It was a late addition to the Sundance 2019 lineup, a top-secret screening that its publicists advised was going to be a big deal. Go to enough film festivals and you’ll hear plenty of similar empty proclamations. But when Leaving Neverland was officially announced—a two-part documentary that consisted largely of two men talking about the sexual abuse Michael Jackson allegedly inflicted upon them—it seemed like the sort of project that might warrant such hyperbole, even if it was a film that seemed terribly hard to endure.
For those who saw Leaving Neverland, either at its premiere or afterward, it is indeed a movie that qualifies as a difficult watch. Difficult, but also damning and essential—a thorough accounting of the pop star’s questionable behavior around children and the warped world he inhabited in the years before his death. I haven’t longed to revisit Leaving Neverland, but the jolt of its impact has never left me. Even more despairing, though, is the fact that the film, essentially, no longer exists. With Michael about to arrive in theaters, promising to celebrate the star while ignoring his alleged crimes, Leaving Neverland is a ghost that haunts that would-be blockbuster—gone but not forgotten.
The documentary, directed by Dan Reed, doesn’t concern itself with slick production values or sophisticated artistry. Instead, Leaving Neverland is a blunt, sobering testament with an unfussy, journalistic tone. It tells the story of Wade Robson and James Safechuck, both of whom were close to Jackson during different periods between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, only to discover that intimacy came with a price.
Robson, who is now 43, started as a professional dancer when he was five, which was also when he first met Jackson. Early in Leaving Neverland, Robson, who works as a choreographer, recalls his time with the superstar. “He was one of the kindest, most gentle, loving people I know,” he said. “He helped me with my career and creativity. And he sexually abused me for seven years.” Safechuck, who recently turned 48, encountered Jackson when he was hired for a Pepsi ad in 1986. A couple years later, Safechuck claimed, they had developed such a close relationship that Jackson went shopping for an engagement ring for the boy. “We were like this married couple,” he tells Reed. “And I say ‘married’ because we had this mock wedding ceremony. We did this in his bedroom. We filled out some vows. It’s like we’re bonded forever. It felt good.” As Safechuck relates this incident, the pain still raw on his face, he shows us that ring, which he keeps in an old jewelry box—a fraught reminder of the hundreds of times Jackson allegedly abused him.
Running about four hours, Leaving Neverland dropped like a bomb at Sundance. No glitzy premiere, the screening was only for select press and invited guests, like filmmaker Boots Riley. Most major festival debuts are greeted with excitement. The atmosphere at Leaving Neverland was akin to an audit or a funeral. The room was solemn, colleagues greeting one another in hushed terms. We were not there to anoint some audacious new masterpiece—we were there to bear witness. “It’s hard not to feel that you’ve experienced post-traumatic stress disorder yourself,” Rolling Stone‘s David Fear later wrote about that first screening. “During a 10-minute intermission, audience members appeared slightly dazed. By the end of the screening, the crowd looked completely shellshocked.”
Leaving Neverland may not be formally inventive, but it’s a devastating delivery device for Robson and Safechuck’s anguished stories. We relive their time with Jackson—the initial highs and eventual lows—in enough detail to get a sense of the innocence and elation that once flowed through them. We understand how thrilling it must have been to be befriended by the biggest star in the world, who showed them kindness and made them feel special. There is shame and anger as the two men recount their tales—mad at themselves for being tricked, wrestling with guilt about how they craved his attention.
Those mixed emotions extend to how they now view their mothers, who missed the warning signs as Jackson insinuated himself into their lives, practically becoming another son. Forced to engage in anal and oral sex, plied with alcohol, made to watch porn, Jackson’s alleged victims were systematically separated from their families so that they spent more and more time alone with the performer at his famed, lavish Neverland Ranch in Southern California. Many who saw the documentary blamed the parents or wondered how these boys didn’t realize what was happening was wrong. Later, it was Reed who voiced the proper perspective. “I think people completely lost their ability to think critically,” he said, “and that goes for James and Wade’s mothers, too. They were dazzled. They were starstruck.”
Such judgmental views of Leaving Neverland said more about those who pointed the finger than it did about these families. But those opinions were also a sign of the times. In 2019, Hollywood and society at large were still grappling with new waves of horrifying #MeToo revelations, which were ignited by The New York Times and The New Yorker‘s October 2017 reports from women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by industry mogul Harvey Weinstein. (Leaving Neverland was not the only film at the 2019 Sundance to examine a legacy of abuse—Untouchable, a documentary about Weinstein’s crimes, also premiered in Park City.) After the Weinstein accusations were published, new misconduct claims came to light seemingly every other month, including those against Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey, and Brett Ratner.
No matter the accused, the story was always the same: We had heard rumors, but nobody ever did anything. I remember back in 1993, when Jackson went to court over charges of sexually abusing Jordan Chandler at age 13. (Chandler’s family and Jackson agreed to a financial settlement the following year.) A decade later, I had seen the TV documentary Living With Michael Jackson, featuring interviews with the singer at Neverland Ranch, which chronicled his unsettling disconnect from reality as he assured viewers that his behavior around children was utterly harmless. I was well aware of the disturbing allegations against Jackson. I just didn’t think about them. I wasn’t alone.
But the #MeToo movement opened my eyes (and many others’) to the realities of sexual abuse, exposing our ignorance. This awkward learning curve played out in everyday life, but also in how some around me responded to Leaving Neverland. The complaints leveled at the film—and abuse survivors in general—began early: “Why didn’t this person speak out when the abuse was going on?” In the case of Robson and Safechuck, the pushback was also, “Why did they previously claim they had not been sexually assaulted?” What Leaving Neverland laid out so well was just how profoundly complicated sexual abuse can be for the survivors—how it can be confusing, humiliating, scarring, and decimating, especially when it’s inflicted by someone you thought loved you.
Reed aimed to make a movie not about Jackson but, rather, what being a survivor looks like and feels like. At the same time, though, Leaving Neverland also tacitly insisted that viewers who adored the pop star question, perhaps for the first time, just how monstrous he may have been when out of the spotlight. Reed’s documentary didn’t achieve this on its own—later films like On The Record (about Russell Simmons) and Allen V. Farrow (about Woody Allen) followed in its wake—but Leaving Neverland inflamed the modern, ongoing, unresolved debate about whether the “separate the art from the artist” argument, which had long been used to insist that bad men’s indelible creative work shouldn’t be canceled along with its creators, was a sensible or moral position.
Writing in The New York Times a month after Leaving Neverland‘s Sundance screening, Wesley Morris, who had lived his whole life adoring Jackson’s music, spoke for many of us when he expressed his struggle to reconcile his fondness for the songs with the upsetting new information he had about the singer. “[T]he question now, of course, is what do we do?” Morris wondered. “It’s the question of our #MeToo times: If we believe the accusers (and I believe Wade and James), what do we do with the art? With Jackson, what can we do? … Michael Jackson’s music isn’t a meal. It’s more elemental than that. It’s the salt, pepper, olive oil and butter. His music is how you start.” There are no easy answers to these questions, but Leaving Neverland impelled us to ask them of ourselves.
After its festival premiere, Leaving Neverland came to HBO that March. A smattering of protesters attended the initial Park City screening, but the estate of Jackson, who died in 2009 at the age of 50, brought its considerable resources to bear to damage the film. HBO was sued, the estate claiming that the company had violated a non-disparagement clause it had entered into with Jackson in order to broadcast a 1992 concert from his Dangerous tour. After years of legal fighting, HBO reached an agreement with the estate in 2024, which included removing Leaving Neverland from HBO Max. Reed’s 2025 follow-up, Leaving Neverland 2: Surviving Michael Jackson, which is under an hour and available on YouTube, contains clips from the original film. Otherwise, good luck finding the documentary in the U.S. in any official form. It’s like Leaving Neverland never happened.
Those who saw it remember, though, reminded by all that followed. The film has left a permanent stain on everything the Jackson estate has done since—even if it hasn’t for so many still besotted with the late singer. The 2021, Tony-winning Broadway smash MJ The Musical continues to travel the country. After some reworking, Michael, starring Jackson’s nephew Jaafar, comes to theaters on April 24, reportedly covering the musician’s childhood stardom through his 1980s heyday. (The producers decided to kill a finale involving the accusations against Jackson.) At a recent public screening of EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert, I saw a trailer for Michael, which frames the biopic as an inspirational tale of surviving adversity. Some audience members clapped at the end.
Reasonable people can differ on the “separate the art from the artist” debate. But the estate and his most defensive fans’ refusal to even acknowledge this other side of the artist they worship is what’s truly galling. There’s no internal wrestling, no dark nights of the soul. Leaving Neverland allowed Wade Robson and James Safechuck to tell their stories and then asked viewers to examine their own consciences. It’s sad how many elected not to take that opportunity to do so.
Great documentaries have been made about Jackson’s creative brilliance. Spike Lee’s films covering Off The Wall and Bad are euphoric. Michael Jackson’s This Is It finds an aging performer still in his prime. But that artistry is inherently incomplete without also weighing what Leaving Neverland has to say about our culture’s willingness to grant carte blanche to genius to behave however it sees fit. For those who saw the film, we recognized it wasn’t just a portrait of Robson and Safechuck’s loss of innocence—it was also ours. We had heard the accusations against Michael Jackson before, but we ignored them. Now, we no longer could. Jackson’s estate tried, and continues to try, to bury the full picture of the superstar it seeks to glorify. But his handlers can never truly erase the truth we saw with our own eyes, or quiet the shockwaves that still reverberate from it.
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