Charles Thomson: The Mirror, the People, and the settlement that never was…

It is funny how different people may be simultaneously struck by one and the same idea though they are continents apart.

It turns out that Charles Thomson, the British journalist also finds it funny that as soon as the AEG trial started the media has become more intent on smearing Michael Jackson.

I wonder if other journalists will also be surprised by this amazing process and notice it as Charles Thomson does.

Time to be getting more attentive, guys – it seems that your media is getting funnier and funnier with each new coming day and may one day turn into a sheer comedy for everyone to look and have a good laugh at.

Charles Thomson is actually being totally serious about it. He is a multi-award winning reporter and investigative journalist, so he knows and seems to genuinely care about the state the media is in now.

I hope he won’t be too cross with me for reposting his article in full here – I simply can’t resist it (again):

SUNDAY, 30 JUNE 2013

The Mirror, the People, and the settlement that never was…

It’s a funny thing. Ever since the high-profile Michael Jackson death trial started going pear-shaped for promoter AEG Live, a lot of newspapers which carry prominent and lucrative advertising for its events have become more intent on smearing Michael Jackson than ever.

Leading the way has been The Mirror in the UK. A few weeks ago, contemporaneous emails presented at trial showed that AEG boss Randy Phillips had ‘slapped’ Michael Jackson because he was scared about attending a press conference. Slapped him and screamed at him ‘so loud the walls shook’.

The shocking revelation was widely ignored by the press. Several days after the evidence was heard in open court, only one outlet had summoned the courage to publish the evidence. AP did not include the testimony in its daily missive from the courtroom. The wire’s reporter claimed on twitter he had been out of the courtroom sending emails when the testimony occurred.

It was only when fans started making noise about the ‘cover-up’ on sites like Twitter that other media companies grudgingly published the comments. AEG-sponsored newspapers like the Mirror, though, bizarrely tried to paint Michael Jackson as the bad guy. According to the first line of the Mirror’s story, Jackson ‘needed to be slapped’. Interestingly, the Mirror was a lot faster to publish a story last year accusing Janet Jackson of slapping a minor. A story which turned out to be a lie.

This weekend – days after Jackson’s son took the stand and testified that he saw Phillips in his home while his father was not there, behaving ‘aggressively’ towards Jackson’s doctor – the Mirror’s Sunday edition, called the People, is at it again. It has published a highly misleading story about some ‘FBI files’ which allegedly show Michael Jackson was witnessed molesting children by multiple Neverland employees. The ‘FBI files’ also detail a supposed settlement with a young accuser in 1992 – before the Jordy Chandler case.

In reality, the story is a nonsense; a birds nest of mangled and misstated accusations which are neither ‘new’ nor ‘exclusive’, despite the People’s repeated claims that they are. In fact, the documents are not ‘FBI files’ at all. This is a flat-out lie. Moreover, the claims have all been in the public domain for a very long time, some having been discredited two decades ago.

Of course, most readers won’t bother to fact-check the story. Why would they? The newspaper is supposed to do that before publishing it. Sadly, it seems other media outlets can’t be bothered either. Britain’s Mail newspaper has already rehashed the story, evidently making no attempt to investigate its veracity before doing so.

I could go into a whole lot of detail about the claims made by the People – and the various lazy journalists who will copy and paste its story hundreds, or perhaps thousands of times onto their own websites and into their own newspapers in the coming days. But what is the point? The info is already in the public domain.Those who hate Jackson will adopt the People’s story as evidence for their case.

Those with an interest in hearing both sides of Jackson’s case will already know that these claims were debunked a long time ago. Nobody else will even bother to research the story. The People’s readers buy the newspaper because they like and trust it. They, as intended, will believe this story and will not question it.

Briefly, however, for the record:1) The ‘FBI files’ are not FBI files. They are transcripts of interviewscompiled by a tabloid journalist who paid his sources – including one who turned out not to exist.They were acquired by a PI who worked for Jackson’s defence team. A decade later, he was prosecuted for tapping phones. The FBI seized all of his files, of which these tabloid interviews formed a miniscule part.2) The allegations of Jackson being caught by multiple employees do not, as the People infers, come from a host of different documents. They all come from one document – a transcript of an interview with a couple called the LeMarques, who worked at Neverland in the late 80s and early 90s. The People intentionally does not state that all of these uncorroborated accusations come from just one of the documents, instead purposely misleading readers and suggesting that they’re taken from a cache of evidence.

The LeMarques never contacted police about the abuse they claimed to have witnessed, instead opting to negotiate deals with tabloid newspapers – including the Mirror. Their claims were investigated by cops probing Jackson, who found the couple had agreed to add increasingly graphic details to their interviews for more and more money. Investigators concluded in the 90s that the pair had no credibility and possessed no evidence of any genuine abuse. They were called on out of desperation to testify in Jackson’s 2005 trial after prosecutors watched their case begin to disintegrate, but were destroyed under cross-examination. Jurors rejected their testimony and acquitted Jackson, unanimously.

3) The supposed ‘settlement’ in 1992 was detailed to a tabloid reporter, for money, by a female source who claimed to work for Jordan Chandler’s legal firm. She never showed the reporter a document – she simply ‘read it out’ over the phone. A police investigation into the claim found that the boy named in the settlement did not exist, there was no record of any settlement ever being paid, and the female source had never worked for the legal firm and in fact did not exist. She was never heard of again.

This leaves one element of the People’s story standing; that Jackson ‘allegedly’ – what a convenient little word that is – paid $35million to two-dozen young accusers. The newspaper presents no evidence to corroborate this claim. Just a note in the tabloid reporter’s documents, which the People intentionally misrepresents as an ‘FBI file’.

Contrary to the People’s claim, investigators knew about and investigated these tapes as part of their probe into Jackson in 2003/4, in which they were assisted by the FBI. Despite all of their resources, neither the Californian police nor the FBI was ever able to locate any evidence that any child besides Jordan Chandler or Jason Francia ever received a settlement.

http://charlesthomsonjournalist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-mirror-people-and-settlement-that.html

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Here is a video supplement in support of Charles Thomson’s article. It includes a piece from an FBI agent:

The TV correspondent:

• “It turns out that Michael Jackson was the target of the most intensive FBI scrutiny. We find that FBI was more involved in the highly-publicized sexual abuse trial than we ever knew.  James Clement was one of the FBI agents brought in to assist in the Jackson investigation.

James Clement, FBI agent speaks on their standards in Jackson investigation:

• “Certainly, there is a very high motivation to help when children, potential children victims are involved. We have international and interstate capabilities to do investigations that local law enforcement and local DAs don’t have. We also have forensic capabilities”.

The TV correspondent:

• “FBI forensic scientists poured over Jackson’s computers looking for evidence of child pornography. The agents helped with interview strategies for a victim who alleged that Jackson abused him in 1993. None of it ultimately mattered. Jackson was acquitted.”

Brian Oxman, the Jacksons family attorney:

• “All of these pages, hundreds of pages, many, many hours of investigation, going to the Phillipines, going to Chicago, going all over the country – there was not one scrap of evidence that Michael Jackson ever harmed a child, did anything wrong, committed any crime. It is almost a vindication, if you look at this. The FBI looked at all these matters and said “There is nothing here” and I think that is the most startling thing I’ve seen”.

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Related articles by Charles Thomson on Michael Jackson’s FBI file:

• FBI Files Support Jackson’s Innocence; Media Reports Otherwise  January 2, 2010
• Interview with Charles Thomson  September 30, 2010
• The Michael Jackson FBI Files Revisited  October 4, 2012