VaNiL
0
Jacko: Bombshell Book Shopped by Insider
Friday, September 03, 2004
By Roger Friedman
Michael Jackson's shady past of being too close to small boys may be catching up with him. Jackson's longtime public relations man, Bob Jones, whom Jackson fired several weeks ago, is now said to be shopping a book to New York publishers through an agent.
I told you about Jones when he was unceremoniously pink-slipped by Michael's brother, Randy. Jones did not have a confidentiality agreement with Jackson and feels so slighted, hurt, and ripped off, according to friends, that he is ready to sell his story to the highest bidder.
And what a story it will be. Jones worked for the Jackson family when he was with Motown in the early 70s and then went to work for Michael a decade later. To say he knows everything we'd want to know is an understatement. He was there for all the key moments including the Pepsi commercial fire, the 1994 pay off of $23 million to the first major accuser, and is on a first-name basis with Bubbles the Chimp (now said to be in retirement).
But news of Jones' book comes as NBC's "Dateline" claims it has evidence that Jackson paid off a former employee and her son to the tune of $2 million in 1990. That would be his former maid, who was long rumored to have taken money from Jackson in exchange for her silence. Whatever happened to this woman is definitely something Jones could address.
Jones would also be able to corroborate many of the stories in a scandalous book that was published abroad several years ago, by Victor Gutierrez, but banned in the United States. In the book several boys are named as having slept in Jackson's bed or been swept into inappropriate relationships with the singer. Most of those boys are now between the ages of 23 and 26, and are starting to talk about their early teen experiences with Jackson.
Many of the boys who spent time with Jackson from 1988 to 1993 have been reported before. Among them of course are child actors Macaulay Culkin and Emmanuel Lewis, TV's Webster. Then there's 'N Sync choreographer Wade Robson, who won a talent contest to meet the pop star when he was a child. There's also a young man, who now lives in Australia, and 23-year-old who now lives in Hamburg, Germany.
I reported in this column some months ago that Jackson dedicated the song "Speechless" on his last album to the German man and his family. When I spoke to the young man's father, who's in the music business in Germany, he refused to comment about Jackson's guilt or innocence in the current case, and also declined to defend him as a friend.
One of Jackson's earliest young friends was Jimmy Safechuck, a child actor who appeared with him in a commercial in the late '80s. Safechuck now plays in a California rock band. Contemporary pictures of him on the Internet show that at least physically, Safechuck resembles Jackson's 1993 accuser. His father, Wayne, refused to take calls yesterday, only to say, "I have no comment."
Wayne Safechuck is described by a Jackson insider as a sanitation worker at the time Jimmy played at Neverland. Nevertheless he and his extended family have been busy in Simi Valley, California buying and selling real estate over the last 12 years.
[Roger Friedman]
