Chandler Suicide Highlights Media Bias Against Jackson

[Catherine Vincent]

http://charlesthomsonjournalist.blogspot.com/

Thursday, 19 November 2009
Chandler Suicide Highlights Media Bias Against Jackson

When it emerged yesterday that two weeks go Evan Chandler, father of Jordan Chandler, shot himself in the head, few tears were shed despite the media's best efforts to eulogise him. Most media outlets are touting Chandler as 'the father of the boy who accused Jackson of child molestation'. Wrong. Chandler was the father who accused Jackson of molesting his son. The initial allegations against Jackson were made not by Jordy Chandler but by his father Evan, in spite of Jordy's insistence that Jackson never touched him inappropriately, a stance that the boy maintained for several months.

Relations between the boy's father and Jackson had soured in early 1993 when Evan asked the popstar to build him a house and Jackson politely declined. A failed screenwriter, Chandler contacted Jackson shortly afterwards and asked him to negotiate three scriptwriting deals on his behalf. If Jackson did not comply, he said, he would accuse him of molesting his son. Jackson didn't comply - and the rest is history.

As revealed by Mary Fischer in her 1994 GQ article 'Was Michael Jackson Framed?' - Jordan Chandler only claimed to have been molested by Jackson after Evan - a dentist by trade - plied him with a mind-bending drug called sodium amytal, which is known to induce false memory syndrome. Even once Jordan Chandler began to toe his father's line, his testimony was so unconvincing that DA Tom Sneddon took his case to three separate grand juries and none of them allowed him to bring charges against Michael Jackson. Contrary to widely reported myth, Jordan Chandler did not accurately describe Jackson's genitals. Among other inaccuracies, he claimed that Jackson was circumcised while police photographs proved that he was not.

Unsurprisingly, none of this information has made its way into the mainstream media's reportage of Evan Chandler's death. Instead, Chandler's suicide is seen as another opportunity to sling mud at Michael Jackson and perpetuate the same, tired old myths about the 1993 allegations - particularly with regard to the settlement. News outlets the world over are once more reporting that in 1994 Jackson paid the Chandlers a settlement. This is total fiction. Court documents from the time state clearly that Jackson's insurance carrier "negotiated and paid the settlement over the protests of Mr Jackson and his personal legal counsel." Jackson didn't even agree with the settlement, let alone pay it.