A California appeals court has recently revived lawsuits from two men who allege Michael Jackson sexually abused them for years when they were boys.
The 3-judge panel of California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal has determined that the lawsuits of Robson and James Safechuck, initially dismissed by a lower court, should be reinstated. The appeals court’s decision rests on the premise that the newly enacted California law temporarily extends the scope of sexual abuse cases, permits these lawsuits to be reconsidered.
The two Jackson-owned corporations, MJJ Productions Inc. and MJJ Ventures Inc., which were named as defendants in the lawsuits, have been accused of failing to fulfill their duty to protect the plaintiffs.
This responsibility has been argued to extend beyond typical corporate boundaries due to the gravity of the allegations.
This is the 2nd time these lawsuits have been brought back after prior dismissals. Robson and Safechuck’s stories gained significant attention when they shared their experiences in the 2019 HBO documentary titled ‘Leaving Neverland.’
The earlier decision to dismiss the suits in 2021 was predicated on the view that the defendant corporations could not be held to the same level of duty as organizations such as the Boy Scouts or church, which are entrusted with the care of minors. Michael Jackson, the sole owner and shareholder of the implicated companies, has passed away in 2009.
The higher court judges disagreed, stating that “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.”
Furthermore, “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.”
Jonathan Steinsapir, attorney for the Jackson estate, stated that they were “disappointed.”
“Two distinguished trial judges repeatedly dismissed these cases on numerous occasions over the last decade because the law required it,” Steinsapir said in an email to The Associated Press. “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.”
Vince Finaldi, an attorney for Robson and Safechuck, stated in an email that they were “pleased but not surprised” that the court overturned the previous judge’s “incorrect rulings in these cases, which were against California law and would have set a dangerous precedent that endangered children throughout state and country. We eagerly look forward to a trial on the merits.”
In July, Steinsapir argued for the defense that it doesn’t make sense that employees would be legally required to stop the behavior of their boss.
Steinsapir stated, “It would require low-level employees to confront their supervisor and call them pedophiles.”
Holly Boyer, another attorney for Robson and Safechuck, countered that the boys, “were left alone in this lion’s den by the defendant’s employees. An affirmative duty to protect and to warn is correct.”
Steinsapir stated evidence that has been gathered in the cases, which have not reached trial, showed that the parents had no expectation of Jackson’s employees to act as monitors.
The lawyer argued stated, “They were not looking to Michael Jackson’s companies for protection from Michael Jackson.”
In a concurring opinion issued with the decision, one of the panelists, Associate Justice John Shepard Wiley Jr., wrote that “to treat Jackson’s wholly-owned instruments as different from Jackson himself is to be mesmerized by abstractions. This is not an alter ego case. This is a same ego case.”
The judges didn’t rule on the truth of the allegations themselves. That will be the subject of a Los Angeles’s forthcoming jury trial.
Robson, now a 40-year-old choreographer, met Jackson when he was 5 years old. He went on to appear in 3 Jackson music videos.
His lawsuit alleged that Jackson molested him over a period of seven years.
