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  • Michael Jackson Bombshell! FIVE Siblings Who Defended MJ For Years Say He Molested Them, Too! – Perez Hilton

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    Michael Jackson’s relationship with children is once again being called into question.

    Prior to his death in 2009, the King of Pop was accused of child abuse at two separate points in his career. Once in 1993, a case which was settled outside of court, and again in 2005, when he was acquitted in court. But throughout it all, the Cascio family stood behind him.

    The Cascio Family

    If the name sounds familiar, it’s because they’re the bunch Michael dubbed his “second family.” Back in the ‘80s, he met patriarch Dominic Cascio while staying at the Helmsley Palace in New York. They quickly became friends, and Dominic introduced the Thriller singer to his family, which included wife Connie, and their two sons. The husband and wife went on to have three more children: two boys and one girl, and Michael remained an active presence in all of their lives.

    Over the years, the family has been open about the dinners they shared with Michael in their New Jersey home, Christmas gift exchanges, shopping sprees, Disneyland trips, and stays at Neverland Ranch in California for the kids. All along they said it was innocent.

    Related: Priscilla Presley Hit With Lawsuit Claiming She Lied To IRS About MILLIONS

    The eldest boy, Frank Cascio, authored a book called My Friend Michael: An Ordinary Friendship With An Extraordinary Man — a 2011 memoir about the nature of his relationship with Michael, where he vehemently defended the singer. He wrote:

    “I want to be precise and clear, on the record, so that everyone can read and understand: Michael’s love for children was innocent, and it was profoundly misunderstood.”

    He continued:

    “In all the years that I was close to him, I saw nothing that raised any red flags, not as a child and not as an adult.”

    Frank went on to claim Michael “was being attacked by liars”, maintaining:

    “There was nothing ambiguous about the whole thing. These people were after Michael’s money. But he was innocent, and we were going to destroy them in court.”

    However, Frank’s tune has now changed.

    The Accusations

    Over the weekend, DailyMail.com reported that all five Cascio children came together earlier this month to file a bombshell suit in Los Angeles Superior Court accusing Michael of of grooming, sexually abusing, and “brainwashing” their family for 25 years. Of the alleged abuse, a source told the outlet:

    “It was everything sexual: sex with under-age children. When they all realized what had been going on it was the most traumatic thing. Their story is insane.”

    According to filings seen by the outlet, the siblings claim:

    “From the early 1980s until at least 2009, Michael Jackson had intimate contact with the Cascio children. This abusive contact occurred over a span of decades and involved hundreds of instances. Each of the Cascio children were groomed, brainwashed and severely manipulated to believe that each was uniquely ‘special’ to Michael and that their relationship with him was exclusive.”

    The docs continue:

    “This emotional manipulation was designed to secure each family member’s loyalty and ensure their silence, making them feel indebted to Michael and isolated from any source of protection or perspective. Through years of psychological conditioning, Michael cultivated dependence and fear in the Cascios, making respondents believe they had no choice but to comply and no safe way to break free. The effects of this conditioning persisted into adulthood, leaving respondents with a deeply ingrained belief that speaking out would constitute betrayal — a dynamic the estate has continued to exploit in its dealings with them.”

    Wow.

    We know there are many MJ fans out there who never wanted to believe any of the allegations from longtime accusers James Safechuck and Wade Robson, who participated in the shocking 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland. But the Cascio family were some of his biggest defenders, and now even they’ve switched sides.

    What Sparked The Lawsuit

    Speaking of Leaving Neverland, multiple insiders tell DM it was the HBO doc that first sparked movement in the case. Safechuck and Robson, now both in their 40s, accused the Beat It star of subjecting them to years of abuse — Safechuck from 1988 to 1992, and Robson from 1990 to 1996. The doc changed things for the general public AND for the Cascios.

    According to sources earlier this year, when the Cascio family raised alarms, the Jackson estate attempted to get ahead of more public accusations in January 2020. Instead they tried to settle behind the scenes.

    The involved parties reportedly reached a confidential settlement that included payouts over five years. However, the Cascio family’s attorney allegedly demanded an additional $213 million in 2024 against a threat the family would “expand the circle of knowledge” to negatively impact the Jackson estate’s business dealings, per the New York Post. The estate has since responded by calling the case a “civil extortion scheme” before initiating arbitration in September 2024, accusing the family of breach of contract and civil extortion.

    However, the filings further accuse the Jackson estate of “exploiting the same patterns of trust, fear and conditioned loyalty” employed by Michael in order to get them to sign the agreement in 2020.

    Family Fallout

    This shocking about-face from the Cascio family follows an implied change even closer to home. Fans noticed Paris Jackson recently got her MJ tattoo covered up. And she’s since raised even more suspicion that she believes the worst allegations against her father.

    When one of the actors in an upcoming Jackson Family biopic said Paris and her family were “very much in support of our film,” she hit back hard! She not only said she “wasn’t involved at all,” she told everyone why:

    “A big reason why I haven’t said anything up until this point is because I know a lot of you guys are gonna be happy with it. A big section of the film panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy, and they’re gonna be happy with it.”

    The fantasy… of his innocence? Did things change for her because of the documentary? Because of the Cascios?? Will she speak out against him, too??

    This is some seriously troubling stuff! What do YOU make of it? Let us know in the comments down below!

    [Images via Michael Jackson/YouTube & WENN]

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    Perez Hilton

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  • Michael Jackson Sexual Abuse Lawsuits Revived By Appeals Court

    Michael Jackson Sexual Abuse Lawsuits Revived By Appeals Court

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    LOS ANGELES (AP) — A California appeals court on Friday revived lawsuits from two men who allege Michael Jackson sexually abused them for years when they were boys.

    A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal found that the lawsuits of Wade Robson and James Safechuck should not have been dismissed by a lower court, and that the men can validly claim that the two Jackson-owned corporations that were named as defendants in the cases had a responsibility to protect them. A new California law that temporarily broadened the scope of sexual abuse cases enabled the appeals court to restore them.

    It’s the second time the lawsuits — brought by Robson in 2013 and Safechuck the following year — have been brought back after dismissal. The two men became more widely known for telling their stories in the 2019 HBO documentary “ Leaving Neverland.”

    A judge who dismissed the suits in 2021 found that the corporations, MJJ Productions Inc. and MJJ Ventures Inc., could not be expected to function like the Boy Scouts or a church where a child in their care could expect their protection. Jackson, who died in 2009, was the sole owner and only shareholder in the companies.

    The higher court judges disagreed, writing that “a corporation that facilitates the sexual abuse of children by one of its employees is not excused from an affirmative duty to protect those children merely because it is solely owned by the perpetrator of the abuse.”

    They added that “it would be perverse to find no duty based on the corporate defendant having only one shareholder. And so we reverse the judgments entered for the corporations.”

    Jonathan Steinsapir, attorney for the Jackson estate, said they were “disappointed.”

    “Two distinguished trial judges repeatedly dismissed these cases on numerous occasions over the last decade because the law required it,” Steinsapir said in an email to The Associated Press. “We remain fully confident that Michael is innocent of these allegations, which are contrary to all credible evidence and independent corroboration, and which were only first made years after Michael’s death by men motivated solely by money.”

    FILE – In this Jan. 24, 2019, file photo, James Safechuck poses for a portrait to promote the film “Leaving Neverland” during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP, File)

    Vince Finaldi, an attorney for Robson and Safechuck, said in an email that they were “pleased but not surprised” that the court overturned the previous judge’s “incorrect rulings in these cases, which were against California law and would have set a dangerous precedent that endangered children throughout state and country. We eagerly look forward to a trial on the merits.”

    Steinsapir had argued for the defense in July that it does not make sense that employees would be legally required to stop the behavior of their boss.

    “It would require low-level employees to confront their supervisor and call them pedophiles,” Steinsapir said.

    Holly Boyer, another attorney for Robson and Safechuck, countered that the boys “were left alone in this lion’s den by the defendant’s employees. An affirmative duty to protect and to warn is correct.”

    Steinsapir said evidence that has been gathered in the cases, which have not reached trial, showed that the parents had no expectation of Jackson’s employees to act as monitors.

    “They were not looking to Michael Jackson’s companies for protection from Michael Jackson,” the lawyer argued said.

    But in a concurring opinion issued with Friday’s decision, one of the panelists, Associate Justice John Shepard Wiley Jr., wrote that “to treat Jackson’s wholly-owned instruments as different from Jackson himself is to be mesmerized by abstractions. This is not an alter ego case. This is a same ego case.”

    The judges did not rule on the truth of the allegations themselves. That will be the subject of a forthcoming jury trial in Los Angeles.

    “We trust that the truth will ultimately prevail with Michael’s vindication yet again,” Steinsapir said Friday.

    Robson, now a 40-year-old choreographer, met Jackson when he was 5 years old. He went on to appear in three Jackson music videos.

    His lawsuit alleged that Jackson molested him over a seven-year period.

    Safechuck, now 45, said in his suit that he was 9 when he met Jackson while filming a Pepsi commercial. He said Jackson called him often and lavished him with gifts before moving on to sexually abusing him.

    The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they were victims of sexual abuse. But Robson and Safechuck have come forward and approved of the use of their identities.

    The men’s lawsuits had already bounced back from a 2017 dismissal, when Young threw them out for being beyond the statute of limitations. Jackson’s personal estate — the assets he left after his death — was thrown out as a defendant in 2015.

    Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.

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