There's a bombshell at the end of the first episode of Michael Jackson: The Verdict, the Netflix documentary exploring the pop singer's infamous 2005 criminal trial.
It comes from Vincent Amen, Jackson's former publicist. He tells a story about Frank Cascio, a mutual friend of theirs who entered Jackson's life when he was five years old and later became his assistant and trusted confidant.
At first, Amen says, he asked Cascio about whether Jackson had ever sexually abused a child. Cascio unequivocally responded no, Amen recalls. Jackson would never do that.
But when Jackson's properties were raided by police in 2003, Amen says Cascio cleared out his own house of anything that came from Jackson's home, Neverland Ranch, and handed it to the publicist. Inside, Amen says, he found an old magazine, the back pages of which featured a video-ordering section.
There were videos circled across the page, Amen says, sharing footage of himself opening the magazine that he took at the time because he felt it needed to be documented. According to Amen, the listings were for tapes featuring naked children.
Amen explains that he went to Cascio to ask him about the magazine. According to Amen's account, Cascio told him that Jackson would circle them, Cascio would order them, and they would watch them together. Amen says Cascio described it as a phase they had gone through.
"That was a defining moment for me," Amen says. "Frank is so close to Michael that he's covering up for him."
If you're watching this documentary to decide for yourself once and for all whether the many allegations against Jackson were true, that scene may be all you need to see. Show this to a Michael Jackson defender in 2026, however, and I have my doubts that it will convince them.
That's because, more than 20 years after the trial and 17 years after Jackson's death, we're in a very different cultural echo chamber. Back then, public consensus was hardly in his favour. Today, especially after the release of the popular Michael biopic in April, a growing online movement has emerged dedicated to defending Jackson.
And if you watch the TikTok videos, scroll through the Instagram carousels or read long threads on X defending Jackson, you do not find people arguing for the reasonable doubt that decided the trial in his favour. Rather, the sentiment echoes the same story that Jackson himself told – that he was the victim of a shadowy conspiracy. In that world, no accusation or accuser has ever been credible enough, even as the allegations mount.
If you're watching this documentary for definitive proof of his guilt or innocence, you won't find it. This is a zoomed-in retelling of the events of the trial, featuring new interviews with many of the major players, including the prosecution and defence lawyers, jury members, associates, journalists and many others who were intimately involved – though not any of the accusers.
It's so zoomed-in, in fact, that it lacks important context. The testimony of Wade Robson as a character witness in Jackson's favour is mentioned, for instance, but it is never brought up that Robson later accused Jackson of sexually abusing him and publicly detailed those allegations in the documentary Leaving Neverland. Nor is it mentioned that Cascio has since made allegations of his own against the deceased singer.
But if you did not live through this period in history or did not follow the trial closely, nearly all of it is here. And it's clearer than ever how Jackson earned a verdict of not guilty, with the defence providing a compelling narrative for reasonable doubt, and at least one juror who appears to be captivated by Jackson's celebrity even now.
It may not be as stomach-churning as Leaving Neverland was, but as a viewer, it was still difficult to watch, and difficult to feel once again that there were still stones left unturned. Did the prosecution have a faulty case? Did the jury get it wrong? I'm not a lawyer and nor do I have every detail, so I cannot provide an expert opinion in that regard.
What I do have is my own conscience and a series of questions and facts that I've collected over many years of considering this, having grown up a passionate fan.
The first questions are: why did this man have so many children in his bed? Why did he purposefully separate them from their parents? Why were they always boys of a certain age? Is there anyone else in history who has behaved this way innocently? And if these accusations only came from people who wanted money or attention from Jackson because of his fame and wealth, why hasn't this happened to others in that circumstance?
When I have the emotional bandwidth, I often think back to a conversation I had with FBI profiler and child abuse expert James Clemente, whom I contacted after Leaving Neverland was released to get his opinion on it.
I asked him: "Do you think these accusers are lying?"
"No," he said. In his experience, people almost never lie about this sort of thing. "The cost is too great."
I thought about that again while watching this documentary, as a family friend of accuser Gavin Arvizo talked about a conversation she had with Arvizo after the trial. "Why didn't they believe me?" Arvizo apparently repeated over and over.
I thought again: maybe Jackson's defenders are right. Maybe these people did want money. Maybe they were flawed and had made many mistakes in their own lives. But perhaps all these things are true at once.
But I would ask even the staunch defenders to watch this documentary closely and ask themselves again why Jackson admitted to owning books containing photographs of naked children that were introduced as evidence during the trial.
Jackson was one of the greatest artists to ever live – with music that unites us all. And even with all the reasonable doubt visible here, as uncomfortable as it is to contend with, there is still too much on display for me to dismiss what so many of his former friends and accusers have said about him.
The Verdict will not settle the debate. But it does make looking away from it much harder.
Michael Jackson: The Verdict is available on Netflix globally
