We all know that it is important to separate the man from the addiction, and that was certainly accomplished at the Staples Memorial Event. Vive Michael the musician. Vive Michael the father. Vive Michael the racial pioneer. But why is the prescription drug addiction being so underplayed? The compulsive trip from Vicodin to Diprivan is not a journey that we often see publicly discussed. The MJ Memorial was a missed opportunity to teach and I mourn that.

the great 'Gloved One' doesn't need your help - nor the sappy shlock of Joan -

You just watch HIM dance and sing and prey that everybody else 'goes more into a silent mood'!

Michael Jackson was never particularly high on my radar, even though I'm as old as he was, but I can fathom his importance in the civil rights spectre - he created a huge pop-cultural opening where there had been none.

That said, I can't believe his memorial is being 'critiqued' by all the hipster news sites as if they were expecting some show that had been in heavy rehearsal for months. And did you all really expect his legal travails and plastic surgery abuse to be hot memorial topics? Or maybe you were looking for tribute dancing to rival the introduction of the moonwalk?

Mercy! It was a damn memorial for a dead person! I'm disappointed with all vulture journalism. I'm sorry he confused you, maybe you shouldn't have watched. Death is ultimately confusing.

2) Having read through the Vanity Fair account of the molestation accusations and the eventual trial, I note this:

the only hearsay testimony that rises to the level of disclosing personal details that could presumably have only been known only by a molestation victim is the statement by Jordie Chandler describing Michael Jackson's genitals, which apparently had piebald markings- mottled light and dark- due to vitiligo.

the only hard evidence at the 2004 trial indicating that Jackson had an explicit interest in pedophiliac topics was a set of magazines- seven of them in total- that showed nude underage boys, and hardcore scenes of homosexual pederasty.

In the first case, it's not out of the question that the accuser might have been fed that single incriminating detail, from- who knows?- someone who had seen Michael Jackson naked, and perhaps even managed to get a photograph or video. That's the ONLY "damning detail" in the entire case; the rest could have been made up as unverified hearsay witness testimony.

In the second case: suffice it to say that it's plantable evidence. If so: by whom ,and when- who knows? And as far as the evidence as detailed by the 2005 Vanity Fair article, the only evidence that Jackson and his accuser ever shared any particular reading material was a single copy of a magazine containing fingerprints from both of them- a copy of Barely Legal, a nude girlie magazine that's stocked in mini-marts and bookstores from coast to coast. Not that there's any way for those fingerprints to indicate whether the two ever shared the magazine. And considering Jackson's narcotics habit at that point, it certainly isn't as if he could have kept track of the boys doings all of the time- even when they were sharing the same room. A lot of the time, Jackson must have been out like a light.

If Jackson possessed that material and it was known that he was under a pending criminal investigation- and he must have known that much- how is it that he didn't get rid of the magazines? After all, from what I've read, they amount to the lynchpin of the prosecution's case. He might have been too stoned, and forgotten to account for them- but criminal investigations have a way of concentrating the mind in that regard, even in the case of junkies.

Consider some of the other allegations made- or repeated- by the Vanity Fair articles; that Jackson had bugging, eavesdropping, motion detector and visual surveillance devices installed all over Neverland; that Jackson had a fetish for the underwear of the child sex victims, and collected them in his drawer:

According to Michael Jackson Was My Lover, a book about Jordie Chandler by Chilean reporter Victor Gutierrez, Jackson had a drawer where he would keep the underwear of boys who stayed overnight.

http://www.vanityfair.com/fame/features/2004/03/orth200403?currentPage=5

[Note: the Vanity Fair stories state that author Victor Guiterrez lost a slander suit in regard to that book brought against him by Michael Jackson, the book was barred from further publication and extant copies were shredded, as part of the settlement.]

Well, if the charges about the underwear fetish are true- where's the evidence? And if the place had been sanitized in advance of the search- admittedly there was plenty of time to do so- how did Jackson faily to get rid of his alleged cache of male porn and young boy nudie pic magazines?

Furthermore- why didn't the prosecution file a child porn charge? Didn't they think they could prove one? Did the prosecution ever bring up finding Jackson's fingerprints on any of those magazines? If not, why not?

The first allegation, about all of the secruity measures, makes him sound like Doctor No- implying as it does that Jackson had a command center from which he exercised a paranoid surveillance and security obsession, in order to provide the maximum privacy for his deviant criminal acts.

The second allegation, about the underwear, sounds as if it would conceivably be able to provide absolutely damning confirming proof of Jackson's activities- for how is it that a collection like that could be free of DNA traces or semen from the victims?

So- where's the evidence?

And who's more likely to know the ins and outs of Jackson's supposed private surveillance network- him, or the people who installed it and maintained it? Where did the alleged phone bugging equipment turn up as evidence in the trial, anyway? If it did exist, is there any evidence that Jackson was acquainted with how to monitor all of its intricacies? And that sort of tech is usually associated with recordings- so where are the relevant recording archives? If they exist- where did the prosecution employ them to strengthen their case in court, as opposed to leaking those details as grist for a magazine article?

Who was responsible for monitoring the surveillance, if Jackson wasn't constantly "on the bridge", so to speak, using the array of cameras, microphones, and motion detectors for his own devious purposes? Isn't it at least as conceivable that he was more the one being spied on, than that he was the one doing the spying?

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