Episode Details

It is almost thirty years since Brett Barnes last spoke to a journalist. The last time he gave an interview was in 1993, aged eleven, when he took to the airwaves to defend his friend Michael Jackson against allegations that he was a molester of young boys. But the Barnes family quickly learned not to engage with the media when it came to Jackson. Attempts by tabloid reporters to hunt them down after that became so intrusive that they were driven from their home for months. When they went off grid, media outlets instead began offering tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to anybody who was prepared to say they’d seen him behave inappropriately with young friends like Brett Barnes.

Ever since then, ugly, graphic sexual allegations about Jackson and Brett have been published in books, magazines and newspapers and have been broadcast by trashy tabloid TV shows. Rarely, if ever, has anybody sought to fact-check the stories – nor have outlets ever really seemed to care when Brett explicitly refuted them. But for almost three decades, he chose to bite his tongue rather than engage with a media industry that seemed to have its own agenda.

In 2019, Brett – by then happily settled down with his wife and their young children – had his peace shattered by a reality TV show called Leaving Neverland. Strangers on the internet began c