Why Jacko can get away with almost anything

MARTIN BASHIR groped about last night in the darkness of Michael Jackson's psyche with the skill of an apprentice plumber trying to perform heart surgery.

Gradually, out of the gloaming appeared the ghost of a possibility that Jackson has never practised as a paedophile, that he really does only sleep when boys come for sleepovers. This apparition was presumably why Jackson made the programme.

To be fair, Bashir was trying to make sense of a particularly bewildering kind of human: personality disordered, with several sub- personalities.

All of us "prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet" as TS Eliot put it, the disordered just do it more extremely. At least half are physically or sexually abused as children, and use alternative personae as a way of escaping from an unbearable present. Jackson described the physical and mental cruelty of his father in detail and although he has denied it and no mention was made of it in the film, Jackson's cousin claims he was also sexually abused, by a relative.

The disordered keep their personae discreet and lack what is called "integration" - the right hand does not know what the left is doing, there is no Mission Control aware of the whole picture. In its extreme, this becomes schizophrenia although not yet in Jackson's case.

"I am Peter Pan", he said, but there were other personae also glimpsed.

The businessman who is proud to own over one billion dollars. The childishly petulant adult confronted by his lies about not having had plastic surgery.

The isolated man who sits alone on the rides in his fairground.

But the most intriguing question was whether there is an active paedophile, sexual subpersonality concealed from the selves that apparently opened up to Bashir. He self-righteously denied any wrongdoing, implying that it is our filthy minds that misread the "innocent" spectacle of a 44-year-old man sharing his bed with children. He admitted that his three offspring were conceived by surrogacy. He claimed the sperm had been supplied by himself although two of the children were visibly caucasian, to judge from their skin colour.

He told the story of how, as a young boy on tour with the Jackson Five, he had shared rooms with brothers who had had sex with women in his presence.

But he did not mention that he would actually try to persuade the girls not to do it.

We also know from other reliable sources, like his sister Janet, that his Jehovah's Witness mother indoctrinated him into believing sex was a "tribulation" which must be endured only to make babies. Several women who have been close to him and tried to initiate sex, have reported that he got out the bible and berated them for wanting sex out of wedlock.

This was just one of many details left out of his account to Bashir. In fact there is a large amount of evidence that he may be what is known as a preferential paedophile. They are fixated on children of a particular age and gender, prepubescent boys in Jackson's case. They get through huge numbers during their paedophile career, averaging 380 children per paedophile in one large study. His alleged career as one was extensively documented by the Los Angeles Police Department and in several books ( such as Unauthorised by Christopher Andersen). Jackson has never taken legal action against these allegations.

The Quindoys, a couple who worked for him and kept a diary, are just two of several employees who claim to have come across Jackson engaged in a sex acts with the boys. They also confirmed that he had an extensive collection of videos and photo albums of child models. When police raided his Neverland home they found an album with pictures of naked boys.

AT LEAST five boys have given evidence of sexual incidents involving Jackson. There are many more whose parents have received substantial gifts to keep quiet.

You could not help feeling some sympathy for Jackson in the film. Innocent until proved guilty, it is conceivable that he really has not had sex with any of his special friends. But the odds are that a paedophile subpersonality also cohabits within the childlike, childish, lonely billionaire.

At the Brit Awards in 1996, Jarvis Cocker famously objected to Jackson's very presence. Also on that occasion, Bob Geldof said of Jackson that he "sings with the voice of angels and when his feet move you can see God dancing".

That may be true. But it should not distract us from the real moral of the story: that if you are filthy rich and live in America, you can get away with almost anything.

Oliver James is a leading psychologist and author of They F*** You Up - How To Survive Family Life.

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