Saturday, December 3

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME...

Jerry Sandusky, accused serial rapist of boys, admitted to the Times that he lavished gifts on the boy he would wrestle and host at sleepovers.

Martin Weiss, accused boy molester and Hollywood agent, decorated his home for Christmas in very child-appealing ways, separated the boys from their parents and have over alone for movie watching.


Details of how Bernie Fine, another accused molester of boys, lured them into his web are not yet known. But his connection to Syracuse University basketball was undoubtedly a big part of it. Sports, sport stars are big attractions to boys. And being around a team is no doubt appealing. And sports provides a natural place for a child to get naked--- the locker room and shower.


I couldn’t help but think, as I listened to the m.o. of the Hollywood agent for boy actors, how everything about this man that screamed “pedophile!” could be said about another person accused not so long ago of also molesting boys. Michael Jackson.


Neverland was an enormous child lure. Jackson gave gifts and got boys away from parents and had them for sleepovers.


And yet, the same people who hear about Sandusky, Weiss and Fine and have no trouble making the very reasonable leap to “pedophile” and yet when confronted with the same sort of details but the person in question is Michael, refuse to believe the obvious.


Had John Nextdoor been tried with the same fact pattern that prosecutors presented to Jackson’s jury, Nextdoor would have been convicted.


None of Jackson’s many many defenders has ever supplied a satisfying answer to my question: If Jackson’s sleepovers were innocent cookies-and-milk fun, after the first public airing of accusations, when his career, fortune and very liberty were at risk, why didn’t Jackson stop? That’s what any rational person would do. But Jackson persisted in sleeping night after night with a series of boys. He could not, would not stop himself because it was a compulsion.


When you find yourself thinking how creepy Sandusky, Fine and Weiss seem, substitute the name Michael Jackson and ask yourself if anyone would believe in his innocence if he weren’t the “King of Pop.”