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‘I’ve kept company with very violent people for a very long time,” says documentary-maker Dan Reed, in his office whose location has to be kept secret – I was led here, from a decoy address, by the Channel 4 publicist. “I’ve had murderers try to find me. I’ve had people threaten to shoot me who are armed. I’ve been threatened many, many times. I don’t want to say I’m a tough guy, but the needle doesn’t go into the red until I’ve got something quite specific. The threats delivered face to face I took seriously. People trying to find my home address to post me a parcel I took seriously. People in China sending me emails? I don’t take so seriously. They’re going to have to get on a plane.”
OK, well he does sound like a tough guy, or at least a foreign correspondent of the old school, and that’s fair enough. From the Kosovan war (The Valley, 1999) to the Russian mafia (From Russia With Cash, 2015), Reed’s films have long been threaded together by the reasonable fascinations of the hard-hitting documentary-maker – corruption, crime, natural disaster, war.
Yet the death threats we’re talking about – and there have been thousands – the ones that urge him to die like a dog in the gutter, or say simply “You’re really disgusting. Go to DEAD. FUCK YOU”, are from Michael Jackson fans, following his 2019 film Leaving Neverland. In it, Wade Robson and James Safechuck give detailed, devastatingly plausible accounts of Jackson as a serial paedophile, moving from one seven- or eight-year-old to the next at 12-month intervals, lovebombing them, sexually abusing them, discarding them.
The follow-up which airs this week, Leaving Neverland 2: Surviving Michael Jackson, is about the fallout from that film, and the awful fact that, when you combine the casual victim-blaming in the mainstream media and the fury of fans, Wade and James have been victimised all over again. We see how they have struggled with depression as adults, particularly since they’ve become fathers themselves. But perhaps more than anything, Surviving Michael Jackson feels like a completely new, feature-length outrage, exploring the attempts of the Jackson estate’s lawyers to keep the allegations from ever reaching open court.
Their testimony is graphic and hard to watch. “When I met with James,” remembers Reed, “I said: ‘If we’re going to do this, we have to go there. We have to be absolutely clear, this was sexual abuse. This wasn’t affection gone wrong.’ Wade immediately got that as well. It was going to be absolutely hardcore, no room for ambiguity. Jackson surfed on that ambiguity for his entire life.”
From a documentary point of view, it’s almost distracting how famous Jackson was, because Leaving Neverland isn’t about his fame or music or the lavish, childlike lifestyle for which he was known – except to explain the hold he had over the boys’ families, particularly their mothers. Rather, it is an anatomy of grooming, which “doesn’t happen the way we think it does. Your kid has a secret agreement with the predator. It will be very obvious to you what your kid is getting from it: your kid will be excited to see the person, will resist attempts to limit that time, they’re like a teenager in love. To show that, I had to get the guys to say: ‘It was amazing.’ Until it wasn’t.”
That is what makes the film petrifying: however much you might judge Robson and Safechuck’s mothers who were often, if not in the room, in the environs when the abuse took place, you can also see how hard it would be to protect your child from a paedophile who wooed them so cynically. Reed – who has four children, ranging from two months to 22 – doesn’t think it’s that complicated: “I don’t care what anyone says or does. I would never, ever allow my child to spend the night in bed with someone who wasn’t a member of the family, and even then …” His demeanour as he interviews Stephanie, James’s mother, and Joy, Wade’s, isn’t studs-first, it’s neutral (in the films, questions are asked off-camera, but you can generally tell how they have been posed). “I loved that quote of Stephanie’s: ‘I had one son, I had one job, and I fucked up.’ Joy is a little more evasive.”
Critically, Leaving Neverland was a great success. Robson and Safechuck were astonished and moved by the warm receptions they got at film festivals. They hadn’t expected to be congratulated for their bravery. But they also had strident detractors, on mainstream chatshows, making excuses for Jackson that you can’t imagine anyone making today – and this was only six years ago when #MeToo as a hashtag was in general use.
It seems like extremely recent history for anyone to have been uttering the argument that “Jackson was just being affectionate”, says Reed. “In some of the ridiculous media that came out afterwards, that line ‘Maybe they were sharing a bed, and maybe nature took its course, and maybe his penis got hard …’, and you’re thinking, what the fuck?” Others, including Piers Morgan, made an argument less inflammatory but more easily falsifiable: that the pair were money-grabbing. Reed bats this off easily – he says that when Leaving Neverland came out, five more people came forward with allegations, and the estate paid them off with millions of dollars – but you can tell by the way he says “Piers Morgan” that the aspersion vexes him. If the poorer party in a relationship is always thought to be on the make, the logical end point is that rich people can get away with anything.
“The thing I’ve never understood,” Reed continues, “is the people who said: ‘[Michael Jackson] never had a childhood, he never grew up.’ Why does not having a childhood entitle you to molest children?” Lawyers acting for the estate, blocking Robson and Safechuck at every turn, are just doing what lawyers do, is Reed’s urbane opinion.
He brings the same shrug-energy to the rage of the diehard fans, who muster mostly online but occasionally spring into real life protesting outside the offices of Channel 4, for instance (who have distributed the films along with HBO). “Nowadays, most people get their information online, and there, people will regularly say: ‘You know Leaving Neverland was debunked, right?’” Does he never find that frustrating? He cares about Wade and James, and has seen at close hand what it has cost them to describe what happened. “In 2019, I’d try to counter it. But you realise it doesn’t matter because those people don’t want to know the truth. They want an excuse to continue being in their tribe, to continue worshipping Michael Jackson. It is a bit of a cult.” And now “we live in a world of disinformation. If I shed a tear every time some piece of disinformation pops up online, I’d be a pile of dust on the floor.”
Reed has returned to these themes in films between the Neverland sequence: in The Truth vs Alex Jones, he tells the story of how disinformation has been monetised; in that case, famously, with the brutal falsehood that the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was a hoax. In Stopping the Steal, covering Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election results, Reed found himself back at the subject of paedophilia. A “hyper-conservative, Mormon politician was asked to throw the election, and he said no – at which point, the online scumosphere starts calling him a paedophile. It’s become this hand grenade that people throw around, and I don’t think that existed in 2019.”
He’s currently working on a documentary about the riots last summer after the Southport murders, and describes this curious internationalism that has taken hold – Elon Musk, driving far-right narratives, as well as hosting, on X, the violent content that spurred the real-life violence. “That’s the frontline – cultural spaces where the left cannot go and the right is supreme. That space contains a lot of concerns that ordinary people have, and it contains a lot of madness as well. Whoever is prepared to stand on that hill gets to sing the song they want to sing. The hill is a real place, built on immigration and family values. The liberal social democratic centre steers clear of these hard discussions, which has allowed the right to take the hill.”
The splenetic misinformation war waged by the Michael Jackson faithful didn’t launch the far-right, obviously. It took no interest in democratic elections; it was only interested in defending child abuse for the sake of Thriller. But Leaving Neverland 2 is a fascinating and sad account of the sheer complexity of a world in which new norms of bad faith constantly challenge the truth, and make the price of telling it unimaginably high.
Leaving Neverland 2: Surviving Michael Jackson is on Channel 4 on Tuesday 18 March at 9pm.
