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As Michael Jackson saw it, children would become enamored with his personality as well as want to touch and hug him – and “sometimes it [got] me into trouble,” the late US pop superstar says in previously unheard audio recordings contained in a new documentary.
The UK’s Wonderhood Studios included the recordings of Jackson voicing those thoughts for a new four-episode documentary series beginning on Wednesday that explores his acquittal on child sexual abuse charges after a 14-week criminal trial near Los Angeles in 2005.
A promotional trailer of Channel 4’s The Trial features Jackson’s soft, high-pitched speaking voice asserting: “Children … wanna just touch me and hug me.”
“Kids end up just falling in love with my personality – sometimes it gets me into trouble,” Jackson also says in the clip, after an interview subject explains that some of the things revealed on the recordings in question “have no precedent”.
The New York Post on Saturday reported on another particularly alarming remark that those recordings captured Jackson making.
“If you told me right now … ‘Michael, you could never see another child,’ … I would kill myself,” Jackson purportedly says on the recordings, according to the Post.
Wonderhood Studios’ website says the The Trial aims to step beyond the “media circus” that surrounded Jackson’s acquittal to pose “profound questions about fame, race and the American justice system”.
Prior to his acquittal, Jackson was charged with molesting a boy, providing a child alcohol, getting a minor intoxicated so as to abuse him, and of plotting to keep a juvenile and his family captive at the 13-time Grammy winner’s Neverland ranch in California.
Those charges stemmed from a UK television documentary, Living with Michael Jackson, that was broadcast in February 2003.
In a March 2005 interview, Jackson argued that the charges were the lowest point in his life – and had been brought against him as part of an elaborate scheme to discredit him.
“I am completely, completely innocent,” Jackson also said in that interview. “Please know a lot of conspiracy is going on as we speak.”
A jury found Jackson not guilty of all charges on 13 June 2005 in a Santa Maria, California, courtroom.
Four years and two weeks later, Jackson died from what authorities described as “acute intoxication” of the powerful anesthetic Propofol. He was 50.
His personal physician, Dr Conrad Murray, was later convicted of giving Jackson the deadly dose of propofol as the singer prepared for a series of comeback concerts. Murray was found guilty of manslaughter and served nearly two years in prison.
