Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | April 21, 2026
For reasons I’m not going to get into at the moment, I’ve spent a lot of time around 14-year-olds these past few months. At one point, a group was talking animatedly about Michael Jackson — how awesome he is, how much they wanted to see the movie about his life. I interjected.
“But what about, you know, the controversies?”
“What controversies?”
“You know. The issues.”
“What issues?”
And that’s the day a group of 14-year-olds jumped on Wikipedia and found out, for the first time, that there’s a dark history in Michael Jackson’s past.
This has not been an isolated instance. There are a lot of people in Gen Z and Gen Alpha who love the music of Michael Jackson — because there is a lot to love about the music of Michael Jackson — but have no idea about the many, many, many allegations that have been leveled against him. For this generation, Jackson exists as a pure cultural artifact: the moonwalk, the glove, the voice. The rest has been quietly composted by the internet’s algorithmic preference for celebration over complication. Ahead of Michael’s release, the kids aren’t revisiting Leaving Neverland or doing Wikipedia searches, they’re gleefully passing around “The Skinniest Jackson” memes (seriously):
@themeantimeradio I’m the mulletest Jackson #michaeljackson #podcast ♬ original sound - The Mean Time
When Michael opens this weekend, that won’t change. Antoine Fuqua’s biopic does not address, discuss, or so much as gesture at the allegations against the late King of Pop. That wasn’t always the plan: the original cut of Michael actually did address the accusations — by challenging the credibility of the Chandler family, Jackson’s first major accusers, and suggesting that the $23 million settlement was a sham.
But Fuqua was forced to reshoot the film after it was discovered that the settlement agreement contained a stipulation barring the Chandler family from ever being depicted in a future telling of the Michael Jackson story. The solution from the filmmaker and the estate was to do something far more sweeping than a casting change: they rewrote the movie entirely, excised the allegations — all of them — and ended the film at the apex of Jackson’s career, before things got complicated.
In other words, 14-year-olds who see Michael this weekend will walk out of the theater completely unaware of Jackson’s history of accusations — not just multiple allegations, but Jackson’s own admitted practice of sharing a bed with young boys, a fact he stated plainly on camera and apparently expected the world to simply accept.
This is how history gets rewritten. Not with piles of documents. With a wide release and a marketing budget.
And Fuqua is not merely a passive instrument here — he’s an active participant, not only in making a film that launders Jackson’s legacy for a new generation, but in minimizing the allegations in the press. From Vanity Fair:
When I hear things about us — Black people in particular, especially in a certain position — there’s always pause,” Fuqua said, with The New Yorker noting the filmmaker “was skeptical of some of the accusers’ parents, particularly Chandler’s father, who was recorded threatening to insure that Jackson was ‘humiliated beyond belief.’” While Fuqua stressed he didn’t know the truth behind the allegations made against Jackson over the years, he noted that “sometimes people do some nasty things for some money.”
History, it is often said, is written by the winners. And sometimes the “winners” are simply the people with enough money and institutional power to not only rewrite that history but discredit anyone who pushes back — even if the person pushing back happens to be Jackson’s own daughter.
The danger isn’t just that a generation grows up not knowing. It’s that they grow up having been actively, deliberately, and expensively taught not to ask.
