The ranch, both men claim, was also ground zero for Jackson's elaborate sexual predation. "What's not to like?" Soon, both boys and their families were spending hours with the pop star and making frequent visits to Neverland Ranch, Jackson's Santa Barbara County home, a dreamlike oasis that had an arcade, amusement park, zoo, and theater. "That creative genius thinks you're special," he remembers of Jackson in the film. Even though he was a larger-than-life entertainer, Jackson made Safechuck feel important, wanted. Safechuck met the singer around the same time, during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. At the time, Robson was an aspiring dancer from Australia who considered Jackson "my idol, my mentor, my god." After winning a local dance competition, Robson and his family find themselves entangled in Jackson's fairytale life. Leaving Neverland opens in the late 1980s at the peak of Jackson's fame, just as he has embarked on his Bad World Tour. Kelly and the Oscar-nominated Minding the Gap-that examine the thorns of domestic and sexual abuse.
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With its release, the film joins a recent spate of documentaries-including Lifetime's six-part series Surviving R. Beginning at ages 7 and 11, respectively, Robson and Safechuck detail how they became close with Jackson and how the singer later exploited that bond. Robson and Safechuck are the focus of the two-part, four-hour HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, in which they allege Jackson sexually abused them for the better part of a decade. And who could blame her? I certainly wasn't about to. Like thousands had online as the doc aired, she was shielding the altar where she had placed him. The end." She was doing what many of us have done-as when the child molestation allegations stirred in 1993 and again in 2005-and will likely continue to do in the wreckage that the documentary is certain to leave behind. When I texted a friend in the moments after I'd watched Leaving Neverland, expressing that it was unquestionably the darkest, and perhaps most haunting, portrait of Jackson's personal life we might ever witness, she cut me off. Because isn't that what we do with people we love? We stand by them, champion them, promise to shield them. That I wanted to protect that place, that altar. I told myself that there was a chamber somewhere deep within, somewhere perhaps beyond reason and logic, that Michael Jackson inhabited. And because he was ours I told myself I wouldn't watch it.