No, Michael Jackson and Jeffrey Epstein are not connected. Here’s why.
In 2019 and 2020, the Epstein/Maxwell case seemed well on its way to become the most talked-about story on the mainstream media. However, with Epstein dying in jail, Maxwell’s case stalling and not many official documents being released, the audience’s interest in the matter has mainly died off. The fact alone that only very few powerful people allegedly connected to Epstein has been named has been a huge let-down for the public.
Still, the mass media need to profit off the narrative — clicks are money, after all — and they always have an ace up on their sleeve to do that: it’s linking the name “Michael Jackson” to whatever putrid case they are treating, in the hope it gets more traction.
This has been happening — albeit ebbing and flowing — for quite some time when it comes to the Epstein case, and some conspiracy theorists on social media have been grasping at straws in the (hopeless) research of something that connects the two. Something that, evidence at hand, does not exist.
Even putting aside how the Jackson case is the complete nemesis of the Epstein case — both in length and scope of the investigation, agencies involved, evidence found, judiciary excursus, judicial outcome, media treatment, incoercible ruthlessness of the authorities…
…let alone number and behavior of the accusers — hundreds for Epstein, a small bunch (five, if we count the accuser who got laughed off court when he tried to connect alleged “tickling” to molestation) for Jackson, two of whom posthumous, none of whom ever going to the authorities but only civil lawyers asking for money, none presenting any evidence, all ending up obliterated once they stepped in the courtroom — to talk about a stretch trying to connect the two cases would be an understatement.
The smear-train caused by Leaving Neverland, a movie that ended up being exposed as a for-profit hit-piece riddled with dozens and dozens of demonstrable lies, hiding a huge financial motive, and starring two men who have been repeatedly thrown out of court since 2013/2014 (last time being in October 2020)— when they started asking for million dollars from the MJ Estate, was a good deflection from actual stories of abuse, and a great way to crowbar Jackson into any sordid story that needed to be sold to the public.
After all, a gap in the law doesn’t protect the dead from slander in the US or UK, which in plain terms means that anyone can say about a deceased person whatever they want, without fearing to be sued. This is a detail that too many people forget: if Michael Jackson was still here, Leaving Neverland would not exist and Robson and Safechuck would still be clinging onto their association with him, like they did for over twenty-five years, until the piggybank was empty.
And these are exactly the foundations on which the (nonexistent) “connection” between Epstein and Jackson began.
Theory One: “Michael Jackson’s contact was included in Epstein’s black book”
It’s false. Demonstrably.
This theory is the result of people being unable to understand what they are reading. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Epstein and Jackson even met or knew each other. There are no pictures of the two of them together and Jackson’s name doesn’t appear in any of Epstein’s court documents — and vice versa. Considering that Jackson was one of the most photographed people in the world and his life was scrutinized and accounted for pretty much daily, and that everyone and their mama has a picture with Jackson, is quite interesting that, in this case, there is none.
This conspiracy theory comes from the typical “degrees of separations” standard: three, in this case. The contacts included in Epstein’s black book are actually Samuel Gen’s, not Michael Jackson’s.
Samuel Gen himself had nothing to do with Jackson directly: he was James Meiskin’s lawyer. James Meiskin was the president of Plymouth Partners, a New York Real Estate firm.
According to journalist Roger Friedman, Jackson met Meiskin in November 2000 at Howard Rubenstein’s home when Jackson was introducing his new charity project with rabbi Shmuley Boteach.
Meiskin’s collaboration with Jackson was short-lived and didn’t end on good terms. Boteach’s relationship with Jackson too turned sour pretty quickly, because Boteach ended up being involved in some duplicitous business regarding Jackson’s finances — something pretty much everyone tried to put their claws in. With both men, Jackson had a quick and bitter fallout.
In October 2003, when his collaboration with Jackson had already ended, James Meiskin and his lawyer Samuel Gen were arrested on charges that they extorted a criminal defense lawyer and one of the lawyer’s clients. The case had nothing to do with Jackson.
In 2006 , Samuel Gen was disbarred following the allegations leveled against him and his client, James Meiskin. In 2015, Gen applied for reinstatement.
In plain terms, Meiskin was just one of the countless temporary business advisors around Michael Jackson, and Samuel Gen was Meiskin’s lawyer. This is also confirmed in the book “MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson”, by S. Knopper, written in 2015.
The contacts in Epstein’s black book are Samuel Gen’s and Jackson’s name seems to be there as a reference — since Jackson was indirectly connected to Gen through MJ’s temporary advisor Meiskin, who was Gen’s client. Epstein didn’t have any direct contact with Jackson, and there is no evidence of the two even knew each other.
That said, Epstein’s black book is nothing but a list of contacts of all kinds that he collected, whether he knew the people personally or not. In fact, many people on the list never met him at all. The majority of them aren’t accused of anything, and countless didn’t even know Epstein.
Another reach someone tries to make in attempting to create a connection between Jackson and Epstein is the fact that one of Epstein’s accusers claimed that Jackson once visited Epstein’s Florida Home in the 2020 book “Relentless Pursuit” by Brad Edwards.
However, Jackson’s name was never mentioned before in connection to Epstein and certainly is not included in Epstein’s case files (just like Epstein’s name is never linked to any of the countless “tracks” investigated by the dozens of agencies that worked on Jackson on a 13-year span, from 1993 onward).
MJ is only vaguely mentioned in a 2020 book, without any evidence and any context (not even timeline-wise, very conveniently), and thrown in the tabloid media as a “hook” to gather more clicks and traction. Essentially, Jackson’s name was one of the ways to promote the book in the tabloid media. But receipts at hand, nobody else has ever mentioned Jackson at all before 2020, when his name was constantly in the news because of the aftermath of the “Leaving Neverland” farce, and when they had to sell a book. Pretty timely, to say the least.
To not find this detail eyebrow-raising would be myopic at best. Unless, of course, one considers tabloids and books for profit more prone to the truth than thousands of court documents accumulated over twenty-five years of discovery and investigation (if we take into consideration Robson & Safechuck’s claims, which began in 2013 and 2014 respectively, and the copious amount of files since produced in civil court).
The bottom line is that anyone can make up any claims they want right now, but can’t turn back time and create preexisting evidence — especially on the Internet, where nothing ever disappears. Trying to connect Epstein and Jackson now is comparable to James Safechuck claiming, in Leaving Neverland, of having been abused daily in 1988/89 inside the famous Neverland Train Station, despite the train station not even existing until 1994, and not being visited by Safechuck before 1996, when he was 18.
Or to Wade Robson claiming, in Leaving Neverland, to have been abused at the ranch for one week straight despite his mother testifying under oath, not once but twice (in 1993 and 2016), that Robson was at the Grand Canyon with his family for the entire time.
Theory Two: “Michael Jackson and Epstein are connected through Tom Barrack”
This false theory is a bit more recent. However, Michael Jackson did not know Tom Barrack directly. Barrack had a direct connection with Jackson’s new manager, Tohme Tohme, who began working for Michael in January 2008. It was Tohme who knew Barrack and introduced him to Jackson a few months later.
With Barrack, Jackson created — through Tohme Tohme— a company called Sycamore Valley Ranch Co, a joint venture that included the commercial use of the ranch. The share was 87.5% undivided shares for Jackson and the difference for Barrack. This meant that the joint venture included a plan to sell the property, with Jackson retaining rights to purchase it before any other — i.e. by reimbursing Colony Capital, which had paid the mortgage debt, as well as the maintenance costs sustained by Colony Capital.
Barrack’s get-in card to Jackson was Fortress Investment Group LLC. Tom Barrack subsequently negotiated with his good pal Phil Anschultz, who was linked to AEG — the company under which Jackson ended up dying (or, more specifically, being killed). All these characters were far from allies to Jackson.
However, who Tom Barrack allegedly has (or had) a good relationship with was Harvey Weinstein, to the point that in 2017 Barrack “promised to restore the Weinstein Company to its rightful iconic position in the independent film and television industry”. This happened when the Weinstein case began to emerge in the media.
Years earlier, in 2013, Barrack’s and Weinstein’s names were linked again in Miramax’s joint venture with Colony Capital. It’s very interesting, especially since, in 2010, Disney had sold Miramax to for US$663 million to a private equity group led by Barrack’s Colony Capital. Essentially, three years later Barrack put the company back into the hands of the Weinstein brothers.
As far as Harvey Weinstein goes, he had no connection to Michael Jackson, who hadn’t been part of any Hollywood circle since the early Eighties (or ever, really), and certainly wasn’t an ally to him either.
Quite the opposite: according to the 2017 expose by the New York Times, Weinstein’s so-called “complicity machine” included paying media mouthpieces and “reporters”, such as AJ Benza, one of the most ruthless Jackson adversaries since the Nineties, to spread “rumors” in the press about other people to divert the attention from himself. One of the targets of said “tabloid rumors” was Michael Jackson.
AJ Benza (who ended up getting a deal with Miramax Books) even bragged about breaking the Chandler story and having a direct line to June Chandler. He also indirectly threatened Jackson when Margaret Maldonado (Jermaine Jackson’s ex longtime partner) cut ties with him.
AJ Benza bizarrely appears in the 2019 documentary “Untouchable” about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior, but as some sort of neutral/positive entity in the press, despite the New York Times’ expose showing Benza having been nothing but a ruthless, ambition-driven ally for Big Harv in the mainstream media.
By the way, does anyone remember “Untouchable” being presented at the same Sundance Festival edition that focused on Leaving Neverland? No, right?
That’s because the documentary about Weinstein ended up being conveniently ignored or brushed off by the mass media, once again focused on smearing Jackson post-mortem through a wall of one-sided coverage in the press.
While Leaving Neverland’s hyper-biased media fanfare continued nonstop for the entire year and the movie was broadcasted all over the world within weeks, it took “Untouchable” almost a year to finally be acquired (by Hulu, in November 2019) and distributed. All without ever being really talked about globally and organically. Ironically, what should have been the biggest documentary about the #metoo movement ended up being buried under the biggest hoax of the year, and was pretty much skimmed over by the same mainstream media which, allegedly, had known about Weinstein’s behavior for years.
Meiskin, Boteach, Barrack, Benza, Weinstein, Tohme, Anschultz and so on: to see alliances or “positive connections” between these people and Jackson simply means not seeing the spiderweb of users and opportunists surrounding Michael for the most diverse reasons — mainly financial.
Eventually, Tom Barrack didn’t end up buying Neverland. The ranch was put on the market in 2015, six years after Jackson’s passing and ten years after Jackson left Neverland forever to move someplace else, after the trial that saw him unanimously acquitted on 14 counts over a total of 14.
The ranch was only recently purchased by Ron Burkle, who Jackson considered a friend, who operates in Real Estate and knows Barrack. That’s it. That’s the supposed “connection”. As flimsy and laughable as Samuel Gen’s.
It’s time to stop and think about the reasons why Jackson’s name always gets thrown into whatever scandal comes up, while the names of living people and possible actual predators are systematically ignored. It’s time to see what this 14-time exonerated, FBI-cleared black man who can no longer defend himself or sue for slander really is: a convenient piñata who knew a lot about corruption in the industry and had spoken about it plenty, a deflection from what could be the biggest and most predatory names in the Entertainment Industry and beyond, a modern-day “black brute caricature” that seems to come straight from the Birth of a Nation’s narrative.
However, the image of Jackson that is depicted by the mass media has very little to do with the actual man.
A good place to start, if one truly wants to get to know more about how the false allegations against Jackson began and became the press’ favorite profitable news, is Danny Wu’s extremely well-done documentary Square One, now available on Amazon Prime pretty much worldwide. It’s an independent documentary that managed to be successful without any big media fanfare behind. The project comes from a filmmaker that used to believe Jackson was guilty — until he was faced with the astounding amount of evidence proving that he was innocent:
https://www.amazon.com/Square-One-Danny-Wu/dp/B0887TPJ6Q
An early release of the Square One documentary is available for free on YouTube:
Extensive research and official files and documents about the Michael Jackson allegations can be found here.
