2003 Michael Jackson footage that shocked the world

The newly-released Michael Jackson biopic looks set to break a box office record this weekend.

Michael is expected to surpass the American $US60 million opening weekend set by the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton in 2015 and earn the strongest US opening weekend takings for a musical biopic.

That success appears to be repeating internationally, with audiences flocking to see the new film, which traces Jackson’s rise to fame and leaves him in 1988 as he mounts the Bad world tour, his biggest tour to date.

The film’s producers have insisted that, should Michael be a success, they’ll follow it up with a sequel, picking up where the first film left off focusing on the final 20 years of his life.

That would be a very different film indeed: Jackson became an increasingly reclusive, bizarre figure after the first of several young boys came forward to accuse him of sexual abuse in 1993, in a case he settled out of court.

Those who want to continue tracing Jackson’s story in film would do well to watch two controversial documentaries, both loathed by his more ardent supporters.

There’s Dan Reed’s harrowing 2019 four-hour doco Leaving Neverland, in which Jackson accusers Wade Robson and James Safechuck allege that the star’s close friendships with them when they were little boys and he was an adult also included repeated sexual abuse behind closed doors.

And then there’s Martin Bashir’s 2003 documentary Living With Michael Jackson, a film that made shockwaves when it was aired on television around the world more than 20 years ago.

Bashir followed Jackson for more than eight months for the project and found his subject to be a man who had lost touch with reality – and who fiercely defended his habit of sleeping with other people’s children, despite how much past trouble it had caused for him.

‘If you love me, you’ll sleep on the bed’

“I, like everyone, knew that 10 years ago, children were being invited to sleep over at Neverland. One of them, a 13-year-old boy, accused Jackson of sexual abuse, a claim that cost him millions of dollars,” Bashir tells viewers in the doco, referring to Jackson’s 1993 child sexual abuse case, which he had settled out of court.

“I’d assumed he’d be more cautious — but to my utter astonishment, I discovered that children were still sleeping over, sometimes in his house, sometimes in his bedroom.”

Bashir then meets 12-year-old child cancer survivor Gavin Arvizo, who is visiting Neverland with his siblings after first connecting with Jackson two years earlier.

“He’s really a child at heart. He knows how a child is, he knows how a child thinks,” Arvizo says, sitting by Jackson’s side on a sofa as Bashir interviews the pair.

Arvizo describes a sleepover he had in Jackson’s own bedroom — although he and Michael are both keen to emphasise that Jackson had slept on the floor.

“There was one night I asked him if I could stay in the bedroom. I was like ‘Michael, you sleep on the bed.’ He was like ‘No, no, no, you sleep on the bed.’ He finally said: ‘If you love me, you’ll sleep on the bed.’ I was like, ‘Oh man!’ So I finally slept on the bed. It was fun that night,” Arvizo says.

Jackson explains he slept on the floor in a sleeping bag.

An incredulous Bashir pushes Jackson on the issue: “Michael, you’re a 44-year-old man now. What do you get out of this?”

Jackson stands firm — all while tightly holding Arvizo’s hand, as the young boy rests his head on his shoulder.

“Why can’t you share your bed? That’s the most loving thing to do, to share your bed with someone. You say, ‘You can have my bed if you want it. Sleep in it. I’ll sleep on the floor. It’s yours’.”

Pressed by Bashir, the young boy says that “most of the time (at Neverland) I wasn’t really with my parents — I was with Michael.”

Swift fallout

Jackson had insisted in the documentary that his bedroom arrangements with children were “Not sexual; we’re going to sleep. I tuck them in … It’s very charming, it’s very sweet.”

But many viewers saw that one brief scene with Arvizo very differently: The intimate displays of physical affection, the admission that Jackson had coerced a child with the chilling line “If you love me, you’ll sleep on the bed.”

Four months after the documentary aired, the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department and District Attorney’s Office reopened their previous 1993 investigation into Jackson.

By November 2004, Arvizo would claim to police that Jackson had molested him several times in early 2003 when, according to his mother, the star had held the family captive at Neverland.

The case went to criminal trial, a public 18-month process that ended with Jackson being acquitted of all charges. At the time, the Guardian described Living With Michael Jackson as “the fuse that ignited the case and the trial.”

Throughout his adult life, Michael Jackson enjoyed close companionships with a series of young boys, all unrelated to him.

These little boys were frequently photographed with Jackson throughout the 1980s and 90s, travelling with him around the world and staying for many nights at his Neverland home.

Over the course of 20 years, five of these boys — Jordan Chandler and Jason Francia in 1993, Gavin Arvizo in 2003 and Wade Robson and James Safechuck in 2013 — publicly accused Jackson of sexually abusing them. The first case was settled out of court; Jackson was acquitted of the second. Robson and Safechuck did not come forward until after Jackson had died.

This year, the Jackson estate faced new legal action, when four adult siblings who had been friends with Jackson when they were children launched a lawsuit alleging the pop star had “drugged, raped, and sexually assaulted” them when they were as young as seven and eight.

The lawsuit, first reported in February, gained new attention this week following a New York Times interview with the siblings.