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Valentine Low END: Module - Module - M24 Article Headline with portrait image (b) Article Copy module BEGIN: Module - Main Article Check the Article Type and display accordingly Print Author image associated with the Author Print the body of the article Pagination Display article with page breaks When Michael Jackson agreed to give the TV journalist Martin Bashir unprecedented access to his personal life, he believed it would help him to win public sympathy and repair a reputation that had become heavily tarnished over the years. It had, after all, worked with Diana, Princess of Wales, a figure with whom Jackson identified closely and who had scored a momentous public relations coup from her Panorama interview with Bashir in 1995. It was to prove a calamitous error of judgment on Jackson’s part. The admissions he made in the interview about sleeping with children at his Neverland ranch in California would eventually lead to criminal charges and a trial which, despite his acquittal, would cause him a level of damage from which he would never recover.

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Jackson was persuaded to let Bashir become part of his entourage for eight months by his friend Uri Geller, who said: “Michael liked Martin and he was happy to have him around. I said to him, ‘Michael, maybe it’s time to open up to the world.’ ” Jackson did exactly that; and the world did not like what it heard. In the film, Living With Michael Jackson, he talked openly about sleeping with boys, including the Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin and his brother Kieran when they were 12 and 10 and a cancer patient called Gavin Arvizo, then 12. He had, he said, “slept in a bed with many chidren”, adding: “It’s not sexual, we’re going to sleep. I tuck them in . . . it’s very charming, it’s very sweet.” His admissions, and the footage of him holding hands and cuddling Gavin, led to an investigation by the Californian authorities and his prosecution on ten separate charges, including four of molesting a minor. When the film was screened, in February 2003, it was a broadcasting sensation. It was watched by 15 million ITV1 viewers in the UK, and another 38 million when it was screened in the US by the network ABC, who bought it for £3.5 million. Jackson was furious. He made a formal complaint to television watchdogs and accused Bashir of “utterly betraying” him. “Martin Bashir persuaded me to trust him that this would be an honest and fair portrayal of my life and told me he was ‘the man that turned Diana’s life around’,” he said in a videotaped statement. “Today I feel more betrayed than perhaps ever before — that someone, who had got to know my children, my staff and me, whom I let into my heart and told the truth, could then sacrifice the trust I placed in him and produce this terrible and unfair programme.” The programme went down worse in the US than the UK. While audiences and critics here concentrated on the extraordinary portrayal of Jackson’s home life, in the US many questioned the ethics used by Bashir to win Jackson’s trust. The New York Times wrote about his “callous self-interest masked as sympathy,” while USA Today called his interviewing style “intrusive”. Jackson later got his revenge when footage was aired on American television of Bashir — the man who said Neverland was a “dangerous place” for children — lavishing praise on the star’s parenting skills. He was heard to tell Jackson: “Your relationship with your children is spectacular. It almost makes me weep when I see you with them because your interaction with them is so natural, so loving, so caring.” It was too late, though. By then the investigation into Jackson was already under way and Bashir’s career was booming as a result of his extraordinary coup. On the back of his success he took up a deal with ABC said to have been worth $1 million to become an anchor on 20/20, the American equivalent of Newsnight. Questioned three years later about the methods he used to win Jackson round, Bashir laughed off suggestions that the star had not realised what he was getting himself into. “As far as Michael Jackson is concerned, he signed three contracts,” he said. “He knew exactly what was happening and the film didn’t emerge in the way that he’d hoped.”