I will just post the entire article here some everyone can read and judge for themselves and also not have to give the UK press more clicks:
Michael Jackson’s former PR: ‘I absolutely believe he is guilty of child abuse’
"A new documentary on the ‘trial of the century’ shows how insider Vincent Amen had a change of heart about allegations against the star
“I absolutely believe that Michael Jackson is guilty of child abuse and molestation,” says Vincent Amen. “I believe there was a cover-up for so many years.” At this point, unless you are a close follower of events in the life of the late pop star Michael Jackson, you may well be wondering: who is Vincent Amen? Well, in 2005, Amen was considered by California state prosecutors to be a key part of what they saw explicitly as that “cover-up” in one of the trials of the century, in which authorities attempted, unsuccessfully, to convict Jackson of sexual abuse.
The trial was the second occasion on which the world had turned its gaze on Jackson and the possibility that he was a paedophile, rumours of which had been circulating since the 1980s. Back then, tabloids had begun noticing his friendships with child actors such as TV sitcom star Emmanuel Lewis and, later, Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin, whom Jackson had met and befriended in the early 1990s. But the first time that reports of an actual allegation emerged was in 1993, when it became known that a 13-year-old boy, Jordan Chandler, had been paid off to the tune of $20-30m, with no admission of guilt on Jackson’s part.
This time, however, allegations – from another boy, Gavin Arvizo – had come to trial and posed a far greater threat to Jackson’s career and reputation. The trial would end in exoneration. But Jackson, ever frailer, appeared a broken man from then on, releasing no new original songs, although a much-touted comeback live show for London, This is It, was announced in March 2009 to general astonishment. Jackson died of a prescription drugs overdose in June 2009 before the tour could begin.
Though musically in steep decline by the 2000s, the “King of Pop” was still the one of the biggest stars in the world when the trial took place. He faced multiple counts related to child molestation as well as conspiracy to commit child abduction and false imprisonment. The four-month trial ended in June 2005, with Jackson acquitted by the jury of all charges.
Arvizo was 15 when the trial began, but had been 13 when the offences were alleged to have happened. Amen was a PR for Jackson at the time and a close friend and business partner of a confidant of Jackson’s: his “PR manager” Frank Cascio. Cascio is currently battling in the American courts to be allowed to make public his own claims of sexual abuse as a child by Jackson. This would make him the fifth person close to the singer about which the same incendiary claim has been made, beginning with Chandler and then Arvizo, followed by James Safechuck and Wade Robson, who gave interviews with detailed accounts of sexual abuse to director Dan Reed in Channel 4’s powerful 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland.
I’m speaking to Amen (via video call from the US) because he is a contributor to a new four-part Channel 4 documentary, Michael Jackson: The Trial, starting on Wednesday, which focuses on those four months of 2005.
Amen has valuable insights into Cascio, the man who brought him into Jackson’s orbit, and tells me about the moment that his own suspicions became impossible to ignore, when he found a magazine that seemed to link Jackson to an interest in minors; how he confronted Cascio about it; and how Cascio, who had assured him there was no substance in earlier rumours, later had a change of heart. “From what I know now,” Amen says, “sex abuse victims reveal information about their abuse, piece by piece, over the years.”
When Jackson had first befriended Arvizo in 2000, the boy was 10 years old and being treated for cancer; he and his family had spent time at Jackson’s Neverland ranch in California, and the singer had paid for some of his treatment. Gavin had recovered. But when he appeared on camera with Jackson in Martin Bashir’s infamous Living with Michael Jackson documentary on ITV in February 2003 (shown in the US three days later), the footage provoked intense scrutiny. The two were shown holding hands, with the teenager leaning his head on Jackson’s shoulder as the singer talked of sharing his bedroom with the boy. Jackson told Bashir: “I have slept in a bed with many children… The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone.”
It’s now possible to see how Bashir’s film led inexorably to the trial. The conspiracy charges against Jackson related to what happened soon after the documentary aired – Jackson was accused of conspiring to abduct Arvizo and his family and hold them prisoner so that they couldn’t speak to the press. Amen and Cascio were accused of being his co-conspirators, but not charged.
Amen talks about those events in the documentary. In 2003, the then-22-year-old business graduate of the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania had joined the Jackson entourage as a PR adviser to help with “damage control” after the Bashir film.
After the documentary had aired and the ensuing furore began, Arvizo and his family had been flown to Miami, where, Gavin’s sister, Davellin, claimed in court, they were told to stay in their hotel room. Amen says he believes the plan had been to hold a press conference there, which didn’t happen. But after the Miami sojourn, plans were made for a trip to Brazil, which also formed part of the conspiracy charge. It had not been Amen’s idea, he insists, but the notion was “everyone’s going to Brazil… Michael’s going to be a part of it. And this is the trip that was organised”. He was involved in getting passports for the planned excursion: “There was a to-do list, you know, ‘Get passports and visas’.”
Was the Brazil trip intended to keep the Arvizos from the press? “That’s what I believed,” Amen tells me, acknowledging the cover-up. “It was never discussed to keep this family from the press, but it was a part of the process.”
The Arvizos’ apartment in Los Angeles had been broken into, Amen says, and the plan was to move them to a new home when they got back from Brazil.
Was the family being forced to go? “I noticed in [Janet Arvizo, Gavin’s mother], she was pushing it off… I figured it out. I said, ‘Janet, do you still want to go on the Brazil trip?’ She replied, ‘I don’t want to go anymore.’” When he reported that back, he says, the trip was cancelled.
Six months later, the Santa Barbara district attorney would file charges against Jackson on the Arvizos’ behalf alleging child molestation (conspiracy charges were added in April 2004). When charges were filed against Jackson, he says, he saw from the inside how panic took hold. “The prosecution was accused of many things – one was physical abuse of Michael Jackson [by police], which I know was fake. They put make-up on him.”
Amen describes in the film how “devastating” it was to hear that the sheriff’s office wanted to speak to him in relation to “kidnapping, hostage taking”. He recalls those days. “I was scared. I was 22 years old.” And he tells how he and Cascio were worried that they would “get searched” and decided to bring any “business items” they had relating to Jackson to an attorney.
Amen says he took a bag that Cascio handed to him back to his house because he was suspicious, then found a publication inside it that appeared incriminating: a naturist magazine with a page of adverts for videos for sale, several of which, featuring “naked kids”, had been circled “to be ordered”. (The original magazine is shown in the documentary.) After seeing it, Amen says he came to the conclusion that he had been lied to about Jackson’s blamelessness. “Finding that, I realised, ‘Something is going on here’,” he tells me, “Where there’s smoke, there is fire.”
He describes “approaching Frank and [saying], ‘Why do you have this?’ And him saying, ‘this is a phase that Michael and I went through and we watched these videos. And he circled the ones that he wanted to watch’”. It was a “crossroads moment [that] put it all together for me”, Amen says – and he made a decision: “I need to go and speak to the prosecution.” (His video interview was ultimately not used at the trial and he was not called as a witness.)
So who was Cascio to Jackson, and why were they watching videos of naked children together?
Cascio had known Jackson since the mid-1980s. His father, Dominic, had struck up a friendship with Jackson while an executive at an upmarket hotel in Manhattan where the star regularly stayed; Frank was around five at the time, and Jackson 25. The singer began regularly visiting the family at home and became close to Frank and his siblings, including his brother Eddie. Jackson eventually invited Frank to travel with him as a teenager, making him part of his inner circle.
Cascio, Amen believes, was for a time “the closest world traveller to Michael”.
Amen himself had been a friend of Cascio since they were teens, and had met Jackson as a result. He recalls a moment when, “[Jackson] had come by Frank’s house and kind of whisked him away on a birthday trip to Euro Disney. So when Michael came over, Frank invited us up to his room to meet Michael and another friend.”
The Jackson he met was just as he would be in the future when he went to work for him, Amen recalls – “Very nice, very cordial, very outgoing with the people that worked for him. I can remember being respectful to him because he was older than us. I said, ‘Hi, Mr Jackson, nice to meet you.’ ‘No, no, don’t call me Mr Jackson; I’m Michael.’” Yet the present US court battle suggests that Jackson may have been abusing Cascio at this stage in their relationship.
Amen had been working in the hedge fund industry after he graduated, but later got involved with Cascio, working on “entertainment deals with celebrities”. “Frank ended up getting in touch with Michael, and he was so interested in [what we were doing in the period before the Bashir documentary] that he wanted us to come out and explain it to him. He wanted us to work there because we were young, we had energy. There were a lot of people in entertainment that he didn’t trust. So he felt very comfortable with us.”
Amen says that, knowing of the 1993 allegations, he always speculated whether something could have happened to Cascio, but that he trusted Frank unconditionally. “I asked him straight out, ‘Did anything occur?’” In the documentary he says that Frank assured him, “Vin, you know me, I’m the closest person to him. Never would happen.” He tells me now: “The words that Frank used were, ‘It’s all BS’ [bulls---], so I believed him.”
When Amen flew out to Neverland after the Bashir documentary, he says, “I was working with [Jackson’s official] spokesman, Stuart Backerman, documenting all the press calls. The phone was ringing all throughout the day. It would only stop around 3am in the morning and then pick up again at around 8am. So we were busy.”
He was also involved in putting together the “business aspect” of a video that the Jackson camp shot in the weeks after the Bashir documentary to counter the narrative that Bashir had put to Jackson in the film – “Is it really appropriate for a 44-year-old man to share a bedroom with a child that is not related to him at all?” Amen organised the foreign rights deals with “the territories who were going to broadcast this”, he says. “I still have the spreadsheets.”
During that early period, he recalls, “they were trying to get Jordan Chandler to issue a retraction”. Arriving on the scene, he remembers thinking, “Wow, there’s going to be a retraction.” But he notes, “it never happened”.
Soon, he was being asked to drive “Janet and the kids” – Gavin Arvizo, his mother and Gavin’s two siblings, Star and Davellin – back and forth between Neverland and their home in LA. “I became more of a therapist-type figure,” he says, “just listening.”
In the trial, the defence was successfully able to paint Janet Arvizo as out for financial gain. Did Amen see it that way? “I don’t feel like she was fully out to exploit it for money,” he says. “But I think there was an aspect of, you know, recouping money and them recouping their reputations.”
His own role has been mischaracterised, he believes, and he says he was “falsely accused” in the trial. “I really cared about the family and Janet.” He helped her to get increased child support from an abusive ex-partner, he tells me, although he has had no contact with her since the trial, or indeed from the time when Janet Arvizo stepped away from all contact with the Jackson family.
It wasn’t until many years later, Amen says, “when Frank and I – I can maybe call it ‘reconvened’ – prior to Leaving Neverland coming out, where he said, ‘You know, I’m very sorry for bringing you into this.’”
Allegations of decades-long grooming and molestation
Today, Amen says he has in his possession “a Polaroid of Frank and Michael” from 1996 that he understands was taken when the former “was smashed drunk”, at 15 or 16 years old. That was, to him, “an indication of, really, what’s occurring here, of sex abuse”.
Earlier this month, it was reported that Cascio and his four siblings are alleging that Jackson “groomed, manipulated, and molested them for decades, from the late 1980s, until his death in 2009”. They are seeking to overturn a financial agreement with the Jackson estate that was made in 2020, which their lawyer has argued “included illegal non-disclosure provisions”. A California judge has yet to rule on whether they must settle the case in private arbitration. Howard King, another lawyer for the Cascio family, told a reporter for Rolling Stone after the hearing that he has 10 hours of sworn testimony, on video and audio, “of all five family members talking about the horrific abuse, in detail, that they suffered at the hands of Michael Jackson”.
“My opinion of it is, when one sex abuse victim comes forward, others tend to,” Amen says. “Leaving Neverland changed the minds of the Cascios. That’s where the process started. I feel by anyone coming forward in any sexual abuse case, it really brings strength to the other victims, by saying ‘It’s OK.’” He has long figured out that what he was seeing before then “was bits and pieces revealed to me”. He says: “I don’t want to really go into it, but my wife is a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, so I live the process of a sex abuse victim.”
I want to know if Amen believes those closest to Jackson knew there was an issue surrounding his contact with children. “I do feel that. And I feel that, by being there and learning on a daily basis, that they used children to profit. There’s people in entertainment that were around him that used children to get Michael to do things, to go to events.” He believes that “there needed to be intervention by an associate to come forward”.
Amen believes those closest to Jackson knew of problems relating to his contact with children, and that they ‘used children to profit’
Of his own actions, he says, “I do not have any regrets – when I saw something that was concerning, which I believe would indicate child sex abuse, I did the right thing and I came forward.” And of the impact of this early period of his career, he notes, “I don’t want to say, necessarily, it ruined my life, but it changed my life and put it on a different course.”
Meanwhile, a new biographical musical film, Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Michael’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson, is set to be released this year. The Jackson estate is acting as producers on the project. I wonder how Amen feels about the fact that the Michael Jackson show rolls on. “I feel they’re trying to recreate his image,” he says. “But truth be told, there needs to be a day of reckoning.”
Michael Jackson: The Trial starts on Channel 4 on Wednesday Feb 4 at 9pm
