A Lesson To Be Learned: … In The End Lies Don’t Pay Off

Dear readers, the following post was already written in October 2017, but was not published at that time due to more important events. Now that the German scammer Michael Jacobshagen changed his plans to earn money from stories in favor of Michael into plans to benefit from anti-Jackson stories, it is necessary to make this post public for our readers.

I don’t want to provide another link to the Mirror article which tells Jacobshagen’s new lies, but the text was already posted by Helena in her comment of January 27.

Please consider that the following post was written in 2017 and relates to the events in 2017 when Jacobshagen told several lies about meetings with Michael and was unmasked in a German TV program as somebody who falsified MJ memorabilia to sell them to fans by presenting himself as one of Michael’s best friends. After he was exposed we hoped he would disappear into oblivion.

But now the situation is different, and I will explain it again in an update at the end of the post.

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This post is meant as a completion of my post of June 7, 2017, on the lies Michael Jacobshagen and Daphne Barak spread earlier this year and Jacobshagen’s following threat to sue us unless we remove this post.

Most of our readers are probably aware by now that Jacobshagen has been exposed as a fraudster in a German TV report on September 12, 2017. He not only told tall tales about alleged meetings with Michael Jackson in the 2000s, but he also sold faked MJ memorabilia to fans for thousands of dollars.

This gives us the opportunity to complete and finally close this chapter of lies – one of many scammers who used Michael Jackson’s name to make money.

We decided to do this in a separate post because first of all we would like to take this opportunity to add more facts – as an example – disproving Jacobshagen’s lies regarding his alleged meeting with Michael in April 2009, and secondly because despite the successful unmasking of this person there is also a downside to the whole story and its end.

The April 2009 trap

In our answer to Jacobshagen we offered him to present his side of the story by answering a few questions, so the readers can decide themselves if he delivers credible answers. So we asked him to answer the following questions:

How can you prove your stay in Las Vegas in 2009? Is there a copy of a flight ticket, a hotel reservation, a photo of you and Michael Jackson or something of the kind?
Can you tell the exact dates when you were with Michael in 2009?
Where exactly did you meet him? Were his children with you, and if not who was with them?
How did Michael get to Las Vegas, when he already lived in Los Angeles in 2009?
Is there any proof of your contact with the LAPD in 2013? Did you send them a mail or did you call them?

He never answered again! We expected this, by the way, because we knew the questions would be too tough for him to answer truthfully. But now that he is exposed, we can provide the information which is necessary to give an honest answer.

In order to show how unbelievably brazen his claim of meeting Michael in April 2009 is, I return to some of our own records. Our long-time readers remember very well how closely Helena followed the trials against Conrad Murray and AEG Live in 2011 and 2013 and how detailed and extensively she wrote down what we learned from the presented evidence, collecting all the facts and information from these trials. Those who are interested can go to the blog’s Categories section and check the numerous posts on these topics.

I already told in the June 7 post that Michael’s last months in his life were dissected in those two trials, this means the trial evidence provided us with almost a complete timeline of his last months in 2009. Among the evidence were also medical records, and from these medical records we know exactly for example when Michael visited Dr. Klein’s office in Los Angeles during that time. And his visits to Klein’s office were particularly frequent in April 2009.

In addition we know from the trial testimony that April 2009 was the month when the rehearsals and the dancers’ auditions started. Michael also had appointments with Dr. Metzger and Cherilyn Lee in April 2009, and Conrad Murray and Kai Chase began their work at Michael’s house in Los Angeles in April 2009.

From the available information, the timeline for Michael in April 2009 in Los Angeles was as follows:

So, wow, can anyone guess when Michael should have been in Las Vegas in April to meet alone with Jacobshagen in a secret place at a secret time for 3 days?

In April, when the preparations for the London concerts were in full swing, with beginning rehearsals, dancers’ auditions and meetings not even included in this timeline? With Conrad Murray being in his house daily from April 2009 and also Kai Chase starting her daily work at Michael’s house in April? With Paris’ birthday on April 3? With his bodyguards constantly around him? None of them ever told that Michael was gone for 3 days.

Well, it’s obvious Jacobshagen never knew about these facts, never followed the trials or read the trial reports and so missed the trap into which he fell with his claim, together with the media who became his accomplices in reporting these lies.

And now he fell into another trap.

The interview trap

On the initiative of a group of MJ fans, German journalists of a cable TV program did some investigation on Michael Jacobshagen and aired a report on September 12, 2017, on the German SAT1 channel. The report was about 15 minutes long and was primarily about MJ memorabilia, letters and signatures which Jacobshagen sold to MJ fans and which now turned out to be falsified.

Our reader jacksonaktak already provided a short summary of the report in the comments section of the July post, but I’m going to repeat the most important content once more:

The report presents three examples of deceived fans and an interview with Jacobshagen in which he says at the beginning that he is thankful for the treasure Michael left him personally. Notes allegedly written by MJ are shown, and Jacobshagen claimed it is in Michael’s interest to make all of them public. He claimed again he remained Michael’s close friend until his death and met him regularly in later years, “for example in 2006 in England”.
At the end he is confronted in the interview with the evidence of his fraud.

The first example of a fan was the case of Thomas Käppeli, a Swiss fan, who also met Michael personally in Switzerland. He bought notes and other memorabilia from Jacobshagen for 30,000 €, allegedly with original MJ signatures.

A short time after he had told Jacobshagen that he would prefer notes of MJ referring to Switzerland and written with a marker instead of a pencil, Jacobshagen surprisingly offered him 5 “original” MJ notes written with a marker and referring to Switzerland (“I love Switzerland” etc.). This made him extremely suspicious.

The next example was presented by another fan who saw a BAD LP on Ebay offered for 2 €, with a positive ranking of Jacobshagen. A month later the exactly same LP, which could be recognized because of a certain price tag in a certain corner, was suddenly “originally signed” by Michael Jackson and offered for 250 € on Jacobshagen’s account.

The third example was a fan who had bought MJ autographs from Jacobshagen and was wondering about the photo paper the autographs were written on. The photo paper of Hewlett Packard had a numerical code on the back and his research revealed that the paper was manufactured years after Jackson’s death.

Dieter Wiesner, who was Jackson’s manager for a period of time, told in the report he had asked Michael’s mother and brother Jermaine about Jacobshagen and they denied knowing him. As Wiesner is in possession of original notes and signatures of Michael, he provided them for a comparison with the notes Jacobshagen sold. The journalists contacted a handwriting expert of the forensic institute of the state criminal police (LKA) of Brandenburg and asked for an expert opinion. This woman compared the handwriting and concluded that the notes in question are “most probably not authentic”. She said: “In the comparison we can see that it was tried over a longer period of time to exercise the handwriting, but he was not successful in completely capturing the form of the authentic handwriting.”

At the end, the report tells that Jacobshagen offered the journalists hand-written MJ notes for 1000 € without being asked and that they pretended to show interest.

Then they had the following conversation:

Reporter: You were with him, when he wrote that?

Jacobshagen: Yes, of course, he stood directly in front of me and then he gave it to me.

Then the showdown begins:
The reporter says to Jacobshagen that the papers at hand had been presented to the LKA Brandenburg for examination and they came to the conclusion that they are counterfeits written by the same hand, but not by MJ. They hand the letter with this result over to Jacobshagen.

J: That’s not true, it’s all from MJ himself.

R: Do you believe that the LKA is mistaken?

J: I don’t know which people sit anywhere, I am very surprised. I was there, I know what happened.

R: How much money have you got for these notes which allegedly are from MJ personally?

J: I can’t say that, there were also a lot of gifts.

R: I’m going to ask the man they belong to. Mr. Käppeli, would you come in?

Mr. Käppeli enters the room. Jacobshagen’s face freezes at that moment.

R: Mr. Käppeli, how much did you pay for the material you bought from Mr. Jacobshagen?

Mr. Käppeli: Altogether 30,000 €.

R: He paid 30.000 € and the LKA says they are counterfeits.

J: I can’t comment on that.

He looks utterly perplexed and doesn’t find words.

A short statement of Jermaine Jackson follows. He says he doesn’t know Michael Jacobshagen or whatever his name is, he never met him. He is angry and disappointed that Jacobshagen abuses the name of his family to deceive fans.

The report ends with the information that several cheated fans are preparing criminal complaints and claims.

Two sides of the story

 Undoubtedly the fans and the journalists did a good job in putting a stop to this unscrupulous profiteer’s game. The time has come to expose him, and it was necessary. He had to be taken down from his cloud where he apparently lived in another world, believing his own lies.

But the more I thought about this surprisingly successful cooperation between journalists and fans, the more I felt a sort of irritation. There is a downside to this story, or perhaps two.

I was asking myself: Why didn’t these or journalists in general examine the accusers and their allegations against Michael in the same way? They could have done it, as we can see in this case! They have the means to do it, and they can if they want!

I know the allegations and the accusers are a complex issue which cannot be handled and explained in a 15 minutes report. But what we have missed so far is even the slightest interest of journalists (with the exception of Mary Fischer in 1994) to go deeply into this matter and examine the accusers, their agenda and their claims. Exactly this could be a very interesting investigation for journalists, though.

I personally feel anger at the fact that today not one professional journalist bothers to investigate the liars speaking against Michael in the same way, whether they are the accusers from the past (Chandler, Arvizo) or the latest ones (Robson, Safechuck) who used the former ones as their template.

Or let me ask the other way round: If fans had put the same energy into debunking the allegations against Michael, could they – with the same effort – have been able to convince journalists of investigating the allegations in detail and restore Michael’s reputation? If fans were not only interested in MJ memorabilia, but equally (or more) in the truth and in exposing those liars accusing Michael, what could they have achieved within the media?

I was wondering about the journalists’ motives for agreeing to investigate the Jacobshagen case. Could it be they were mainly interested in the weirdness of MJ fans?

Of course in this case it became very clear that the fans distance themselves strictly from this fraudster, which is very important.

But Jacobshagen was supposed to be a fan, and if fans have such a liar in their ranks, this may shed a bad light on all of them. When a Michael Jackson fan says that Michael was innocent and then he turns out to be a horrible fraudster, it makes people doubt everything he said about MJ.

Do people really see the difference between this “fan” and the others?

To me it was shocking that some fans are spending 30,000 € for MJ memorabilia. Are they also interested in MJ’s reputation?

And do people really look at Michael Jackson fans as reasonable people in light of such amounts?

The story leaves a sour taste. It’s good Jacobshagen is stopped and that fans played a part in it by cooperating with journalists, but it is of minor effect for Michael Jackson’s legacy. The real success would be the next step: if journalists could be convinced to investigate the accusations against Michael Jackson himself and so put a stop to his character assassination.

Would fans put the same energy into this kind of efforts, when it’s not about large sums of lost money?

And would journalists show the same interest in a Michael Jackson story, when it’s not about crazy fans or fraudsters, but about justice for MJ?

I am just wondering. In any case, the chapter “Jacobshagen” is closed for us now.

However, the lesson from this case for liars in general should be that lies don’t pay off in the end, as also can be seen in the case of Paul Horner, the fake news writer during the US election campaign of 2016, who now died almost a year after he had admitted publicly to writing fake news on Facebook and declaring he “was the reason Mr. Trump had been elected”, as I told in this post.

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UPDATE  January 28, 2019

Unfortunately this chapter is not closed now! The rat came back out of its hole in a way Helena and I had already expected earlier. We always feared that he could make a U-turn in view of his public downfall and start to accuse Michael. After he miscalculated his plans to benefit from faked MJ memorabilia and pro-Jackson lies, he now tries to benefit from anti-Jackson lies. It had to be expected because a liar remains a liar, whether it’s in favour or against Michael, and now with Robson and Safechuck telling their lies in a 4-hour-film, Jacobshagen found the opportunity for him to change sides because he thinks this is more favourable for him. Because of his own massive contradictions his example shows best how some people change their stories for their own benefit. In the case of Jacobshagen this is very well documented and was even foreseeable.

See his original reply to the Robson allegations in 2013:

I left the headline of this post as it was written in 2017 because I still believe that the lies of all the accusers, whether it’s Robson, Safechuck or Jacobshagen, won’t pay off in the end!

Perhaps the whole issue requires a new post with updated information. We will see if this is necessary and possible. But to do this, we first had to make the above information available for our readers.

Update 29/01/19

Here is the video by the German cable TV with English subtitles. By the way at about 1:00 it says that Jacobshagen met Michael Jackson in 1998 (only):

https://www.bitchute.com/video/9EpoE5b1euuw/?fbclid=IwAR34yZj_9VNR_U7vgFPkH2U6WLapCyAyQFS-lkkyNeSB7uV_1Dso0_27skA