Brittany Luce

In early 2019, an audience sat in the Times Center Auditorium in Manhattan for a preview screening of Leaving Neverland.

That's Dan Reed's controversial HBO documentary about Michael Jackson.

The film's approximately four hours of testimony from James Safechuck and Wade Robson, who allege in great detail that the pop star groomed and abused them when they were children.

Many of the audience members at that screening were sexual abuse survivors.

And once the final credits had rolled, the house lights came up and Oprah Winfrey took the stage, joined by Safechuck, Robson, and a psychological trauma consultant for a Q&A.

The filmed conversation was meant to help everyone in that room process what they'd just witnessed, and it aired later on HBO as the special

after Neverland.

It's like a scourge on humanity.

So I was at that taping as a member of the press.

I was a TV editor at The New York Times.

And this was a huge story we were covering from multiple angles.

But like so many people, I'd also been a lifelong Michael Jackson fan.

He was my first and most intense pop cultural obsession.

I'd devoured all the music and video choreography and archival footage I could.

I'd bawled when he died in 2009.

And I'd always doubted the allegations of child abuse.

Watching Leaving Neverland and being in the room for that Oprah conversation removed pretty much all of my doubt.

And for that brief moment around the documentary's release, it seemed, to me at least, as if the general public might finally reckon with Jackson's complicated legacy, that in the midst of the Me Too movement, one of entertainment's biggest stars could fade a bit.

Maybe.

Or maybe I was wrong.