There were so many truly evil people in MJ's life so I always find it odd when fans attack someone as harmless as Brooke. It's like some try so hard to find something to bash in everyone who was around MJ. People are not perfect, so you can always find a reason to bash anyone, but I don't think Brooke was one of the bad people in MJ's life.
Yet I still like Brooke, but I am not going to believe everything she says since Michael claims something else.
What was the something else that Michael claimed which directly contradicts what Brooke says? He never claimed that Brooke abandoned him.
Were there many people who abandoned him? Yes, there were. But from that to make the conclusion that he's definitely talking about Brooke is such a stretch. He could have meant hundreds of other people by that comment, not only Brooke. From that Evvy Tavasci note we do know that there WERE people who did call and offer their help. So to make it out to be such an extreme situation where
absolutely everyone abandoned him is just not right and not correct. And Michael himself never claimed that either.
Is it speculation that Brooke was among those calling and offering their help? Maybe, as we do not have definitive proof of it, however there is still more proof for her support than for any basis of the bashing she gets here. Like shown above she did publicly support him both in 1993 and 2004. She says they last talked in 2005, which implicitly means that they did speak in 2005, so during or shortly after MJ's trial. She also mentions Michael calling her in 2003 when her father died. Michael was not the kind of person who called people against whom he held a grudge, so I have no reason to think there were any hard feelings between them if Michael called her. Michael also spoke nicely of her to the Rabbi. In fact, he even had a painting of Brooke on his bedroom wall. I don't think that would have been the case if he had felt Brooke did something bad against him.
My main problem with her is that she is perpetuating the persona of Michael as a man terrified of intimate relationships & sex.
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And about the comment that some fans thrive on negative, well negativity is saying Michael was terrified and believing in it and condoning it. Terrified is not a positive word.
Terrified or chickened out is basically the same thing - only a matter of semantics and a matter of their own perspective of the situation but here again we see that what Brooke says is actually consistent with what Michael said. I have no problems with accepting the fact that Michael might not have been that comfortable with sex and intimacy during the 80s. I see no problems with that, he was a late bloomer, he needed his time and he got more comfortable later. Big deal.
Yes, maybe Michael would have never allowed that to be published, but on the other hand he knew the Rabbi was recording him and was not shy or ashamed to talk about it. In actuality, he was never shy about talking about the fact that he was not that comfortable with sex and intimacy early on. He does not try to portray himself as some big womanizer. He openly talked about the fact that Tatum O'Neal too wanted something more from him and he was not ready. I don't think that Michael ever tried to hide the fact that he was not that comfortable with sex and intimacy at the time. Partly because of religious reasons, partly because he himself was not ready.