Clearly you know the truth.
I would have preferred that he be vindicated in court.
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Janelle Monae!
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Courts don’t “vindicate” people so much as “determine whether or not there’s enough evidence for a conviction.” There’s no such thing as an “innocent” verdict, just “not guilty.” Which was the verdict the jury reached for all charges in his 2005 trial.
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It’s almost as if he was an addict with better things on his mind and his children were under ten!
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At the other times he settled out of court?
As has been said, if he wasn’t Michael Jackson, no one would be assuming innocence on multiple out of court settlements around behavior with kids.
I don’t assume he’s innocent either, except in the “innocent until proven guilty” sense. I simply haven’t yet seen any evidence I could have convicted him on.
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If he’s guilty, that’s that whole reason to settle: so the evidence is never public record.
If he’s innocent, then I guess he just wanted it to go away.
There’s also the other side to consider: if he was really a serial child molester would it even be POSSIBLE to make it all go away, even years after his death? Money and lawyers have their limits. Children can’t be made legally beholden to lifelong gag orders, and even rich people can’t settle criminal trials.
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I tend to take the view that “innocent until proven guilty” is a safeguard against the overwhelming power of the state.
The rest of us are free to make up our minds on the balance of probabilities. Would you let your kids go to a sleepover at MJ’s house?
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Korine made a movie that failed to provoke outrage? He must be slipping.
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No, but I’m still not convinced the balance of probabilities points to MJ being a child molester. Like I said earlier it seems highly likely (though not a given) that at least one of his victims would have come forward independently as an adult by now if he were.
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I won’t just do one response, so I’ll do a blanket one.
I thought victim blaming was strictly forbidden on BoingBoing’s BBS. That doing so was pretty much a guaranteed ban.
Guess I was wrong.
No one has blamed victims for anything. If indeed MJ was a child molester that is 100% on him.
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If you didn’t, you came mighty close, matey.
EDIT: I shouldn’t have to, but if it helps, substitute “women” for “kids”, and, oh, I don’t know, “Bill Cosby” for “Michael Jackson”.
The thing is, if you have to go that far, you probably still won’t get it. One of the arguments you used against those kids is the same argument used against several of Cosby’s accusers. “Oh, if he really did it, they would have come forward before now, right? They’re just in it for the money.”
It could be, too, that the parents were in it for the money. It could also be that they were molested. Unless some of them come forward someday, we’ll probably never know. I just felt like parts of this conversation were veering into “not saying this is what happened, I’m just asking questions” weasel dudebro territory, that’s all.
Generally true, but there is such a thing as “actual innocence,” which may be determined and used to vacate an arrest or conviction in some states.
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I do think that more than a few people blame the parents, though.
I already explained why I think the evidence against Bill Cosby is far more compelling than the evidence against Michael Jackson. If dozens of now-adult children had come forward to say “yes, Michael Jackson sexually assaulted me back in the 90s” then it would be a very different story. As it stands not even one person has done so, before or after Michael’s death.
The testimony against Jackson in the 2005 case smacked of careful coaching (I included one damning snippet above), so the juvenile involved was either a victim of Michael Jackson or a victim of his grandmother and some overzealous prosecutors. I couldn’t tell you which with any real certainty, but the jury clearly didn’t buy the prosecution’s story.
If it was the latter then it would hardly be the first time that an overzealous California prosecutor tried to put an innocent person away based on coached testimony of child sexual abuse.
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