Michael Jackson Sexual Abuse Accusers Earn Legal Win With Revived Lawsuits

Wade Robson and James Safechuck filed lawsuits against two of Jackson's production companies in 2013 and 2014.

By Ashley Turner

An appeals court in California ruled on Friday that two men who have accused Michael Jackson of sexually abusing them when they were children can go forward with their lawsuits and have a jury trial. Those two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck were featured in a 2019 HBO documentary series called Leaving Neverland, which detailed a number of allegations they made against Jackson, who died in 2009. As part of their ongoing legal fight, Robson and Safechuck filed lawsuits against MJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures, two of Jackson's production companies that were owned by the singer at the time of his death, in 2013 and 2014. After being initially dismissed in 2017 due to being passed the statute of limitations, the two cases were resurrected in 2020, thanks to a new California law that allowed survivors who were children at the time of their abuse to bring their lawsuits to court. According to a Los Angeles judge, the companies did not have the legal power to control Jackson since he was the company's sole owner, so the lawsuit was dismissed in 2020 and 2021. In a ruling issued Friday, however, a three-judge panel from California's second district court of appeals disagreed with the judge, saying the case could proceed to a jury trial, reported The Guardian.

"A corporation that facilitates the sexual abuse of children by one of its employees is not excused from an affirmative duty to protect those children merely because it is solely owned by the perpetrator of the abuse," wrote the panel of judges in their decision. "It would be perverse to find no duty based on the corporate defendant having only one shareholder. And so we reverse the judgments entered for the corporations." Robson, now 40, alleged he suffered abuse from Jackson from age seven to 14. Safechuck, now 45, said he suffered abuse from Jackson between the ages of eight and ten, starting around the end of 1988, when he was just 10. In both men's cases, company employees are accused of failing to protect them from Jackson adequately and coordinating visits so that Jackson could spend time alone with them. Attorneys representing Jackson's companies, as well as his estate, maintain Jackson was innocent of any wrongdoing and that the men had targeted him for his reputation and money.

"We remain fully confident that Michael is innocent of these allegations, which are contrary to all credible evidence and independent corroboration, and which were only first made years after Michael's death by men motivated solely by money," Jackson's estate lawyer Jonathan Steinsapir said after the appeals court's decision. Robson and Safechuck attorney Holly Boyer told the Associated Press that the men, as boys, were "left alone in this lion's den by the defendant's employees." "An affirmative duty to protect and to warn is correct," Boyer said. Leaving Neverland was the first movie to ignite a discussion about Jackson's legacy, but it was after the #MeToo movement, which saw a reckoning on sexual abuse in the entertainment industry and other sectors. The allegations of child sexual abuse Jackson faced during his lifetime were the subject of two investigations. The charges were dropped in 1994 after Jackson settled with the boy's family for $20 million after the primary alleged victim declined to testify. Jackson was then acquitted of child molestation and serving alcohol to minors by a California jury in 2005.

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