Jordie Sees a Psychiatrist
On 16 August 1993, after negotiations broke down between Evan Chandler and Anthony Pellicano, Michael Freeman (June’s attorney) alerted everyone that he was going to petition the court to demand that Evan return Jordie to his mother. June didn’t know what to make of the discussions between Evan and Anthony Pellicano. If Evan was certain Michael Jackson had molested Jordie, why was he trying to extract twenty million dollars from him instead of reporting him to the proper authorities? She began to question Evan’s motives; she wanted her son back. A court date was then set to determine who would have custody of Jordie.
However, Evan did not want to return Jordie to June, no matter how a judge might rule. He felt sure that she would simply hand him right over to Michael Jackson. They would live happily ever after at Neverland, he feared, and he would never see his son again.
Not knowing what course of action to take, and feeling pressured to do something, Evan made an appointment for Jordie with Dr Mathis Abrams, the psychiatrist who provided the letter in which he speculated that, based on the hypothetical case proposed by the attorney, sexual abuse had occurred. He told the doctor that the case wasn’t imaginary, after all, and that it actually involved his own son and Michael Jackson. Evan realized that once Abrams met with Jordie, the real drama would most certainly begin. After all, the doctor would be required to file a report with the authorities, which would be the end of any confidentiality where the matter of Jordie and Michael was concerned. However, as he later would tell it, Evan felt pressured to protect his son, and if it meant sacrificing Michael Jackson then that was a small price to pay, especially since negotiations with him had ended so badly.
At the hearing, on 17 August 1993, Evan’s attorney agreed that Jordie would be returned to June by seven o’clock that night. In fact he was stalling for time – he had no intention of returning Jordie to his ex-wife. At the very hour of the hearing, Jordie was meeting with the psychiatrist.
During a gruelling, three-hour session with the doctor, Jordie told of many incidents of masturbation and oral sex with Michael Jackson. In fact, he claimed, he and Michael had been having sex for months.
Just as expected, the psychiatrist reported everything Jordie said direcdy to the Department of Children’s Services. Within hours, the youngster was interviewed by a caseworker with the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services and an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department.
The caseworker’s eleven-page, hand-written report began with a description of how Evan and Michael met, when Michael’s car broke down. Jordie said that he and Michael became friends and that Michael would telephone him almost every day for ‘long conversations about video games’. The conversations continued, he said, even when Michael was on tour. In February (1993) and in succeeding weeks, Michael began seeing more of him and his mother, June. He bought toys for Jordie and took him, June and his half-sister, Lily, to Las Vegas. There, Jordie recalled, they watched
The Exorcist
. The film frightened Jordie, he said, and that night he slept in the same bed as Michael – a pattern, he said, that was repeated several times, including during visits to Neverland. During those initial encounters, however, sexual abuse was not alleged. According to the report, at first Michael would merely ‘cuddle and kiss him [Jordie] on the cheek’. However, on one occasion at the ranch while June slept in guest quarters and Michael and Jordie shared the same bed, the pop singer began to ‘rub up against me’.
‘Over time,’ claimed Jordie in the report, ‘Michael graduated to kissing me on the mouth. One time, he was kissing me and he put his tongue in my mouth. I said, “Don’t do that”. He started crying. I guess he tried to make me feel guilty.’ The report then alleged that Michael told the boy their relationship was ‘meant to be’ and was ‘in the cosmos’.
According to the report, Michael’s relationship with Jordie became sexual when he took the family to Monaco, and then continued to be sexual from that time, onward. The details Jordie provided were graphic.
Jordie also claimed that Michael had threatened that if he ever told anyone what had transpired between them, they would both be in trouble and he [Jordan] would be sent to Juvenile Hall, a young offenders’ institution. ‘Minor also said Mr Jackson told him about other boys he had done this with,’ wrote the investigator, ‘but did not go as far with them. Minor said Mr Jackson tried to make him hate his mother and father, so that he could only go with Mr Jackson.’ The report ended with Jordie’s wish to remain in his father’s custody, and his belief that his mother liked the ‘glitzy life’ that surrounded Michael.
Later, when Jordie was interviewed by the police department, he relayed the same anecdotes of sexual encounters and also gave officers what he said was a detailed description of Michael’s genitalia.
With such stunning disclosures of a sexual nature involving a star as world-famous, as controversial and as seemingly androgynous as Michael Jackson, there was no way the story would not emerge with some of the most sensational headlines in show-business history… It was just a matter of time.