The film-maker Louis Theroux said he felt obliged to support individuals who had accused Michael Jackson of being a paedophile, partly because his own programmes had helped to “rehabilitate” Jimmy Savile’s public image.
Theroux accused Jackson’s fans in March of being “wilfully blind” after they denied detailed claims made in the Channel 4 documentary entitled Leaving Neverland that the singer was a child abuser.
Theroux, a journalist and documentary maker, told the Edinburgh TV festival this year that his decision to speak up was partly influenced by the relatively friendly relationship he had had with Savile after the pair made a documentary in the early 2000s, years before the the former DJ and entertainer was exposed as one of the UK’s worst sex offenders.
He said the experience had made him feel obliged to “stick his head above the parapet” and defend Wade Robson and James Safechuck when they came forward to be interviewed for the film about Jackson.
“In a strange sense I suppose I felt I had a little bit of a responsibility. One of the most upsetting things for me is when you go through Twitter and you see the abuse directed at Dan Reed, the director of Leaving Neverland.”
He suggested that Jackson fans, who claimed the accusers had made up the stories for publicity reasons, were suffering from a combination of “ignorance and a sort of self-grooming” which left them unable to understand that it could take a person years to recognise that they were a victim of sexual abuse.
Supporters of Jackson, who died in 2009, paid for an advertising van, bearing the slogan “facts don’t lie, people do” and blaring out the singer’s songs, to be parked outside the Edinburgh international conference centre – while Jackson’s face was projected on to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock.
Theroux said it was perfectly understandable that Jackson’s accusers might take years to tell their stories in public. “If you actually understood how mixed up we are as people and how our circuits get scrambled, that makes complete sense.”
Theroux also disputed claims made by the comedian Ruby Wax that he stole her documentary style in the late 1990s for his TV series Weird Weekends. “I was in America throughout the 90s at the time when Ruby Wax was on TV a lot. I hadn’t seen many of them until later on. It is mistaken, the idea that I took ideas, at or least very much, from her.”
He said he had been more influenced by other filmmakers. Jon Ronson has “got more of a right to be annoyed than Ruby Wax,” he said.
“But I also feel that people resenting you is a compliment. I feel bad that she is upset, I can completely relate to the sense of being brought face to face with your TV shelf life, and the sense of people threatened by someone a bit younger than you … and a man. At the same time a little part of me is flattered that she would be so annoyed.”
Theroux, who is starting his own independent television production company, also said he ate the same lunch every day, a falafel wrap and orange juice from Pret A Manger. “I’m quite a creature of habit,” he said.