Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic originally opened with what the New Yorker’s Fuqua profile described as an “action sequence” depicting the 1993 police raid on Jackson’s Neverland Ranch—a sequence the film was forced to discard after it was discovered that Jackson’s settlement with the family of Jordan Chandler, whose family sued after Chandler accused Jackson of sexually molesting him when he was 13, forbade any depiction related to Chandler’s allegations. Michael Jackson: The Verdict, the three-part docuseries that is now streaming on Netflix, begins with a different raid, conducted after 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo told investigators that Jackson had molested him. But the raid, as seen through the copious video footage the police shot as they were carrying out their search of Jackson’s property, doesn’t look like a raid at all, nor is it even slightly action-packed. The police, knowing that they were preparing to charge the most famous person in the world with the most awful of crimes, are on their best behavior, riffling cautiously through his belongings and calmly pressing Neverland’s staff for details about “Mr. Jackson.” When Jackson was taken into custody a few months later, the squad car was fitted with audio recorders to preempt any charges that he might have been mistreated, and on the recording, you can hear the officers asking if he’d like them to adjust the air conditioning.
There’s not much, if anything, new in director Nick Green’s two-and-a-half-hour series. Many of what are being touted as “bombshells” are forgotten details that have been public for decades, like the fact that Jackson gave the younger brother of one of his alleged victims the nickname “Blowhole.” (Even the picture of a pornographic magazine in which Jackson is said to have circled the names of videotapes featuring naked children he wanted an associate to order for him was released months ago as part of the Epstein files.) But The Verdict walks viewers through the tangle of Jackson’s court case with a steady hand and clear eyes, making it essential viewing for anyone who’s curious about what Michael left out.
Green devotes much of his first episode to the fallout from the British TV documentary Living With Michael Jackson, which took interviewer Martin Bashir on a guided tour of Jackson’s sprawling Neverland compound. The program itself is more of a gawking drive-by than a hard-hitting expose; as Bashir admits in a new interview for The Verdict, he was powerless to go anywhere that Jackson didn’t invite him, so he had to play nice, and Jackson was media-savvy enough to know just how to work their power dynamic. But a staged interview with Arvizo, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, backfired when the boy volunteered more than he was supposed to. Holding Arvizo’s hand, Jackson claimed that “whenever kids come here, they always want to stay with me,” his explanation for why a man in his mid-40s would regularly host unaccompanied “sleepovers” with children he barely knew. But a smiling Arvizo undermined the idea that it was the children’s idea. “He finally said, ‘OK, if you love me, you’ll sleep on the bed.’ ”
The Verdict returns more than once to the expression on Jackson’s face as Arvizo lets that slip, which is all the more heartbreaking for the apparent lack of calculation on the boy’s part. You can almost see Jackson’s eyes go blurry and his face fall. Even as evidence of the true nature of his relationships with young boys mounted, Jackson had maintained that he was something between a father and a peer, an adult living out the childhood that his abusive father and early fame prevented him from experiencing when he should have. But spending 90 offstage minutes with Michael Jackson drove home to many viewers how eccentric, if not downright weird, he was, and with his last tether to normalcy snapped, Arvizo’s words took on a newly ominous cast.
Living With Michael Jackson apparently played very differently in court, where it was screened for the jury in its entirety. Prosecutor Ron Zonen says he thought that jurors would see what the viewing public had seen: a freak. But the documentary also contained clips of Jackson’s music, and Zonen realized that the jury, the spectators, and even people at his table were tapping their feet and bobbing their heads, unable to resist the pull of “Billie Jean” while the man who sang it was mere feet away. One of the jurors who eventually voted to acquit Jackson recalls, “It was neat.”
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Green doesn’t openly take sides on the question of Jackson’s guilt or innocence, and he interviews lawyers and civilians on both sides, including a preschool teacher who quit her job in order to attend the trial and wore a “King of Pop” T-shirt to her documentary interview. But the story that emerges over the course of The Verdict is one of a case that shouldn’t have been lost, not a celebrity brought down by money-grubbing scammers. Jackson’s lawyers, Mark Geragos and Thomas Mesereau, make the latter case with plenty of force—sometimes, as when Geragos recounts how they broke down a teenage Arvizo on the witness stand and cast his mother as a welfare cheat, with something approaching glee. But no one rebuts damning evidence like the black briefcase full of pornographic images that Arvizo told the police Jackson used to groom him, and that showed up in the search of Jackson’s house. Instead, we’re taken time and again through what becomes a familiar arc: The prosecution calls what they think will be a devastating witness, only for them to fizzle—Bashir refused to answer many questions, and Jackson’s ex-wife, Debbie Rowe, unexpectedly reversed course on the stand—or have their credibility detonated by Jackson’s lawyers, sometimes over what seem like relatively minor inconsistencies.
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What’s missing in The Verdict is hearing from those witnesses themselves, or anyone who could explain why an alleged victim of child rape might not make the most consistent of witnesses—perhaps the most shattering image in the entire series is Gavin Arvizo sucking from a juice box as the police take his initial statement. It also lacks any acknowledgement that the story continued after Jackson’s acquittal; one wonders what the juror who thought Wade Robson was “very convincing” when he testified in Jackson’s defense makes of the fact that Robson later accused Jackson of repeatedly raping him. Fortunately, there’s already a documentary that covers that territory: the four-hour Leaving Neverland, which details both Robson’s and fellow accuser James Safechuck’s allegations against Jackson and their explanations for why it took them so long to go public with them. Unfortunately, you can’t legally watch it, at least in the U.S., due to some crafty maneuvering by the Jackson estate. But the internet is vast, and The Verdict might be the impetus some viewers need to go looking.
