What “occurrences” were those? Bashir inquired: Was there “anything inappropriate”?
“If you consider it inappropriate for a man to look at a book of naked pictures with a child that’s thirteen or fourteen years old, then your answer would be yes,” Feldman replied. It had happened during a stopover at the Hideout on the way to Disneyland, Feldman said: “We went to his apartment, and I noticed a book that he had out on his coffee table. The book contained pictures of grown men and women naked. And the book was focused on diseases and the genitalia.” When he asked what it was all about, Michael sat down with him and began to explain the pictures, Feldman recalled. “I was kind of grossed out by it,” he said. “I didn’t think of it as a big deal. And for all these years I probably never thought twice about it . . . But in light of recent evidence, I have to say that if my son was fourteen years old, thirteen years old, and went to a man’s apartment that was thirty-five, and I knew they were sitting down together talking about this, I would probably beat his ass.”
Ray Chandler didn’t see it as especially significant that Feldman had followed up by admitting that Michael “never did anything out of line” and that “the closest he ever came to touching me was maybe slapping me on the leg once.” Evan’s brother simply dismissed boys like Ahmad Elatab, a New Jersey teen who said he had begun to spend extended periods of time at Neverland in the mid-1990s, when he was nine years old. After a New York columnist wrote that Jackson disliked Middle Easterners, Elatab recalled, Michael had arranged to bring a bunch of Arab kids to a private studio in New York City where he explained that this was not true. He and Michael developed a phone relationship, Elatab said, and eventually started “hanging out” at Neverland. He slept in the same room with Michael on multiple occasions, Elatab said, and knew any number of kids who had spent the night in the same bed with Michael. Those evenings had been nothing more than really fun slumber parties, Elatab told CBS News: “He’s not sexual with kids. He’s not a molester. He’s not a pedophile. He just likes to help children.”
Ray retorted that, “Michael only made sexual advances to a select few of the boys he spent time with. He was quite selective.” During Jackson’s criminal trial, Jordie’s uncle was employed by the networks as a sort of self-made authority on pedophiles, having read dozens of books and spoken to nearly that many psychiatrists about the subject. He liked to quote Sam Vaknin, whose writings on the “roots of pedophilia” sounded to some people like a personality profile of Michael Jackson. “Sex with children is the reenactment of a painful past,” Vaknin had asserted. “Children are the reification of innocence, genuineness, trust, and faithfulness—qualities that the pedophile wishes to nostalgically recapture . . . Through his victim, the pedophile gains access to his suppressed and thwarted emotions. It is a fantasylike second chance to reenact his childhood.” Ray noted that pedophile “profiles” described common characteristics that sounded like an inventory of life at Neverland Ranch, such as a “fascination with children and child activities,” a tendency to refer to children “in pure or angelic terms using descriptives like ‘innocent,’ ‘heavenly,’ and ‘divine,’” the cultivation of “childlike hobbies such as collecting popular expensive toys and keeping reptiles or exotic pets,” the use of “childlike decor,” and a preference for “children close to puberty who are sexually inexperienced but curious about sex.” Ray particularly liked pointing out that pedophiles commonly targeted single-parent familes. “What made Michael different,” Evan Chandler’s younger brother said, “is that the average pedophile can only offer candy and video games. Michael offered the world.”
He was perplexed by the fact that his brother Evan and nephew Jordie were unhappy with him for going on television, Ray admitted. The two of them wanted nothing to do with the criminal case in Santa Barbara County. Jordie was especially displeased when his Uncle Ray publicly implored him to testify in court against Michael Jackson. He was not going to sacrifice his privacy—not to mention risk his physical safety—to take the stand in California, the younger Chandler said. “Jordie’s attitude is, ‘Think what you want. I don’t care. Just leave me alone,’” explained one of his relatives. During the trial, Jordie tried to hide out at a Lake Tahoe ski chalet in the company of school friends who included Sonnet Simmons but was photographed on the slopes wearing a big smile and expensive ski wear, an image of cavalier indifference that caused him to be more hated than ever among Michael’s fans.
By the time of Michael’s acquittal in June 2005, Jordie and Evan were sharing a luxury apartment on the sixteenth floor of the Liberty Towers in Jersey City. Tall windows offered a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline, but Evan was largely indifferent to it. He was sixty-one now but looked much older, despite the Botox and wrinkle filler injections. What made Evan age faster than other men was the degree of his suffering. The agony he experienced did indeed come from deep inside, as so many of those who despised him suggested it should, but the primary source of Evan’s hurt was a rare genetic disorder called Gaucher’s disease. In Gaucher’s patients (an unusually high percentage of whom are Ashkenazi Jews), the deficiency of an enzyme that disperses lipids causes a fatty substance to accumulate in white blood cells. Among the most common symptoms are bone lesions that eventually result in constant racking pain.
The ache in his bones made Evan increasingly irritable and exacerbated the mood swings of his untreated bipolar condition. Jordie was his only companion but relations between the two grew more and more strained. Evan would explode into rages and blame his son for all that had happened to him and to the family. In September 2005, Jordie filed a motion with the Hudson County Family Court for a restraining order against his father, claiming that Evan had attacked him from behind with a twelve-pound barbell, sprayed him in the face with a can of Mace, and then attempted to choke him. When Evan refused to leave the apartment, Jordie did, moving back into Manhattan by himself.
By the summer of 2009 Evan was sixty-five years old and a virtual hermit. The only people he conversed with were the staff at the Colanta Hematology and Oncology Center in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he went for his pain medication prescriptions. His Gaucher’s disease had progressed to the point that Evan found it impossible to make it through even part of a day without being doped up. He wasn’t living, he was existing, Evan told his brother Ray during one of their infrequent phone conversations.
Now almost thirty, Jordie spent much of his time in California, taking guitar and surfing lessons. He had cowritten a frothy song with Sonnet Simmons called “You’re So Good for Me” that became a minor pop sensation. In Los Angeles, Jordie was surrounded by friends and family. He and his two half-brothers remained close, supporting one another in their refusal to have anything to do with the man who had fathered each of them.
Neither his sons nor anyone else knew what Evan Chandler made of Michael Jackson’s death, because by that time even his brother Ray had stopped speaking to the man. Alone with his agony and unwilling to swallow another pill, Evan allowed himself to feel the pain in his bones for a few hours on a day in the middle of November 2009, not quite four months after Michael Jackson’s passing. It might have been the fourteenth or the fifteenth—nobody would ever be sure. He sat on his bed in the Liberty Towers apartment with the inspiring view of the Manhattan skyline and held a snub-nose .38 revolver, a pistol he had purchased years earlier to protect himself against a feared attack by some deranged Jackson fan. He wrote no note before raising that revolver to his head and pulling the trigger.
The Liberty Towers concierge found his body sprawled across the bed, the gun still in his hand, late on the afternoon of November 17, 2009, after doctors from the Colanta Center phoned to say that Mr. Chandler had missed his regular appointment.
Ray Chandler would chafe at Internet reports that Evan had taken his own life out of remorse over what he had done to Michael. “It had absolutely nothing to do with Michael Jackson,” Ray said. “That was the last thing on his mind. He was just in a lot of
pain. He and I had talked a lot about euthanasia, about how if either of us got in the position of being in a hospital bed with the tubes and all that, that we would see to it that the plug was pulled. Evan just decided to pull his own plug while he still had the strength to do it.”
When a reporter phoned him from London’s Daily Mail, Ray said he was waiting to hear about the funeral arrangements, but by then Evan’s body had already been cremated. “Actually, no one was there,” a staff member at the Jersey City funeral home where the cremation had taken place told the Mail’s reporter. “We were instructed that no one would want to go. It was very sad. They still haven’t decided what to do with the ashes.”
Evan Chandler’s bleak end occasioned cruel celebration among dozens of Michael Jackson fans who posted about it online. “Good riddance, you piece of shit,” wrote one. “Hope you rot in hell!!” Evan was “a very, very evil man,” wrote another fan. “He should have been punished. This seems the easy way out.”
One of Jordie’s relatives said the young man hoped that the successive deaths of Michael Jackson and Evan Chandler might be “two very important events for him, because he thought that people would finally lay off of him, that it would all die down and he’d finally get some anonymity.” It quickly became clear this wouldn’t be the case. The postings on Jackson fan sites were as vicious and threatening as they had ever been. “Jordan Chandler, I hope you dream of Michael every night. Nightmares for the rest of your life. Guilt should rack your soul forever,” wrote one. Added another, “If I ever see him he’d better run . . . a brick will be headed for his bitch-ass head.”
Jackson fans posted the Old Meadow Boulevard address of Jordie’s $2.35 million West Hampton home on the Internet and warned him not to return there. They created a “tracking” blog where people described various sightings of the young man and listed the places he frequented in both New York and Los Angeles, urging one another to keep up the “hunt” for him.
Shortly after a British tabloid offered $300,000 for a photograph of “the Michael Jackson boy,” Jordie left LA and headed for Europe. A supposed “confession” by Jordie that Michael had never molested him and that he only made such a claim because “my father made me do it” popped up on dozens of Web sites. The confession was a fraudulent attempt at solace sent to Katherine Jackson by someone posing as Jordan Chandler. The Jackson family insisted that it was authentic, though, and after Jermaine Jackson arranged its dissemination in cyberspace Jordie’s “confession” achieved a kind of de facto substantiality. The young man himself refused to comment, telling those closest to him that people could believe whatever they wanted to believe, he didn’t care.
A week after the discovery of Evan Chandler’s body in the Liberty Towers apartment, his two youngest sons gathered with friends and family for a Thanksgiving dinner at their mother’s house in Los Angeles. A Hollywood producer at the table was taken aback by the animosity that Nikki and Emmanuel expressed toward Michael Jackson. “They literally couldn’t speak his name without cursing him,” the producer said. “They blame him not only for what they believe he did to their brother, but also for what they believe he did to their family.”
None of the Chandlers had recanted their conviction that Michael Jackson was a child molester, and they weren’t alone. Ron Zonen, years removed from the prosecution of Michael in Santa Barbara County, remained convinced that the defendant had been guilty as charged. During a September 15, 2010, Los Angeles Bar Association “Frozen In Time” symposium, Zonen betrayed a barely suppressed bitterness about the outcome of the criminal trial and a dogged insistence that justice had not been done. In front of an audience that included Tom Mesereau, Larry Feldman, Carl Douglas, and Judge Rodney Melville, Zonen told his audience about what a fine young man Gavin Arvizo had turned out to be.
After moving out of state and changing his name, Zonen said, Gavin became a high school football star, until his identity was revealed by a Michael Jackson fan who had linked his Myspace page to the social network connections of every other student at his school, then posted a lengthy attack on the teenager’s character. Gavin was twenty years old now, Zonen said, and in his third year at a prominent East Coast university where he was an honor student with a 3.5 GPA pursuing a double major in history and philosophy. He wanted to become, of all things, a lawyer. Gavin was deeply religious, Zonen told the crowd, and had been in a relationship for the past three years with the daughter of a minister. He continued to refuse to accept so much as a penny from the numerous media organizations that were offering him six-figure sums for an interview and was paying his way through school with a half-scholarship supplemented by student loans. That Gavin had risen so far above his family background to develop into such an admirable person spoke volumes, in Zonen’s opinion, about the truth of his accusations against Michael Jackson, accusations that he had never withdrawn.
Mesereau frowned and shook his head. The crowd observed an uncomfortable silence.
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“Michael was a good person, of that I’m certain,” Tom Mesereau said shortly after the star’s death. “He was one of the most sensitive and kindest people I’ve ever encountered. He really wanted what was best for everyone. He wanted people to do well. And he was remarkable with children and the elderly, one of the most considerate, if not the most considerate people I’ve ever met in that regard.”
Kenny Ortega said that if you had been there to see what it was like to be on tour with Michael in the 1980s, before those allegations about him first made by the Chandler boy, if you had seen him hurrying to visit one orphanage or children’s hospital ward after another between performances, in city after city, all over the world, you would have understood that the accusations against him simply could not be true. He had spent months at a stretch in constant contact with Michael Jackson, over a period of more than two decades, Ortega noted, and in all that time, “I’ve never seen Michael do anything to embarrass, harm, insult, or hurt anyone, ever.”
What was perhaps most remarkable about Michael Jackson—more remarkable even than his tremendous talent—was that the overwhelming testimony to his goodness, to his sensitivity and kindness and generosity and resilience, could be so completely convincing and yet not cancel out the voices of those who gave the world reasons to wonder what lay underneath, or alongside, that goodness. The conundrum was as perplexing as any in the history of celebrity. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt about what Michael had or had not done would never be possible. Questions would remain. He didn’t have to live with them anymore, but those he had left behind did.
“Please tell the world my son was not a pedophile,” Katherine Jackson told me in the spring of 2011. “He was not and people need to know that about him.” I could only say that I didn’t believe Michael was a child molester.
Later I thought that perhaps it was a pity Mrs. Jackson had decided her son should not be interred at Neverland Ranch. What her decision had cost was more than a pilgrimage site for the fans or a row of ticket booths for the estate. The greater loss, it seemed to me, was that within the main house at Neverland existed the most fitting of all possible crypts for the King of Pop, the one perfect place in the world to contemplate the abiding mystery of Michael Jackson.
This hidden space was a custom feature of the main house that the dozens of deputies who swarmed the ranch back in November 2003 had almost overlooked. Behind a screen of stage uniforms in the back of a closet in the master bedroom was a trapdoor that opened onto a narrow carpeted stairwell lined with rag dolls, descending to a tiny eight-foot-by-seven-foot cubicle that seemed like a small child’s bedroom. There were toys and games stacked on shelves. The walls were decorated with photographs of diapered babies. A large stuffed doll with big eyes and red hair reclined at the head of the single bed, leaning against pillowcases imprinted with the face of Walt Disney’s Peter Pan—the one with Bobby Driscoll’s features—and the word “Neverland.” A Mickey Mouse telephone sat on the nightstand, next to a framed photograph of Ma
caulay Culkin signed, “Don’t leave me in the house alone.”
This, according to the Santa Barbara sheriff’s department, was where Michael Jackson brought boys to sexually molest them. There was some basis for believing it might be true. The three deadbolt locks on that trapdoor, for instance. Michael wanted his privacy when he came down those carpeted stairs to the room with baby pictures on the walls, obviously. But for what? Those who arrested and prosecuted Jackson have yet to explain how it was that, out of the hundreds of boys who spent the night with him at Neverland Ranch, only two (or three, if Jason Francia is counted) ever accused him of sexual molestation, and that in each case the circumstances of those charges was at least as suspicious as anything Michael ever did or said. The detectives and the district attorneys haven’t explained, either, how it could be that even those accusers never claimed Michael took them to the secret room to abuse them.
Marc Schaffel had purchased the photographs of the little boys in diapers that hung on the walls of Michael’s most private place. It had started after Michael saw a poster-size photograph of a little blue-eyed blond boy in a diaper on the ceiling of a store they visited together, Schaffel recalled, and sent him back to buy the picture, whatever it cost. He remembered being instructed also to locate and obtain a book that featured naked toddlers done up as cherubs, Marc said. Schaffel admitted he had no idea whether such images stirred sexual feelings in Michael, but it was in this secret room where Michael had hidden from his father, his mother, and his brother Jermaine back in 2001, when they were trying to get him to the sign the contract promising them another $500,000 for showing up at thirtieth anniversary concerts. Prince and Paris had been with Michael on that occasion, noted Schaffel, who found it impossible to believe his friend would have brought his own children to a room where he had sexually molested others.
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