When it emerged yesterday that two weeks go Evan Chandler, father of Jordan Chandler, shot himself in the head, few tears were shed despite the media's best efforts to eulogise him.
Most media outlets are touting Chandler as 'the father of the boy who accused Jackson of child molestation'. Wrong. Chandler was the father who accused Jackson of molesting his son.
The initial allegations against Jackson were made not by Jordy Chandler but by his father Evan, in spite of Jordy's insistence that Jackson never touched him inappropriately, a stance that the boy maintained for several months.
Relations between the boy's father and Jackson had soured in early 1993 when Evan asked the popstar to build him a house and Jackson politely declined. A failed screenwriter, Chandler contacted Jackson shortly afterwards and asked him to negotiate three scriptwriting deals on his behalf. If Jackson did not comply, he said, he would accuse him of molesting his son. Jackson didn't comply - and the rest is history.
As revealed by Mary Fischer in her 1994 GQ article
'Was Michael Jackson Framed?' - Jordan Chandler only claimed to have been molested by Jackson after Evan - a dentist by trade - plied him with a mind-bending drug called sodium amytal, which is known to induce false memory syndrome.
Even once Jordan Chandler began to toe his father's line, his testimony was so unconvincing that DA Tom Sneddon took his case to three separate grand juries and none of them allowed him to bring charges against Michael Jackson. Contrary to widely reported myth, Jordan Chandler did not accurately describe Jackson's genitals. Among other inaccuracies, he claimed that Jackson was circumcised while police photographs proved that he was not.
Unsurprisingly, none of this information has made its way into the mainstream media's reportage of Evan Chandler's death. Instead, Chandler's suicide is seen as another opportunity to sling mud at Michael Jackson and perpetuate the same, tired old myths about the 1993 allegations - particularly with regard to the settlement.
News outlets the world over are once more reporting that in 1994 Jackson paid the Chandlers a settlement. This is total fiction.
Court documents which came to light in 2005 state clearly that Jackson's insurance carrier "negotiated and paid the settlement over the protests of Mr Jackson and his personal legal counsel."
Jackson didn't even agree with the settlement, let alone pay it.
Amongst the publications that rehashed this age old nonsense was
The Sun, to which I often contribute as a Michael Jackson expert. I was contacted yesterday and asked to provide information about Evan Chandler and the 1993 allegations, which I did. However, none of my information was used - most likely because it reflected too well on Jackson. Myths that imply Jackson's guilt are evidently more important than truths which exonerate him.
Noticing that The Sun's article on Chandler's suicide contained several factual inaccuracies (most promintently that Jordy initiated the claims of molestation and that Jackson paid the family a settlement) I contacted two members of staff at the newspaper - my usual contact and the journalist who wrote the article. Neither email was replied and the article was not changed.
Elsewhere, The Mirror ranked several places higher on the adbsurdity scale as it attempted to portray Chandler as a martyr of some kind.
'Michael Jackson sex case dad Evan Chandler wanted justice but ended up destroyed', read the headline.
Justice?
If Evan Chandler had wanted justice, why did he contact Jackson and ask for a three-movie script deal before he went to the police? If he wanted justice, why did he accept a settlement from Jackson's insurance carrier?
Indeed, the settlement included a clause which stated that accepting the payment in lieu of a civil trial would not affect the family's ability to testify in a criminal case. So if Evan Chandler wanted justice, why didn't he allow the police to press ahead with their investigation?
The headline, along with much of the article, is nonsense.
Having taken Jackson's insurance carrier for just under $15million (not the $20million usually alluded to by the press), in 1996 Evan Chandler tried to sue Jackson for a further $60million after claiming that the star's album HIStory was a breach of the settlement's confidentiality clause. In addition to trying to sue Jackson, Chandler requested that the court allow him to produce a rebuttal album called EVANstory.
Yes, really.
So the man who The Mirror claims only 'wanted justice' thought that the best course of action after the initial media storm died down would be to release an album of music about the supposed abuse of his pre-pubescent son.
The Mirror alluded to the fact that relations between Jordan and his parents were strained after 1993, but laid the blame at Jackson's door, claiming that the trauma of the case had driven them apart.
In actuality, Jordan Chandler went to court when he was 16 and gained legal emancipation from both of his parents. When called to appear at Jackson's 2005 trial, he refused to testify against his former friend. Had he taken the stand, Jackson's legal team had a number of witnesses who were prepared to testify that Jordan - who now lives in Long Island under an assumed name - had told them in recent years that he hated his parents for what they made him say in 1993, and that Michael Jackson had never touched him.
The evidence surrounding the 1993 allegations overwhelmingly supports Michael Jackson's innocence. It is for this reason that during the lengthy investigation, which continued for many months before Jackson's insurance carrier negotiated a settlement, Michael Jackson was never arrested and he was never charged with any crime.
The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Evan Chandler masterminded the allegations as a money making scheme, believing it would help him to achieve his dream of working in Hollywood. Tape recorded telephone conversations heard him dismiss the boy's wellbeing as 'irrelevant' and claim that he was out to take Jackson for all he was worth. (
Click here for Mary Fischer's GQ article, which contains transcripts of the telephone calls.)
Mary Fischer's evidence shows that as well as falsifying the sexual abuse of his own son in an elaborate extortion plot, when Jordan refused to play along Evan plied him with mind-altering drugs in a bid to trick him into believing that he was molested.
But even drugging a child as part of an extortion plot wasn't Evan Chandler's lowest point. That came when he petitioned the court to allow him to release an album of music about the supposed sexual abuse of his own son.
If Evan Chandler wanted justice, he got it two weeks ago.
As for the media, this latest incident cements once more the industry's almost total unwillingness to report fairly or accurately on Michael Jackson, particularly on the bogus allegations of sexual abuse that were levelled against him. None of the aforementioned information and evidence was included in any article about Chandler's suicide that I have read so far, despite the fact that I personally delivered it to at least one newspaper which has repeatedly paid me as a Jackson expert on other stories.
Exculpatory facts are overlooked in favour of salacious myths. A black humanitarian is tarred as a paedophile and his white extortionist is painted as a martyr.
As for Jordy Chandler, maybe with his father gone he will find the courage to do the honourable thing. Perhaps he will surface somewhere and tell the world what he's been telling his friends for over a decade now - that Michael Jackson never laid a finger on him. Until then, I suspect he will live with the same torment that it seems eventually claimed his father, suspiciously soon after the demise of the biggest victim in all of this; Michael Jackson.
