Dan Reed

I have.

I went to watch it the other day with my son.

Well, it's obviously a great jukebox movie for people who love Michael Jackson's music.

But it portrays his interest in children as something innocent and eccentric and

And we know that that wasn't the case and that, in fact, his interest in children was sinister.

And so I came away from the movie feeling slightly sickened.

Well, it presents Jackson as, you know, someone who had a difficult childhood and therefore escaped into a bit of a fantasy land.

It shows him reading Peter Pan by torchlight under the bedclothes and sort of fantasizing about being Peter Pan.

And it shows him also visiting sick children in hospital, which was kind of a bit icky, given that a child who had cancer and then recovered was his accuser in the criminal case.

which happened in 2005.

So, yeah, they sort of try and touch on why he sought the company of children, but, you know, it's all very vague.

And the film stops before the year in which the first child sex abuse allegations were made public.

Well, you know, I think there's a great film to be made about a great British philanthropist who was knighted by the Queen and gave a lot of money for charity and worked all his life with children.

And his name was Sir Jimmy Savile.

Now, why don't we make a movie that celebrates the philanthropic achievements and the generosity with children of Sir Jimmy Savile?

Well, and, you know, just stop before his death or at his death.

And the reason we don't do that is because he was exposed as a prolific, predatory paedophile, right?

And no one would countenance a movie about Sir Jimmy Savile that celebrated his life of charity.

And so, you know, the makers of the Michael biopic, which include the estate which inherited his, which manages his fortune in his catalogue,

They set out, and I know this, to make a film that would be, if you like, the retort or the answer, the rebuttal to my documentary, which went out in 2019, called Leaving Neverland, which is about these two young lads who reveal that they've been abused, sexually abused as a seven-year-old and a ten-year-old, respectively, by Michael Jackson.