It’s a movie starring his nephew in the lead role, approved by his estate, and by all accounts it just feels like an attempt to whitewash him. This is a man who was accused of being a serial child molester, settled with a family out of court for $25 million just to avoid a trial (Chandler), and openly admitted he slept in the same bed as kids while he was an adult (Bashir interview), among other things. I don’t really see what there is to debate.
Anything pointing this out gets backlash on movie-related subreddits, which I find wild. It makes me wonder, if Epstein could sing and dance, would he have gotten a biopic too? Would people be defending him like this?
I do believe he molested children, although I think the reason we have trouble accepting it is that I think there are a bunch of types of molestation, and we as a culture have a poor understanding of what these are, and so we struggle to recognize them.
Epstein, for instance, sought the youngest possible post-pubescent girls in order to get off on taking their innocence.
Jackson, imo, sought out intimate friendships with prepubescent children for companionship, and those unsupervised interactions included nudity and touching of an inappropriate nature.
Both are child abuse. But they look different. Jackson got away with it (and still does, in a sense) because we don’t understand his motivations the way we can for Epstein, so we can’t recognize what happened.
This is unproven, right?