The truth about Michael Jackson’s FBI case files and the Foundation’s statement on it

Read that the British gossip newspaper (tabloid) Daily Mirror, in its Sunday edition special titled Sunday People, claimed—by publishing false stories—that years ago Michael paid millions of dollars as hush money to the families of children he had abused. This story was then published by other English newspapers, including Daily Mail, and was reflected across news agencies worldwide. The Michael Jackson Foundation sent us the email below yesterday. This is the Foundation’s second statement about this rumor. Read the first statement here.

We know that many fans have been outraged by stories about Michael that have appeared in British tabloids. Michael Jackson sings in the song “Tabloid Junkie”: just because you read it in a magazine or see it on television doesn’t mean it’s true.

Unfortunately, when these degrading, outdated, and discredited stories—more than two decades old—were recently published, bringing up baseless accusations about Michael and so-called FBI case files, we were reminded how prophetic Michael’s songs have been.

It’s not surprising that one of the writers of these old discussions has a long track record of writing articles in British tabloids about Michael. It’s also important to note that this person had previously been one of the editors of a disgraced British tabloid (News of the World), which was shut down after it was revealed that the phones of celebrities, stars, and even a child murder victim were being tapped by the newspaper. Even worse, at one point one of the tabloid’s sources—called a former detective—lost his license to work and announced his resignation. He (the detective) doesn’t deny that he was paid to tell all these lies, but he boasts about his work in the porn industry. Obviously, such cold-hearted and shameless disregard for Michael’s children, family, and fans deserves condemnation.

Responsible journalists who don’t trade on a checkbook have rejected this hateful story and its unreliable sources. Showbiz411 titled its article: “The FBI files were written by people who were discredited years ago,” and CNN called the tabloid’s reports a suspicious old matter, pointing out that the tabloid’s website would benefit from a sensational headline that would mean increased traffic—i.e., their use of high ad revenue. This shows how media can divert from the truth and steer audiences and readers toward their own websites.

In our view, it’s better to ignore the journalists and tabloid publications that spread lies about Michael for their own selfish reasons. Sadly, these people hide behind a legal shield* that allows them to smear the dead. When their readers leave and their business is put at risk, they desperately go looking for attention and advertising. We believe they don’t deserve this attention, and we’re sure such unreliable articles will quickly disappear and be forgotten.

Be assured that Michael’s legacy is his artistic genius. It is his humanity and his message of peace that has affected millions. Most importantly, Michael’s legacy is his enduring love for children, his family, and his fans.

John Branca and John McClain, co-trustees of the Michael Jackson Estate.

(* Under the law, defamation and accusations made against a deceased person are not subject to legal or criminal pursuit. In other words: lying about the dead is free and without cost. / eMJey)

Source: MJOnline™ The Official Online Team of The Michael Jackson Estate VIA eMJey.com

Roger Friedman is honored that the Michael Jackson Foundation mentioned his article in its statement. He wrote: “I was surprised and proud that the Michael Jackson Foundation cited one of my articles about these malicious lies and discredited rumors that have lasted for decades.”

In the article referenced by the Foundation, published on CNN, quotes are attributed to Drew Griffin, Diane Diamond, and Thomas Miesro.

Drew Griffin, a special reporter for CNN, said: “None of this is new, and the FBI has nothing to do with this. These things don’t exist in (real) FBI files.”

Thomas Miesro, Michael’s attorney in the 2005 court case, stated—emphasizing that the FBI, after years of investigation, had closed Michael’s accusation case—that: “This newspaper took an old story and made it look new.”

Even Diane Diamond, a reporter whom her colleagues consider unethical, unscrupulous, and biased—and who has never hesitated to shut down any lie about Michael—took a different stance this time and said: “A former porn actor whose work license was revoked plays a role in this story.”

Diamond also writes that Sunday People: “pulled an old story back out and added a few numbers to it—paying $35 million to 24 boys. The problem is that there is no evidence proving that Michael Jackson paid such money.”

Griffin, Diamond, and Miesro all referred to a person named Paul Barresi, who was previously a porn actor and whose license to work as an investigator was revoked.

Fake FBI evidence is made and manufactured by the media

The fake FBI evidence was actually created by an unethical American journalist named Jim Mettiger. After Mettiger died of cancer in 1997, he left the documents to Paul Barresi, a self-styled detective, who then provided them to tabloid newspapers.

Roger Friedman wrote: “Mettiger willed that after his death these documents would reach Paul Barresi, a self-styled detective, with the idea that Barresi would do the ‘right thing’ with them. Barresi was an assistant to Anthony Pellicano, who had worked as Michael’s lawyer for a time. Barresi thought the documents were important but didn’t realize their historical significance. In the end, these documents reached the prosecutor handling Michael’s case. In 1993, Michael’s cook and maid, Philip and Stella Lemarck, asked Barresi to publish the fake story they had written about Michael’s sexual abuse of children. Barresi didn’t believe their story. But these same people were treated as witnesses by Michael’s prosecutor, Thomas Sneddon, and Sneddon brought their names—along with those of several other Michael employees who had sold their stories to newspapers—into his witness list (the 2005 court).”

Read the full article “A Conspiracy to Defame Michael Jackson” here.

In 1994, one year after the first accusation of sexual abuse of boys was raised by a person named Evan Chandler, Paul Barresi tried to sell a false story about Michael to newspapers.

Evan Chandler was the father of a boy who had spent some time in Michael’s home. Before bringing the accusation, Chandler had extorted Michael. After his request was rejected by Michael, he turned to filing a lawsuit. In a recorded telephone conversation, his voice was heard saying that if this went through, he would become wealthy and Michael would be ruined forever.

Barresi’s role in selling the story of Philip and Stella Lemarck

In 1994, two former Michael employees named Philip and Stella Lemarck went to Paul Barresi to tell him their fake story. They claimed they had seen Michael molesting Macaulay Culkin, the star of the film Home Alone. Barresi secretly recorded what these two people said. These two former employees had been fired by Michael in 1991.

Barresi said about the two: “When the price was one hundred thousand dollars, they said Michael’s hand wasn’t in the child’s pants. When the price became five hundred thousand dollars, they said his hand was in his pants.”

Barresi contacted the editor of The Globe and said he had an audio tape and was on his way to the prosecutor.

Barresi: “(The editor) said, ‘Let’s go too,’ and I realized I had managed to get his attention. In my mind, I wanted to ask him for thirty thousand dollars in exchange for the tape. You always have to ask for twice what you expect. He kept me waiting on the phone, and less than a minute later he came back and said, ‘We can’t give thirty—we’ll give ten.’ I said, ‘Make it fifteen.’ He said the deal was closed. I could see the headlines and the money coming in.”

Barresi also sold the news to Kevin Smith at Splash News, who then provided the story to Daily Mirror, and in the end he pocketed thirty thousand dollars from the Michael Jackson story.

In 1993, the police didn’t set up any criminal case against Michael. In the FBI files, it is stated that the insurance company for Michael Jackson reached an agreement with the man who had sued him for an amount between $16 and $20 million. Chandler withdrew his sexual accusation and said that Michael had been negligent in caring for his child. Michael disagreed with the settlement, but the insurance company paid that amount to Evan Chandler. Michael denied any wrongdoing, and Chandler’s lawyer, Larry Feldman, wrote that this money was not hush money. Chandler and Feldman signed the agreement without any dispute. Nearly a decade later, Thomas Miesro revealed that the agreement had been signed without Michael’s consent.

In 2005, when the second sexual accusation against Michael came up, the 1993 case was brought to court by prosecutor Thomas Sneddon, who also handled the 1993 investigation.

Philip Lemarck, the maid who had been fired by Michael in 1991 and who tried to sell her story to the media—and who even Paul Barresi didn’t believe—appeared in the 2005 court as a prosecutor’s witness and said that when she worked as Michael Jackson’s cook for ten months in 1991 at Neverland, she had seen Michael touch Macaulay Culkin inappropriately.

Thomas Miesro brought Culkin to the stand to refute Lemarck’s claim.

In the same court, Lemarck admitted that she had tried to sell her story. She said that Paul Barresi had promised her a payment of one hundred thousand dollars, and that if the story became even more outrageous and dirty, the payment amount would increase.

Miesro, referring to Lemarck, said: “As the amount went higher and higher, he made his story dirtier and dirtier.”

In court, in the presence of the jury that later returned a verdict of Michael’s innocence, Miesro asked Lemarck:

“Is it true that you were told that if Michael’s hands were in Culkin’s pants, you would be paid more?” Lemarck’s answer was: “He said that.”

Paul Barresi himself, in an interview for the PBS documentary Frontline in 1994, had said:

“My interest in helping them (the Lemarck couple) was that I would receive a percentage of their income. I had no intention of doing justice for anyone. At that time, Michael Jackson’s innocence or guilt was irrelevant. I was only after money, and they were too.”

The story told by Philip and Stella Lemarck was only one of the examples that Daily Mirror referred to as FBI files. In 1992, a woman using the alias Taily She contacted a tabloid reporter and said she had details of a financial agreement between Michael and the family of a boy. Did she have evidence? No. She only read to the reporter over the phone the story she had written, took her money, and then disappeared—and no one ever heard of that woman again. Police investigations showed that the boy claimed by that woman didn’t exist at all.

Evidence that Barresi received

When Jim Mettiger, a reporter for National Enquirer and The Globe—who considered “defaming celebrities” his profession—died of cancer in 1997, he willed that all his files would be handed to Paul Barresi. Among them was also a long interview tape with Philip and Stella Lemarck.

Barresi never hid these tapes and documents from anyone because over the years he tried to sell them by approaching media owners. For example, Roger Friedman, Drew Griffin, and Diane Diamond had also read and reviewed his materials.

Griffin says that the reports Barresi had prepared for Anthony Pellicano were also part of the materials in his possession. Anthony Pellicano, the lawyer who had been removed from his job, is now serving a fifteen-year prison sentence for wiretapping and extortion. He was arrested in 2006 and found guilty in 2008.

Anthony Pellicano: the lead in the case

In 1994, Barresi began working as a private investigator for Anthony Pellicano. At that time, Pellicano was working as Michael’s lawyer. Barresi says Pellicano bought tabloid stories about stars before they were made public, and then told those same stars that in exchange for money he would buy their reputations and arrange things so their fame would be harmed less. Unaware stars saw a powerful lawyer who could help them, and they hired him—while the real point was that Pellicano had hired them. Barresi says that whenever Pellicano had a sexual case file about stars, he would also get involved. Pellicano even once instructed Barresi to “drag his former client, Sylvester Stallone, through the mud,” as if the relationship between Pellicano and Stallone had soured.

The dirty and ruthless world of Hollywood media is just as filthy.

Who is Paul Barresi?

Paul Barresi, the man tasked with dragging stars through the mud, has a long history in acting and directing porn films. Married Men with Men on the Side, Leather Bears, and Smooth Chested Huskies are two of his works that earned him critics’ awards in 1985. In 2008, he was inducted into the GayVN (gay porn) Hall of Fame.

Barresi is now sixty years old and has retired from porn cinema. In 2009, he focused on his second job as an investigator. After years of working in this field, in 2009 he received a license to work in the state of California as a private investigator, which was revoked after only three years due to preparing creative and realistic reports. Barresi also announced his bankruptcy in 2010.

Diamond writes: “Since he lost his license, I can imagine he’s in financial trouble. I guess British newspapers paid him several thousand dollars in exchange for copies of Pellicano’s old reports.”

When CNN called Barresi on Tuesday, he said: “I have no comment, and that’s the only thing I have to say.”

Before saying that one sentence, CNN’s reporter had asked whether he would like to know how many times he had engaged in sexual activity in the porn industry. Barresi then explained that because he had acted in porn films, people ask him about it.

CNN also contacted Sunday People. They accepted that the documents were collected by Anthony Pellicano’s assistant. Sunday People said that during an inspection of Pellicano in 2002, the FBI had seized and confiscated these documents.

The truth about the FBI files

On September 7, 1993—one month after the first sexual accusation against Michael was raised—Los Angeles police asked the FBI to step in. The FBI then kept Michael under surveillance for years. When he was acquitted of the charges in the 2005 court case, the FBI also closed his file.

Six months after Michael’s death in 2009, the FBI published the files it had about Michael Jackson on its website. These documents are still available on their website. Two years later, the Child and Family Support organization announced that Michael Jackson was innocent. (News)

Thomas Miesro, who has read all 330 pages of the FBI file, says that the alleged files mentioned by Sunday People do not exist among the real files uploaded on the FBI website. He says:

“Imagine if the prosecutor had the alleged documents that Sunday People claims to have. What wouldn’t he do with them.”

CNN also separately reviewed the original FBI file on the organization’s website. None of the files claimed by Sunday People are among them, and even the page numbers are not the same.

Most of the real FBI files consist of copied versions of articles that had been published about Michael in the media.

Over the years, Michael’s home was raided by police several times. In 2003, when exactly a decade after the first accusation, the second false accusation against Michael was raised, more than seventy Los Angeles police officers poured into Neverland Ranch, looking for a trail that would indicate sexual abuse of children or a desire to do so—for example, child porn. They took Michael’s personal computers, magazines, and many other items. The police even showed no mercy toward the sofas and couches in the house. Desperate to find evidence against Michael, they tore apart the couch upholstery—an item that had been signed by many stars, including Marlon Brando, and was considered a treasure—hoping to find evidence inside the couch.

The evidence released by the FBI showed that the FBI and the Los Angeles police had wasted more than a decade of their time.

Racism against Michael Jackson in the FBI files

One of the FBI documents shows that in 1993, Los Angeles police asked the FBI to investigate the possibility of transferring an underage person in the state of California in order to carry out immoral acts. Perhaps it won’t surprise you that this action by Los Angeles police was connected to racism—and this is something that English journalist Charles Thomson, a staunch defender of Michael Jackson, revealed.

Charles Thomson wrote that the documents published on the FBI website show that Los Angeles police tried to pursue Michael legally by using a law that had previously been used to smear certain prominent Black figures, including Jack Johnson and Chuck Berry. This law in the U.S. is known as the Mann Act.

It is also called the “White Slave” law. The law was first introduced in 1910 to fight trafficking of women and girls in the U.S., but in practice it allowed police to accuse and pursue Black men who spent time with white women—based on their own personal suspicions—and to defame them. The law became a tool for racism. Under this law, prominent and successful Black figures in America—such as Jack Johnson, who had stepped beyond his bounds—were jailed for their association with white women, which police interpreted as sexual slavery.

That in 1993 Los Angeles police used the same law to pursue Michael shows that U.S. laws had not changed much since 1910, although not bringing this accusation against Michael in court indicates progress in this regard. At the same time, it should be known that although the white members of the jury condemned Johnson and his peers, Michael was fully acquitted in the 2005 court case.

Charles Thomson, however, believes that the very fact that that ridiculous court was formed in 2005 without any evidence against Michael and that it defamed him shows discrimination and racism toward him. Michael Jackson stepped beyond his boundaries and shone above every white star in the sky of fame.

Does A.J. have any connection to fake FBI files?

Charles Thomson also writes about the widespread release of fake files attributed to the FBI, saying that since the A.J. trial began—which deals with A.J.’s company’s negligence in Michael’s death—newspapers that rely on advertising revenue have become even more eager to defame Michael Jackson. Daily Mirror has been a pioneer in this trend in British print media.

Charles writes that A.J. is a financial supporter of Daily Mirror, and it’s not surprising to this journalist that only a few days after Randy Phillips, CEO of the company, testified in court that in 2009 he beat Michael and screamed at him so hard that the walls shook, these fake documents were published by the newspaper backed by the company. Randy Phillips’ testimony was met with silence or delays from the media, and Daily Mirror—trying to portray Michael as guilty in this matter—ran the headline: “Michael Jackson should be beaten.”

A few days later, when Michael’s son testified that he had seen Randy Phillips at their home in his father’s absence arguing with Michael’s doctor, Dr. Murray, Daily Mirror—in its Sunday edition special titled Sunday People—claimed it had FBI documents.

Charles Thomson regrets that readers of these magazines do no investigation into the truth or falsehood of what they read and believe everything they read. He adds: “Why should they investigate themselves? Isn’t it the newspaper’s job to verify the accuracy of a story before publishing it?” Unfortunately, the Mirror story was copied by other British newspapers and other countries and published without the slightest investigation. And of course, this rumor also reached Iran, where it was reported on the IRIB news network. This news is available on the network’s website at this link.

Thomson doubts that Mirror published these documents without knowing they were fake. He considers two possibilities: 1) the media’s members are unaware and lack the necessary qualifications, or 2) they are knowingly trying to defame Michael Jackson.

Source: eMJey.com / MJOnline & Charles Thomson & Showbiz411 & CNN