Walking in the light

*Trigger warning*

By now, you have probably seen the headlines: Wade Robson has accused Michael Jackson of molesting him when he was a kid. Robson, now 30 years old, alleges that he was sexually abused by Jackson for seven years, from ages 7–14, and though he never repressed the memory of the abuse, he didn’t understand that it was abuse until he was an adult—until he had a son and subsequently suffered two nervous breakdowns.

Robson, a dancer originally from Australia, has had a relatively lucrative career since childhood and now works as a choreographer. It’s safe to say his friendship with megastar Jackson had quite a bit to do with that, though I don’t think anyone would hire him at this point if he wasn’t actually talented. When Jackson was brought to trial for sexual abuse in 2005, Robson defended him on the stand, saying the singer had never had inappropriate contact with him. Robson’s mother testified as well, telling the court that she absolutely trusted Jackson to sleep in a bed with her son, that she never had a moment’s hesitation over it. Back in 1993, when another boy accused Jackson of molesting him and witnesses came forward to say they’d seen Jackson molesting Wade, too, Robson denied it.

Now, the internet is aflame with people accusing Robson of lying, saying he just wants money from the estate of a dead man—and those posting in his defense, trying to explain victim psychology. People say he’s lying because why would he have denied it earlier if he was, in fact, a victim? They say he had two very public chances to tell the truth, but instead he waited until Jackson was long dead to make a claim; therefore he is lying. People say he’s telling the truth because this is how being molested works. Victims are often well into adulthood before they can come to terms with what happened to them.

So, as ADA Jack McCoy famously said 10,000 times on Law & Order, is he lying now or was he lying then? 

***

In my memory, Michael Jackson got really popular when I was in fourth grade. Maybe third. The timeline is fuzzy. It was the Thriller era. At first, I didn’t know who Michael Jackson was based on his name, since I didn’t pay much attention to celebrities and we didn’t have MTV, which was still in its toddlerhood. I recall seeing some girls with Michael Jackson buttons on their jackets on the school bus, and I wondered who he was. When I put his name and face together with the songs that he sang on the radio, I was surprised to find out that they were all one person that that he was not a woman. I found his feminine look and high speaking voice incredibly disconcerting, to the point where it made me feel overheated and panicked. And though I found his songs and beats catchy, he did this little hitch-squeal-sex-noise in between words that made me hate myself.

Michael Jackson was a celebrity, a big one, maybe the biggest of the 1980s. At some point in fourth grade, I was questioned about my lack of love for him. I was already an outcast, and my refusal one day in the hallway to say “Michael Jackson is my favorite singer” or “I love Michael Jackson” caused a large group of girls to tell me I was lying, because he was everybody’s favorite singer. Not too long later, my best friend outside of school, Paula, used this same reasoning to tell me she didn’t want to be my friend anymore.

When he went on his world tour the following year, my friend Kim went to the concert with her mom and she was so excited, she told me, she cried. Girls cried over Michael Jackson like girls had cried over the Beatles. I did not understand. When he came out with a new album a few years later, when I was in junior high, I remember being actively angry that he was still around and that people still liked him. Everything about him made me feel self-injurious. And the glove. The glove. The way he would cover his hand while simultaneously drawing attention to it. It was wrong.

I didn’t like Michael Jackson because everything about him was cold and false and calculating, and everyone around me had been sucked in. Fooled. Everyone around me thought it was just dandy that the biggest star around was quite clearly obsessed with kids and making his voice sound like a baby’s on purpose. He was a demented Peter Pan, a Pied Piper. When he filmed that Pepsi commercial and his hair caught on fire, I hoped desperately that he would die or be so maimed he’d never appear in public again. Nothing worked. He always came back. Like a ghoul. I remember worrying about Webster’s safety when Jackson would pick him up. I would hold my breath.

***

I was being molested, too. Those kids and me. And everyone thought it was just fine. People think they would know if someone was predating on their kids, but they let us go off with people who obviously wanted to do us harm, who wanted us to sleep over too often and in their beds, and didn’t think anything of it. Jackson gave his victims wine—“Jesus juice.” My molester, on at least one occasion, put something to make me sleep into a baked apple.

This is how molestation works. Most kids keep it a secret because there is no other choice. The truth would destroy them. It would destroy their families; it would tear their own hearts out. And that’s before the abuser has said one threatening thing to make sure the secret stays buried. The ones that tell: they are the outliers, and they are amazing. But most kids can’t. They physically can’t form the words in their throats, if they can even form the thoughts in their minds. It’s like being strangled by invisible hands that exert the softest, most irritating pressure. A silk glove covered in cut diamonds.

***

I grew up. We all grow up. We survive even if we don’t survive that well. There are levels. Some people develop eating disorders or drug problems. Some people become frigid or are addicted to sex. Some people can have sex but not love; some people can’t hold down jobs because they cry when people don’t smile at them or they are scolded for missing a deadline. Some people can’t stand the sound of other people breathing or chewing. Some people can’t listen to the radio, because disembodied voices is the same as having the lights out and all your senses dispersed. Some people can’t smell certain brands of lotion.

I can’t drive on the highway. I have a phobia. I believe the laws of physics don’t apply to me and that my breaks won’t work and that when I try to make them work my car will crash into the car in front of me and I will eject out the roof and explode into a billion particles. I have to take Xanax even to be a passenger if we’re going to leave the city limits.

I’m afraid of money yet I always fear starving to death. I don’t sleep well, I cry a lot, I’m overly sensitive, I snap at people, and I’m sickly. Other than that, I’m fine.

I make a living as a writer, even if it’s not writing my own stuff.  I have a great husband. We have a great dog. I survived—although I don’t know if I’d be here to say that if I hadn’t gone to therapy when I was 27. I was 28 when I walked into my therapist’s office and told her who molested me.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that—despite obvious huge differences—my path isn’t tremendously different from Wade Robson’s. We’re both creative, though our creativity is most often employed in the service of others. We were the same age when we started dealing with our abuse, and it took having good, stable, loving relationships in our adult lives for our minds to handle the hideous truth of our pasts.

And when I say “handle,” I mean “reveal.”

People are questioning whether Robson’s accusation is a result of recovering a repressed memory, which he says isn’t the case. He said he remembers everything but wasn’t looking at it in the right way. I know that’s a hard thing to understand, because to people who weren’t molested, it seems like it must be a pretty black and white issue. Someone touches you or makes you do something, and maybe you don’t tell of your own volition, but when the police ask you, of course you tell. You tell because the way you were touched was wrong, and now that an authority figure is involved, you are safe.

That is exactly how being molested doesn’t work.

Kids don’t tell. They just don’t. If they did, no one would be getting molested. And, the kids that do tell? Rarely are they believed. Statistically, if you know victims, you know abusers. But who in your life is sneaking into their kids’ room at night or tricking the neighbor-boy into coming over for a snack? Sexual abuse stays secret because that’s just how it works. People would rather walk in darkness than in light, because darkness hides the guilt—and the complicity.

Robson was being explicitly manipulated and threatened by Jackson in daily phone calls, when he was a child and again when he was in his twenties. This is one reason he didn’t tell, but the other reason, as he said, is because he wasn’t looking at what happened in the right way. It took having horrific unwanted visions of his baby son being abused to bring the memories into focus.

***

This is how it happened for me. I’d been in therapy a little over a year and I had to go to Chicago for a family function. I was extremely anxious about seeing my abuser and having her come near me or touch me, and worried that other people would be mad if I treated her poorly. The thing is, at this point, I had never said or thought anything along the lines of “sexual abuse.” I just didn’t like being anywhere near this person and never had, and it had always been a problem.

(In Robson’s case, he was abused by one of the most famous men on the planet. There was nothing “cool” about my abuser, nothing tempting to outweigh how she made me feel. I didn’t like her, but she was a close blood relative. I couldn’t have avoided her, and I did try. Try telling someone that you don’t want special attention from a celebrity. They’d think you were an asshole. Also, my molester wasn’t a pedophile, whereas Jackson was. The grooming a pedophile does is designed to make the victim feel wonderful and special and good. And it works.)

I went to Chicago and, when I was in a nail salon, my abuser, who was in her eighties by then, came up behind me and stuck her hand between my legs.

The pieces started to slide into the place in front of my eyes instead of the places on either side of my head. It wasn’t that I hadn’t remembered—though not very many memories of it are linear, due the shrapnel-like nature of traumatic experience—it was just that I hadn’t been looking at the memories the right way. They didn’t have noise, or if they had noise they didn’t have feeling, or if they had feeling they didn’t make any kind of sense. The memories, like my dreams often do, lack visuals. It would stand to reason that my eyes were shut. It was night and my abuser wanted me to be a malleable sleeping doll. Who would watch while this happens to them?

***

She’s dead now.

***

When Michael Jackson died, my Facebook feed and the morning news shows fell all over themselves with adulation for this man everyone kept saying had been brilliant, truly talented, a wonderful musician and dancer. I thought I was going to vomit. It went on for a week or more, until after the funeral. People posted video after video, and never-ending reminiscences of what his music had meant at different times in their lives. Some people acknowledged the abuse charges, most often to dismiss them in favor of “not speaking ill of the dead.” Here’s the thing: if we’re going to honor someone’s life, shouldn’t we be honest about the most intrinsic parts of them? Wouldn’t they want that? In death, Jackson is free to love children with no shame or fear of legal action, and he would want us to know that, to love that part of him, because had a little boy walked into his room when he was barely alive anymore, barely had another wakeful moment left in his body, he would have reached out his hand for him.

So, was Wade Robson lying then, or is he lying now?

On the Today Show this morning, Matt Lauer asked Robson what comes to mind now when he thinks of Michael Jackson.

“Heartbreak, pain, anger, and compassion,” Robson said. “There’s no excuse for what he did to me and I believe many others, but he was a troubled man and every effect has its cause. The image that one presents to the world is not the whole explanation of who someone is. Michael Jackson was, yes, an incredibly talented artist with an incredible gift. He was many things. And he was also a pedophile and a child sexual abuser.”

Wade Robson, keep shining the light.