By Vasantha K
When Michael Jackson died at the age of 50, he left behind many nagging questions. Apart from the obvious cause of his death, there was of course, the matter of his sexuality. Despite his acquittal, there are many who believe that MJ abused the young boys whom he chose to befriend and take under his wing. But a recent book by Ian Halperin, a celebrity journalist as well as musician, finally lays these ghosts to rest.

Halperin is not a rabid MJ fan and neither is his book an official biography. But when a jury found Michael Jackson ‘not guilty' of the charges leveled in his child molestation trial, on June 13, 2005, the concerned father in Halperin resolved to conduct his own investigation and bring a person, whom he believed to be a confirmed pedophile, to book. But four years later, the conclusions Halperin arrives at are totally in variance with his initial beliefs. His book, Unmasked : The Final Years of Michael Jackson, effectively debunks the ‘lies and media distortions' that surrounded the king of pop and reveals him to be the victim of a conspiracy played out among greedy extortionists who hoped to cash in on his vast fortune and members of the media who sought to burnish their own reputations by tarnishing that of an innocent man.

What the book brings to fore is the shocking depths, to which the people around MJ would sink to lay their hands on his money. And these included not just greedy parents of friends and disgruntled former employees but even his own estranged sister, La Toya, whose abusive husband forced her to lie about her famous brother. Of the hundreds of ‘special friends', chiefly prepubescent boys, who had been the singer's privileged guests in Neverland, only two—Jordan Chandler and Gavin Arvizo—accused him of child abuse. The famous child star Macaulay Culkin, who had been a regular at Neverland, firmly denied that any child abuse had taken place. So did many others who had been singled out for special treatment by MJ.

Halperin himself could not turn up any evidence of the abuse despite his persistent efforts. On the other hand, he found that almost all the witnesses who testified against MJ lacked credibility. Even the million dollar settlement to Chandler was at the insistence of MJ's insurers rather than MJ who wanted to fight the case in court. Halperin feels that MJ would have won, if he had done so. The writer, who has authored a book on Kurt Cobain's death, argues that Hollywood celebrities are very vulnerable as a lot rides on their reputation. They are easy bait for unscrupulous people who have nothing to lose except their financial insecurity and anonymity.

But Halperin reserves his most severe indictment for reporters like Diane Dimond of Hard Copy who use questionable tactics to elicit information about their celebrity victims. The American tabloid media doles out thousands of dollars in payouts for such information, even if the source is unreliable and the information, hogwash.  Halperin admits that MJ was eccentric. He also believes that MJ was gay and had adult, male lovers. But by the end of his investigation, he is no longer convinced that the singer was a pedophile. He declares that Evan Chandler, father of Jordan Chandler, was actually after a deal, in terms of cash or lucrative film scripts, for which he may have implanted false memories in his son's mind using Sodium amytal commonly known as truth serum. He cites an incriminating tape to prove that Evan Chandler had laid a well thought out plan to realise his goal.

Halperin's book leaves us with a poignant picture of a man who desperately tried to recapture a lost childhood by surrounding himself with children --a man who was betrayed in the cruelest manner possible by the very people he had loved and helped generously. The writer quotes a close source who said that two weeks before his death, MJ had an emotional phone conversation with the source, during which he broke down and expressed his wish to ‘go to a better place'. The source believed that MJ's death may have been an assisted suicide and that he brought in the new doctor, Conrad Murray, for just such a purpose.

Whatever the autopsy report may say, it was not disease that killed MJ. It was the greed of those who wanted his money. It was an 'irresponsible and heavily biased media', which hounded him incessantly and declared him guilty without a fair trial. It was the skewed race relations in the United States where white pedophiles get away with murder everyday while an innocent  black man is subjected to the worst humiliation in his own home by cops wanting to photograph his private parts. But most tragically, it was his own childlike innocence which killed him. For it blinded him to the venalities of human beings that no amount of love or charity can heal. 
Source: Merinews.com