Michael Jackson’s accusers search to open sealed data that embody nude photographs of the singer
Michael Jackson’s manufacturing firm is combating to maintain sealed courtroom data out of the arms of two of his accusers forward of a forthcoming jury trial.
MJJ Productions filed a movement Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court docket to quash 4 subpoenas issued by Jackson’s alleged sex-abuse victims, Wade Robson, 41, and James Safechuck, 46. The subpoenas, directed on the county sheriff’s places of work and the district attorneys of Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties, are for sealed police data associated to Jackson’s 2005 pedophilia costs.
The manufacturing firm believes Robson and Safechuck’s precise goal is a sequence of nude images of Jackson included within the data.
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The nude images have been taken by police in 1993 amid accusations from a 13-year-old boy that he was sexually abused by Jackson, which culminated in an estimated $20-million settlement.
They’re additionally protected by a court-entered protecting order, MJJ Productions stated within the Wednesday submitting.
“Past the invasion of privateness points, the obtainable data point out the images Plaintiffs now search are additionally topic to a strict protecting order agreed to by Michael Jackson and Santa Barbara regulation enforcement and entered by the Santa Barbara Superior Court docket,” stated the submitting, based on the Mail Online.
MJJ Productions went on to say that the photographs have been “not taken willingly” and have been “the results of a court-ordered search primarily based on a false assertion in what grew to become a discredited legal investigation.”
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“To permit Plaintiffs to use that sequence of circumstances to their profit by acquiring these images now provides a second defilement to the primary,” the corporate concluded within the submitting, the Mail On-line reported.
The movement comes lower than a 12 months after a California appeals courtroom revived lawsuits from Robson and Safechuck that had been thrown out and later revisited twice since they have been first filed in 2013 (Robson) and 2014 (Safechuck).
The second dismissal got here in 2021 from the L.A. County Superior Court docket, which dominated that the firms MJJ Productions Inc. and MJJ Ventures Inc. — of which Jackson was in sole management — had no authorized responsibility to forestall sexual abuse of youngsters by the singer.
In its August 2023 resolution, the state appeals courtroom reversed the choice, approving Robson and Safechuck collectively to take their abuse claims to a trial — through which they might want to show not solely that Jackson abused them, however that manufacturing firm employees have been complicit.
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Jonathan Steinsapir, legal professional for the Jackson property, stated his shopper was “disillusioned” with the appellate courtroom’s resolution.
“Two distinguished trial judges repeatedly dismissed these instances on quite a few events over the past decade as a result of the regulation required it,” Steinsapir informed the Associated Press. “We stay totally assured that Michael is harmless of those allegations, that are opposite to all credible proof and impartial corroboration, and which have been solely first made years after Michael’s loss of life by males motivated solely by cash.”
Howard Weitzman, the late legal professional who beforehand represented Jackson, equally described Robson and Safechuck as “serial perjurers, whose sole agenda has been to extract cash from Jackson’s rightful heirs and chosen beneficiaries,” after the discharge of the 2019 HBO documentary “Leaving Neverland.
Within the documentary, the repeat plaintiffs recounted the abuse they endured as boys at Jackson’s Neverland Ranch.
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Jackson’s estate sued HBO over the documentary, alleging that the cable channel violated non-disparagement agreements it had made with the singer prior to his death in 2009.
“Regardless of the determined lengths taken to undermine the movie, our plans stay unchanged,” HBO stated in a press release on the time of the lawsuit. “This can permit everybody the chance to evaluate the movie and the claims in it for themselves.”
Robson and Safechuck’s trial date has been scheduled for April 2025, the identical month that the forthcoming Michael Jackson biopic is slated for launch.
The 2 hope their trial comes first, however apparently suspect MJJ Productions is gunning for the alternative.
“They need the Michael Jackson biopic to come back out earlier than the trial. That is what I believe,” their lawyer John Carpenter informed Rolling Stone in February. “These firms that facilitated the abuse within the first place, they’re rewriting the historical past.”
This story initially appeared in Los Angeles Times.
