Sheryl Crow’s time as a backing singer for Michael Jackson‘s Bad Tour left her with some questions about his behavior amid, the singer revealed in a recent interview with The Telegraph following the release of the Leaving Neverland documentary, which alleged Jackson had sexually abused children in his care before his 2009 death.
“I haven’t seen the documentary and I don’t want to see it,” she said of the film, which has been broadly denied by Jackson’s estate. “I was around for some things that I thought were really strange and I had a lot of questions about.”
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One of those questions was as to why James Safechuck, a 9-year-old boy who was part of the 1987-1989 tour, was spending so much time with the King of Pop.
She told The Guardian, “I happened to turn on CNN the morning after the first half [of Leaving Neverland] aired.”
“They showed clips of the young man who was on the Jackson tour with us and it made me… I mean, I still feel really…” she continued. “It’s like a death in the family, you know? It’s sad.”
“[James Safechuck] was a great kid and the whole time he was with us—which was the better half of an 18-month tour—I always wondered: ‘What in the world are his parents doing?’, you know?” she asked.
Crow added of Jackson’s star power, “I think that there were a lot of exceptions made because of the damage that [Jackson] … I mean, he didn’t intentionally project it, but it was part of his aura—this almost being untouchable and almost alien-like [figure].”
Coming to terms with everything amid the allegations that have come out over the years, Crow admitted, “And, yeah, I mean, I’m sad, and I’m mad at a lot of people. I feel like there was just a huge network of people that allowed all that to go on. It’s just tragic.”
Photo credit: Pete Still/Redferns
