The new Michael Jackson documentary, The Verdict, on Netflix has set the world on fire. Fans are calling for a boycott of Netflix. The innocent glove picture is popping up all over social media, and people are speculating the documentary is the reason for the company’s stock drop over the past week.

 But the most insidious part is the Michael biopic just came out. The movie is still in theaters and it’s bringing old fans and new fans together to celebrate Michael. And right in the middle of it, Netflix puts out this documentary talking about the one thing the movie was forced to leave out due to a legal clause.  This was a man who was unique in his talent, skill, and accomplishment and unique in his victimization of children.

 So, I watched all three episodes. They cover the entire 2005 trial. And even though Michael won the case, the documentary paints the picture that Michael was a monster who got away with abusing children. But then I went and found the real court documents, the testimonies that they chose to leave out.

 See, the story that Netflix tells you isn’t quite what it seems. Even the family at the center of the whole case, the Arzos in the documentary, they’re the victims. The broke family, the sick kid, the superstar who took advantage of them. But that’s not the family I found in the court records. What they don’t tell you is this family is probably the worst nightmare for a celebrity.

 And this is a scam that they’ve been running for years before they met Michael. But before we meet the Arzos, we got to start with the man who put this entire thing in motion. Martin Basher is the British journalist who made Living with Michael Jackson back in 2003. It’s the one where Michael’s holding hands with Gavin Arzo and talking about letting kids sleep in his bed.

 And Basher’s documentary is the whole reason the 2005 trial even exists. So Netflix brings him back in, sits him down, and lets him walk you through how he met Michael and earned his trust. They frame him as a credible, respected journalist who finally got the story. Except Netflix leaves out one pretty important detail about Martin Basher.

The documentary mentions that Basher interviewed Princess Diana in 1995, and it’s a big reason why Michael trusted him. Over 20 million people watched it, and it’s the thing that made his career. But in 2021, an investigation by the BBC figured out how he actually got the interview. He faked bank statements.

 He had a designer mock up fake documents to make it look like people close to Diana were being paid to spy on her. And he used those fakes to win over her brother and get himself in the door. So that’s the man whose documentary launched the whole case. Basically, Basher was a snake in the grass.

 It’s the same play that he ran on Diana. be the sympathetic guy in the room, but then turn around and sell them out in the edit.  Certainly, when I made the documentary, there was a small part of that which contained a controversy uh concerning his relationship uh with other young people. But the truth is that he was never convicted of any crime.

 I never saw any wrongdoing myself. And whilst his lifestyle may have been a bit unorthodox, I don’t believe it was criminal.  But Basher only made the film that started all this. He’s not the one that’s narrating the trial. For that, Netflix needed reporters, people who were actually there in 2005, who covered the whole thing day by day.

 And the journalist they leaned on more than anyone has been on a Michael Jackson witch hunt since 1993.  Ever since the Michael Jackson child molestation scandal broke, we’ve gotten a constant stream of calls and letters from people making dubious claims about the singer. Her name is Diane Diamond. And the biggest story she ever broke about Michael was a video tape.

 A tape that she told the entire country was real. One that supposedly caught him doing some bad things to a child. By the way, I am going to have to watch my language a little bit in this video. So, just bear with me. Now, about this tape. The problem was the tape never existed. The whole thing traced back to one source, a guy named Victor Gutierrez, who claimed he’s seen it.

 Diane Diamond took that claim, put it on national TV and on the radio, told millions of people the tape was real and that the investigators were closing in on Michael. Now Diane, she got off. The court ruled that she was just reporting on the claim and not necessarily stating it as fact. So Michael sued her for defamation, but he didn’t win.

 But I’m pretty sure that Diane didn’t appreciate it. So, the reporter Netflix is using to narrate Michael Jackson’s trial as the credible voice who knows the case better than anybody is the same person who ran a national defamation news story with no evidence. And she wasn’t just talking about the trial itself.

 She actually inserted her own opinions and versions of stories and information. She even talked about a story from her own book where she claims that she saw Michael Jackson in a Las Vegas hotel room partying with random German boys drinking and smoking. There’s a lot of reasons why that story doesn’t really make any sense, but who knows? So, I guess the question is why would Netflix have somebody that seems so personally attached and committed to taking Michael down and still try to sell the documentary as fair and balanced?

Now, the reporters are one problem, but Netflix also leans hard on the people who were actually in the trial. And one of them was a prosecutor who tried to send Michael to prison, but as we’re about to see, he had his own conflict of interest. Ron Zonin was one of the lead prosecutors on the 2005 case, working right under the district attorney, and he’s one of the main voices that’s walking you through the whole thing.

 But there’s a connection that Netflix never mentions. During the trial, the prosecution called a witness named Louise Palanker. She’d known the Arvisal family for years, and she met Gavin back when he was around 9 years old. And over time, she gave them money and gifts. So, you got Ron Zonan, the prosecutor, and Luis Pallanker, a witness who’s close to the accuser’s family.

 And somewhere in the middle of the trial, the two of them got into a romantic relationship, and they got married a few years later. Now, the relationship wasn’t known at the time of the trial, but if it had, Ronin could have been removed from the case altogether. So, in the documentary, he’s sitting there giving his own opinions and interpretations.

 He even tries to paint Michael as this evil mastermind where he he pretends to be the father figure and makes them fall in love with him and say, “Okay, now now that you love me, now let’s go to bed.” So, that’s who’s telling the story. Now, let’s talk about the story itself. Because a biased narrator is one thing, but the verdict also puts a handful of stories and claims on the screen and they make it feel like hard evidence.

Vincent Aean was a former publicist of Michaels and he knew him through his assistant Frank Cillio. Aean says after the Neverland raid, Frank Cillio gave him a bag with all of the things that he had from the Neverland ranch. Inside was a nature’s magazine with this section in the back for ordering videos.

 It had listings containing nudist families and they were circled. And he says that this was a defining moment that changed his whole perspective, changed his mind and it made him think that something was actually going on here. But let’s actually take a look at it and get the whole picture. First of all, that magazine was never tested for fingerprints and it was never entered in as evidence at the trial.

 It didn’t come from Michael’s house. It came out of a bag that Frank Cillio gave him. and nobody knows who circled the listings. And across both Neverland raids in 93 and 2003, investigators never found any of those videos. The only thing that we have about this story is the trust of Vincent Aean and the fact that he says that Frank Cillio gave it to him.

 And Frank Cillio and his family aren’t the most trustworthy people either. The Cillo family spent the last 30 years defending Michael. And literally right now they’re switching their story trying to get millions of dollars out of the Jackson estate. The next thing the documentary leans on is when they raided Neverland Ranch, they did find a stash of adult magazines.

 Nothing like the magazine that Aean was talking about. There was nothing illegal in the stash. But there’s one piece the prosecution really hung on to. One magazine had Michael’s fingerprints on it and the accuser’s fingerprints on it. And they use this to argue, see, this proves it. Michael sat there and he showed it to the kids.

 But there’s problems with that. Multiple staff members, they testified that the Arzo kids would go through Michael’s things when he wasn’t even there. So, a fingerprint on a magazine tells you the kid touched it. It doesn’t tell you Michael handed it to him. So, obviously, this doesn’t confirm or deny what happened, but the documentary paints it as if, hey, this is what happened.

 and how could they have let this slide? But to really sell the idea that Michael was guilty, the documentary reached all the way back to 1993 where the first allegation happened from Jordan Chandler. And the big talking point is the settlement. Michael paid the Chandler family somewhere around $20 million.

 And the way it gets framed is innocent people don’t pay and it was hush money. But that’s not exactly how settlements actually work. That was a civil case, a lawsuit for money for damages. And a civil settlement can’t shut down a criminal case. Now, paying off an accuser might look bad in the court of public opinion, but it doesn’t make you guilty.

 Now, the documentary kept trying to bring up old dirt because tied to that 1993 trial comes with one of the most uncomfortable claims in the whole documentary. They served a search warrant on me which allowed them to view and photograph my body including my penis, my buttocks, my lower torso, thighs, and any other error that they wanted.

 They photographed him naked, and they were trying to compare it to a description that Jordan Chandler gave of what Michael looked like under his clothes. And in the documentary, they actually make the claim that the descriptions matched. But what they leave out is when the strip search first happened, the early reporting on it, they all cited law enforcement sources who said that the descriptions did not match.

 They went out and they got a search warrant. That meant that Michael had to comply. He had to go down to the sheriff’s department. He had to drop his pants. He had to do whatever whatever said in the search warrant. If Jordy Chandler had an accurate description, if he was right with whatever he said, if he was spot on 100%.

they would have hooked up Michael right there on the spot.  So, if Jordan Chandler’s description was a real match, why did law enforcement who performed the search otherwise? And why didn’t they make an arrest? And more importantly, why put a straightup lie in the documentary? So, those are the main claims that the documentary leans on, and none of them really hold up the way that they want them to.

 But the evidence was never really the heart of this. The heart of this whole thing is the family, the Arzos. In the verdict, it paints them one way. A struggling single mom, a sick kid, a family that got used by a rich, powerful celebrity. But at one point, the doc does actually tell a story that shows the Arzos have a history of money scams.

In 1998, Gavin got caught stealing from J. C. Penney, and the security confronted the family. But Gavin’s mom sued J. C. penny and claimed that the security guards sexually assaulted her in the parking lot and she won $150,000. And right after that, she applied for government assistance, which she later got charged with welfare fraud.

 So, I do give Netflix credit for including this story, but J Penney wasn’t the only time the Azizos did something like this. And Michael wasn’t the first celebrity the Azizos attached themselves to. Before they met Michael, they did the same thing to two of the most famous comedians in America. And this is the part that Netflix didn’t tell you.

 Chris Tucker tried to warn Michael about the Azizos because of his own run in with them.  I was performing one night and this uh this guy came up to me and I thought he worked at the club, but it was this um it was this guy. He said, “My kid has cancer and he loves you as a comedian. The father, his father came up to me again.

 He said, “Tomorrow night is the benefit.” And the kid’s named Gavin. So I said, “Okay, tomorrow night I’m not doing that. I’ll be here.” you know, he had he had he had cancer. So, I came and met him. Uh his name is Gavin and he’s good real good friend of mine. I love him to death. He said uh he met me. He said, “Hey, Chris, how you doing? Thanks for coming.

” And he said, “I I know Michael Jackson.” I was like, “Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Okay. How you doing? You feeling good?” He said, “All right.” Yeah, I know Michael Jackson. And I come and find out later he really did know Michael Jackson.  Chris Sucker being a good guy felt for the kid. So, he opened up his life to him. Trips, theme parks.

 But then things started to get weird. They turned up at the set of Rush Hour 2 and they wouldn’t leave. The kids are disruptive on set.  One day I was filming Rush Hour 2. I’ll never forget this. I was in the middle of a scene and Gavin’s bad too. He’s real bad, but he’s I love him. But we was filming the scene.

 Me and Jack and Gavin runs on the set in the middle of the set.  It got so bad that they even asked Chris Tucker to not bring them around anymore. And then Chris, he started to notice that the family was working them. They was always leaning on the cancer, always needing the next thing. Chris even testified in the trial in 2005 and he told the jury that Gavin was unusually cunning and sophisticated for a kid his age. And Chris Tucker wasn’t alone.

George Lopez had almost the same experience with them.  How many times were you in court and you saw him?  Uh twice.  Okay. And for for the backstory of that was because you got subpoenaed because it was a family that you had helped out and they just kept coming. Right. I would always try to help people, but then I’d be the one that that gets messed up.

 Now, putting the history of money and scams aside, the accusation itself has one problem that it can’t get past when it actually happened. The Living with Michael Jackson documentary came out in February 2003 where Michael’s holding hands and talking about the sleepovers that blows up.

 Now, Michael and this one kid are the biggest story in the world. Child services opens a case. The police start looking around. The FBI gets involved. And right in the middle of all of that, the family sits down and films a video defending Michael.  And Gavin was the one that asked him, “Could I call you daddy?” And Michael said, “Of course.

” Very innocent and beautiful relationship, which everyone has spuned out of control. But the prosecution’s own timeline says Michael started abusing Gavin after all this blew up, after the world was already watching with the investigations already open. It just doesn’t make sense. The most famous man in the world who already knew he was being watched, that Gavin was being watched, he chose that exact moment to start abusing him.

 And the jury says the same thing when they explain why they let Michael go. The timeline of how things happened was one of the things they pointed to. The night that I spent the night, they actually asked to sleep in Michael’s room. However, Michael was not there. And so, one of his employees said that he could not allow them or anyone into the room while Michael was not there, but they insisted and they really wanted to.

 I thought to myself, what child would want to go into the room where these awful things were happening to them?  But was that before or after it could have happened? According to the timeline, it was after these things had already been happening to him.  So over the course of the documentary, you’re listening to Diane Diamond and the prosecutor zoning and you get this sense that they’re upset and they’re trying to say here’s all these things that happened and they let it slip through the cracks. So overall, the

verdict documentary tries to present itself as balanced because it includes Michael’s security guard and his family attorney, but it’s pretty clear that the people with the most conflicts of interest and personal vendettas against Michael were leading the narration. They’re trying to undo the 2005 trial that Michael already won and he’s gone.

You know, let the man rest. You know what I mean? So, I don’t necessarily encourage boycotting the documentary like a lot of people have because it’s important to see at least see what’s being presented in there. And even though there are some lies and misinterpretations, it is an entertaining watch.

 And you do get some good moments, too. There’s moments of the fans waiting outside the courthouse and some heartfelt moments with people who were on Michael’s side. But let me know what you guys think in the comments. Should Netflix have even released this documentary? If you seen it, did it convince you? And what did you think about the points I made in this video? Let’s talk about it.

 Till next time, peace.