feet nine inches tall and weighed 136 pounds.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  His skin showed the depigmentation pattern of vitiligo, confirming the diagnosis he had disclosed 16 years earlier on Oprah's couch. The condition the tabloids had spent decades insisting was voluntary skin bleaching. His heart was healthy, his major organs were functional, there was no cancer, no terminal illness, no underlying condition that would have killed him. Without the propofol, Michael Jackson's body could have continued living. It was not the body that failed, it was the people around his body. So Conrad Murray was charged with involuntary manslaughter on February 8th, 2010, eight

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  months after Jackson's death, not murder, not even second degree murder, which the LAPD detectives who investigated the case believed the evidence warranted. Led detectives Orlando Martinez, Dan Myers, and Scott Smith, would later state in a 2019 documentary called Killing Michael Jackson, that they had pushed for a second degree murder charge, but the district attorney's office opted for manslaughter. And the trial lasted six weeks, from September 27th to November 7th, 2011. And the prosecution's case was straightforward. Murray had administered a powerful surgical anesthetic in a home setting without appropriate monitoring equipment, had failed to call 911 promptly, had attempted to conceal evidence,

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  and had never disclosed the propofol to emergency medical personnel. And the defense argued that Jackson had self-administered additional propofol when Murray left the room, a accidental overdose by a desperate addict, not criminal negligence by a doctor. Doctor. Fucking not a doctor at all. And Murray did not take the stand. And on November 7th, 2011, the jury found Conrad Murray guilty of involuntary manslaughter. And he was sentenced on November 29th to four years in county jail. Four years. That was the maximum for the charge. And due to California's overcrowding provisions, he served approximately two years before being released on October 28th, 2013.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  And he later published a memoir titled, "This Is It", positioning himself as a scapegoat. And he never expressed remorse for Jackson's death, even though it was completely his fault. And then the second trial was civil. Katherine Jackson, Michael's mother, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against AEG Live, seeking between 1.5 and 2 billion dollars in damages. And the case, Katherine Jackson versus AEG Live, was the longer and in many ways more revealing proceeding, lasting five months with 58 witnesses. And the central question was whether AEG had hired, controlled, or supervised Murray,

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  and whether they bore responsibility for placing a financially desperate, unqualified doctor in charge of Jackson's care. And the evidence that emerged was damning in texture, if not in legal outcome. And AEG's own emails showed executives who knew Jackson was deteriorating and pushed forward anyway. And Paul Gomwir, AEG's co-CEO, had written of Murray, quote, "We want to remind him that it is AEG, not Michael Jackson, who is paying his salary. We want him to understand what is expected of him." Unquote. No background check had been conducted. The contract gave AEG termination power over Murray's compensation if shows were postponed,

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  meaning the doctor's paycheck depended on his patient performing, as we said before. And Kenny Ortega's "Trouble at the Front" email describing Jackson as "lost and incoherent" six days before his death, had been answered with Phillips' instructions to "stop playing amateur doctor and defer to Murray." And Prince Jackson- Michael's eldest son, 15 years old at the time, testified that his father had told him in tears after phone calls with AEG executives, quote unquote, "They're going to kill me. They're going to kill me." And he named Randy Phillips and Tome, and Tome specifically. And on October 2nd, 2013, the jury delivered its verdict. And they found unanimously that AEG Live had indeed hired Conrad Murray.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  But they also found that Murray was not unfit or incompetent for the job, a conclusion that struck many observers as difficult to reconcile with the facts. Because the jury answered "no" to the competence question, AEG was found not liable, and the case was over. And the jury foreman later told reporters, quote, "Had the question been, was Murray ethical? It could have been a different outcome," unquote. Just unbelievable, in my opinion. And Katherine Jackson's appeal was rejected by the California Court of Appeals in 2015. And after Jackson's death, Randy Phillips wrote in an email, quote, "AEG will make a fortune from merch sales,

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  ticket retention, the touring exhibition, and the film slash DVD," unquote. And unfortunately, he was right. AEG recouped its losses and then some through merchandise, through the 40 to 50% of ticket holders who kept their tickets as souvenirs rather than requesting refunds, and through a 10% stake in This Is It. The concert rehearsal documentary assembled from footage of Jackson's final rehearsals. And the film grossed $267 million worldwide. And it showed Michael Jackson dancing, singing, directing, alive, electric, unmistakably brilliant. Now, last footage of the greatest performer who ever lived,

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  packaged and sold to the world by the company, his son said, was going to kill him. So the Los Angeles County Coroner ruled the manner of Michael Jackson's death as a homicide, as we know. And Conrad Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. A charge that led the LAPD detectives on the case believed should have been second degree murder, and the official cause was acute propofol intoxication administered by a doctor who should have never been in that bedroom. So for the legal system, the story ends there. But for Jackson's family and for a substantial number of people who have examined the documented evidence, including myself, it does not. And Michael Jackson spent the last years of his life telling the people closest to him that he was going

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  to be killed. And his son, Prince, who testified under oath at the AEG trial in 2013, quote, "After he got off the phone, he would cry. He would say, 'They're going to kill me, they're going to kill me,' unquote. And he named specific people, AEG's Randy Phillips and his former manager, Tome Tome. And he told Lisa Marie Presley during one of their final conversations in 2005 that someone was going to kill him for his music catalog. And she confirmed on Oprah in 2010 that he gave her names. But, as we said before, she declined to share them. And he told his sister, Latoya, quote, "I'm going to be murdered for my music publishing catalog and my estate," unquote.

• 1:26:23Speaker 06

  You've been quoted as saying you believe it may have been murdered. Do you still think that?

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:26:27Speaker 06

  Why?

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I would never, ever think differently.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  And he told his daughter, Paris, who recalled in a 2017 Rolling Stones interview, quote, "He would drop hints about people out to get him. And at some point, he was like, 'They're going to kill me one day,' unquote. And handwritten notes attributed to Jackson, shared by a friend and published in 2017, read, quote, "They are trying to murder me, and the system wants to kill me for my catalog," unquote. And his bodyguards, Bill Whitfield and Havon Beard, wrote in their 2014 memoir that Jackson's primary security concern was not fans or strangers, but, quote, "The people who were already in his life. He wanted us there so he could hide his movements from his own lawyers and

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  managers," unquote. And the identity of "they" shifted over time, and AEG executives, Sony, Tommy Mottola, unnamed catalog seekers, the system. And the warnings-

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  were consistent and the question is what they mean prophetic awareness of a genuine conspiracy or the escalating paranoia of a man whose brain was being ravaged by nightly propofol and regular demerol injections substances known to exacerbate anxiety and disordered thinking and the honest answer is that both could be true simultaneously and what follows are the major theories presented with the evidence that supports them and the evidence that complicates them and I want to put a disclaimer that none of these have been proven but also that none can be entirely dismissed and the broadest and most legally tested theory holds that AEG Live knowingly pushed a deteriorating Jackson

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  beyond his limits to protect a roughly $30 million investment while hiring a financially desperate doctor they could control the evidence is substantial as AEG expanded Jackson's commitment from 10 shows to 50 within days of the announcement despite handwritten notes attributed to Jackson reading quote only agreed to 10 shows unquote and their own CEO described Jackson as quote locked in his room drunk and despondent unquote before the press conference and their co-CEO wrote of Murray quote we want to remind him that it is AEG not Michael Jackson who is paying his salary unquote and when Kenny Ortega warned six days before Jackson's death that the former was lost and incoherent and needed

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  a psychiatrist Randy Phillips told him to stop playing amateur doctor no background check was conducted on Murray the contract tied Murray's compensation to the concert's proceedings and so on we know this we know all the information regarding the AEG theory but after the trial the jury while unanimously finding that AEG had hired Murray concluded he was not unfit or incompetent and therefore AEG bore no liability but the counter argument is real a living Jackson touring globally over three years was projected to generate $450 million or more and AEG also dropped its own $17.5 million of insurance claim

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  with Lloyds of London in 2012 not exactly the behavior of a company that planned a death for profit I personally think, and you guys can sound off all of what you think in the comments, but I feel like it was in their interest to have Michael actually do those concerts. Did they use and abuse him horrifically and did that lead to his death? Absolutely. But I don't think that was planned, but they were absolutely a giant part of him passing away. And next there is the catalog theory, and this is the theory Jackson himself most explicitly articulated, because his 50% stake in the Sony ATV catalog purchased in 1985 for $47.5

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  million, worth approximately $1 billion by 2009 and $4 billion by 2016, made him one of the most valuable targets in the entertainment industry. And he had publicly declared war on Sony in July 2002, calling CEO Tommy Mottola "a racist and very, very devilish," at L. Sharpton's National Action Network in Harlem. And he accused Sony of sabotaging his album Invincible to force a catalog sale. And by 2009, Jackson had borrowed between $270 and $380 million against his catalog share, held by Fortress Investment Group at 16.8% annual interest, because a default could trigger a forced sale.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  And Sony held a first right of refusal, so what happened after his death is the theory's most powerful exhibit. So in 2016, Sony bought the estate's 50% of Sony ATV for $750 million. And in 2018, Sony paid $287.5 million for the estate's share of EMI Music Publishing. And in 2024, Sony purchased 50% of Jackson's Mejoc Music Catalog for over $600 million. Total payments from Sony to the estate now exceed $2 billion. So Sony owns the catalog Jackson swore he would never sell.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  That's the basis of all of this. So that- Doesn't look good. Um, looks like they were constantly waiting to prey upon this sale. But the counterargument would be that Sony could have acquired the catalog through legal financial pressure. And Jackson's mounting debt had a forced sale plausible without violence. And no law enforcement investigation found evidence of a catalog motivated conspiracy. And Murray's conviction established propofol negligence, not corporate assassination. Now, a narrower version of the conspiracy asks not whether Jackson was murdered by

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  a corporation or a cabal, but whether Murray was specifically selected or allowed to remain because his financial desperation made him controllable and his lack of qualifications made Jackson's death inevitable. Now, to go over Murray again, he owed over $1 million. He had defaulted on a $1.66 million mortgage, and he had $600,000 in court judgments, and he had $71,000 in student loans, child support for children by six or seven women, and a 2002 bankruptcy. And his Las Vegas clinic was being evicted. And he initially asked, as we know, AEG for $5 million per year before accepting $150,000 per month.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  And LAPD Detective Orlando Martinez testified that Murray's financial situation was a major incentive to break the rules. And his qualifications were grossly inadequate for what he was doing. Not board certified in cardiology, internal medicine certification lapsed, and no training in anesthesiology or sleep medicine, suspended from hospitals three times, and he administered propofol nightly in a bedroom with no pulse oximeter, no capnography, and an empty oxygen tank. And the timeline on June 25th raises its own questions. Forty-seven minutes of phone calls while his patient lay unconscious, a gap of over an hour before 911 was called, and bodyguard testimony about concealing vials before summoning help.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  Murray never told paramedics or emergency physicians that he had administered propofol.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  And Paris Jackson was direct, saying, quote, "Absolutely, because it's obvious, all arrows point to that," unquote. And she used air quotes around the word "doctor" when discussing Murray, which, yeah. And the LAPD detectives who built the case believed the evidence warranted a second-degree murder charge. But, as we're doing for all the other theories, there's the counterargument. And that is that Murray, the fucking idiot that he is, panicked, had a chaotic response that looked more like incompetence than execution, and if he had been hired to kill, the execution would presumably have been more professional. And Jackson actively

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  sought propofol, multiple doctors before Murray had refused his requests. So, I don't know. I would love to know what you guys think down below. And the next one is that Jackson was approximately $500 million in debt at the time of his death. And his estate has since generated roughly $3.5 billion. And Joe Jackson said it publicly, saying, quote, "He's worth more dead than he was alive," unquote. And the IRS argued the same point during tax proceedings. And Forbes named Jackson the top-earning-dead celebrity in nearly every year since 2009, peaking at $825 million in 2016. And the

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  "This Is It" documentary grossed $267 million. And the Cirque du Soleil residency generated over $160 million. And the Broadway musical grossed approximately $300 million. And the estate cleared all $500 million in debt and is currently valued at $2 to $2.5 billion. And the counterargument is just timing, because this success was not foreseeable in 2009. And a living Jackson completing a three-year global tour was the most immediately profitable scenario for everyone involved. And the "worth more dead than alive" observation is retrospective, powerful as rhetoric, but weak as evidence of any premeditation. And then there's Dr. Arnold Klein.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Now, Dr. Arnold Klein, Jackson's longtime Beverly Hills dermatologist, administered over 200 Demerol injections across decades, with records kept under the alias Omar Arnold. And in the four months before Jackson's death, the doses escalated dramatically: 375mg in three hours on April 22, 2009, and 900mg over three days in May. And his last appointment was June 22, three days before death. And when he received 100mg, a typical anxiety dose is 50mg, just so you know. Marie's defense argued the chain explicitly that Klein's Demerol created dependency, withdrawal caused insomnia,

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  insomnia drove propofol use, and propofol killed him. And Demerol's short half-life meant none appeared in the autopsy. But withdrawal symptoms from the June 22 injection would have been active on June 25. So Klein was investigated by the DEA and the California Medical Board, but never charged. And he filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and died in 2015 at the age of 70. And the mainstream interpretation is that Klein was an enabler in a system of medical exploitation, not a conspirator, but a link in the chain that killed Michael Jackson nonetheless. And now, the most enigmatic figure in Jackson's final years was his manager, Tome, a man who represented himself

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  as a Lebanese doctor, orthopedic surgeon, PhD in economics, and ambassador-at-large for Senegal. But under cross-examination at an IRS tax trial, he admitted he had never attended medical school and did not hold a PhD. And the Senegalese embassy confirmed he was not their ambassador. So Tome entered Jackson's life in late 2007 through Jermaine Jackson, working as a consultant for Colony Capital at $20,000 per month. And he connected Jackson to Colony's Tom Barak, who connected him to AEG's Philip and Schutz. And Tome negotiated that this-is-it deal, and his financial arrangements were extraordinarily favorable.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  A $35,000 monthly management fee, 15% commission on all Jackson's earnings, which is crazy, and $100,000 per month as a concert producer, and a $2.3 million finder's fee for a Neverland loan, and 10% of any future Neverland sale. But Jackson fired Tome on May 5, 2009, seven weeks before his death. And Tome reportedly responded with rage, threatening to "bring death and destruction" on Michael Jackson. But despite being fired, Tome denied his termination, continued identifying himself

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  as Jackson's manager, and on the day of Jackson's death, spoke as his representative at UCLA Medical Center. Just a scum-of-the-earth piece of shit. And a taped conversation from September 2008 captures Jackson's own unease, saying, "This guy has ways about him. There's a divide between me and my representatives, and I don't talk to my lawyer, my accountant." And Prince Jackson named Tome by name in his sworn testimony. And then the estate later sued Tome for financial exploitation, and the case settled in 2019 for $3 million. And the counterargument is basically that Tome was not at that mansion on June 25.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  And there is no actual tangible evidence that connects him to the propofol administration and a lawsuit alleged financial exploitation, not necessarily murder. And beyond the major theories lie smaller, less substantiated claims. Five of the Jackson siblings alleged in 2012 that his July 7, 2002 will was forged, claiming he was in New York City at an L. Sharpton event on the date it was supposedly signed in Los Angeles. And the legal challenges were rejected by every court that heard them, from LA Supreme Court through the California Supreme Court. Jackson's entertainment attorney, Peter Lopez, was found dead from a gunshot wound on April 30, 2010, less than a year after Jackson's death.

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  ruled in apparent "you-know-what." And conspiracy theorists noted a cluster of connected deaths in the months after Jackson's. Evan Chandler had died by "you-know-what" in November of 2009, and Bruce Iyers, a former Klein employee, in December of 2009, and Lopez. And Canadian journalist Ian Halperin predicted in December of 2008, six months before the death, that Jackson had six months to live. And his conclusion was, quote, "greed killed Michael Jackson," unquote. But no court and no law enforcement investigation and no credible journalistic inquiry has established that Michael Jackson was deliberately murdered as part of a conspiracy.

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  And the official cause of death is acute propofol intoxication due to criminally negligent care by a doctor who was convicted and served two years, which is garbage, in my opinion. And a five-month civil trial found AEG not liable, yet the documented record provides substantial material for those who believe the story is incomplete. And Jackson repeatedly warned he would be killed, naming specific individuals in his son's sworn testimony. But the coroner ruled the manner of death a homicide. And Catherine Jackson would say in 2011, quote, "If such evidence ever comes to my attention, I will be the first to bring those facts to light," unquote. But the evidence still has not arrived, but the questions have not gone away.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  And on July 7th of 2009, 12 days after his death, Michael Jackson was memorialized at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. And 17,500 tickets were distributed by lottery from a pool of over a million applicants. And an estimated 2.5 billion people watched globally, though that figure is essentially unverifiable. And Stevie Wonder performed, and Mariah Carey performed, and Usher approached the open casket and broke down. And Jennifer Hudson sang "Will You Be There." And Smokey Robinson read from the Bible. And Brooke Shields, one of Jackson's closest friends, described the boy she had known since they were both teenagers. Two of the most famous children in the world finding refuge in each other's company.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  And Barry Gordy, the man who had signed the Jackson Five four decades earlier, called him the greatest entertainer that ever lived. And Reverend Al Sharpton addressed Jackson's three children directly.

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  Wasn't nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  And the moment that silenced the arena came at the end, with Paris Jackson, 11 years old, stepped to the microphone. Ever since I was born, daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him so much. And she could not finish, so Janet Jackson held her. And Michael Jackson would then be buried on September 3rd, 2009, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, interred in the Holly Terrace section of the Great Mausoleum. So he would forever be remembered as the greatest performer who ever lived. But those questions are still being asked to this day, mostly in why did he actually die?

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  Because it's hard to even accept what came to be. And for a while, it seemed like the story might end there, with the gold casket, the tearful daughter, the billion-dollar estate slowly paying off a dead man's debts. The world moved on the way it always does. Jokes faded, and the music came back on the radio, and the conspiracy theories settled into the corners of the internet where conspiracy theories live. So it seemed Michael Jackson finally was being allowed to rest, until a decade later. So a decade after Jackson's death, the allegations would return. And on January 25th, 2019, the documentary Leaving Neverland premiered at a Sundance Film Festival, directed by Dan Reed.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  And the four-hour film featured two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, describing in graphic detail what they said were years of essay by Jackson during their childhoods. And Robson was the same choreographer who had testified under oath at Jackson's 2005 criminal trial that he had never been abused. And he reversed his position in 2013 filing a civil claim against the estate and SafeChuck filed a similar claim and the documentary was devastating in its impact and it won a primetime Emmy Award and radio stations pulled Jackson's music from rotation and The Simpsons removed

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  an episode featuring his voice and statues were taken down and the cultural reassessment was swift and severe and the Jackson estate responded with a hundred million dollar lawsuit against HBO alleging the network had violated a non disparagement clause from a 1992 concert film agreement and the legal battle over the Robson and SafeChuck claims continues and a trial is actually scheduled for November 2026 and the estate has denied all allegations and has pointed to Robson's prior sworn testimony inconsistencies in the accuser's timelines and the 2005 jury's unanimous acquittal and the documentary did not settle

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  the question that has followed Michael Jackson since 1993 it just deepened it and then just as the world thought it had heard everything there was to hear about Michael Jackson just as the debate between defenders and accusers had calcified into two immovable camps a dead man's filing cabinet blew the conversation wide open again and in January 2024 and again in December of 2025 and again in January of 2026 the US Department of Justice released millions of pages of documents, images and videos related to Jeffrey Epstein whom I have spoken about at length on this channel and Michael Jackson's name appeared in the

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  files and for a man who had spent the last 16 years of his life under suspicion involving children and who had been fully acquitted the mere appearance of his name in Epstein records detonated across social media with predictable ferocity and minimal context and the actual content of the files tells a narrow story and the key testimony comes from Joanna Joberg, an Epstein victim who stated in a 2016 deposition that she met Michael Jackson. at Epstein's house in Palm Beach. And when lawyers asked whether she had given Michael Jackson a massage, standard questioning since massages were a known euphemism in Epstein's operation,

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  Joe Berg's answer was unequivocal, "I did not." And no allegation of inappropriate conduct by Jackson appears anywhere in the files. No victim has accused him of anything. And on December 19th, 2025, the DOJ released over 300,000 pages of documents, including previously unseen photographs and two images involved Jackson. The first showed him posing with Epstein at the Palm Beach house, and Jackson in a suit and dark sunglasses, and Epstein casually dressed, standing in front of a painting. And the second showed Jackson with Bill Clinton and Diana Ross, with children's faces redacted. And that photo was taken at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on April 24th, 2002. And there was no record that Epstein was present at that event. And the image was simply found among Epstein's possessions. And White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson was subsequently called out for inserting the Apollo photo into social media posts implying it depicted the trio with Epstein's victims. The children in the photo, or Michael Jackson and Diana Ross's own children. And Matt Feid, Jackson's bodyguard for approximately a decade, provided immediate context for the Epstein photo. And he stated it was taken in 2003 during a week of house hunting in Palm Beach. And Jackson was considering a move to be closer to his friend Barry Gibb,

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  with whom he was recording daily. And Epstein's residence was one of roughly 30 properties they toured with a real estate agent. And the encounter lasted no more than half a minute, a polite greeting and a photograph. Quote, "We never even knew who Epstein was." Unquote. Feid's rides. End quote. "He was not famous then." Unquote. An action to James Myskin, a real estate figure arranging property viewings for Jackson, whose attorney had a link to Epstein's circle. And CBS News and other outlets noted that Epstein routinely collected photographs with celebrities to project social legitimacy. Because we know he was a fucking monster piece of shit who just needed to look famous all the time.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  But Michael Jackson's name does not appear in Epstein's contact book at all. And it does not appear in the flight logs of Epstein's private planes either. And there are no emails, letters, phone records, financial transactions, or any evidence of further contact between the two beyond that single house viewing encounter for half a minute. And as of February 2026, apart from Epstein himself, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jean-Luc Brunel, no individual has been charged with a crime connected to the Epstein files, as we know if you have watched this channel. And hundreds of public figures appear in the documents without any allegation of wrongdoing. But for Michael Jackson, the Epstein files are ultimately notable for what they do not contain.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  But the damage was already done, not by the files themselves, but by the headlines that outran them. So another cycle of suspicion and another wave of context arriving too late to catch the accusation. And it's the story of Michael Jackson's entire afterlife. The truth never moves as fast as the rumor. And yet, somehow, neither does the music. Because underneath all of it, the trials, the conspiracies, the files, the documentaries, the arguments that will outlive everyone reading this, there is still the work. And the work refuses to disappear. Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August 29, 1958, in a 672-square-foot house in Gary, Indiana.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  He died on June 25, 2009, in a rented mansion in Los Angeles at the age of 50. And between those two points, he became the most famous person on the planet and one of the most complicated figures the American century ever produced. And the arguments about what he was and was done to him show no signs of ending. But the music, at least, is settled. And it is as close to permanent as anything human beings have made. And that is that for Michael Jackson. This was a long one. You guys have asked me to deep dive into multiple figures like Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana and Michael Jackson. If you have anybody else you want me to deep dive into, let me know down below.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  I always read the comments. And until then, I will see your beautiful face. All right?

• 1:51:35Speaker 00

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