Interview with Charles Thomson, part 3

NB: for those just dropping in, Extreme Michael Jackson has been talking with journalist Charles Thomson, who championed Michael Jackson’s innocence and blasted the media for choosing character assassination over evidence. Charles recently found himself in the middle of a bizarre hazing by bloggers and Jackson fans, some who questioned his liaisons, identity, and whether or not he was involved in Jackson’s death, conspiracies, and coverups. Since I didn’t understand what was going on, I decided to find out.

Click here if you missed part one:

Click here if you missed part two:

You wrote an excellent piece for the Huffington Post about how the tabloid lynching of Jackson is one of the media’s most shameful episodes in history. And you’ve consistently conveyed fact based journalism and analysis that champions Michael Jackson as innocent, doing much to prove that innocence to his detractors. This has exposed many prejudiced hate-mongers and the woefully misinformed for what they are. Yet recently, you have been attacked on some rather absurd premises. Can you tell me about that?

I discovered a few months ago that somebody had been impersonating me on TMZ. Worried that they’d start impersonating me elsewhere, and knowing that twitter is famous for such cases, I decided to set up a twitter account. Within a few days I had roughly 200 followers and was enjoying interacting with the fans and answering their questions.

During one discussion the subject of Michael Jackson’s drug dependencies came up. I suddenly found myself bombarded with angry and abusive tweets insisting that Jackson had never been addicted to any substance and the whole story was an evil media conspiracy. I pointed out that several of Jackson’s relatives have said in interviews since his death that they knew he was addicted to drugs and had tried to stage interventions. The fans simply claimed that these relatives were part of the conspiracy.

That incident caused some of Jackson’s fan to turn against me. My comments have been blown up since then; the product of several months’ worth of Chinese whispers. I recently saw somebody claiming they’d seen me write on twitter that I was planning a negative article about Jackson’s drug addictions – a total fabrication. The incident has been exaggerated to a ridiculous extent.

At roughly the same time, I travelled to Los Angeles for a week and while I was there I met the author J Randy Taraborrelli, who quoted my work in the latest edition of his Michael Jackson biography. We went out for dinner and while we were there we got some pictures taken. Both Randy and I posted the pictures on our facebook pages.

A while later I found out that somebody had written a blog accusing Randy and I of being involved in a Sony conspiracy to murder Michael Jackson. I emailed the blogger asking them to remove the entry because it was false. The blogger simply replied, ‘But I have a photo of you and Taraborrelli. What am I supposed to do with that?’, as though the photo was some sort of big secret. The blogger was taking an open and acknowledged friendship between myself and Randy and claiming that it was somehow secretive or suspicious.

The twitter incident combined with the animosity some fans felt towards Randy – and therefore towards me by association – created a backlash against me and my work, spurred on in no small part by the constant assertions by conspiracy theorist bloggers that I was somehow involved in a thus far unfathomable (at least to me) plot by Sony to murder Michael Jackson by writing blogs about him after his death.

I have never worked for Sony. Ever. The allegation is absurd and it is entirely without any evidential basis. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped a number of vulnerable fans from being taken in by the claims.

The fall-out from these Sony allegations has been extremely distressing for me. I received numerous obscene and threatening messages via email and facebook. The blogger’s followers started spying on my social networking accounts and publishing details of who I was talking to and what I’d been writing.

This intrusion into my private life, as well as the hate mail, prompted me to privatise all of my social networking accounts. The blogger even tried to use that against me, claiming that the privatisation of my accounts proved Sony had ordered me to stop interacting with the fans!

I soon came under attack from a second blogger who actually attempted to blackmail me. The blogger found my page on a website I’d joined at college that offered support for gay teens, then emailed me threatening to ‘expose’ me unless I gave them information on Sony’s involvement in Michael Jackson’s death. This was information I didn’t have, which resulted in the blogger outing me as gay.

That second blogger also unearthed an old account I had on a Michael Jackson related forum, where I made – I would estimate – in excess of 10,000 posts over approximately 5 years. The blogger selectively posted a handful of comments I’d made on the forum (many quite similar to comments I’d made in our last interview; points about not liking Jackson’s latter musical output and complaining that he didn’t help himself in terms of bad press by constantly painting a target on his back). This sparked fury among some of the more obsessive fans.

This all links into what I was saying earlier about how some fans can’t conceive of somebody believing in Jackson’s innocence but also disagreeing with some of his decisions. The stance these fans take is that you either totally support every single thing Michael Jackson has ever done or you’re a traitor and a hypocrite.

In your question you used the word ‘absurd’, and I think that’s a very accurate word to describe what has happened to me over the last few months. The allegations being levelled at me are beyond absurd. There is no evidence in existence that will tie me to Sony and I can state that with 100% certainty because I have never worked for them. Ever. I’ve never worked for Sony, I’ve never met John Branca, I’ve never been a ‘paid blogger’ for anybody and I certainly wasn’t involved in Michael Jackson’s death. Anybody claiming to have evidence supporting any of these allegations is a liar and/or a fantasist.

Sometimes, as I read the blogs making these allegations, I do still get angry at how these people can write total nonsense about me and there is nothing I can really do about it. However, I don’t get too worked up because as I browse their other content – nasty comments about Jackson’s grieving relatives, allegations that ‘This Is It’ is all body doubles and even claims that Jackson may have faked his own death – I understand that nobody of sound mind would take any notice of them.

What does make me angry is when I see vulnerable fans looking to these blogs for answers and taking them seriously. Whenever I look underneath one of those blogs and see somebody commenting, ‘Thanks – I didn’t know Charles was a hired Sony blogger. I won’t support him anymore’, that makes my blood boil. These bloggers are taking advantage of vulnerable people – and those vulnerable people are bigger victims in this situation than I am.