Michael Jackson's Friendships With Other People Who Had Experienced Childhood Abuse

Michael Jackson's Friendships With Other People Who Had Experienced Childhood Abuse

Tatum O’Neal; child star, abusive father, he once punched her in the face after she was nominated for an Oscar for Paper Hearts, absent drug addict mother
Synopsis of her autobiography, “A Paper Life”
Although Tatum at times shares a magical relationship with her father, his chaotic and temperamental moods turn ugly. When Tatum is given the role of Addie in Paper Moon (co-starring dear old dad) Ryan can barely contain his jealousy when Tatum wins accolades and an Oscar nomination. According to Tatum her father punched her in the face when he heard of her nomination. On Oscar night when Tatum was the youngest winner in history neither of her parents attended the ceremony.
Through the years living with her father Tatum recounts incidents in which she is molested, her father sleeps with her best friend, her father sleeps with numerous women and serious drug use/abuse occurs. Tatum recounts her low self esteem as a adolescent and her growing alienation from her father. She details her father’s relationship with Farrah Fawcett and the major rift that began to develop with her father during that period. Tatum writes about meeting John McEnroe and about their tempestuous relationship which yielded three children. The author paints a chilling portrayal of her own addication, the destruction of her marriage, the loss of her children and the way in which she rebuilt her life.
Brooke Shields; child star, alcoholic mother who allowed her pre-teen daughter to pose nude and semi-nude in photos and movies
Life Magazine, March 2007
Brooke: “I left abruptly when I was 28. Growing independently of her (Teri) really changed my perspective. I have more empathy. I appreciate her more because she did shelter me from a lot, and she took the rap for it. But she’s an alcoholic, and that affects everything. And she’s very sad. We talk every day, but I have to draw a line. Or I get pulled back in.”
Brooke, Love Magazine, UK, Autumn/Winter 2010
In the remarkably candid interview, Shields also discusses her relationship with Michael Jackson and described the King of Pop’s father, Joe Jackson, as the “devil incarnate.”
Elizabeth Taylor; child star, abusive father lead to her getting an early marriage to an abusive husband.
1988
Says his most famous ally, Elizabeth Taylor: “I know some of the pain Michael goes through. I’ve been there. It takes, I think a fellow sufferer, a fellow survivor, to understand.”
On Oprah, February 1993
Oprah: And why do you think you all are such good friends? What has brought about this kind of bond? Because people try to make this weird.
Elizabeth: Well it’s not. I mean our childhoods are very similiar, and we had that from the very beginning in common. Um, I was a child star at nine, had an abusive father, um, and that kind of brought us together in the very beginning.
Joint interview with Theroux, 1999
We talked about the famous Neverland wedding, about Larry Fortensky, whom Michael said he liked. About Elizabeth as an inspiration, and about how she supported her family from the age of nine.
“I did that too. My father took the money.”
“But there’s some moment in childhood when one feels particularly vulnerable. Did you feel that? Elizabeth said that she felt she was owned by the studio.”
“Sometimes really late at night we’d have to go out – it might be three in the morning – to do a show. My father made us. I was seven or eight. Some of these were clubs or private parties at people’s houses. We’d have to perform.” This was in Chicago, New York, Indiana, Philadelphia, all over the country. “I’d be sleeping and I’d hear my father. ‘Get up! There’s a show!”‘
MJ about Elizabeth, Shmuley Tapes, 2000/1
“Our fathers were very much alike, tough, hard, brutal.”
Elizabeth, New York Times, Sept 29 2002
Ms. Taylor said that she and Mr. Jackson share more than just the experience of child stardom.
”I can tell him things that I wouldn’t tell anybody else,” she said. ”He had one of the worst childhoods. I think I had the second.”
She had no playmates and was isolated, she said, educated by tutors. Her father, increasingly irrelevant in the shadow of her fame, was abusive, she said. ”That’s why I married so early,” she said. ”To get out of the house.”
That first marriage, to the hotel heir Nicky Hilton when she was 18, ended in months. He beat her so violently, she said, that she had a miscarriage.
”I couldn’t take his physical abuse or his mental abuse longer,” she said. (Ms. Taylor testified during her divorce proceedings from Hilton that he had been physically violent. It is not clear if Hilton, who died at 42, ever refuted her testimony.)
Macaulay Culkin; child star, emancipated himself from his parents at the age of 14
Culkin is the third of seven children. And while in the Home Alone films he has a loving family —, albeit occasionally absent — in real life, he says his father, Kit Culkin, was a constant and controlling presence. His mother stayed home with his brothers and sisters, his father traveled with him from one movie set to the next. Culkin’s father managed his son’s career and is said to have alienated most of Hollywood with his rages and excessive demands.
Culkin says his father’s treatment of him and his family mirrored the way he dealt with people in Hollywood. “He was very hard on me, and he would deny me certain things in my life.”
He says his father would not let him have his own room, forcing him and his brother to sleep on the couch.
“We didn’t even have our own bedroom,” he told Walters. “I mean, I was — I was making — forget about how much money I was making — but I was sleeping on the couch.
“I think it was just a way of him wanting to break my spirit,” he says. “He wanted me to know and my brother to know that he was in charge and if he didn’t want us to sleep on a bed, we weren’t gonna sleep on a bed.”
Culkin asserts his father established the hectic filming schedule he kept from 1990 to 1994. “I’ve done 14 films and I’ve never read one of the scripts,” he says. During the movie shoots, Culkin says he and his father would stay up every night, studying the lines the young actor would have to say the next day. It was, he says, all work and no play — a situation that discouraged the young star.
Although the young actor says his father promised to give his son a break from production, Kit Culkin continued to cast him in movies that were bombing at the box office. “I was actually very happy that they [Mac's films] were not being as successful,” Culkin told Walters in the 2001 interview. “I was hoping — literally, I was hoping to disappear off the face of the Earth.”
Shortly after Kit Culkin decided to drop the custody battle, he disappeared. Culkin says he had not heard from his father in years, until the opening of Madame Melville when he received a telegram from him. He says he remains unsure if he would like to see him again.
“I think we understand each other in a way that most people can’t understand either of us,” Culkin said of Michael Jackson.
“Michael and I had an understanding about my father,” he told the British newspaper, The Guardian. “He knew what that was all about. He’d lived it.”
Culkin said he regretted not defending Jackson when the singer was accused of child molestation in 1993, a case in which no charges were ever filed. Santa Barbara prosecutors decided not to pursue the 1993 case after they said the alleged victim refused to testify.
The actor said he didn’t speak up for his friend because his father wouldn’t allow it.
“I would have liked to say something in his defense,” Culkin told the British paper. “I still wish I had.”
Michael Jackson and Rabbi Shmuley, 2000/1
MJ: Macaulay Culkin, who is wondering, “How did I get caught up in all of this? I never asked to be an actor.” He always wanted out. You gotta watch that energy when he gets heavy on his father, man, it tears into him and that’s what happens, you know. Oh, but I saw it myself with him. [Michael screams, immitating Macaulay's father] “Mac get in here!” the screaming…
Jordie Chandler; came up with the idea for the movie “Robin Hood: Men In Tights” aged 11, emancipated himself from his parents at the age of about 14 after his father Evan set up the allegations against Michael, attacked from behind with 12lb weight, maced and choked by his father after Michael’s acquittal
Mel Brooks, LA Times, June 13 1993
The idea [for the movie] actually came from Chandler’s then 11-year-old son, Jordie.
Full transcript of Evan Chandler’s telephone conversation, takes place June 1993
EVAN: “And if I go through with this, I win big-time. There’s no way I lose. I’ve checked that inside out. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever. June will lose [custody of the son]…and Michael’s career will be over.”
SCHWARTZ: “Does that help [the boy]?”
EVAN: “That’s irrelevant to me. It’s going to be bigger than all of us put together. The whole thing is going to crash down on everybody and destroy everybody in sight. It will be a massacre if I don’t get what I want.”
Thomas Mesereau had witnesses lined up to testify that Jordie Chandler had told them that Michael had never molested him
“Now, the one you’re talking about never showed up. He’s the one who got a settlement in the early 90s. Now my understanding is that prosecutors tried to get him to show up and he wouldn’t. If he had, I had witnesses who were gonna come in and say he told them it never happened and that he would never talk to his parents again for what they made him say. It turned out he had gone to court and had legal emancipation from his parents. His mother testified and said she hadn’t talked to him in 11 years. So, you know, there was a problem there as well.”
Less than 2 months after Michael had been acquitted on all counts, on August 5th 2005 Jordie Chandler issued a restraining order against his father Evan Chandler after Evan attempted to kill him
“The judge found that plaintiff had proved that he and his father, the defendant, were members of the same household when defendant struck him on the head from behind with a twelve and one-half pound weight and then sprayed his eyes with mace or pepper spray and tried to choke him. The judge also found that the weight could cause serious bodily injury or death.”
When Evan Chandler committed suicide in November 2009, 5 months after MJ’s passing, nobody attended his funeral. None of his children, ex-wives and family had been interested in attending.
He also seems to have been friendless, and so totally estranged from his family that, when I spoke to Raymond Chandler on Wednesday, he was waiting to hear about the funeral arrangements – unaware that his brother had already been cremated.
‘Actually, there was no one there,’ said a member of staff at the Jersey City funeral home which organised the service.
‘We were instructed that no one would want to go. It was very sad. They still haven’t decided what to do with the ashes.’