Your fact-checks will appear here
Australian choreographer, creative director, and songwriter
Michael Jackson faced multiple, high-profile allegations of sexual abuse of minors beginning in 1993, including a reported 1993 settlement and a criminal trial that ended in acquittal in 2005; later t...
Michael Jackson faced repeated and serious allegations of sexual abuse of boys across three decades, including a 1993 accusation by Jordan Chandler that led to a large civil settlement and a 2005 crim...
Michael Jackson was criminally investigated twice over allegations of child sexual abuse (1993–94 and 2004–05) and was acquitted at trial in 2005 on all counts after a four-month criminal trial (jury ...
Michael Jackson repeatedly admitted in interviews and was reported by journalists and trial records to have allowed unrelated boys to spend the night in his bedroom and sometimes to share his bed; def...
Key civil litigation alleging Michael Jackson’s sexual abuse has been revived and survives appeals, but criminal prosecutions ended without conviction and many factual questions remain litigated, not ...
Michael Jackson paid one or more large out‑of‑court settlements tied to child abuse allegations in the 1990s — commonly reported as around $20–25 million for the 1993 claim by Jordan Chandler — and th...
The principal accuser in Michael Jackson’s 2005 criminal child molestation trial was , a teenager who alleged Jackson abused him after they met when Gavin was being treated for cancer; the prosecution...
Key defense witnesses who testified that Michael Jackson did not molest children included Wade Robson (who in 2005 denied any abuse) and Macaulay Culkin (who defended Jackson’s bed-sharing with boys),...
Leaving Neverland presents detailed, first-person accusations by Wade Robson and James Safechuck that Michael Jackson sexually abused them as children, describing prolonged contact, graphic acts, groo...
Many defenders of Michael Jackson point to his 2005 criminal acquittal, decades-long fandom, and what they call inconsistencies or motives in accusers’ accounts; fans and family mounted legal and medi...
Michael Jackson was acquitted on all criminal charges in the 2005 Santa Barbara trial; jurors returned a not‑guilty verdict on June 13, 2005 . Separately, he had settled an earlier civil claim in the ...
The 2005 Michael Jackson trial ended in a full acquittal after a nearly four-month proceeding with 140 witnesses and intense global media attention; the verdict removed criminal liability but did not ...
Posthumous lawsuits by Wade Robson and James Safechuck have revived legal scrutiny of Michael Jackson’s conduct by allowing personal-injury claims against his companies to proceed to trial after appel...
Michael Jackson was criminally charged in the 2005 Santa Barbara County case with a total of 14 counts: four counts of child molestation, four counts of administering an intoxicant to a minor to facil...
The principal prosecution witnesses in Michael Jackson’s 2005 criminal trial were the Arvizo family—chiefly (the accuser), his brother Starr (often spelled “Star” in contemporaneous reporting), and th...
The release of Leaving Neverland produced a sustained rupture in Michael Jackson’s public standing: it transformed whisper and accusation into detailed survivor testimony that , while simultaneously p...
The 2005 prosecution of Michael Jackson largely rested on witness testimony and documentary footage rather than incontrovertible forensic or physical evidence; jurors and multiple news outlets conclud...
Michael Jackson was the subject of a high‑profile child sexual abuse allegation in 1993 that ended without criminal charges after the principal family declined to cooperate and with a large out‑of‑cou...
Multiple official actors—law enforcement, courts, Michael Jackson’s estate, corporations, and individual witnesses—have issued statements, rulings, or public retractions touching on allegations agains...
In the 2005 People v. Jackson trial the prosecution’s key witnesses included the accuser Gavin Arvizo, his family members and former Neverland staff who described observations; the defense’s high-prof...